"Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves
of change."

He thought of change itself as an unchangeable groove; and so it is.
Change is about the narrowest and hardest groove that a man can
get into.

The main point here, however, is that this idea of a fundamental
alteration in the standard is one of the things that make thought
about the past or future simply impossible. The theory of a
complete change of standards in human history does not merely
deprive us of the pleasure of honouring our fathers; it deprives
us even of the more modern and aristocratic pleasure of despising them.

This bald summary of the thought-destroying forces of our
time would not be complete without some reference to pragmatism;
for though I have here used and should everywhere defend the
pragmatist method as a preliminary guide to truth, there is an extreme
application of it which involves the absence of all truth whatever.
My meaning can be put shortly thus. I agree with the pragmatists
that apparent objective truth is not the whole matter; that there
is an authoritative need to believe the things that are necessary
to the human mind. But I say that one of those necessities
precisely is a belief in objective truth. The pragmatist tells
a man to think what he must think and never mind the Absolute.
But precisely one of the things that he must think is the Absolute.
This philosophy, indeed, is a kind of verbal paradox. Pragmatism is
a matter of human needs; and one of the first of human needs
is to be something more than a pragmatist. Extreme pragmatism