The alternative is definite. It seems to me, moreover, that the two horns of it make pragmatically different ethical appeals--at least they _may_ do so, to certain individuals. But if you consider the pluralistic horn to be intrinsically irrational, self-contradictory, and absurd, I can now say no more in its defence. Having done what I could in my earlier lectures to break the edge of the intellectualistic _reductiones ad absurdum_, I must leave the issue in your hands. Whatever I may say, each of you will be sure to take pluralism or leave it, just as your own sense of rationality moves and inclines. The only thing I emphatically insist upon is that it is a fully co-ordinate hypothesis with monism. This world _may_, in the last resort, be a block-universe; but on the other hand it _may_ be a universe only strung-along, not rounded in and closed. Reality _may_ exist distributively just as it sensibly seems to, after all. On that possibility I do insist. One's general vision of the probable usually decides such alternatives. They illustrate what I once wrote of as the 'will to believe.' In some of my lectures at Harvard I have spoken of what I call the 'faith-ladder,' as something quite different from the _sorites_ of the logic-books, yet seeming to have an analogous form. I think you will quickly recognize in yourselves, as I describe it, the mental process to which I give this name. A conception of the world arises in you somehow, no matter how. Is it true or not? you ask. It _might_ be true somewhere, you say, for it is not self-contradictory. It _may_ be true, you continue, even here and now. It is _fit_ to be true, it would be _well if it were true_, it _ought_ to be true, you presently feel. It _must_ be true, something persuasive in you whispers next; and then--as a final result-- It shall be _held for true_, you decide; it _shall be_ as if true, for _you_. And your acting thus may in certain special cases be a means of making it securely true in the end. Not one step in this process is logical, yet it is the way in which monists and pluralists alike espouse and hold fast to their visions. It is life exceeding logic, it is the practical reason for which the theoretic reason finds arguments after the conclusion is once there. In just this way do some of us hold to the unfinished pluralistic universe; in just this way do others hold to the timeless universe eternally complete. Meanwhile the incompleteness of the pluralistic universe, thus assumed and held to as the most probable hypothesis, is also represented by the pluralistic philosophy as being self-reparative through us, as getting its disconnections remedied in part by our behavior. 'We use what we are and have, to know; and what we know, to be and have still more.'[1] Thus do philosophy and reality, theory and action, work in the same circle indefinitely.