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 is just as inhuman as the
determinism it so powerfully attacks. The determinist (who, to do him
justice, does not pretend to be a human being) makes nonsense of the
human sense of actual choice. The pragmatist, who professes to be
specially human, makes nonsense of the human sense of actual fact.

To sum up our contention so far, we may say that the most characteristic
current philosophies have not only a touch of mania, but a touch of
suicidal mania. The mere questioner has knocked his head against the
limits of human thought; and cracked it. This is what makes so futile
the warnings of the orthodox and the boasts of the advanced about the
dangerous boyhood of free thought. What we are looking at is not the
boyhood of free thought; it is the old age and ultimate dissolution of
free thought. It is vain for bishops and pious bigwigs to discuss what
dreadful things will happen if wild scepticism runs its course. It has
run its course. It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great
truths that will be revealed if once we see free thought begin. We have
seen it end. It has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself.
You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask
themselves if they have any selves. You cannot fancy a more sceptical
world than that in which men doubt if there is a world. It might
certainly have reached its bankruptcy more quickly and cleanly if it had
not been feebly hampered by the application of indefensible laws of
blasphemy or by the absurd pretence that modern England is Christian.
But it would have reached the bankruptcy anyhow. Militant atheists are
still unjustly persecuted; but rather because they are an old minority
than because they are a new one. Free thought has exhausted its own