VII
If, with such a view of the nature of absolute truth, we turn back to estimate the sense in which our opinions about the world as a whole can be true or false, we now see that our account both of the insight of the reason, and of the nature of the world, [{159}] has become enriched by this whole analysis of the nature of opinion. Opinions about the universe are counsels as to how to adjust your deeds to the purposes and requirements which a survey of the whole of the life whereto your life belongs shows to be the genuinely rational purposes and requirements. Every such opinion then, whether true or false, is an effort to adjust your will and your conduct to the intents of a supreme will which decides values, establishes the rule of life, estimates purposes in the light of complete insight. That is, the insight to which your opinions appeal is indeed the insight of a real being who values, estimates, establishes, decides, as concretely as you do, and who is therefore not only all-wise, but possessed of a will. Your search for salvation is a seeking to adjust yourself to this supreme will. That such a will is real is as true as it is true that any opinion whatever which you can form with regard to the real world is either true or false. However ignorant you are, you are, then, in constant touch with the master of life; for you are constantly doing irrevocable deeds whose final value, whose actual and total success or failure, can only be real, or be known, from the point of view of the insight that faces the whole of real life, and with reference to the purposes of the will whose expression is the entire universe.
If, however, you say, with the pragmatists: "There is no whole world, there is no complete view, there is no will that wills the world; for all [{160}] is temporal, and time flows, and novelties constantly appear, and the world is just now incomplete, and therefore there is nothing eternal," then my answer is perfectly definite. Of course there is, just at this point of time, no complete world. Of course, every new deed introduces novelties into the temporal world. But, on the other hand, even to assert this is to assert that the future, and in fact all the future, in all its individual detail, belongs to reality, and forms part of its wholeness. To admit this is to admit that the true insight, and the divine will, require, and get, the endless whole of future time, as well as of past time, before them in one, not timeless, but time-inclusive survey, which embraces the whole of real life. And just such a survey, and just such a life, not timeless, but time-inclusive, constitute the eternal, which is real, not apart from time, and from our lives, but in, and through and above all our individual lives. The divine will wills in us and in all this world, with its endless past and its endless future, at once. The divine insight is not lifeless. It includes and surveys all life. All is temporal in its ceaseless flow and in its sequence of individual deeds. All is eternal in the unity of its meaning.
To assert this, I insist, is not to deny our freedom and our initiative. The divine will wills me, precisely in so far as it wills that, in each of my individual deeds, I should then and there express my own unique, and in so far free, choice. And to assert, as I do, that the divine will wills all "at once" [{161}] is not to assert that it wills all at any one moment of time, but only that the divine will is expressed in the totality of its deeds that are done in all moments of time.
But this, you will say, is still philosophy, not what the plain man needs for his religion. The question remains: Through what source of insight are we able to adjust our daily lives to this divine wisdom and to this divine will? I answer: Through a source of insight which is accessible to the plainest and simplest reasonable and sincere human being. Yet this source of insight, not yet expressly named in our study, includes in a beautiful and spiritual unity the true sense of our individual experience, of our social experience, of our reason, and of our will, and gives us at length a genuine religion. This new source we are to study in our next lecture.