Historically, it is quite possible to show how under certain social conditions this human and practical problem of the relation of good and intelligence generated the notion of the transcendental good and the pure reason. As Grimes reminded us, Plato---- _Moore._ Yes, and Protagoras--don’t forget him; for unfortunately we know both the origin and the consequences of your doctrine that being and seeming are the same. We know quite well that pure empiricism leads to the identification of being and seeming, and that is just why every deeply moral and religious soul from the time of Plato and Aristotle to the present has insisted upon a transcendent reality. _Eaton._ Personally I don’t need an absolute to enable me to distinguish between, say, the good of kindness and the evil of slander, or the good of health and the evil of valetudinarianism. In experience, things bear their own specific characters. Nor has the absolute idealist as yet answered the question of _how_ the absolute reality enables him to distinguish between being and seeming in one single concrete case. The trouble is that for him _all_ Being is on the other side of experience, and _all_ experience is seeming. _Grimes._ I think I heard you mention history. I wish both of you would drop dialectics and go to history. You would find history to be a struggle for existence--for bread, for a roof, for protected and nourished offspring. You would find history a picture of the masses always going under--just missing--in the struggle, because others have captured the control of natural resources, which in themselves, if not as benign as the eighteenth century imagined, are at least abundantly ample for the needs of all. But because of the monopolization of Nature by a few persons, most men and women only stick their heads above the welter just enough to catch a glimpse of better things, then to be shoved down and under. The only problem of the relation of Nature to human good which is real is the economic problem of the exploitation of natural resources in the equal interests of all, instead of in the unequal interests of a class. The problem you two men are discussing has no existence--and never had any--outside of the heads of a few metaphysicians. The latter would never have amounted to anything, would never have had any career at all, had not shrewd monopolists or tyrants (with the skill that characterizes them) have seen that these speculations about reality and a transcendental world could be distilled into opiates and distributed among the masses to make them less rebellious. That, if you would know, Eaton, is the real historic origin of the ideal world beyond. When you realize that, you will perceive that the pragmatists are only half-way over. You will see that practical questions _are_ practical, and are not to be solved merely by having a theory _about_ theory different from the traditional one--which is all your pragmatism comes to.