sternly loyal to the ideal of change; he must not begin to flirt gaily
with the ideal of monotony. Progress itself cannot progress. It is worth
remark, in passing, that when Tennyson, in a wild and rather weak
manner, welcomed the idea of infinite alteration in society, he
instinctively took a metaphor which suggests an imprisoned tedium. He
wrote--

"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