And there are other lines of reflection among Neo-Hegelians against which Pragmatism is equally determined to make a more or less definite protest, in the interest, as before, of our practical and of our moral activity. We may recall, to begin with, the memorable words of Mr. Bradley, in his would-be refutation of the charge that the ideals of Absolutism “to some people” fail to “satisfy our nature’s demands.” “Am I,” he indignantly asks, “to understand that we are to have all we want, and have it just as we want it?” adding (almost in the next line) that he “understands,” of course, that the “views” of Absolutism, or those of any other philosophy, are to be compared “only with views” that aim at “theoretical consistency” and not with mere practical beliefs.[163] Now, speaking for the moment for Pragmatism, can it be truly philosophical to contemplate with equanimity the idea of any such ultimate conflict as is implied in these words between the demands of the intellect[164] and the demands of emotion--to use the term most definitely expressive of a personal, as distinct from a merely intellectual satisfaction? Then again there is, for example, the dictum of Dr. McTaggart, that there is “no reason to trust God’s goodness without a demonstration which removes the matter from the sphere of faith.”[165] May there not, we would ask, be a view of things according to the truth of which the confidence of the dying Socrates in the reasonableness and the goodness of God are at least as reasonable as his confession, at the same time, of his ignorance of the precise, or the particular, fate both of the just and of the unjust? And is not, too, such a position as that expressed in these words of Dr. McTaggart’s about a logically complete reason for believing in the essential righteousness of things now ruled out of court by some of the concessions of his brother rationalists to Pragmatism, to which reference has already been made? It is so ruled out, for example, even by Mr. Bradley’s condemnation as a “pernicious prejudice” of the idea that “what is wanted for working purpose is the last theoretical certainty about things.”[166] CHAPTER IV PRAGMATISM AND HUMAN ACTIVITY It requires now but a slight degree of penetration to see that beneath this entire matter of an apparent opposition between our “theoretical” and our “practical” satisfaction, and beneath much of the pragmatist insistence upon the “consequences” of ideas and of systems of thought, there is the great question of the simple fact of human action and of its significance for philosophy. And it might truly be said that the raising of this question is not merely another of the more or less definitely marked features of Pragmatism, but in some respects it is one outstanding characteristic.