Page:Essays on Truth and Reality (1914).djvu/102

iv ON TRUTH AND PRACTICE 83 species, while enjoying the social consideration and the amusements of the average man? And the young man may reply that, so far as he sees, this would not bring him happiness. He prefers to place his chief end perhaps in art or in science, or again in the excitement of the chase or of gaming or amours, or possibly, it may even be, in some form of mystical religion. And to seek my happiness, he would exclaim, however far away from what the world calls practical, how can there be for me any course more practical than this? And evidently here there is a failure to use words on each side with a common meaning. Our confusion may be further heightened when we reflect on the one hand that everything in our lives must be practical. For conduct is practical, and nothing that we are and do can possibly, it seems, be external to conduct. But on the other hand in at least some men we seem to discover non-practical wants. We seem to find a desire for the cultivation of truth or beauty for their own sakes, or even a longing for the contemplative absorption in the eternal. And thus while on the one side every desire and every want must be practical, on the other side some practical aims seem to entail the subordination of practice.

These familiar doubts, idle to those minds which have risen far above doubt, to other minds have suggested serious questionings. And I will go on briefly to state that which has served as perhaps a sufficient answer. My practice may be called in general the alteration by me of existence, inward and outward, and 'existence' we may understand as what happens or as the series of events. And since, whatever else it is, my whole life certainly is a process in time, certainly everything which I am or do has, or may have, this practical