le. The theory of a complete change of
standards in human history does not merely deprive us of the pleasure
of honouring our fathers; it deprives us even of the more modern and
aristocratic pleasure of despising them.

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 sceptica