Immortality is, in fact, a necessary implicate of personal religion. The man that lives with God is immortal as He is.”[265] If the reader be inclined to interject here that all that this pragmatist talk about the importance of action obviously amounts to is simply the position that the highest truth must somehow take recognition of our beliefs as well as of our knowledge, we can but reply that he is literally so far in the right. Our point, however, for Pragmatism would here be that belief rests not merely upon the intellect, but upon the intellect in conjunction with the active and the ethical nature of man. It is mainly because we feel ourselves to be active and legislative and creative, mainly because we partly are and partly hope to be, as the phrase has it, that we believe as well as seek continually to know. Hence the rightness and the soundness of Pragmatism in its contention; the truth is not so much a datum (something given) as a construction,[266] or a thing that is made and invented by way of an approximation to an ideal. That it is this almost in the literal sense of these words is evident from the fact of the slow and gradual accumulation of truth and knowledge about themselves and their environment by the fleeting generations of men. And even to-day the truth is not something that exists in nature or in history or in some privileged institution, or in the teaching of some guild of masters, but rather only in the attitude of mind and heart of the human beings who continue to seek it and to will it and to live it when and where they may. Truth includes, too, the truth of the social order, of civilization[267]--this last costly work being just as much the creation of the mind and the behaviour of men as is knowledge itself. And there can, it would seem, be but slight objection to an admission of the fact that it is only in so far as the truth has been conceived as inclusive of the truth of human life as well as of that of the world of things that humanity as a whole seems to have any abiding interest in its existence, even where, as in _Omar Khayyàm_ and in other writings, the idea of its discovery is given up as impossible. Only, in other words, as the working out of the implications of desire does thought live, and the completest thought is at bottom but the working out of the deepest desire.[268]