Such are the forms of incomplete conviction which make tolerance plausible. There remain those attitudes which frankly abandon, for both sides, the claim to truth in any absolute sense. Our opinions in any case, they maintain, are but aspects of an all-embracing truth which can be known only to a consciousness of the whole. Your opinion and mine are, therefore, in the limited sense which is alone applicable, equally true. But the only ideas which we can admit to have an equal claim to partial truth, are those which are not mutually exclusive, so that the different facets of the universal truth shall not interfere with one another. Unless we mean simply that a variety of opinion makes the world less dull, in which case conviction does not come in at all, we are unable to admit that a belief diametrically opposed to our own is "just as good," not as a foil, or a spur, to our own thinking, but in its own right. It may be that the Bradleyan Absolute can admit contradictories as equally true, but such mental acrobatics do not come naturally to human thinking. Since we cannot view the world as the Absolute sees it, we cannot, in practice, be guided by the theory that opposite answers to living problems, set in all their complex conditions, are equally true. The conviction that is softened by an historic sense or by use of the terms of biological evolution, meets the same difficulty. In so far as there is any real demand for tolerance, it must be in the conflict of present issues. We do not need to be tolerant of the past, unless we imagine ourselves in that past, and regard its issues as, for the time being, contemporary with us. Ideas opposing our own may be gently dealt with, as necessary stages of civilization. But if a stage is now no longer necessary, the excuse fails. Cannibalism could not be defended as a civilized practice, simply because it represents a stage of development. Still less can we tolerate on the same ground what seems to us wrong in modern life. For we cannot without undue vanity maintain that the rest of mankind living under our conditions are less highly developed than we. So the sincere pacifist, for example, cannot properly be tolerant of war as an expression of prevailing savagery, beyond which he has himself advanced.