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This bald summary of the thought-destroying forces of our
time would not be complete without some reference to pragmatism;
for though I have here used and should everywhere defend the
pragmatist method as a preliminary guide to truth, there is an extreme
application of it which involves the absence of all truth whatever.
My meaning can be put shortly thus. I agree with the pragmatists
that apparent objective truth is not the whole matter; that there
is an authoritative need to believe the things that are necessary
to the human mind. But I say that one of those necessities
precisely is a belief in objective truth. The pragmatist tells
a man to think what he must think and never mind the Absolute.
But precisely one of the things that he must think is the Absolute.
This philosophy, indeed, is a kind of verbal paradox. Pragmatism is
a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs
is to be something more than a pragmatist. Extreme pragmatism
is just as inhuman as the determinism it so powerfully attacks.
The determinist (who, to do him justice, does not pretend to be
a human being) makes nonsense of the human sense of actual choice.
The pragmatist, who professes to be specially human, makes nonsense
of the human sense of actual fact.
To sum up our contention so far, we may say that the most
characteristic current philosophies have not only a touch of mania,
but a touch of suicidal mania. The mere questioner has knocked
his head against the limits of human thought; and cracked it.
This is what makes so futile the warnings of the orthodox and the
boasts of the advanced about the dangerous boyhood of free thought.
What we are looking at is not the boyhood of free thought; it is
the old age and ultimate dissolution of free thought. It is vain
for bishops and pious bigwigs to discuss what dreadful things will
happen if wild scepticism runs its course. It has run its course.
It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that
will be revealed if once we see free thought begin. We have seen
it end. It has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself.
You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men
ask themselves if they have any selves. You cannot fancy a more
sceptical world than that in which men doubt if there is a world.
It might certainly have reached its bankruptcy more quickly
and cleanly if it had not been feebly hampered by the application
of indefensible laws of blasphemy or by the absurd pretence
that modern England is Christian. But it would have reached the
bankruptcy anyhow. Militant atheists are still unjustly persecuted;
but rather because they are an old minority than because they
are a new one. Free thought has exhausted its own freedom.
It is weary of its own success. If any eager freethinker now hails
philosophic freedom as the dawn, he is only like the man in Mark
Twain who came out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise and was
just in time to see it set. If any frightened curate still says
that it will be awful if the darkness of free thought should spread,
we can only answer him in the high and powerful words of Mr. Belloc,
"Do not, I beseech you, be troubled about the increase of forces
already in dissolution. You have mistaken the hour of the night:
it is already morning." We have no more questions left to ask.
We have looked for questions in the darkest corners and on the
wildest peaks. We have found all the questions that can be found.
It is time we gave up looking for questions and began looking
for answers.
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