Utility cannot become the test of truth. The ways of the individual are capricious, and do not by themselves set forth any definite standard of judgement. What is constantly in a state of change cannot be an ultimate truth, for all change points to something towards which it moves. If truth is based on mere belief or even on a pragmatic consideration, it will contradict itself every time our beliefs get disillusioned. Such a truth has no doubt a pragmatic value in the sense that even hallucinations have a value at the time of their being experienced. Even our dreams are real and satisfy the pragmatic test in their own realm. But in the end such truths get contradicted in a greater reality than themselves. If pragmatism holds that there is no such thing as error at all, and that every experience is real within its own field, we have to add that these experiences cannot be ultimately real, for the test of reality is non-contradiction. When we apply this test we find that the plurality of individuals, the finitude of God, and the ultimate validity of observed facts in empirical life vanish in an experience which transcends relative categories. If we are to confine ourselves every time to the immediate presentations in sense-perception and mental operations, irrespective of their being dreams, errors of thought or defective revelations through the senses, we have to be for ever sceptics in regard to the nature of truth. That such a sceptic attitude is impossible on the very face of it is easy to understand. Ultimate truth is not a means to an end, but an end in itself, for we have no other desire than to be in possession of truth, and as truth, in the end, should be universal, an experience of it would be the same as being in communion with it. Knowledge is the essence of truth, and what applies to truth applies also to knowledge. We cannot create truth; we only get a gradual revelation of it in the different stages of the unfoldment of our consciousness. What is created is perishable and is not truth. Else, we could call every whim, fancy and illusion a truth. Truth has a self-certainty and finality which none of the human experiences in the sense-world can afford to possess. Belief is not truth, for our beliefs often deceive us. Only a higher faith rooted in an illumined conviction can correspond to truth. The truths of sensations as well as those of mathematics and logic—the two aspects of truth for the pragmatist—are comprehended in a higher and more inclusive experience which we term the Absolute.

The philosophy of the Absolute is not fatalistic. It gives the greatest hope and courage to man by asserting that his essence is an immortal omnipresent existence which is wisdom and truth, freedom and bliss. It does not deny free-will or effort as a practical means to this glorious experience. The highest effort consists in meditation on the Absolute. Effort, however, rises beyond itself when the goal is reached. Finitude, evil, duality, plurality, change, evolution are all true and have a meaning in the level of individual experience. But they are all sublimated and absorbed in the Universal Self. There are three degrees of reality, all to be accepted as valid while they are experienced,—the apparent, the practical and the absolute - revealed respectively in hallucination, in waking life, and in the supersensuous realisation of Eternal Being.

James, sometimes, seems to believe in a reality which is independent of human thinking, and like the absolute idealists makes its being consist in pure experience. Contrary to his fundamental view he speaks as though truth is discovered rather than created in the adventures of life's processes, and makes out that it is a unity as real as diversity and that experience is not confined to the diverse perceptions of the senses. These developments are definitely foreign to the main current of his thought which suggests that the conscious self is only a flow of ideas appearing successively and that an indivisible consciousness is never experienced. The idea of a real unity behind a real diversity can make no sense, for we are confronted with two realities each contending to be as universal as the other. Is James occasionally being dogged by a faint persistence of the unsurmountable feeling that there ought to be, after all, a ground for all phenomena, which is immediately battled with by his usual belief that plurality cannot be denied on account of its being the object of the empirical will-to-believe? Perhaps, yes. He admits an aboriginal stuff of experience which enters experience and has not yet become properly a part of conscious life, a subject without a disjoined predicate, a neutral limit of our mental functions. But, no. What we call a universe is for him a multi-verse, and his universe is only a universe of discourse. The real objective field of experience is pluralistic. The oneness that he is talking about is a collection of particulars, the concatenation of things in space and time, and the continuity in the operation of the laws of physics, like gravitation, light, heat, sound, magnetism and electricity, and the influence of one man on another, etc. James thinks that even this continuity is not really continuous; it is broken up into divided parts by the existence of opaque material bodies. James overlooks the fact that even the physical universe is a perfectly continuous field of force or energy and that even opaque bodies which, according to him, create plurality in the supposed continuum are, as corroborated by the discoveries of modern physics, reducible to this common universal force or energy, and matter loses its matterness or its character of being an embodied substance when subjected to careful observation. We know how Whitehead surmounts all plurality and division, in his illuminating philosophy of organism. Even lines of physical influence cannot be explained without a basic unity which is coextensive with our own conscious indivisible Self. James tells us that truth is neither a presentation of reality nor a correspondence with it; it is a relation between our ideas and experiences, effected, changed and created by us. That relations between things are themselves matters of experience takes us forcibly to its deeper implication that there is a unity linking all things together and that experience ought to be an undivided whole of consciousness. There cannot be consciousness of the relation of things without a universal consciousness that holds them together and makes them intelligible. James thinks that truth is a normal functioning and a harmonious relation of ideas, even as health is a normal functioning and a balanced relation of the parts of the body. He forgets that health is the indication of the expression of a wholeness that we experience when the harmonious relations of the parts of the body reflect the indivisibility of the Self. James manages to maintain, however, that reality is a stream of perceptions and ideas together with the relations that obtain between these perceptions and ideas as connecting links, and that reality is created by us every moment. He does not stop to think that no relation of ideas within is possible without an indivisible Self, and that there can be no perceptions outside without an Absolute underlying all things related in knowledge.