ng or steps toward failure. All this is
surely concrete enough. And, in real life, this account applies
equally to the practical situations of the workshop or of the
market-place, and to the ideas and deeds of a religious man seeking
salvation.

But now one of the central facts about life is that every deed once
done is _ipso facto_ irrevocable. That is, at any moment you perform a
given deed or you do not. If you perform it, it is done and cannot be
undone. This difference between what {154} is done and what is left
undone is, in the real and empirical world, a _perfectly absolute
difference._ The opportunity for a given individual deed returns not;
for the moment when that individual deed can be done never recurs.
Here is a case where the rational constitution of the whole universe
gets into definite relation to our momentary experience. _And if any
one wants to be in touch with the "Absolute"--with that reality which
the pragmatists fancy to be peculiarly remote and abstract--let him
simply do any individual deed whatever and then try to undo that deed.
Let the experiment teach him what one means by calling reality
absolute. Let the truths which that experience teaches any rational
being show him also what is meant by absolute truth._

For this irrevocable and absolute character of the deed, when once
done, rationally determines an equally irrevocable character about the
truth or falsity of any act of judgment, of any assertion or opinion,
which has actually called in a concrete situation for a given deed,
and which therefore has had this individual deed for any part of its
intended "workings." Let us return to the simile of the game. Suppose
the coach to counsel a given deed of the player. Suppose the player,
acting on the coach's advice, to perform that deed, to make that play.
Suppose the play to be a misplay. The play, once made, cannot be
recalled. It stands, if the rules of the game require it so to stand,
on the score. If it stands there, then just _that_ item of the score
{155} can never be changed under the rules of the game. The score is,
for the game, absolute and irrevocable. If the coach counselled that
misplay, his counsel was an error. And just as the player's score
cannot be changed without simply abandoning the rules of the game, so
too the coach's record as a blunderer is, in respect of this one bit
of counsel, unalterable. Analogous results hold for the player's
successful hits and for the coachi