ng that required them. All this is
no result of abstractions or of bare theory. It is the result of
having the will to play the game. It is the absolute truth that
results from joining definite practical issues.

Returning to life, we must say: If our assertions have a determinate
meaning, they get their concrete workings through counselling
determinate individual deeds. Each deed, as an individual act, is
irrevocable and is absolutely what it is. Our deeds, judged in the
light of a reasonable survey of life--a survey of life such as that to
which, when we form our opinions, and when we act on our opinions, we
intend to appeal--are, for a determinate purpose, either hits or
misses. If the issues of life in question when we act are definite
enough, our deeds, under the rules of the game of life, cannot avoid
this character of being the right deeds or the wrong deeds for the
purpose in question and in view of their actual place in real life.
Whoever so acts that his deeds are done, as a cant phrase has it,
"with a string attached to them"--that is, whoever regards {156} his
deeds as having only relative reality, as capable of being recalled if
he chooses, is not acting seriously. He is not, as they say, really
"playing the game." And, as a fact, he is trifling with absolute
reality. He is not only not serious; he views real life as it
absolutely is not. For whatever individual deed he actually does is
absolutely irrevocable, whether he wants to recall it or not. Once
done, it stands eternally on the world's score.

Now I insist, whatever assertion, or opinion, regarded as itself an
expression of one's will, has for its intended working one of these
irrevocable deeds, is in so far forth true, as the individual deed
which it counsels is for the required purpose quite irrevocably a
right deed when estimated with reference to this purpose and to the
life into whose score it enters. That is, the opinion is true in so
far as the working which it counsels is a deed that is in fact a hit
in the chosen game of life under the rules of that game. And whatever
opinion counsels a deed that, as the working of this opinion, is a
miss in the game of life, is a false opinion. And, so I insist, _this
distinction between the truth and falsity of an opinion that counsels
an individual deed is as absolute and irrevocable as is the place of
the deed when once done on the score of the game of life._

Whoever denies this position simply trifl