These be but trifling affairs of commonplace life if you will, but the imagination sweeps easily on from the relation of man and man to all that man’s work which is done shoulder to shoulder. “A social organism,” James goes on, “of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted. A whole train of passengers (individually brave enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter can count on one another, while each passenger fears that if he makes a movement of resistance, he will be shot before anyone else backs him up. If we believed that the whole car-full would rise at once with us, we should each severally rise, and train robbing would never even be attempted.” Have you ever, O patient reader, in the heat of a political campaign for what you thought were better things met with that cool chilling intelligence that hastens to warn you against trying to change human nature? As it was in the beginning it is now and ever shall be, gangs without end. Amen! And he is right, this unduped and undupable intelligence is right--but on one condition only: The world will always be as it was at the beginning if it is exclusively inhabited by unduped and undupable intelligences--by realists, in short. Or, have you ever tried to refresh your tired soul with what the Germans have written of Realpolitik? If so, you will already know a great deal of what pragmatism is _not_. It is not a philosophy of the “what never has been never can be” temper of mind. “There are cases,” James puts it, “where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. _And where faith in a fact can help create the fact_, that would be an insane logic which would say [with Huxley] that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the ‘lowest kind of immorality into which a thinking being may fall.’...” I am afraid there is about the pragmatist something of that dangerous citizen who will not hesitate on occasion to grasp this sorry scheme of things entire and shatter it to bits, full of the faith that it can be remoulded closer to the heart’s desire. * * * * * “But now,” James returns to his argument, “these are all childish human cases, and have nothing to do with the great cosmical matters, like the question of religious faith. Let us then pass on to that....