are accessible to us, the opinion remains in so far
meaningless. If concrete tests lead to workings that disappoint our
human expectations, our opinions are in so far false. Moreover (and
upon this all the pragmatists lay great stress), truth is for us a
temporal affair. It changes, it flows, it grows, it decays. It can be
made eternal only by tying ourselves, for a given purpose, to abstract
ideas which we arbitrarily require to remain, like mathematical
definitions, unchanged. Even such ideas have no sense apart from the
uses to which they can be put. Concrete truth grows or diminishes as
our successes in controlling our experience, through acting upon our
beliefs, wax or wane. Truth is subject to all the processes of the
evolution of our concrete lives. The eternal is nothing that can be
for us a live presence. What we deal with is, like ourselves, fluent,
subject to growth and decay, dynamic, and never static. The pragmatist
recoils with a certain mixture of horror and amusement from the
conception of an all-inclusive divine insight. That, he says, would be
something static. Its world of absolute reality would be a "block
universe" and itself merely an aspect of a part, or perhaps the whole,
of just this block. Its supposed truth would be static like itself,
and therefore dead.

{143}

But does pragmatism forbid us to have religious insight? No; James, in
ways which you have repeatedly heard me mention, insists that
pragmatism leaves open ample room for what he thinks to be the best
sort of religion, namely, for a religion suited to what he calls the
"dramatic temper" of mind. Truth, so far as we men can attain to it,
has indeed to be human enough. But nothing forbids us to entertain the
belief that there are superhuman and supernatural realities, forms of
being, living and spiritual personalities, or superpersonalities, as
various and lofty as you please, provided only that they be such as to
make whatever evidence of their being is accessible to us capable of
definition in a human and empirical way. The truth, namely, of our
belief about such beings, has to be tested by us in terms of our own
concrete religious experience. Such beliefs, like others, must "work"
in order to be true. That is, these beliefs, however they arise, must
lead to conduct; and the results of this conduct must tend to our
religious comfort, to our unity of feeling, to our peace, or power, or
saintliness, or other form of spiritual perfect