If, with such a view of the nature of absolute truth, we turn back to
estimate the sense in which our opinions about the world as a whole
can be true or false, we now see that our account both of the insight
of the reason, and of the nature of the world, {159} has become
enriched by this whole analysis of the nature of opinion. _Opinions
about the universe are counsels as to how to adjust your deeds to the
purposes and requirements which a survey of the whole of the life
whereto your life belongs shows to be the genuinely rational purposes
and requirements._ Every such opinion then, whether true or false, is
an effort to adjust your will and your conduct to the intents of a
supreme will which decides values, establishes the rule of life,
estimates purposes in the light of complete insight. That is, the
insight to which your opinions appeal is indeed the insight of a real
being who values, estimates, establishes, decides, as concretely as
you do, and who is therefore not only all-wise, but possessed of a
will. Your search for salvation is a seeking to adjust yourself to
this supreme will. That such a will is real is as true as it is true
that any opinion whatever which you can form with regard to the real
world is either true or false. However ignorant you are, you are,
then, in constant touch with the master of life; for you are
constantly doing irrevocable deeds whose final value, whose actual and
total success or failure, can only be real, or be known, from the
point of view of the insight that faces the whole of real life, and
with reference to the purposes of the will whose expression is the
entire universe.
If, however, you say, with the pragmatists: "There is no whole world,
there is no complete view, there is no will that wills the world; for
all {160} is temporal, and time flows, and novelties constantly
appear, and the world is just now incomplete, and therefore there is
nothing eternal," then my answer is perfectly definite. Of course
there is, _just at this point of time,_ no complete world. Of course,
every new deed introduces novelties into the temporal world. But, on
the other hand, even to assert this is to assert _that the future, and
in fact all the future, in all its individual detail, belongs to
reality, and forms part of its wholeness._ To admit this is to admit
that the true insight, and the divine will, require, and get, _the
endless whole of future time, as well as of past time, before them in
one, not timeless, but time-inclusive survey, which embraces the whole
of real life._ And just such a survey, and just such a life, not
timeless, but time-inclusive, constitute the eternal, which is real,
not apart from time, and from our lives, but in, and through and above
all our individual lives. The divine will wills in us and in all this
world, with its endless past and its endless future, at once. The
divine insight is not lifeless. It includes and surveys all life. All
is temporal in its ceaseless flow and in its sequence of individual
deeds. All is eternal in the unity of its meaning.
To assert this, I insist, is not to deny our freedom and our
initiative. The divine will wills me, precisely in so far as it wills
that, in each of my individual deeds, I should then and there express
my own unique, and in so far free, choice. And to assert, as I do,
that the divine will wills all "at once" {161} is not to assert that
it wills all _at any one moment of time,_ but only that the divine
will is expressed in the totality of its deeds that are done in all
moments of time.
But this, you will say, is still philosophy, not what the plain man
needs for his religion. The question remains: Through what source of
insight are we able to adjust our daily lives to this divine wisdom
and to this divine will? I answer: Through a source of insight which
is accessible to the plainest and simplest reasonable and sincere
human being. Yet this source of insight, not yet expressly named in
our study, includes in a beautiful and spiritual unity the true sense
of our individual experience, of our social experience, of our reason,
and of our will, and gives us at length a genuine religion. This new
source we are to study in our next lecture.
{162}
{163}
V