I have tried to show pragmatism as a moment in the swing of thought from realism to idealism, and how for it the most vital, that is to say, the moral and religious aspects of our world are things to work and fight for, to make and to mould, not just to find and come across. Its god is indeed a god of battles, and we are his soldiers on whom his victory depends. But as I view this battle, it is not to be fought out in heart throes and outpourings of sentiment. These may indeed change and better human relationships; but it must not be forgotten that human relationships exist in a physical universe that is older than they, and promises to outlast them. Now, just the physics of things show a strong tendency to be amoral and atheistic. “You all know the picture of the last state of the universe which evolutionary science foresees. I cannot state it better than in Mr. Balfour’s words: ‘The energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit and all his thoughts will perish. The uneasy consciousness which in this obscure corner has for a brief space broken the contented silence of the universe will be at rest. Matter will know itself no longer. “Imperishable monuments” and “immortal deeds,” death itself, and love stronger than death, will be as if they had not been. Nor will anything that is be better or worse for all that the labor, genius, devotion, and suffering of man have striven through countless ages to effect.’ “That,” comments James, “is the sting of it, that in the vast drifting of the cosmic weather, though many a jeweled shore appears, and many an enchanted cloud-bank floats away, long lingering ere it be dissolved--even as ours now lingers for our joy--yet, when these transient products are gone, nothing, absolutely _nothing_ remains to represent those particular qualities, those elements of preciousness which they may have enshrined. Dead and gone are they, gone utterly from the very sphere and room of being. Without an echo; without a memory; without an influence on aught that they may come after to make it care for similar ideals.”[14] Has not, then, realism the last word in this argument and does not the rolling mechanism of things have its way with us in the end--since it compasses not only our death, but the collapse of the very theatre in which our little lives have played themselves out? No, I should say, this is not the moral of the tale, though there is a moral to the tale. “Knowledge,” writes Francis Bacon, in his “Novum Organum,” “knowledge and human power are synonymous.” So are human impotence and human ignorance synonymous. The child that dips a cup of water from the fountain is subduing nature’s mechanism to its needs. It is only a question of how great is our knowledge if we would know how great is our power.