ty of California 
 era Regional 
 iry Facility
 
 STUDIES IN HUMANISM
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 RIDDLES OF THE SPHINX 
 
 A STUDY IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 
 LONDON : SWAN SONNENSCHEIN AND CO. 1894 
 
 "AXIOMS AS POSTULATES" 
 
 IN 
 
 PERSONAL IDEALISM 
 
 EDITED BY HENRY STURT 
 LONDON : MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD. 1902 
 
 HUMANISM 
 
 PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS 
 LONDON : MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD. 1903
 
 STUDIES 
 
 IN 
 
 HUMANISM 
 
 BY 
 
 F. C. S. SCHILLER, M.A., D.Sc. 
 
 FELLOW AND SENIOR TUTOR OF CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD 
 
 Pontoon 
 MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED 
 
 NEW YORK : THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 I 
 1907 
 
 All rights reset z-ed
 
 TJNIV^?TTY OF CALIFORNIA 
 SANTA 5 ARA COLLEGE LIBRART 
 
 7711 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 OF the essays which compose this volume about half 
 have appeared in various periodicals Mind, the Hibbert 
 Journal, the Quarterly Review, the Fortnightly Review, 
 and the Journal of Philosophy during the past three 
 years, and I am indebted to their editors for the 
 leave to republish. Additions have, however, grown 
 so extensive that of the matter of the book not more 
 than one - third, and that the less constructive part, 
 can be said to have been in print before. That the 
 form should still be discontinuous is due to the fact 
 that the conditions under which I have had to work 
 greatly hamper and delay the composition of a con- 
 tinuous treatise, and that it seemed imperative to deal 
 more expeditiously with the chief strategic points of the 
 philosophic situation. I hope, however, that the dis- 
 continuity of the form will not be found incompatible 
 with an essential continuity of aim, argument, and 
 interest. In all these respects the present Studies may- 
 most naturally be regarded as a continuation of Humanism 
 and of my share in Personal Idealism, without, however, 
 ceasing to be independently intelligible. They have had 
 to reflect the developments of philosophy and the 
 progress of discussion, and this has rendered them, I 
 fear, slightly more technical on the whole than Humanism. 
 Nor can their main topic, the meaning of Truth, be made 
 
 vii a 2
 
 viii STUDIES IN HUMANISM 
 
 an altogether popular subject. On the other hand, they 
 touch more fully than Humanism on subjects which 
 are less exclusively technical, such as the nature of our 
 freedom and the religious aspects of philosophy. 
 
 That in the contents construction should be somewhat 
 largely mixed with controversy is in some respects re- 
 grettable. But whether one can avoid controversy 
 depends largely on whether one's doctrines are allowed 
 an opportunity of peaceful development. Also on 
 what one has undertaken to do. And in this case 
 the most harmless experiments in fog - dispelling have 
 been treated as profanations of the most sacred mysteries. 
 It is, however, quite true that the undertaking of the new 
 philosophy may be regarded as in some ways the most 
 stupendous in the history of thought. Heine, in a 
 well - known passage, once declared the feats of the 
 German Transcendentalists to have been more terrific than 
 those of the French Revolutionaries, in that they de- 
 capitated a Deity and not a mere mortal king. But 
 what was the Transcendental boldness of Kant, as described 
 by Heine, when armed only with the ' Pure Reason,' 
 and attended only by his ' faithful Lampe ' and an 
 umbrella, he ' stormed Heaven and put the whole garrison 
 to the sword,' to the Transatlantic audacity of a philosophy 
 which is seriously suspected of penetrating into the 
 ' supercelestial ' heavens of the Pure Reason, and of there 
 upsetting the centre of gravity of the Intelligible Universe, 
 of dethroning the ' Higher Synthesis of the Devil and 
 the Deity,' the Absolute, and of instituting a general 
 ' Gbtzendammerung ' of the Eternal Ideas? Even its 
 avowed aim of humanising Truth, and bringing it back to 
 earth from such altitudes, seems at least as sacrilegious 
 and Promethean as the theft of fire. What wonder, 
 then, that such transcelestial conflagrations should kindle
 
 PREFACE ix 
 
 burning questions on the earth, and be reflected in the 
 heating of terrestrial tempers ? 
 
 But after all, the chief warrant for a polemical handling 
 of these matters is its strict relevance. The new truths 
 are most easily understood by contrast with the old 
 perplexities, and the necessity of advancing in their 
 direction is rendered most evident by the impossibility of 
 advancing in any other. 1 
 
 That the development of the new views, then, should 
 have been so largely controversial, was probably in- 
 evitable. It has been all the more rapid for that. For 
 the intensity of intellectualistic prejudice and the intoler- 
 ance of Absolutism have compelled us to attack in self- 
 defence, to press on our counter-statements in order to 
 engage the enemy along his whole front, and to hurry 
 every new argument into the line of battle as soon as it 
 became available. 2 
 
 The result has been an unprecedented development of 
 converging novelties. Within the past three or four 
 years (i.e. since the preface to Humanism was written) 
 there have .'appeared in the first place the important 
 Studies in Logical Theory by Prof. Dewey and his 
 coadjutors. These, it is becoming more and more 
 evident, have dealt a death-blow, not only to the ' corre- 
 spondence-with-reality ' view of Truth, but also to all the 
 realisms and idealisms which involve it. And so far no 
 absolutism has succeeded in dispensing with it. Prof. 
 Dewey and his pupils have also contributed a number of 
 weighty and valuable papers and discussions to the philo- 
 sophic periodicals (Mind, the Journal of Philosophy, and 
 the Philosophical Review}. Mr. C. S. Peirce's articles in the 
 
 1 Cp. pp. 73-4. 
 
 2 Readers, however, who wish to avoid this controversial side as much as 
 possible, may be counselled to read Essays i., v., ii., iii., vii., xvi.-xx. in the 
 order indicated.
 
 x STUDIES IN HUMANISM 
 
 Monist (1905) have shown that he has not disavowed the 
 great Pragmatic principle which he launched into the 
 * world so unobtrusively nearly thirty years ago, and 
 seemed to leave so long without a father's care. William 
 James's final metaphysic, on the other hand, is still in 
 the making. But he has expounded and defended the 
 new views in a series of brilliant articles in the Journal of 
 Philosophy and in Mind} In England the literature of 
 the question has been critical rather than constructive. 
 In the forefront may be mentioned Mr. Henry Sturt's 
 Idola Theatri, a singularly lucid and readable study of 
 the genesis, development, and ailments of English Ab- 
 solutism. But the masterly (and unanswered) criticisms by 
 Capt. H. V. Knox and Mr. Alfred Sidgwick of the most 
 essential foundations of absolutist metaphysics should not 
 be forgotten. 2 And lastly, Prof. Santayana's exquisite 
 Life of Reason should be cited as a triumph, not only of 
 literary form, but also of the Pragmatic Method in a 
 mind which has espoused a metaphysic very different 
 from that which in general Pragmatism favours. For 
 Prof. Santayana, though a pragmatist in epistemology, 
 is a materialist in metaphysics. 3 
 
 The new movement is also in evidence beyond the 
 borders of the English - speaking world, either in its 
 properly pragmatic forms or in their equivalents and 
 analogues. It is most marked perhaps in France, where 
 it has the weighty support in philosophy of Prof. Bergson 
 of the College de France, who has followed up the anti- 
 intellectualism of his Donn/es immediates de la Conscience 
 
 1 Journal of Philosophy, I. Nos. 18, 20, 21, 25; II. Nos. 2, 5, 7, 9, n ; 
 III. No. 13. Mind, N.S. Nos. 52 and 54. In general it must be added that for 
 the most up-to-date contributions to the subject the Journal of Philosophy must 
 be consulted, though its matter often suffers from a crudeness of literary form. 
 
 - Mind, N.S. Nos. 54 and 53. 
 
 3 I have discussed the relations of his work to the Pragmatic movement in 
 reviewing it for the Hibbert Journal (January and July 1906).
 
 PREFACE xi 
 
 by his Matiere et Memoire, and in science of Prof. Henri 
 Poincare" of the Institute, whose La Science et UHypothese 
 and La Valeur de la Science expound the pragmatic 
 nature of the scientific procedures and assumptions with 
 unsurpassable lucidity and grace. He seems, indeed, as 
 yet unwilling to go as far as some of the ultra-pragmatic 
 followers of Prof. Bergson, e.g. MM. Leroy and Wilbois, 
 and imposes some slight limitations on the pragmatic 
 treatment of knowledge, on the ground that knowledge 
 may be conceived as an end to which action is a means. 
 But this perhaps only indicates that this pre-eminent man 
 of science has not yet taken note of the work which has 
 been done by philosophers in the English-writing world 
 on the nature of the conception of Truth and the relation 
 of the scientific endeavour to our total activity. At any 
 rate he goes quite far enough to make it clear that 
 whoever henceforth wishes to uphold the traditional views 
 of the nature of science, and particularly of mathematics, 
 will have in the first place to confute Prof. Poincare. 
 
 In Italy Florence boasts of a youthful, but extremely 
 active and brilliant, band of avowed Pragmatists, whose 
 militant organ, the Leonardo, edited by Signor Giovanni 
 Papini, is distinguished by a freedom and vigour of 
 language which must frequently horrify the susceptibilities 
 of academic coteries. In Denmark Prof. Hoffding is 
 more than sympathetic, and the Royal Academy of 
 Science has recently made the relations of Pragmatism 
 and Criticism the subject for the international prize essay 
 for which Schopenhauer once wrote his Grundlage der 
 Moral. 
 
 In Germany alone the movement seems slow to take 
 root eo nomine. Nevertheless, there are a goodly number 
 of analogous tendencies. Professors Ostwald and Mach 
 and their schools are the champions of a pragmatic view
 
 xii STUDIES IN HUMANISM 
 
 of science. Various forms of ' Psychologism,' proceeding 
 from the same considerations as those which have inspired 
 the Anglo-American pragmatisms, disturb the older con- 
 ceptions of Logic. Among them Prof. Jerusalem's Der 
 Kritische Idealismus und die reine Logik is particularly 
 noteworthy. The ' school of Fries,' in which Dr. Julius 
 Schultz, the author of the brilliant Psychologic der Axiome, 
 is conspicuous, excellently emphasises the postulation of 
 axioms, though as their polemic against empiricism still 
 presupposes the Humian conception of a passive ex- 
 perience, they prefer to call them a priori} The human- 
 istic aspects of the movement find a close parallel in the 
 writings of Prof. Eucken. But on the whole Germany 
 lags behind, largely because these various tendencies have 
 not yet been connected or brought to a common focus. 
 I have, however, reason to believe that this deficiency 
 may soon be remedied. 
 
 What, meanwhile, is the situation in the camp of 
 Intellectualism, which is still thronged with most of the 
 philosophic notables ? Although the technical journals 
 have been full of controversial articles, and the interest 
 excited has actually sent up the circulation of Mind, 
 singularly little has been produced that rises above the 
 merest misconception or misrepresentation ; and nothing 
 to invalidate the new ideas. Mr. F. H. Bradley has 
 exercised his great talents of philosophic caricature, 2 but 
 a positive alternative to Pragmatism, in the shape of an 
 intelligible, coherent doctrine of the nature of Truth, is 
 still the great desideratum of Intellectualism. 
 
 The most noteworthy attempt, beyond doubt, to work 
 out an intellectualistic ideal of Truth, which has proceeded 
 from the Anglo-Hegelian school, is Mr. H. H. Joachim's 
 recent Nature of Truth. But it may be doubted whether 
 
 1 Cp. Mind, xv. p. 115. 2 Cp. Essay iv.
 
 PREFACE 
 
 Xlll 
 
 its merits will commend it to the school. For it ends in 
 flat failure, and avowed scepticism, which is scientifically 
 redeemed only by the fact that its outspokenness greatly 
 facilitates the critic's task in laying his finger on the 
 fundamental flaw of all Intellectualism. With the ex- 
 ception of Plato's Theaetetus, no book has, consequently, 
 been of greater service to me in showing how fatal the 
 depersonalising of thought and the dehumanising of Truth 
 are to the possibility and intelligibility of knowledge, 
 and how arbitrary and indefensible these abstractions 
 really are. 
 
 It would seem, therefore, that the situation is rapidly 
 clearing itself. On the one hand we have a new Method 
 with inexhaustible possibilities of application to life and 
 science, which, though it is not primarily metaphysical, 
 contains also the promise of an infinity of valuable, and 
 more or less valid, metaphysics : on the other, opposed to 
 it on every point, an old metaphysic of tried and tested 
 sterility, which is condemned to eternal failure by the 
 fundamental perversity of its logical method. And now 
 at last is light beginning to penetrate into its obscurities. 
 It is becoming clear that Rationalism is not rational, and 
 that ' reason ' does not sanction its pretensions. Absolut- 
 ism is ending as those who saw its essentially inhuman 
 character foresaw that it must In its ' Hegelian ' as in 
 its Bradleian form, it has yielded itself wholly up to 
 Scepticism, and Mr. Bradley was evidently not a day 
 too soon in comparing it to Jericho. 1 For its defences 
 have crumbled into dust, without a regular siege, 
 merely under the strain of attempts to man them. Its 
 opponents really are not needed for their demolition ; 
 they need merely record and applaud the work of self- 
 destruction. 
 
 1 Cp. p. 119.
 
 xiv STUDIES IN HUMANISM 
 
 But that this process should provoke dissatisfaction 
 and disintegration in the ranks of the absolutists is no 
 wonder, nor that the signs of their confusion should be 
 multiplying. No one seems to know, e.g., what is to be 
 done about the central point, the conception of Truth ; 
 whether the ' correspondence-view ' is to be reaffirmed or 
 abandoned, and in the former case, how it can be defended, 
 or in the latter, how it can be discarded. 1 Nay, the voice 
 of mutiny is beginning to be heard. The advice is 
 openly given to the ' idealist ' host to shut up their 
 Bradley and their Berkeley, and to open their Plato and 
 their Hegel. 2 As regards Hegel this recommendation is 
 not likely to be fruitful, because nothing will be found in 
 him that bears on the situation : Plato, on the other 
 hand, is likely to provide most salutary, but almost 
 wholly penitential, reading. For I believe, these Studies 
 will be found to fulfil a pledge given in Humanism? and 
 to show that Intellectualism may be confuted out of the 
 mouth of its own founder and greatest exponent For 
 Plato had in fact perceived the final consequence of 
 Intellectualism, viz. that to complete itself it must de- 
 humanise the Ideal and derealise the Real, with superior 
 clearness. His unwillingness either to avoid or to conceal 
 this consequence is what has engendered the hopeless 
 crux of the ' Platonic problem ' from his day to this, and 
 from this difficulty no intellectualism can ever extricate 
 itself. It may rail at humanity and try to dissolve 
 human knowledge ; but the only real remedy lies in 
 renouncing the abstractions on which it rests. Our only 
 hope of understanding knowledge, our only chance of 
 keeping philosophy alive by nourishing it with the 
 realities of life, lies in going back from Plato to Prota- 
 
 1 Cp. Essays iv. 7 ; vii. i ; xx. 2. 
 2 Mind, N.S. No. 59, xv. p. 327. s P. xvii.
 
 PREFACE xv 
 
 goras, and ceasing to misunderstand the great teacher 
 who discovered the Measure of man's Universe. 
 
 I cannot conclude this Preface without recording my 
 indebtedness to my friend Capt H. V. Knox, who has 
 read a large part of these Studies in proof and in manu- 
 script, and with whom I have had the pleasure of dis- 
 cussing some of the knottiest points in the theory of 
 knowledge. I have profited thereby to such an extent 
 that I should find it hard to say how far some of the 
 doctrines here enunciated were his or mine. 
 
 SILS MARIA, September 1906.
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 ESSAY PAGE 
 
 I. THE DEFINITION OF PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM i 
 
 II. FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS . . .22 
 
 III. THE RELATIONS OF LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY . 71 
 
 IV. TRUTH AND MR. BRADLEY . . .114 
 V. THE AMBIGUITY OF TRUTH . . .141 
 
 VI. THE NATURE OF TRUTH. . . .163 
 
 VII. THE MAKING OF TRUTH. . . . 179 
 
 VIII. ABSOLUTE TRUTH AND ABSOLUTE REALITY . 204 
 
 IX. EMPIRICISM AND THE ABSOLUTE . . .224 
 
 X. Is ABSOLUTE IDEALISM SOLIPSISTIC? . . 258 
 
 XI. ABSOLUTISM AND THE DISSOCIATION OF PER- 
 SONALITY ..... 266 
 
 XII. ABSOLUTISM AND RELIGION . . .274 
 
 XIII. THE PAPYRI OF PHILONOUS, I.-II. . . 298 
 
 XIV. I. PROTAGORAS THE HUMANIST . . . 302 
 XV. II. A DIALOGUE CONCERNING GODS AND PRIESTS 326 
 
 XVI. FAITH, REASON, AND RELIGION . . . 349 
 
 XVII. THE PROGRESS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH . 370 
 
 ' XVIII. FREEDOM .... 391 
 
 XIX. THE MAKING OF REALITY . . .421 
 
 XX. DREAMS AND IDEALISM . . . .452 
 
 INDEX . 487
 
 I 
 
 THE DEFINITION OF PRAGMATISM AND 
 HUMANISM 1 
 
 ARGUMENT 
 
 The need of definitions. I. Importance of the problem of Error. Truth 
 as the evaluation of claims. The question begged and burked by 
 Intellectualism. The value of the consequences as the Humanist test. 
 Why 'true' consequences are 'practical' and 'good.' Impossibility of 
 a ' purely intellectual ' satisfaction. First definition of Pragmatism : 
 truths are logical values. II. Necessity of ' verification ' of truth by use 
 and application ; the second definition, the truth of an assertion depends 
 on its application ; and the third, the meaning of a rule lies in its 
 application ; the fourth, all meaning depends on purpose. Its value as a 
 protest against the divorce of logic from psychology. Fifth definition, all 
 mental life is purposive, a protest against Naturalism, as is the sixth, a 
 systematic protest against ignoring the purposiveness of actual knowing. 
 No alien reality. Finally this leads to the seventh definition as a conscious 
 application to logic of a ideological psychology, implying a voluntaristic 
 metaphysic. III. Humanism as the spirit of Pragmatism, and like 
 it a natural method, which will not mutilate experience. Its antagonism 
 to pedantry. It includes Pragmatism, but is not necessitated by the 
 latter, nor confined to epistemology. IV. Neither are as such meta- 
 physics, both are methods, metaphysical syntheses being merely 
 personal. But both may be conceived metaphysically and have 
 metaphysical affinities. Need of applying the pragmatic test to 
 metaphysics. 
 
 REAL definitions are a standing difficulty for all who 
 have to deal with them, whether as logicians or as 
 scientists, and it is no wonder that dialectical philosophers 
 fight very shy of them, prefer to manipulate their verbal 
 imitations, and count themselves happy if they can get 
 an analysis of the acquired meaning of a word to pass 
 
 1 Based in part on two short papers, in Mind, xiv. N.S. No. 54, and Leonardo 
 for April 1905. 
 
 B
 
 2 STUDIES IN HUMANISM i 
 
 muster instead of a troublesome investigation of the 
 behaviour of a thing. For a real definition, to be adequate, 
 really involves a complete knowledge of the nature of the 
 thing defined. And of what subject of scientific interest 
 can we flatter ourselves to have complete knowledge ? 
 
 The difficulty, moreover, of defining adequately is in- 
 definitely increased when we have to deal with subjects 
 of which our knowledge, or their nature, is rapidly develop- 
 ing, so that our definitions grow obsolete almost as fast 
 as they are made. Nevertheless definitions of some sort 
 are psychologically needed : we must know what things 
 are, enough at least to know what we are discussing. It 
 is just in the most progressive subjects that definitions 
 are most needed to consolidate our acquisitions. In their 
 absence the confusion of thought and the irrelevance of 
 discussion may reach the most amazing proportions. 
 And so it is the duty of those who labour at such subjects 
 to avail themselves of every opportunity of explaining 
 what they mean, to begin with, and never to weary of 
 redefining their conceptions when the growth of know- 
 ledge has enlarged them, even though they may be aware 
 that however assiduously they perform this duty, they 
 will not escape misconception, nor, probably, misrepre- 
 sentation. The best definitions to use in such circum- 
 stances, however, will be genetic ones, explaining how the 
 matters defined have come into the ken of science, and 
 there assumed the shape they have. 
 
 All these generalities apply with peculiar force to the 
 fundamental conceptions of the new philosophy. The 
 new ideas have simultaneously broken through the hard 
 crust of academic convention in so many quarters, they 
 can be approached in such a multitude of ways, they 
 radiate into so many possibilities of application, that 
 their promoters run some risk of failing to combine their 
 labours, while their opponents may be pardoned for 
 losing their tempers as well as their heads amid the 
 profusion of unco-ordinated movements which the lack of 
 formal definition is calculated to encourage. 
 
 Even provisional definitions of Pragmatism and
 
 i PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 3 
 
 Humanism, therefore, will possess some value, if they 
 succeed in pointing out their central conceptions. 
 
 The serious student, I dare not say of formal logic, 
 but of the cognitive procedures of the human intelligence, 
 whenever he approaches the theory of actual knowing, 
 at once finds himself confronted with the problem of 
 error. 1 All ' logical propositions,' as he calls them, make 
 the same audacious claim upon him. They all claim to 
 be ' true ' without reservations or regard for the claims of 
 others. And yet, of course, unless he shuts his eyes to 
 all but the most ' formal ' view of ' truth,' he knows that 
 the vast majority of these propositions are nothing but 
 specious impostors. They are not really ' true,' and 
 actual science has to disallow their claim. The logician, 
 therefore, must take account of this rejection of claims, of 
 this selection of the really ' true ' from among apparent 
 ' truths.' In constituting his science, therefore, he has to 
 condemn as ' false ' as well as to recognise as ' true,' i.e, 
 to evaluate claims to truth. 
 
 The question therefore is How does he effect this ? 
 How does he discriminate between propositions which 
 claim to be true, but are not, and claims to truth which 
 are good, and may be shown to be valid ? How, that is, 
 are valid truths distinguished from mere claims which 
 may turn out to be false ? These questions are in- 
 evitable, and no theory of knowledge which fails to 
 answer them has any claim on our respect. It avows 
 an incompleteness which is as disgraceful as it is in- 
 convenient. 
 
 1 Contrast with this the putting of the question in an absolutist logic, e.g. Mr. 
 Joachim's instructive Nature of Truth, which I had not seen when this was written. 
 Mr. Joachim begins at the opposite end with ' the Ideal, ' and avoids the con- 
 sideration of Error as long as he can. But when he does come to it, he is 
 completely worsted, and his system is wrecked. Thus the difference between the 
 Absolutist and the Humanist theory lies chiefly in the standpoint ; the facts are 
 the same on either view. The question, in fact, resolves itself into this, 
 whether or not ' Logic ' is concerned with human thought. This the humanist 
 affirms, while the absolutist is under the disadvantage of not daring to deny it 
 wholly. Hence the incoherence and inevitable collapse of his theory. Cp. 
 Essay ii. 16-17.
 
 4 STUDIES IN HUMANISM r 
 
 Now from the standpoint of rationalistic intellectual- 
 ism there is no real answer to these questions, because 
 a priori inspection cannot determine the value of a claim, 
 and experience is needed to decide whether it is good or 
 not. 1 Hence the obscurity, ambiguity, and shiftiness, the 
 general impotence and unreality, of the traditional logic 
 is largely a consequence of its incapacity to deal with this 
 difficulty. For how can you devise any practicable 
 method of evaluating 'truths,' if you decline (i) to allow 
 practical applications and the consequences of the work- 
 ing out of claims to affect their validity, if you decline 
 (2) to recognise any intermediate stage in the making of 
 truth between the mere claim and a completed ideal of 
 absolute truth, and if, moreover, (3) you seek to burke 
 the whole question of the formation of ideals by assuming 
 that prior to all experience and experiment there exists one 
 immutable ideal towards which all claims must converge ? 
 
 Pragmatism, on the other hand, essays to trace out 
 the actual ' making of truth,' 2 the actual ways in which 
 discriminations between the true and the false are effected, 
 and derives from these its generalisations about the 
 
 1 The complete failure of intellectualism to apprehend even the most obvious 
 aims of Pragmatism is amusingly illustrated by Mr. Bradley's fulminations 
 against us on the ground that we cannot possibly distinguish between a 
 random claim and an established truth. He pontifically declares (Mind, xiii. 
 p. 322) that "the Personal Idealist ... if he understood his own doctrine 
 must hold any end, however perverted, to be rational, if I insist on it person- 
 ally, and any idea, however mad, to be the truth, if only some one will have it 
 so." Again, on p. 329, he ludicrously represents us as holding that "I can 
 make and I can unmake fact and truth at my caprice, and every vagary of mine 
 becomes the nature of things. This insane doctrine is what consistency demands," 
 but Mr. Bradley graciously concedes that " I cannot attribute it even to the 
 protagonist of Personal Idealism." Of course if there is one subject which 
 pragmatist logicians may be said to have made their own from the days of 
 Protagoras downwards, it is that of the evaluation of individual claims and their 
 gradual transformation into 'objective' truths (cp. Essay ii. 5). Intellectualists, 
 on the other hand, have ever steadfastly refused to consider the discrepancies 
 arising from the existence of psychological variations in human valuations (cp. p. 
 132), or lazily preferred to attribute to 'the human,' or even to 'the absolute, 
 mind whatever idiosyncrasies they discovered in themselves. Thus inquiry into 
 the actual making of truth has been tabooed, the most important questions have 
 been begged, and both the extent and the limitations of the ' common' world of 
 intersubjective social agreement have been left an unaccountable mystery, some- 
 times further aggravated by the metaphysical postulation of a superhuman mind 
 conceived as ' common ' to all human minds, but really incompetent to enter into 
 relation with any of them, and a fortiori incapable of accounting for their 
 individual differences. 
 2 Cp. Essay vii.
 
 i PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 5 
 
 method of determining the nature of truth. It is from 
 such empirical observations that it derives its doctrine 
 that when an assertion claims truth, its consequences are 
 always used to test its claim. In other words, what \ 
 follows from its truth for any human interest, and more 
 particularly and in the first place, for the interest with 
 which it is directly concerned, is what established its real 
 truth and validity. This is the famous ' Principle of ' 
 Peirce,' which ought to be regarded as the greatest truism, 
 if it had not pleased Intellectualism to take it as the 
 greatest paradox. But that only showed, perhaps, how 
 completely intellectualist traditions could blind philo- 
 sophers to the simplest facts of cognition. For there 
 was no intrinsic reason why even the extremest in- 
 tellectualism should have denied that the difference 
 between the truth and the falsehood of an assertion must 
 show itself in some visible, observable way, or that two 
 theories which led to precisely the same practical con- 
 sequences could be different only in words. 
 
 Human interest, then, is vital to the existence of truth : 
 to say that a truth has consequences and that what has 
 none is meaningless, means that it has a bearing upon 
 some human interest. Its c consequences ' must be con- 
 sequences to some one for some purpose. If it is clearly 
 grasped that the ' truth ' with which we are concerned is 
 truth for man and that the ' consequences ' are human too, 
 it is, however, really superfluous to add either (i) that the 
 consequences must be practical, or (2) that they must be 
 good^ in order to distinguish this view sharply from 
 that of rationalism. 
 
 1 I must here rectify a misapprehension under which I laboured in discussing 
 the subject in Mind, xiv. N. S. No. 54, p. 236. I there tried to draw a distinction 
 between a narrower and a wider ' pragmatism,' of which I attributed only the 
 former to Mr. Peirce. In this I was following James's distinction between the 
 positions that ' truths should have practical consequences,' and that they ' consist 
 in their consequences,' and that these must be ' good.' Of these he seemed to 
 attribute only the former to Mr. Peirce, and denominated the latter Humanism. 
 But Humanism seems to me to go further still, and not to be restricted to the one 
 question of ' truth, ' while Mr. Peirce has privately assured me that from the first 
 he had perceived the full consequences of his dictum. Hence the formulation of 
 the whole pragmatic principle must be ascribed to him. He now, however, calls 
 his own specific developments of Pragmatism, ' pragmaticism. ' See Monist, 
 
 XV. 2.
 
 6 STUDIES IN HUMANISM i 
 
 For (i) all consequences are 'practical,' sooner or 
 later, in the sense of affecting our action. Even where 
 they do not immediately alter the course of events, they 
 alter our own nature, and cause its actions to be different, 
 and thus lead to different operations on the world. 
 
 Similarly (2) if an assertion is to be valuable, and 
 therefore ' true,' its consequences must be ' good.' They 
 can only test the truth it claims by forwarding or baffling, 
 the interest, by satisfying or thwarting the purpose, which 
 led to the making of the assertion. If they do the one, 
 the assertion is ' good,' and pro tanto ' true ' ; if they do 
 the other, it is ' bad ' and ' false.' For whatever arouses 
 an interest or forwards an end is judged to be (so far) 
 ' good,' whatever baffles or thwarts is judged to be ' bad.' 
 If, therefore, the consequences of an assertion turn out to 
 be in this way ' good,' it is valuable for our purposes, and, 
 provisionally at least, establishes itself as ' true ' ; if they 
 are bad, we reject it as useless and account it ' false,' and 
 search for something that satisfies our purpose better, or 
 in extreme cases accept it as a provisional truth concern- 
 ing a reality we are determined to unmake. Thus the 
 predicates ' true ' and ' false ' are nothing in the end but 
 indications of logical value, and as values akin to and 
 comparable with the values predicated in ethical and 
 aesthetical judgments, which present similar problems of 
 the validation of claims. 1 
 
 The reason, therefore, why truth is said to depend on 
 its consequences is simply this, that if we do not imagine 
 truths to exist immutably and a priori in a supercelestial 
 world, and to descend magically into a passively recipient 
 soul, as rationalists since Plato have continually tried 
 to hold, 2 they must come into being by winning our 
 acceptance. And what rational mode of verification can 
 any one suggest other than this testing by their con- 
 sequences ? 
 
 Of course the special nature of the testing depends on 
 the subject-matter, and the nature of the ' experiments ' 
 which are in this way made in mathematics, in ethics, 
 
 1 Essay v. 3. 2 Cp. Essay ii. 15, 16.
 
 i PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 7 
 
 in physics, in religion, may seem very diverse super- 
 ficially. 
 
 But there is no reason to set up a peculiar process of 
 verification for the satisfying of a ' purely intellectual ' 
 interest, different in kind from the rest, superior in dignity, 
 and autocratic in authority. For (i) there is no pure 
 intellect. If ' pure intellect ' does not imply a gross 
 blunder in psychology, and this is probably what it too 
 often meant until the conception was challenged, it means 
 an abstraction, an intellect conceived as void of function, 
 as not applied to any actual problem, as satisfying no 
 purpose. And such an intellect of course would be 
 absurd. Or is it possibly conceived as having the end 
 of amusing its possessor ? As achieving this end it may 
 claim somewhat more regard, but apart from its value as 
 exercise, the mere play of the intellect, which is meant 
 for serious work, does not seem intrinsically venerable ; 
 it is certainly just as liable to abuse as any other game. 
 And (2) if we exclude morbid or frivolous excesses, the 
 actual functioning of the intellect, even in what are called 
 its most ' purely intellectual ' forms, is only intelligible by 
 reference to human ends and values. 
 
 All testing of ' truth,' therefore, is fundamentally alike. 
 It is always an appeal to something beyond the original 
 claim. It always implies an experiment. It always 
 involves a risk of failure as well as a prospect of success. 
 And it always ends in a valuation. As Prof. Mach has 
 said: 1 "knowledge and error flow from the self-same 
 psychic sources ; the issue alone can discriminate between 
 them." We arrive, therefore, at our first definition of 
 Pragmatism as the doctrine that (i) truths are logical 
 values, and as the method which systematically tests 
 claims to truth in accordance with this principle. 
 
 1 Erkenntnis und Irrtum, p. 1 14. The German word 'Erfolg,' translated ' issue, ' 
 covers both ' consequence ' and ' success ' : it is, in fact, one of those numerous 
 words by which language spontaneously testifies to the pragmatic nature of 
 thought. Cp. 'fact' 'made,' 'true' 'trow' 'trust,' 'false 1 'fail,' 'verify,' 
 ' object '=' aim '; and in German 'wirklich' ' wirken,' ' wahr' ' bewahren ,' 
 ' Wahrufhmung,' etc.
 
 8 STUDIES IN HUMANISM i 
 
 II 
 
 It is easily apparent that it directly follows from this 
 definition of truth that all ' truths ' must be verified to 
 be properly true. A ' truth ' which will not (or cannot) 
 submit to verification is not yet a truth at all. Its truth 
 is at best potential, its meaning is null or unintelligible, 
 or at most conjectural and dependent on an unfulfilled 
 condition. To become really true it has to be tested, 
 and it is tested by being applied. Only when this is 
 done, only that is when it is used, can it be determined 
 what it really means, and what conditions it must fulfil to 
 be really true. Hence all real truths must have shown 
 themselves to be useful ; they must have been applied to 
 some problem of actual knowing, by usefulness in which 
 they were tested and verified. 
 
 Hence we arrive at a second formulation of the prag- 
 matic principle, on which Mr. Alfred Sidgwick has justly 
 laid such stress, 1 viz. that (2) the 'truth' of an assertion 
 depends on its application. Or, in other words, ' abstract ' 
 truths are not fully truths at all. They are truths out of 
 use, unemployed, craving for incarnation in the concrete. 
 It is only in their actual operations upon the world of 
 immediate experience that they cast off their callous 
 ambiguity, that they mean, and live, and show their 
 power. Now in ordinary life men of ordinary intelli- 
 gence are quite aware of this. They recognise that truth 
 depends very essentially upon context, on who says what, 
 to whom, why, and under what circumstances ; they know 
 also that the point of a principle lies in the application 
 thereof, and that it is very hazardous to guide oneself 
 by abstract maxims with a doctrinaire disregard of the 
 peculiarities of the case. The man of science similarly, 
 for all the world-embracing sweep of his generalisations, 
 for all his laudations of inexorable ' law,' is perfectly 
 aware that his theoretic anticipations always stand in 
 need of practical confirmation, and that if this fails his 
 ' laws ' are falsified. 
 
 1 See his article on "Applied Axioms" in Mind, xiv. N.S. No. 53.
 
 i PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 9 
 
 The intellectualist philosopher alone has blinded him- 
 self to these simple facts. He has dreamt a wondrous 
 dream of a truth that shall be absolutely true, self-testing, 
 and self-dependent, icily exercising an unrestricted sway 
 over a submissive world, whose adoration it requites with 
 no services, and scouting as blasphemy all allusion to use or 
 application. But he cannot point to any truth which really 
 realises this ideal. 1 Even the abstract truths of arithmetic, 
 upon which alone he seems to rest his case, now that the 
 invention of metag^eometries has shown the ' truth of 
 geometry' to involve also the question of its application, 
 derive their truth from their application to experience. 
 The abstract statement, e.g. that "two and two make 
 four," is always incomplete. We need to know to what 
 ' twos ' and ' fours ' the dictum is applied. It would not 
 be true of lions and lambs, nor of drops of water, nor of 
 pleasures and pains. The range of application of the 
 abstract truth, therefore, is quite limited. And conceivably 
 it might be so restricted that the truth would become 
 inapplicable to the outer world altogether. Nay, though 
 states of consciousness could always be counted, so long 
 as succession was experienced, it is impossible to see how 
 it could be true to an eternal consciousness. The gods, 
 as Aristotle would have said, seeing that they cannot 
 count, have no arithmetic. 
 
 In short, truths must be used to become true, and (in 
 the end) to stay true. They are also meant to be used. 
 They are rules for action. And a rule that is not applied, 
 and remains abstract, rules nothing, and means nothing. 
 Hence we may, once more following Mr. Alfred Sidgwick, 
 regard it as the essence of the pragmatic method that (3) 
 the meaning of a rule lies in its application. It rules, that 
 is, and is true, within a definite sphere of application which 
 has been marked out by experiment. 
 
 Perhaps, however, it is possible to state the pragmatic 
 character of truth still more incisively by laying it down 
 that ultimately (4) all meaning depends on purpose. This 
 formulation grows naturally out of the last two. The 
 
 1 Cp. Essay ii. 16-18.
 
 io STUDIES IN HUMANISM i 
 
 making of an assertion, the application of an alleged 
 truth to the experience which tests it, can only occur in 
 the context of and in connexion with some purpose, which 
 defines the nature of the whole ideal experiment. 
 
 The dependence of meaning on purpose is beginning 
 to be somewhat extensively recognised, though hardly as 
 yet what havoc this principle must work among the ab- 
 stractions of intellectualist logic. For it is one of the most 
 distinctive ways in which the pragmatic view of truth 
 can be enunciated, and guards against two of the chief 
 failings of Intellectualism. It contains an implicit protest 
 against the abstraction of logic from psychology : for 
 purpose is as clearly a psychological conception as meaning 
 is professedly a logical one. 1 And it negatives the notion 
 that truth can depend on how things would appear to an 
 all-embracing, or ' absolute,' mind. For such a mind could 
 have no purpose. It could not, that is, select part of its 
 content as an object of special interest to be operated 
 on or aimed at. 2 In human minds, on the other hand, 
 meaning is always selective and purposive. 
 
 It is, in fact, a biological function, intimately related 
 to the welfare of the organism. Biologically speaking, 
 the whole mind, of which the intellect forms part, may be 
 conceived as a typically human instrument for effecting 
 adaptations, which has survived and developed by showing 
 itself possessed of an efficacy superior to the devices 
 adopted by other animals. Hence the most essential 
 feature of Pragmatism may well seem its insistence on 
 the fact that (5) all mental life is purposive. This insist- \ 
 ence in reality embodies the pragmatic protest against 
 naturalism, and as such ought to receive the cordial 
 support of rationalistic idealisms. But it has just been 
 shown that absolutist idealisms have their own difficulties 
 with the conception of purpose, and besides, it is an open 
 secret that they have for the most part long ago reduced 
 the ' spiritual nature of reality ' to a mere form, and retired 
 from the struggle against naturalism. 3 A ' spiritual nature 
 
 1 See Essay iii. 9. ' 2 Cp. Essay ix. 5. 
 
 3 Cp. Essay xii. 5.
 
 i PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM n 
 
 of reality' which accepts all the naturalistic negations of 
 human activity and freedom, and leaves no room for 
 any of the characteristic procedures and aspirations of the 
 human spirit, is a more dangerous foe to man's spiritual 
 ambitions than the most downright materialism. 
 
 Pragmatism, therefore, must enter its protest against 
 both the extremes that have so nearly met. It must 
 constitute itself into (6) a systematic protest against all 
 ignoring of the purposiveness of actual knowing, alike 
 whether it is abstracted from for the sake of the im- 
 aginary ' pure ' or ' absolute ' reason of the rationalists, 
 or eliminated for the sake of an equally imaginary ' pure 
 mechanism ' of the materialists. It must insist on the 
 permeation of all actual knowing by interests, purposes, 
 desires, emotions, ends, goods, postulations, choices, etc., 
 and deny that even those doctrines which vociferate their 
 abhorrence of such things are really able to dispense with 
 them. For the human reason is ever gloriously human, 
 even when most it tries to disavow its nature, and to mis- 
 conceive itself. It mercifully interposes an impenetrable veil 
 between us and any truth or reality which is wholly alien 
 to our nature. The efforts, therefore, of those who ignore 
 the nature of the instruments they use must ever fail, and 
 fail the more flagrantly the more strenuously they persist 
 in thinking to the end. 
 
 If, however, we have the courage and perseverance to 
 persist in thinking to the end, i.e. to form a metaphysic, 
 it is likely that we should arrive at some sort of Volun- 
 tarism. For Voluntarism is the metaphysic which most 
 easily accords and harmonises with the experience of 
 activity with which all our thinking and all our living 
 seem to overflow. Metaphysics, however, are in a 
 manner luxuries. Men can live quite well without a 
 conscious metaphysic, and the systems even of the most 
 metaphysical are hardly ever quite consistent, or fully 
 thought out. Pragmatism, moreover, is not a metaphysic, 
 though it may, somewhat definitely, point to one. It is 
 really something far more precious, viz. an epistemological 
 method which really describes the facts of actual knowing.
 
 12 STUDIES IN HUMANISM i 
 
 But though it is only a method in the field of logic, it 
 may well confess to its affinities for congenial views in 
 other sciences. It prides itself on its close connexion 
 with psychology. But it clearly takes for granted that 
 the psychology with which it is allied has recognised the 
 reality of purposes. And so it can be conceived as a 
 special application to the sphere of logic of standpoints 
 and methods which extend far beyond its borders. So 
 conceived we may describe it as (7) a conscious application 
 to epistemology (or logic) of a teleo logical psychology, which 
 implies, ultimately, a voluntaristic metaphysic. 
 
 These seven formulations of the essence of Pragmatism 
 look, doubtless, very different in words ; but they are 
 nevertheless very genuinely equivalent. For they are 
 closely connected, and the ' essence,' like the ' definition,' 
 of a thing is relative to the point of view from which it 
 is regarded. And the problems raised by Pragmatism are 
 so central that it has points of contact with almost every 
 line of philosophical inquiry, and so is capable of being 
 defined by its relation to this. What is really important, 
 however, is not this or that formulation, but the spirit in 
 which it approaches, and the method by which it examines, 
 its problems. The method we have observed ; it is em- 
 pirical, teleological, and concrete. Its spirit is a bigger 
 thing, which may fitly be denominated Humanism. 
 
 Ill 
 
 / ' 
 
 Humanism is really in itself the simplest of philosophic 
 
 standpoints : it is merely the perception that the philo- 
 sophic problem concerns human beings striving to com- 
 prehend a world of human experience by the resources of 
 human mindsT Not even Pragmatism could be simpler 
 or nearer to an obvious truism of cognitive method. For 
 if man may not presume his own nature in his reasonings 
 about his experience, wherewith, pray, shall he reason ? 
 What prospect has he of comprehending a radically alien 
 universe? And yet not even Pragmatism has been more 
 bitterly assailed than the great principle that man is the
 
 i PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 13 
 
 measure of his experience, and so an ineradicable factor 
 in any world he experiences. The Protagorean principle 
 may sometimes seem paradoxical to the uninstructed, be- 
 cause they think it leaves out of account the ' independence ' 
 of the ' external ' world. But this is mere misunderstand- . 
 ing. Humanism has no quarrel with the assumptions of 
 common-sense realism ; it does not deny what is popularly 
 described as the ' external ' world. It has far too much 
 respect for the pragmatic value of conceptions which de 
 facto work far better than those of the metaphysics which 
 despise them. It insists only that the ' external world ' 
 of realism is still dependent on human experience, and 
 perhaps ventures to add also that the data of human 
 experience are not completely used up in the construction 
 of a real external world. 1 Moreover, its assailants are not 
 realists, though, for the purpose of such attacks, they may 
 masquerade as such. 2 
 
 The truth is rather that Humanism gives offence, not 
 because it leaves out, but because it leaves in. It leaves 
 in a great deal Intellectualism would like to leave out, a 
 great deal it has no use for, which it would like to extir- 
 pate, or at least to keep out of its sight. But Humanism will 
 not assent to the mutilations and expurgations of human 
 nature which have become customary barbarisms in the 
 initiation ceremonies of too many philosophic schools. It 
 demands that man's integral nature shall be used as the 
 whole premiss which philosophy must argue from whole- 
 heartedly, that man's complete satisfaction shall be the 
 conclusion philosophy must aim at, that philosophy shall 
 not cut itself loose from the real problems of life by making 
 initial abstractions which are false, and would not be admir- 
 able, even if they were true. Hence it insists on leaving in 
 the whole rich luxuriance of individual minds, instead of 
 compressing them all into a single type of mind,' feigned to 
 be one and immutable ; it leaves in also the psychological 
 wealth of every human mind and the complexities of its 
 interests, emotions, volitions, aspirations. By so doing it 
 sacrifices no doubt much illusory simplicity in abstract 
 
 1 Cp. Essay xx. 14. a Cp. Essay xx. 4.
 
 14 STUDIES IN HUMANISM i 
 
 formulas, but it appreciates and explains vast masses of 
 what before had had to be slurred over as unintelligible 
 fact. 1 
 
 The dislike of Humanism, therefore, is psychological 
 in origin. It arises from the nature of certain human 
 minds who have become too enamoured of the artificial 
 simplifications, or too accustomed to the self-inflicted 
 mutilations, and the self-imposed torments, whereby they 
 hope to merit absorption in absolute truth. These ascetics 
 of the intellectual world must steadfastly oppose the free 
 indulgence in all human powers, the liberty of moving, of 
 improving, of making, of manipulating, which Humanism 
 vindicates for man, and substitutes for the old ideal of an 
 inactive contemplation of a static truth. TE is no wonder 
 that the SirneOiii stylite" of "Ihe oTd order, hoisted aloft 
 each on the pillar of his metaphysical ' system,' resent the 
 disturbance of their restful solitude, ' alone with the Alone,' 
 by the hoots of intrusive motor-cars ; that the Saint 
 Antonys of the deserts of Pure Thought are infuriated by 
 their conversion into serviceable golf-links ; and that 
 the Juggernaut Car of the Absolute gets fewer and fewer 
 votaries to prostrate themselves beneath its wheels every 
 time it is rolled out of the recesses of its sanctuary for 
 when man has grown conscious of his powers he will prefer 
 even to chance an encounter with a useful machine to 
 being run over by a useless ' deity.' 
 
 The active life of man is continuously being trans- 
 formed by the progress of modern science, by the know- 
 ledge which is power. But not so the ' knowledge ' which 
 is ' contemplation,' which postpones the test of action, 
 and struggles to evade it. Unfortunately, it is hard to 
 modernise the academic life, and it is this life which is 
 the fountain-head of intellectualism. Academic life natur- 
 ally tends to produce a certain intellectualistic bias, and to 
 select the natures which incline to it. Intellectualism, 
 therefore, in some form will always be a congenial philo- 
 sophy which is true to the academic life. 
 
 1 Contrast Mr. Joachim's Nature of Truth throughout, and especially pp. 
 167-68, and compare Essay ii. 16.
 
 i PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 15 
 
 Genuine whole-hearted Humanism, on the other hand, 
 is a singularly difficult attitude to sustain in an academic 
 atmosphere ; for the tendencies of the whole mode of life 
 are unceasingly against it. If Protagoras had been a univer- I 
 sity professor, he would hardly have discovered Humanism ; 
 he would more likely have constructed a Nephelococcygia 
 of a system that laid claim to absolute, universal, and 
 eternal truth, or spent his life in overthrowing the dis- 
 crepant, but no less presumptuous, systems of his col- 
 leagues. Fortunately he lived before universities had 
 been invented to regulate, and quench, the thirst for 
 knowledge ; he had to earn his living by the voluntary 
 gratitude for instructions which could justify themselves 
 only in his pupils' lives ; and so he had to be human and 
 practical, and to take the chill of pedantry off his discourses. 
 
 Just because Humanism, then, is true to the larger life 
 of man it must be in some measure false to the artificially 
 secluded studies of a ' seat of learning ' ; and its accept- 
 ance by an academic personage must always mean a 
 triumph over the obvious temptation to idealise and adore 
 the narrownesses of his actual life. However much it exalts 
 the function of man in general, it may always be taken, to 
 hint a certain disparagement of the academic man. It 
 needs a certain magnanimity, in short, in a professor to 
 avow himself a Humanist. 
 
 Thorough Humanists, therefore, will always be some- 
 what rare in academic circles. There will always be many 
 who will not be able to avoid convincing themselves of 
 the truth of a method which works like the pragmatic one 
 (and indeed in another twenty years pragmatic convictions 
 will be practically universal), without being able to over- 
 come the intellectualistic influences of their nature and 
 their mode of life. Such persons will be psychologically 
 incapacitated to advance in the path which leads from 
 Pragmatism to Humanism. 
 
 Yet this advance is in a manner logical as well as 
 psychological. For those whose nature predisposes them 
 towards it will find it reasonable and satisfying, and when 
 they have reached the Humanist position and reflect upon
 
 16 STUDIES IN HUMANISM i 
 
 the expansion of Pragmatism which it involves, there will 
 seem to be a ' logical ' connexion. Pragmatism will seem 
 a special application of Humanism to the theory of know- 
 ledge. But Humanism will seem more universal. It 
 will seem to be possessed of a method which is applicable 
 universally, to ethics, to aesthetics, to metaphysics, to 
 theology, to every concern of man, as well as to the theory 
 of knowledge. 
 
 Yet there will be no ' logical ' compulsion. Here, as 
 always when we come to the important choices of life, we 
 must be free to stop at the lower level, if we are to be 
 free to advance to the higher. We can stop at the 
 epistemological level of Pragmatism (just as we can stop 
 short of philosophy on the scientific plane, and of science 
 on the plane of ordinary life), accepting Pragmatism indeed 
 as the method and analysis of our cognitive procedure, 
 but without seeking to generalise it, or to turn it into a 
 metaphysic. Indeed if our interest is not keen in life as 
 a whole, we are very likely to do something of the kind. 
 
 IV 
 
 What, then, shall be said of metaphysics ? As Prag- 
 matism and Humanism have been defined, neither of them 
 necessitates a metaphysic. 1 Both are methods ; the one 
 
 1 Hence the criticism to which both have frequently been subjected on the 
 ground that they were not metaphysically complete philosophies (e.g. by Dr. S. H. 
 Mellone in Mind, xiv. pp. 507-529) involves a certain misconstruction. I can 
 only reply that I have not yet attempted to formulate a (or rather my] pragmatic or 
 humanist metaphysic. The essay on ' Axioms as Postulates ' in Personal Idealism 
 was epistemological throughout ; so were the pragmatic parts of Humanism. 
 'Activity and Substance' does indeed contain some metaphysical construction, but 
 it is not distinctively pragmatic. When, therefore, Dr. Mellone (I.e. p. 528) 
 ascribes to me the assumption of an absolute chaos as the prius of experience, 
 condemns it as unthinkable, and finally complains of feeling a ' collapse ' when 
 ' ' this incredible metaphysical dogma is suddenly transformed into a methodo- 
 logical postulate," he has made his difficulty by construing my epistemology as 
 metaphysics. Antecedently this misinterpretation would never have seemed 
 possible to me, and so I thought it unnecessary to insert a warning against 
 it. But that several able critics have fallen into this error shows the extent 
 of the confusion of thought induced by the deliberate blurring of the 
 boundaries between logic and metaphysics which we owe to Hegelising 
 philosophers. If, however, Dr. Mellone will do me the honour of re-reading 
 my doctrine as purely epistemological, he will see that both the difficulty 
 and the ' collapse ' were in his own preconceptions. In itself the conception
 
 i PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 17 
 
 restricted to the special problem of knowing, the other 
 more widely applicable. And herein lies their value ; for 
 methods are necessities of scientific progress, and there- 
 fore indispensable. Metaphysics, on the other hand, are 
 really luxuries, personal indulgences that may be conceded 
 to a lifelong devotion to science, but of no coercive 
 objective validity. For there is an immense discrepancy 
 between the ideal claims of metaphysics and the actual 
 facts. By definition metaphysics is (i.e. tries to be) the 
 science of the final synthesis of all the data of our experi- 
 ence. But de facto these data are (i) insufficient, and (2) 
 individual. Hence (i) the metaphysical synthesis is 
 lacking in cogency : it is imaginative and conjectural. It 
 is the ideal completion of an image of reality which is 
 rough-hewn and fragmentary ; it is the reconstruction of 
 a torso. Whoever therefore prefers to remain within the 
 bounds of actual knowledge, is entitled to refrain from 
 pledging himself to a metaphysic. He may recognise any 
 realities, he may employ any conceptions and methods, he 
 finds necessary or expedient, without affirming their 
 ultimate validity. 
 
 (2) And so those whose spirits crave for an ideal 
 completion and confirmation of knowledge by a meta- 
 physical construction must abate their pretensions. They 
 must renounce the pretence of building what is universal, 
 and eternal, and objective, and compulsory, and ' valid for 
 
 of knowledge as developing by the progressive determination of a relatively 
 indeterminate and plastic ' matter ' never pretended to be more than an analysis 
 of knowledge. It does indeed point to the conceptual limit of a ' first matter ' 
 in which as yet no determinations have been acquired, but it does not affirm its 
 positive existence, and it is quite conceivable (i) that our analysis may be brought 
 up against some irreducible datum of fact, and (2) that it should never actually 
 get back to the metaphysical origin of things. Anyhow, the question of the proper 
 metaphysical interpretation of the conceptions used in pragmatic epistemology 
 was not raised. Epistemologically, however, the conception of a determinable 
 plastic ' matter ' seems useful enough as descriptive of our knowing, and as inno- 
 cent and at least as valid as the Aristotelian notion that knowledge always arises 
 out of pre-existent knowledge. Of course such notions get into difficulties when 
 we try to extract from them accounts of the absolute origin of knowledge. But 
 is it so sure that absolute origins can ever be traced ? They are certainly not to 
 be had for the asking. For they always seem to involve a demand for the 
 derivation of something out of nothing. And I am not aware that any theory 
 has up to date answered these questions. But I am confident that when 
 Humanist metaphysics are constructed, they will not be so wildly irrelevant to 
 actual life as in the past metaphysical attempts have mostly been. 
 
 C
 
 1 8 STUDIES IN HUMANISM i 
 
 intelligence as such.' In view of the actual facts, does it 
 not argue an abysmal conceit and stupendous ignorance 
 of the history of thought to cherish the delusion that of 
 all philosophies one's own alone was destined to win 
 general acceptance ipsissimis verbis, or even to be reflected, 
 undimmed and unmodified, in any second soul ? Every 
 metaphysic, in point of fact, works up into its structure 
 large masses of subjective material which is individual, and 
 drawn from its author's personal experience. It always 
 takes its final form from an idiosyncrasy. 
 
 And, furthermore, this is quite as it should be. If it 
 really is the duty of metaphysics to leave out nothing, to 
 undo abstractions, to aspire to the whole of experience, 
 it must have this personal tinge. For a man's personal 
 life must contribute largely to his data, and his idiosyn- 
 crasy must colour and pervade whatever he experiences. 
 It is surely the most sinister and fatal of abstractions to 
 abstract from the variety of individual minds, in order to 
 postulate a universal substance in which personal life is 
 obliterated, because you are too ignorant or indolent to cope 
 with its exuberance. Two men, therefore, with different 
 fortunes, histories, and temperaments, ought not to arrive at 
 the same metaphysic, nor can they do so honestly ; each 
 should react individually on the food for thought which 
 his personal life affords, and the resulting differences 
 ought not to be set aside as void of ultimate significance. 
 Nor is it true or relevant to reply that to admit this 
 means intellectual anarchy. What it means is something 
 quite as distasteful to the absolutist temper, viz. tolera- 
 tion, mutual respect, and practical co-operation. 
 
 It means also that we should deign to see facts as 
 they are. For in point of fact, the protest against the 
 tyrannous demand for rigid uniformity is in a sense 
 superfluous. No two men ever really think (and still 
 less feel) alike, even when they profess allegiance to the 
 self-same formulas. Nor does the universe appear to 
 contain the psychological machinery by which such 
 uniformity could be secured. In short, despite all 
 bigotry, a philosophy is always in the last resort the
 
 i PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 19 
 
 theory of a life, and not of life in general or in the 
 abstract. 
 
 But though Pragmatism and Humanism are only 
 methods in themselves, it should not be forgotten (i) that 
 methods may be turned into metaphysics by accepting them 
 as ultimate. Whosoever is wholly satisfied by a method 
 may adopt it as his metaphysic, just as he may adopt 
 the working conceptions of a science. Both Pragmatism 
 and Humanism, therefore, may be held as metaphysics : 
 this will induce no difference in their doctrines, but only 
 in the attitude towards them. 
 
 (2) Methods may have metaphysical affinities. Thus 
 our last definition of Pragmatism conceived it as derivative 
 from a voluntarist metaphysic. Humanism, similarly, 
 may be affiliated to metaphysical personalism. 
 
 (3) Methods may point, more or less definitely, to 
 certain metaphysical conclusions. Thus Pragmatism may 
 be taken to point to the ultimate reality of human 
 activity and freedom, 1 to the plasticity and incompleteness 
 of reality, 2 to the reality of the world-process ' in time,' 
 and so forth. Humanism, in addition, may point to the 
 personality of whatever cosmic principle we can postu- 
 late as ultimate, and to its kinship and sympathy with 
 man. 
 
 Clearly, therefore, there is no reason to apprehend 
 that the growth of the new methods of philosophising 
 will introduce monotonous uniformity into the annals of 
 philosophy. ' Systems ' of philosophy will abound as 
 before, and will be as various as ever. But they will 
 probably be more brilliant in their colouring, and more 
 attractive in their form. For they will certainly have to 
 be put forward, and acknowledged, as works of art that 
 bear the impress of a unique and individual soul. 3 Such 
 
 1 Cp. Essay xviii. 2 Cp. Essay xix. 
 
 3 In point of fact this is already beginning to happen. Personally, after 
 perpetrating as pretty a metaphysic as most, in the pre-pragmatic era, viz. 
 Riddles of the Sphinx, I now stand almost alone in threshing the old straw, in 
 persevering with the logical elaboration of the new methods, and in shrinking 
 from more than transient dips in the ocean of metaphysics, which Professors 
 James and Dewey have bravely begun to traverse. Mr. Sturt is meditating a 
 new religion, while Signor Papini is proclaiming the advent of the Uorno-Dio,
 
 20 STUDIES IN HUMANISM i 
 
 has always been their nature, but when this is frankly 
 recognised, we shall grow more tolerant and more 
 appreciative. Only we shall probably be less impressed, 
 and therefore less tormented, than now, by unclear thinking 
 and bad writing which try to intimidate us by laying 
 claim to absolute validity. Such ' metaphysics ' we shall 
 gently put aside. 
 
 It is clear, therefore, that Metaphysic also must hence- 
 forth submit its pretensions to the pragmatic test. It will 
 not be valued any longer because of the magniloquent 
 obscurity with which it speaks of unfathomable mysteries 
 which have no real concern with human life, or because it 
 paints fancy pictures which mean nothing to any but their 
 painters. It will henceforth have to test all its assumptions 
 by their working, and above all to test the assumption that 
 ' intellectual satisfaction ' is something too sacred to be 
 analysed or understood. It will have to verify its con- 
 jectures by propounding doctrines which can be acted 
 on, and tested by their consequences. And that not 
 merely in an individual way. For subjective value any 
 philosophy must of course have for its inventor. But a 
 valid metaphysic must make good its claims by greater 
 usefulness than that. It need not show itself ' cogent ' 
 to all, but it must make itself acceptable to reasonable 
 men, willing to give a trial to its general principles. 
 
 Such a valid metaphysic does not exist at present. 
 But there is no reason why it should not come into 
 being. It can be built up piecemeal bit by bit, by the 
 discovery that truths which have been found useful in the 
 sciences may be advantageously taken as ultimate, and 
 combined into a more and more harmonious system. 
 The opposite procedure, that of jumping to some vast 
 uncomprehended generality by an a priori intuition, 1 and 
 
 man the maker of reality. Mr. Alfred Sidgwick, on the other hand, will not 
 commit himself to Pragmatism save as a logical method. Prof. Santayana's 
 Life of Reason has exquisitely fused together a naturalistic metaphysic and a 
 stoical ethic with a pragmatic theory of knowledge. II y en a pour tons les 
 go-tits ! meme pour le de'gout our absolutist friends will hasten to add ! But 
 for my part I welcome them all. 
 
 1 It matters not at all what that intuition is. Whether we proclaim that 
 All is 'Matter,' or 'Spirit,' or 'God,' we have said nothing, until we have
 
 i PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 21 
 
 then finding that it does not connect up with real life, is 
 neither scientifically tolerable, nor emotionally edifying 
 in the end. All experience hitherto has proved it a 
 delusion. The procedure of a valid metaphysical con- 
 struction must be essentially ' inductive,' and gradual 
 in its development. For a perfect and complete meta- 
 physic is an ideal defined only by approximation, and 
 attainable only by the perfecting of life. For it would 
 be the theory of such a perfect life. 
 
 made clear what 'God,' 'Spirit,' and 'Matter' are in their application to 
 our actual experience, and wherein one practically differs from, and excels, 
 the other. But it is just at this point that intuitions are wont to fail their 
 votaries, and to leave them descanting idly on the superiority of one synonym 
 of ' the blessed word Mesopotamia ' over the others.
 
 II 
 
 FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 1 
 
 ARGUMENT 
 
 I. The value of classical studies and their relation to a ' liberal ' education. 
 2. The paradox of Greek thought its development from science to 
 theology. Philosophic pantheism obvious, but anti-scientific. Why did 
 the Greek gods preserve their personality ? 3. The genesis of Science. 
 Anaximander's ' Darwinism. ' Why so little experimentation ? 4. 
 The great Sophistic movement humanistic, but not therefore anti- 
 scientific. 5- Protagoras's great discovery. Is the individual man 
 the measure of all things ? The transition from ' men ' to ' man,' from 
 subjective to objective truth. Protagoras's speech in the Theaetetus. 
 Its humanism is not scepticism, nor has Plato refuted it, or understood 
 it. 6. Plato's anti-empirical bias leads to misconstruction of Prota- 
 goras and Heraclitus, and ultimately ruins Greek science. 7. Plato's 
 genius and personality. 8. The scientific importance and anti-scientific 
 influence of the Ideal Theory. 9. The difficulty of formulating it. 
 Had Plato two theories ? The ' later theory of Ideas ' criticised. It 
 does not remove the difficulties of the 'earlier.' 10. The unity of 
 Plato's theory defended. n. Its primary aspect is the logical, and 
 this too is the source of its metaphysical embarrassments. 12. The 
 Idea as Plato's solution of the predication problem, and as the mediation 
 between Heraclitus and Parmenides. Ideas as ' systems ' and as 
 necessarily connected inter se. 13. The culmination of the Ideal 
 system in the Idea of Good, a teleological postulate. Its degeneration 
 into an abstract unity under mathematical analogies. 14. Plato's 
 misconception of the Idea's relation to perception leads to a reduction 
 of the sensible to a ' non-existent,' and an impossibility of knowing it. 
 His confusion of ethical with epistemological 'sensationalism.' 15. 
 From this epistemological dualism arises the metaphysical chasm between 
 the Real and the Sensible. It is at bottom a collapse of intellectualistic 
 logic. 1 6. The 'transcendence' of the Idea as tsi translation into 
 metaphysics. Plato well aware of its failure, but unable to remedy it 
 with his notion of the Concept. Platonism has two worlds only from 
 its critics' standpoint, but relapses into Eleaticism. On which side of 
 ' Plato's chasm ' should we stand ? Aristotle's inability to extricate himself. 
 17. The functional nature of the concept not perceived by Plato or 
 his followers. His two mistakes: abstraction (l) from personality; (2) 
 
 1 2-9 of this essay are a considerably expanded form of part of an article 
 which appeared in the Quarterly Review for January 1906.
 
 ii FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 23 
 
 from the growth of truth. Concepts are not immutable unless they are 
 cut loose from human knowing, and then they become useless, because in- 
 applicable to our knowing. Human concepts grow and are not ' eternal.' 
 But ideal knowledge is denned as something humanly unattainable. 
 Intellectualism is less clear-sighted Platonism. 18. 'Back to Plato,' there- 
 fore, and from Plato to Protagoras. Knowledge not to be dehumanised. 
 
 i. AN essay on Greek Philosophy should nowadays 
 be prefaced by an excursus on classical education 
 desperate as its vindication may appear. For the only 
 thing which can justify our continued preoccupation with 
 the past as the staple procedure of a ' liberal ' education 
 is that the past should not be studied entirely for its own 
 sake, i.e. in a merely historical spirit. This latter notion 
 is one which never stands in need of support : academic 
 pedantry may always be trusted to champion it. A host 
 of specialists is ever eager to exaggerate the modicum of 
 truth which it conceals, and it is notorious that if only 
 the specialists are allowed to have their way, they will 
 not only 'ruin every system of education ever devised, 
 but will themselves become so triumphantly unintelligible 
 and illiterate, as to render indigestible and innutritious 
 every science and every study society has endowed them 
 to cultivate. It is probably by this senseless policy of 
 insisting (falsely) on the uselessness of knowledge in 
 order to arouse intellectual interests in the young, that 
 these same sages have fostered the ' deficient interest in 
 the things of the mind,' which they are wont to deplore. 
 Human indolence does indeed naturally shrink from the 
 labour of learning, but there would probably be far less 
 ground for complaint, if the victims of their educational 
 prejudices were allowed to learn how knowledge is the 
 most useful and salutary of all things, and shown the 
 uses even of the staple methods. Nay, if the peda- 
 gogical value of interest were more extensively exploited, 
 even the optimistic dictum of Aristotle that ' all men 
 by nature desire knowledge ' might cease to seem a 
 pathetic paradox. 
 
 Such a policy, moreover, would afford far less nutri- 
 ment to the ' sordid utilitarianism,' which it is so customary 
 and so hypocritical to denounce, than the working of our
 
 24 STUDIES IN HUMANISM n 
 
 actual institutions. For inasmuch as it is not considered 
 legitimate to lay stress on the intrinsic usefulness of know- 
 ing, on the value of language as our means of communi- 
 cating with each other, on the value of science as our 
 means of controlling the world, on the value of philosophy 
 as our means of controlling ourselves, extraneous motives 
 of a far baser kind have to be supplied to arouse the 
 interest which sets in motion the wheels of our educa- 
 tional machinery. All the talk about the nobility of a dis- 
 interested pursuit of learning is almost wholly cant. In 
 point of fact ' liberal education ' in England at the present 
 day rests not on the legendary ' love of knowledge for its 
 own sake,' but on the twin pillars of Commercialism and 
 Competition, buttressed perhaps in some few cases by the 
 additional support of snobbishness. These two major 
 motives have been combined in the crafty device of 
 ' scholarships,' awarded on the results of competitive 
 examination, and their operation on the minds alike of 
 parents and of children is practically irresistible. This 
 coarsely and artificially utilitarian system extends from the 
 preparatory school right through the public schools and 
 universities, gathering momentum as it rises, until finally, 
 in the great Civil Service examination, the reward of 
 successful competition is an honourable career for life ! 
 Surely such inducements would be sufficient to sustain 
 any amount of nonsense ; they would render useful, and 
 therefore interesting (at all events pro tem.\ the silliest 
 subtleties, the most abstruse absurdities which an ex- 
 aminer's intelligence may have succeeded in excogitating ! 
 If the advocates of ' useless knowledge ' had not sternly 
 suppressed their (' useless ' ?) sense of humour, they would 
 surely wear a perpetual Roman augur's smile at the 
 exquisite figure which our ' liberal ' studies cut, so long 
 as, e.g. in the Oxford ' school ' of ' Humaner Letters ' 
 three-fourths, and in that of ' Pure ' Mathematics practi- 
 cally all, of the students are paid anything between thirty 
 and two hundred pounds per annum to tolerate and to 
 abate their vaunted ' uselessness.' 
 
 The natural and true way of making a classical educa-
 
 ii FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 25 
 
 tion really ' liberal ' is not to bolster it up with scholarships 
 and prizes, but to make it as intrinsically useful as possible 
 as a means of appreciating language, that indispensable 
 instrument of human thought and intercourse, of develop- 
 ing the power of using it, and of bracing and expanding 
 the mind by training it to trace the interesting and in- 
 structive connexions and contrasts which exist between 
 ancient and modern civilisation. It is, moreover, to its 
 efficiency in performing these very functions that the 
 Oxford School of Liters Humaniores owes its very real 
 value as an educational instrument As a training school 
 of a ' disinterested ' interest in knowledge it is a complete 
 and utter failure ; as a mode of mental training its success 
 and survival is a marvel, more particularly to those who 
 are in a position to appreciate the constant struggle to 
 preserve its value, and are aware of the perils which con- 
 tinually beset its existence. 
 
 2. The above considerations must form my apology 
 for venturing upon a sketch of some important points in 
 the history of Greek thought which have hitherto been 
 neglected, or, perhaps, were not visible from the stand- 
 points hitherto adopted. Their discussion will display a 
 certain unity, owing to the fact that they may all be 
 grouped around the problems presented by the genesis, 
 the growth, the arrest, and the decline of Greek science, 
 and their outcome will be to exhibit Plato as the great 
 fountain-head of intellectualism, his victory over Protagoras 
 as the great clog upon science, his failure to give a true 
 account of the function of the Concept and of the nature of 
 Truth, as the secret canker vitiating all philosophy, and a 
 return to the frankly human view of knowledge advocated by 
 Protagoras as the surest guarantee of philosophic progress. 
 
 Let us begin, then, by observing that the paradoxical 
 character of Greek genius shows itself also in the course 
 of Greek thought ; for in Greece the development of 
 thought reverses the direction taken in all other nations. 
 It begins, apparently, where the others end, and it ends 
 where the others begin. Broadly viewed, the movement 
 of Greek thought is from science to theology, or rather
 
 26 STUDIES IN HUMANISM n 
 
 theosophy ; elsewhere it starts from theology and struggles 
 towards science. The emancipation from theological pre- 
 occupations with which the scientific philosophy of the 
 lonians appears to have started, is an extraordinary and 
 unique phenomenon. In Egypt, in Babylonia, in India, 
 reflection never frees itself from the fascinations of religi- 
 ous speculation. 
 
 The religious independence of Greek thought, therefore, 
 is utterly unparalleled. It is, moreover, psychologically 
 unnatural. The natural development of a polytheistic 
 religion when transformed by reflection is not into science, 
 but into philosophic pantheism. The interest in the problem 
 of life arises in a religious context ; what more natural, 
 therefore, than that the answers given should be couched 
 in the familiar religious terms ? The more so that these 
 answers look easy and seem adequate. It is easy enough 
 for thought to fuse the multitude of discrepant deities, the 
 a/j,vr)va Kaprjva of imperfectly personified gods, into one 
 vast power which pervades the universe, 7ro\\G)v OVO/JMTWV 
 /j>op(f>r) pia. This process is typically shown in the evolu- 
 tion of Hindu thought. And pantheism is not only easy, 
 but also specious. At the various stages of its develop- 
 ment it seems capable of satisfying all man's spiritual 
 needs ; to the end it satisfies one craving of, perhaps the 
 most reflective, souls. Whoever conceives religion as 
 nothing more than an emotional appreciation of the unity 
 of the universe may rest content with pantheism, and even 
 derive from its obliteration of all differences the most 
 delirious satisfaction. Whoever demands more, such as, 
 e.g. a moral order and a guiding and sympathising per- 
 sonality, will ultimately fail to get it from any theory 
 which equates God with the totality of being. 
 
 But a mighty effort at clear and persistent thinking is 
 needed to perceive these limitations ; and, scientifically at 
 first, pantheism seems adequate enough. It needs a very 
 clear grasp of the nature of science to perceive that the 
 One is as useless scientifically as it is morally, because a 
 principle which explains everything, whether it be called 
 ' God ' or ' the devil,' or conceived as the ' higher synthesis '
 
 n FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 27 
 
 of both, really explains nothing. If, however, we seem 
 to ourselves to have reached the conviction that the one 
 thing really worth the toil of knowing is that all is 
 ' Brahma/ or ' the Absolute,' and that plurality is but 
 phenomenal illusion, why should we trouble laboriously 
 to unravel the intricate web of a multitude of partial 
 processes, to study the relations of a multitude of partial 
 beings, as if they were real and important and independent, 
 and as if anything they could do or suffer could in any 
 wise affect the absolute and immutable truth of the one 
 reality ? Pantheism, therefore, is prejudicial to science ; 
 and Greece was fitted to become the birthplace of science 
 by the fortunate circumstance that in Greece alone philo- 
 sophic pantheism was developed too late to destroy all 
 the germs of scientific progress. It makes its appearance, 
 indeed, in the Eleatic philosophy, significantly enough dis- 
 guising its anti-scientific bias in the delightfully stimulating 
 paradoxes of Zeno ; but its sterilising influence could never 
 overpower the original Greek tendency to pry unceasingly 
 into every fact that an infinitely various world presented. 
 We may, therefore, regard the non-religious and non- 
 pantheistic character of early Greek philosophy as con- 
 nected with the genesis of science, and also connect these 
 anomalies with the striking uniqueness of all the really 
 important things in history. Science, like civilisation, has 
 only been invented once. Monotheism arises similarly 
 through an anomaly of religious development which, else- 
 where than in Judaea, reached unity only by sacrificing 
 personality. A similar refusal to give up the personality 
 of the divine probably underlies the failure of philosophic 
 reflection to transform Greek popular religion into a pan- 
 theism. But in Greece the motives for this refusal were 
 certainly different. The philosophers could not effect a 
 unification of Olympus, because the personality of the 
 gods was strong enough to resist the merger. But this 
 personality did not rest on moral or intellectual con- 
 ceptions ; it was essentially an aesthetic or artistic thing. 
 The clearness and intensity with which the Greeks con- 
 ceived their gods under definitely sensuous shapes is one
 
 28 STUDIES IN HUMANISM n 
 
 of the earliest and most distinctive features of their 
 religion. Homer already could use the divine shapes as 
 standards for the description of human beings. Agamem- 
 non, he once tells us (Iliad, 2, 478-9), went to battle with 
 head and eyes like thunder-loving Zeus, with a waist like 
 Ares, and a chest like Poseidon. 
 
 Thus the gods possessed an artistic, humanly beauti- 
 ful personality, uncorrupted by the unaesthetic symbolism 
 which encumbers Hindu deities with superfluous limbs. 
 And we may be sure that, as Greek sculpture developed 
 its glories, it would become less and less plausible to 
 confound Apollo with Ares, or Athene with Aphrodite. 
 If, therefore, the philosophers had ever attempted to 
 interpret the gods into a unity, they would have found 
 that Zeus, for example, was so essentially the god with 
 hyacinthine locks that it was absurd to transfigure him 
 into a cosmic unity. To do them justice, they never 
 seriously attempted it ; they were glad enough that the 
 lack of organisation of the popular cults and the non- 
 existence of a professional priesthood permitted them to 
 pursue their scientific researches with only nominal and 
 ritual concessions to the established forms of divine 
 worship. 
 
 3. Science, therefore, owes its genesis to a curious and 
 unique emancipation from the pressure of religious problems, 
 and this dominance of the scientific interest in the early 
 Greek philosophy is well brought out in Prof. Gomperz's 
 admirable Greek Thinkers. In dealing with the whole of 
 pre-Platonic philosophy the historian is, however, woefully 
 hampered by the fragmentary condition of his material. 
 He has to reconstruct systems of thought out of scanty 
 references and more or less casual quotations in later 
 writers, who are usually biassed, and often careless or 
 incompetent. The palaeontologist's task in reconstructing 
 fossils from a tooth or a bone is child's-play in comparison ; 
 for the bones, at least, of Pithecanthropus erectus (the miss- 
 ing link) cannot lie, while in Greece the Cretans had many 
 rivals. 
 
 At times, therefore, the process of writing a history of
 
 ii FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 29 
 
 early Greek philosophy rather resembles that of making 
 bricks without clay out of the scattered straws of a dubious 
 tradition. At others we get singularly suggestive but 
 ambiguous glimpses, which suggest alternative interpreta- 
 tions, between which it is impossible to decide. For 
 example, our accounts of Anaximander's doctrine are so 
 wretchedly inadequate that we may please ourselves as 
 to how far we believe him to have carried his anticipa- 
 tions of Darwinism. If we choose to suppose that the 
 tatters of his reasoning, which their very quaintness has 
 preserved, were merely childish guesses of an infant science, 
 we shall regard these anticipations merely as coincidences. 
 If, on the other hand, we note the singular acuteness of 
 the observations, and the cogency of the reasoning which 
 they still display, there is little to hinder us from hailing 
 him as the scientific discoverer of organic evolution. Prof. 
 Gomperz inclines rather to the former view, but he might 
 have changed his opinion if he had noted how clearly 
 and completely Anaximander anticipated the argument 
 for evolution from the helplessness of the human infant, 
 by which an American Spencerian, Prof. John Fiske, 
 gained great glory. 1 Our record runs as follows : 2 
 " Further, he says that man originally was generated 
 from animals of a different kind, seeing that other 
 animals are quickly able to manage for themselves, 
 whereas man alone requires protracted nursing. Where- 
 fore he could not as such originally have been pre- 
 served." How could the case be put more concisely or 
 scientifically ? 
 
 The scientific promise of the Ionian philosophy is so 
 great that it becomes a legitimate perplexity to account 
 for the fact that it was so imperfectly fulfilled, and that, 
 after making steady progress for three centuries, science 
 should begin to languish shortly after Aristotle had 
 codified knowledge and apparently provided the sciences 
 with a firm platform for more extensive operations. It 
 is part of the same puzzle that the Greeks, though, as 
 
 1 Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, ii. 343. 
 
 2 Plutarch Strom. 2, Doxogr. 579, 17.
 
 30 STUDIES IN HUMANISM n 
 
 Prof. Gomperz is careful to notice, they undoubtedly ex- 
 perimented, 1 never did so systematically, and that, in 
 spite of their devotion to mathematics and enthusiasm 
 for ' measure,' they never had recourse to exact measure- 
 ments nor constructed instruments of precision. Why, a 
 modern is disposed to wonder, when it had been perceived 
 that ' all things flow,' was not the next question, ' at what 
 rate ? ' Why, when it had been laid down that ' man is 
 the measure of all things,' was not the next question, 
 ' How, then, does he measure ? ' It is idle to suggest that 
 the Greeks lacked instruments. Had they wished to ex- 
 periment they would have constructed them. 
 
 We believe that it is possible to point out some, at 
 least, of the influences which conduced to the disappoint- 
 ing end of Greek philosophy. Experimentation demands 
 manual dexterity and familiarity with mechanisms, as well 
 as ingenuity. In a slave-holding society, however, any- 
 thing savouring of manual training is despised as illiberal 
 and ' banausic.' ' No gentleman,' Plutarch nai'vely tells 
 us, ' however much he might delight in the Olympian 
 Zeus or the Argive Hera, would like to have been their 
 sculptor, a Phidias or a Polyclitus.' Whence we may 
 infer the depth of the contempt for experiment enter- 
 tained by a nobleman of Plato's distinction. 
 
 4. The rise of Sophistry is sometimes regarded as 
 another reason for the progressive alienation from science 
 exhibited by Greek thought. And there is perhaps a 
 certain measure of truth in this. The natural acuteness 
 of the Greek mind and the great practical value of forensic 
 and political speechifying no doubt tended to an over- 
 development of dialectical habits of thought. As Prof. 
 Gomperz says : 2 " The preference for dialectic expressed 
 here and elsewhere in Plato bespeaks an intellectual atti- 
 tude which is almost the opposite of that of modern 
 science. For him all that is given in experience counts 
 as a hindrance and a barrier to be broken through : we 
 are learning to content ourselves more and more with 
 what is so given." But, as his example shows, it would 
 
 1 Greek Thinkers, \. 291. 2 Loc. cit. Hi. 88.
 
 ii FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 31 
 
 be most unjust to render the Sophists responsible for this. 
 The great humanistic movement of the fifth century B.C., 
 of which they were the leaders, is now beginning to be 
 appreciated at its true value. Prof. Gomperz, following 
 Grote, points out that the source of the whole develop- 
 ment lay in the political situation. The rise of democracies 
 rendered a higher education and a power of public speak- 
 ing a sine qua non of political influence and, what 
 acted probably as a still stronger incentive of the safety 
 of the life and property, particularly of the wealthier 
 classes. The Sophists, ' half professors, half journalists,' 
 or as one might perhaps say with a still closer approxi- 
 mation to modern conditions, ' university extension lecturers 
 hampered by no university,' professed to supply this great 
 requisite of practical success. And their professional 
 success attests the solid value of their instructions. It 
 seems almost incredible that an age in which it was 
 deemed revolutionary to be educated, and monstrous to 
 have to pay your teachers, when it had not yet become 
 a fashionable pastime to go to college, when pupils were 
 allowed and encouraged to appraise their professors' in- 
 structions at their spiritual value and to remunerate them 
 accordingly, 1 should have been the Golden Age of the 
 teaching profession, in which rara temporum felicitate 
 ' Sophists ' could grow rich by intellectual labour. And 
 yet Plato's glowing descriptions of the numbers and 
 enthusiasm of the youths who flocked to hear the great 
 Sophists are too embittered by envy to be suspected of 
 exaggeration. The fact, moreover, was that the Sophists 
 had discovered for their pupils a way both to honour and 
 to safety. As Prof. Gomperz tersely puts it (i. 417), in 
 so litigious and quarrelsome a place as Athens their 
 function was analogous to that of ' professors of fencing 
 in a community where the duel is an established institu- 
 tion.' Nowadays the rich no longer become lawyers : 
 they hire them. But the lucrative profession of the law 
 had not yet been invented. 
 
 The result was a great development of rhetoric and 
 
 1 An astonishing custom of Protagoras.
 
 32 STUDIES IN HUMANISM n 
 
 dialectic, to which, it may be noted, Socrates (whom it 
 is quite unhistorical to oppose to the Sophists *) appears 
 to have contributed the invention of the art of cross- 
 examination, which Plato, when it suits him, denounces as 
 ' eristic.' Naturally, however, this sophistic education 
 was not popular with those who were too poor or too 
 niggardly to avail themselves of it, i.e. with the extreme 
 democrats and the old conservatives ; it was new, and it 
 seemed to bestow an unfair and undemocratic advantage 
 on those who had enjoyed it. Further reasons for the 
 bad name acquired by the Sophists are to be found in 
 the jealous polemic directed by the philosophers (especially 
 by Plato) against rival teachers and in what Prof. 
 Gomperz calls 'the caprice of language' (i. 422). This, 
 however, is more properly an accident in the history of 
 logic. When the Sophists first began to reflect on reason- 
 ing they had to make logic along with rhetoric and 
 grammar. They naturally fell into many errors, which 
 their successors gradually corrected. And so what was of 
 value in their logical researches came to be appropriated 
 by later logicians (Plato and, above all, Aristotle), while 
 their crude failures clung to them and engendered the 
 mistaken impression that ' Sophists ' were men foolish 
 enough to specialise in bad reasoning. 
 
 5. Intrinsically, then, there was no reason why this 
 great intellectual movement should have injured scientific 
 interests. It ought more properly to have broadened its 
 basis by adding the psychological and moral inquiries, 
 the sciences of man, to those of nature ; and perhaps there 
 
 1 In Plato's dialogues he converses with them on amicable and familiar terms. 
 In Aristophanes he is actually selected as their representative, largely, no doubt, 
 by reason of his well-known ugliness and the aid his physiognomy afforded to a 
 comic mask, while the nature of the conservative prejudices is revealed by the 
 pursuits for which he is derided ; they are scientific rather than philosophic, and 
 nowadays, e.g. an entomologist who had measured the length of a flea's leap 
 would be listened to with respect, and perhaps quoted in Tit-Bits. The fact, 
 again, that his conversations were probably too rambling and unsystematic to earn 
 money can just as little be held to constitute an essential difference between 
 Socrates and the Sophists, as the fact that Socrates was an amateur who neglected 
 his duties (as a sculptor and a husband and a father) in order to teach, while the 
 Sophists were professional teachers who, apparently, fulfilled theirs. In short, as 
 Socrates had not started a regular philosophic school like Plato and Aristotle, 
 there was no reason for any antagonism between him and the Sophists on account 
 of the struggle for pupils.
 
 ii FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 33 
 
 actually was a chance of events taking this course if only 
 the great idea of Protagoras, the greatest of the Sophists, 
 had been scientifically interpreted and properly elaborated. 
 His famous dictum that ' man is the measure of all things ' 
 must be ranked even above the Delphic ' Know thyself,' 
 as compressing the largest quantum of vital meaning into 
 the most compact form. 
 
 It must be admitted, of course, that we do not know its 
 exact context and scope, and so can interpret it in various 
 ways. But, however we understand it, it is most im- 
 portant and suggestive, and, in every way but one, it is a 
 fundamental truth. That one way, of course, is Plato's, 
 and of it more anon. It might have proved impossible 
 to refute his version of Protagoras, if it had not lapsed 
 into discrepancies within itself. Even as it stands it is 
 plausible enough to have mostly been accepted without 
 cavil, and even those who realised the danger of accepting 
 Plato's polemics without a large grain of salt have been 
 beguiled by it. It is needless, however, with Prof. Gom- 
 perz, to adopt the expedient of denying the plain 
 application of the words to the individual, and to insist 
 that ' man ' in the dictum must be understood generically. 
 This would render the dictum as tame as Plato rendered 
 it nonsensical. Nor does it follow that Plato's rendering 
 is authentic. Indeed, we take it that the extraordinary 
 value and suggestiveness of Protagoras's dictum largely 
 reside in the conciseness which has led to these divergent 
 interpretations. 
 
 Their great mistake is that each should lay claim to 
 exclude the other. For this procedure, however, there is 
 neither logical nor linguistic warrant. Protagoras may 
 well have chosen an ambiguous form in order to indicate 
 both the subjective and the objective factor in human 
 knowledge and the problem of their connexion. Initially, 
 no doubt, his dictum emphasises the subjective factor. 
 And this is most important. For whatever appears to 
 each that really is to him. And also to others in so far 
 as they have to deal with him and his ideas. Hallucina- 
 tions, illusions, whims, individual preferences and private 
 
 D
 
 34 STUDIES IN HUMANISM n 
 
 judgments, idiosyncrasies of every kind, are real, and woe 
 betide any thinker or manager of men who fancies that 
 he can ignore them with impunity ! It is a fact, more- 
 over, that individuals are infinitely different, and that the 
 more carefully they are studied the less true does it seem 
 to lump them all together. To have been the first to 
 have an inkling of all this was Protagoras's great achieve- 
 ment, for the sake of which science owes him an eternal 
 debt of gratitude. 
 
 The subjective interpretation, therefore, of the dictum 
 embodies a great scientific truth ; and it is astonishing 
 that this should have been ignored in order to denounce 
 it as subversive of all truth, especially by thinkers 
 who, starting uncritically from the opposite assumption, 
 have themselves completely failed to develop a coherent 
 theory of truth. Surely was there no occasion to 
 conceive it as denying what it did not state directly, the 
 objectivity of truth, and to assume Protagoras to have 
 been unaware of this. The fact that a man makes a great 
 discovery does not necessarily deprive him of all common 
 sense. And that there is objective truth, in some sense 
 4 common ' to mankind, is a matter of common notoriety. 
 The difficulty about ' objective truth ' lies, not in observing 
 the fact, but in devising a philosophic theory of its pos- 
 sibility ; and concerning this philosophers are still at 
 variance. That reality for us is relative to our faculties 
 is likewise a clear truth which must be assumed even in 
 questioning it. 
 
 Man, therefore, is the measure also in the generic sense 
 of man ; and it is very unlikely that Protagoras should 
 have overlooked these obvious facts. Nor had he any 
 motive to ignore them. It is most likely, therefore, that 
 he would placidly have accepted the truisms which are 
 commonly urged against him. His Humanism was wide 
 enough to embrace both ' man ' and ' men,' and it could 
 include the former because it had included the latter. 
 
 There only remains, therefore, the question of what 
 is the connexion between the two senses in which the 
 dictum is true. What, in other words, is the transition
 
 ii FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 35 
 
 from subjective truth for the individual to objective truth 
 for all ? That we must pass from the one to the other, 
 and succeed in doing so, is obvious ; but how we do so 
 forms a very pretty problem. And to any scientifically 
 disposed mind it should have been clear that here was a 
 splendid subject for research, e.g. along the lines since 
 taken by modern psychological experiment. Conceived, 
 therefore, in a scientific spirit, the Protagorean dictum 
 yields great openings for science. 
 
 But is there any reason to suppose that Protagoras 
 himself conceived it so, and had formed any ideas as to 
 how objective truth arose ? Constructively the tolerant 
 humaneness of his temper (even in Plato's account), his 
 ' strictly empirical method,' l and the caution and candour 
 implied in his complaint (for which he suffered martyrdom), 2 
 that he had never been able to obtain trustworthy informa- 
 tion about the gods, almost entitles us to answer both 
 these questions in the affirmative. 
 
 But much more direct evidence can be extracted from 
 Plato's own polemic. In the Thecetetus (166-8) Prota- 
 goras is represented as replying, that though one man's 
 perceptions could not be truer than another man's they 
 might yet be better. So far, therefore, from admitting 
 that on his theory men, pigs, and dog-headed baboons 
 must all alike and equally be the measure of all things, 
 the Platonic ' Protagoras ' very lucidly explains that the 
 wise man is he who, when something appears amiss and 
 is ' bad ' to any one, is able to alter it so as to make it 
 appear to be ' good ' to him instead, and to bring him 
 from a bad to a better state of mind. In other words, he 
 is represented as recognising distinctions of value among the 
 individual perceptions to all of which ' reality ' is conceded. 
 
 And not only that. There are distinct traces in that 
 marvellous speech on behalf of Protagoras of other doctrines 
 
 1 Gomperz, i. 455. 
 
 2 A fact which, like the similar cases of Anaxagoras and Aristotle, Dr. Caird 
 appears to have forgotten when he says, in his Evolution of Theology in the Greek 
 Philosophers (i. p. 44), that Socrates was " the only martyr of philosophy in the 
 ancient world, the only man who can be said to have suffered for the freedom of 
 thought." What rendered the case of Socrates different in its issue was merely 
 his obstinate refusal to go into exile.
 
 36 STUDIES IN HUMANISM n 
 
 to which attention has only been recalled in the last few 
 years. ( I ) It is plainly hinted throughout that the attain- 
 ment of wisdom is not a matter of idle speculation, but of 
 altering reality, within oneself and without. (2) There 
 are repeated protests against the dialectical spirit which 
 argues solely from the customary uses of words, and un- 
 critically accepts verbal ' contradictions,' as if they proved 
 more than the incompleteness of the human knowledge 
 which has been embodied in the words. And (3) in one 
 or two passages (167 A, 168 A) the point, though some- 
 what obscured in the Platonic statement, seems genuinely 
 to be a repudiation of the intellectualistic trick of repre- 
 senting all moral shortcomings as defects of intelligence. 
 The diseased man, ' Protagoras ' protests, is not merely 
 ' uninstructed ' ; he has to experience a change of heart. 
 Nor is education merely intellectual instruction ; it is the 
 making of a new man and the getting rid of an old self. 
 These hints are all of a tantalising brevity, but they evince 
 a depth of moral insight with which nothing else in the 
 orthodox Greek ethics, corrupted as they were by intel- 
 lectualism and enervated by aestheticism, can at all compare. 
 And they very distinctly savour of the moral fervour of 
 St. Paul. 
 
 The doctrine as a whole, however, is perfectly clear, 
 rational, and consistent. It differs from that of modem 
 Humanism, apparently, only in the terminological point 
 that ' true ' and ' false' are not regarded as values essentially 
 cognate with ' good ' and ' bad,' or, in other words, that 
 they are used primarily of the individual claims to cog- 
 nitive value rather than of their subsequent recognition. 
 But this is a secondary divergence, if such it is. It is 
 quite possible that Protagoras already perceived the 
 ' ambiguity of truth,' * and that his distinction has merely 
 been blurred in the Platonic statement. As regards the 
 necessity of altering reality, and of connecting this process 
 with the making of truth, and the impossibility of reducing 
 evil to ignorance, Protagoreanism and Neo-Protagoreanism 
 would appear to be at one. 
 
 1 Cp. Essay v.
 
 ii FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 37 
 
 The only question, therefore, that remains is, how far 
 this whole doctrine can be transferred from the Platonic 
 to the historical Protagoras, and, as in the similar case of 
 the Platonic 'Socrates,' complete cogency cannot be attained 
 by arguments on this point. The historic Socrates wrote 
 nothing ; the magnum opus of the historic Protagoras, his 
 book on Truth, has been destroyed. It began with too 
 incisive a declaration that its subject was logic, and not 
 theology ; and so the Athenians set the hangman to burn it. 
 What few copies escaped him probably perished of neglect 
 during the long reign of Platonic intellectualism. And 
 so the combined bigotries of vulgar piety and dogmatic 
 philosophy have deprived us of what was probably one of 
 the greatest monuments of Greek genius. 
 
 Nevertheless, it seems extremely probable, on internal 
 evidence, that the ' defence of Protagoras,' so far as it goes, 
 embodies genuine doctrines of his, greatly curtailed, no 
 doubt, and perhaps somewhat mangled in the reproduction. 
 For the reason, mainly, that Plato manifestly has not 
 understood its argument at all. Nowhere else does he 
 betray the slightest suspicion of the doctrine that the 
 nature of truth is essentially dependent upon the ' altera- 
 tion ' of reality. Had he examined it, he would not 
 only have escaped the negative results of his Tkeatetus, 
 but would have had to transform his whole view of know- 
 ledge. Nowhere else does he perceive the radical vice of 
 the intellectualistic analysis of wickedness as ignorance. 
 To the end he retained his faith in the dialectical play 
 with concepts as the method of penetrating to the secret 
 of the universe. And, most significantly of all, the recog- 
 nition by ' Protagoras ' of distinctions of value in percep- 
 tions is treated as wholly non-existent or unintelligible. 
 Not only does Plato fail to see that it is a complete 
 answer to the trivial objections and shallow gibes of his 
 ' Socrates,' not only does he fail to answer it, but he 
 feels that he must divert attention from the plea of 
 ' Protagoras ' by recourse to the most artistically brilliant 
 digressions. The whole subsequent course of the dis- 
 cussion shows that he had not the faintest idea of the
 
 38 STUDIES IN HUMANISM n 
 
 scope and significance of the argument he had stated. It 
 is clear that if he had grasped the meaning of his ' Prota- 
 goras,' the whole argument of his Thecetetus would have 
 had to proceed and end differently. It seems incredible, 
 therefore, that Plato should have invented a distinction 
 which he did not know how to handle, and it remains 
 that he was really candid enough to reproduce the genuine 
 contentions of Protagoras. 
 
 If, then, this doctrine that truth is a valuation, and to be 
 discriminated from ' error ' as ' good ' from ' bad,' can really 
 be attributed to Protagoras, it is easy for us to see how it 
 might provide him with the means of passing from subjective 
 to objective judgments in a perfectly valid and scientific 
 manner. For if there is a mass of subjective judgments 
 varying in value, there must ensue a selection of the more 
 valuable and serviceable, which will, in consequence, sur- 
 vive and constitute growing bodies of objective truth, 
 shared and agreed upon by practically all. It is highly 
 probable that the general agreement about sense per- 
 ceptions has actually been brought about by a process of 
 this sort ; l and it is still possible to observe how society 
 establishes an ' objective ' order by coercing or cajoling 
 those who are inclined to divergent judgments in moral 
 or aesthetic matters. And, though no doubt Protagoras 
 himself could not have put the point as clearly as the 
 discovery of natural selection enables us to do, it seems 
 highly probable that he saw, at least, the beginnings of the 
 very real connexion between the two meanings of his 
 dictum. 
 
 6. Plato's interpretation, therefore, of the Protagorean 
 dictum is merely a trick of his anti-empiricist polemic, 
 and it may be very closely paralleled by similar charges 
 which have been brought against modern revivals of 
 Protagoreanism, and are not likely similarly to prevail 
 only because they cannot command the services of a 
 Plato and an executioner. To say 'that ' man is the 
 measure of all things ' necessarily conducts to subjectivism 
 and to scepticism is simply not true. To a mind desirous 
 
 1 Cp. pp. 316-20.
 
 ii FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 39 
 
 of scientific knowledge the dictum should be fertile only 
 of a multitude of instructive observations and experiments. 
 Unfortunately this was not the spirit in which it was 
 received. A spirit of dialectical refutation cared nothing 
 for the varieties of physical endowment and of psychical 
 reaction ; it took no interest in the problems and methods 
 of scientific measurement. The question, ' If man is the 
 measure, then how do we manage to measure ? ' was not 
 raised. What was raised was the unfair, untrue, and 
 uninstructive cry, ' then knowledge becomes impossible ! ' 
 The levity with which this outcry rises to the lips of a 
 priori metaphysicians is as extraordinary as the vitreous- 
 ness of the abodes which ultimately house their own con- 
 victions. It has often been remarked that the ' deceptions ' 
 and ' contradictions ' of the senses, which, to the ancients, 
 provided only texts for sceptical lamentation and excuses 
 for taking refuge in ' supra-sensible ' Ideas (which were 
 really nothing more than the acquired meanings of words), 
 have yielded to modern energy valuable starting-points 
 for scientific inquiries. To the dialectical temper the fact 
 that a stimulus may feel both hot and cold simultaneously 
 would merely be a contradiction ; to the scientific temper 
 it gives a clue to the discovery of the ' cold ' and ' hot ' 
 spots of cutaneous sensibility. Similarly such notions as 
 ' solid solutions,' and ' liquid crystals,' and ' subconscious ' 
 mental life, seem mere foolishness until we realise that the 
 work of science is not to avoid verbal contradiction, but to 
 frame conceptions by which we can control the facts. 
 
 Another parallel is afforded by the treatment of 
 Heraclitus's great discovery of the universality of process 
 or change. It too was taken to mean that knowledge 
 was impossible, as if, forsooth, men were usually altered 
 beyond recognition overnight, and rivers changed their 
 courses daily. If the Greeks, instead of indolently content- 
 ing themselves with a qualitative enunciation of its truth, 
 had attempted a quantitative estimation of the universal 
 process, they might have anticipated some of the 
 most signal triumphs of modern science ; and, it may be 
 added, they would speedily have convinced themselves of
 
 40 STUDIES IN HUMANISM n 
 
 the practical innocuousness of the Flux, and perhaps even 
 have learnt, from the impossibility of any but relative 
 determinations, that practical limitations and a relation to 
 practical application are inherent in the very nature of 
 truth, and that the pretensions of ' ideals ' which cannot 
 be applied, and can only condemn all human experience 
 as unintelligible, prove nothing but the ludicrous falsity of 
 such ideals. But this assumes that they wanted to know 
 and were willing to view these doctrines in a scientific 
 spirit, And this is just where they lamentably failed. 
 
 7. That the Hellenic will to know scientifically gave 
 out at this point is a fact which must certainly be connected 
 most vitally with the appearance of the stupendous genius 
 whom history knows only by his nickname, Plato. This 
 extraordinary man was equally great as a writer and as 
 a thinker. He was at once a poet and a philosopher, a 
 prophet and a professor, an initiator and an imitator, a 
 theologian and a sceptic ; and he excelled in all these 
 parts. Regarded from the literary side he is admirable 
 as a parodist, as a maker of stories and inventor of fairy- 
 tales, as a delineator of character, as a critic, as a dissector 
 of arguments. Regarded as a thinker, he maintains in 
 equipoise the most contrary excellences. One hardly 
 knows whether to admire more the grandeur of his con- 
 structions, or the subtlety of his criticisms, the compre- 
 hensive sweep of his ' synoptic ' view, or the patience 
 which descends into the minutest details. Regarded as 
 a wit, he was capable of the most reckless raillery, the 
 most savage satire, the gentlest humour, and a persiflage 
 so graceful, that Aristophanes compared with him seems 
 coarsely farcical ; and yet in his serious moods he could 
 reach heights of solemnity in which the slightest hint of 
 comedy would seem a profanation. In spite, or perhaps 
 by reason, of a life-long devotion to philosophy, he never 
 scrupled to deride the pretensions of philosophers. The 
 most devoted of disciples, he yet became the most potent 
 of masters. One of the world's great artists, he was yet 
 one of the most puritanical of the censors of art. The 
 idealising apologist of erotic passion, he was also the most
 
 ii FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 41 
 
 austere of moralists and the eulogist of asceticism. A 
 typical intellectualist, he was also intensely emotional. 
 By birth a man of quality, he yet knew how to withdraw 
 from the world of fashion without offending it ; an 
 abstainer from political life, he was yet the most inspiring 
 of radical reformers ; by turns a counsellor of princes and 
 a recluse in the groves of Academe. 
 
 It is plain that no great man has laid upon the world 
 a harder task in imposing on it ' the duty of understand- 
 ing him ' ; and it is no wonder that posterity has but 
 imperfectly succeeded. We read his writings, preserved 
 for us in far more perfect shape than those of any other 
 ancient thinker, and are plunged in unending perplexities 
 as to their meaning. We listen to the comments of one 
 of his immediate pupils, and doubt whether, after eighteen 
 years of intimacy, Aristotle's genius has comprehended 
 Plato's. We flatter ourselves that we should understand 
 him better if we knew more facts about the historical 
 order of his works and the circumstances which evoked 
 them, and hope by the minutest tabulation of his tricks 
 of style to extort the secrets of their history. But Plato 
 was master of so many styles, and could parody himself 
 with such consummate ease, that it is no wonder that the 
 conclusions of ' stylometry ' are dubious, and hardly com- 
 patible with any coherent view of Plato's philosophic 
 development. Moreover, even if we knew the facts we 
 now desiderate, it is quite probable that our perplexities 
 would only recur in subtler forms. For they ultimately 
 spring from the personality of their author. 
 
 The core of the Platonic problem is Plato's person- 
 ality, a personality whose diversity and many-sidedness 
 is the delight of his readers and the despair of his critics. 
 How can the clumsy canons of a formal criticism ever 
 determine what degree of seriousness and literality 
 attaches to any of his statements, and how far its 
 meaning should be modified by a touch of irony, of 
 humour, of satire, of imagination ? The simplest even of 
 Platonic myths is infinitely baffling. Who will undertake 
 to expound its meaning fully, to determine where precisely
 
 42 STUDIES IN HUMANISM n 
 
 its formal teaching melts into its imaginative setting, how 
 much of its detail was premeditated, how much of it the 
 spontaneous outgrowth of the fairy tale? What again 
 of the dialogue form ? What at any point is the working 
 compromise between the dogmatic and the dramatic 
 interest by which the course of the proceedings is deter- 
 mined ? No one, assuredly, who has ever tried so far to 
 enter into Plato's spirit as to imitate his literary methods, 
 will delude himself into thinking that these questions 
 are ever likely to be answered with exactness. Plato's 
 personality is far too rich for the precise analysis all 
 pedants love. 
 
 And yet, perhaps, we may observe a conspicuous gap 
 even in the far -extended spectrum of this giant soul. 
 It seems incapable of vibrating in response to the en- 
 lightenment of merely empirical fact ; and this defect 
 has had tremendous consequences. For similarly con- 
 stituted souls are common ; and Plato has become their 
 greatest spokesman. Yet the pathetic futility of apriorism 
 appears again in this, that ultimately the whole world is 
 empirical and all that therein is. However, therefore, 
 we may try to hedge round portions of it against the 
 intrusions of the unexpected, the very facts that our 
 hedges can withstand intruders, that we desire to keep 
 them in repair, and that all this will continue to be true, 
 are as empirical as the greatest brute of a fact against 
 which our reason sought protection. Of what value, then, 
 are a priori guarantees, if the continuance of their applica- 
 bility to experience, and of their own apriority are both 
 empirical, and cannot be guaranteed ? 
 
 8. We must affirm, therefore, that Plato's anti- 
 empirical bias renders him profoundly anti-scientific, and 
 that his influence has always, openly or subtly, counter- 
 acted and thwarted the scientific impulse, or at least 
 diverted it into unprofitable channels. The potency of 
 this influence may best be gauged by observing how 
 completely Plato's greatest pupil, Aristotle, has fallen under 
 his spell. For if ever there was a typically scientific 
 mind it was Aristotle's. That he should revolt against
 
 ii FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 43 
 
 his master was inevitable for many reasons. That he 
 should assail the citadel of Plato's power, the theory of 
 the ' Ideas,' in which Plato had hypostasised and deified the 
 instruments of scientific research and uplifted them beyond 
 the reach of human criticism, evinced a sound strategic 
 instinct. But in the end his spirit also proved unable to 
 escape out of the magic circle of conceptual realism, 
 which he renders more prosaic without making it more 
 consistent or more adequate to the conduct of life. 
 Indeed his analytic sharpness, by exaggerating into 
 opposition the rivalry between practical and theoretic 
 interests, which Plato had sought to reconcile in too 
 intellectualist a fashion, probably contributed, much 
 against his intentions, an essential motive to that aliena- 
 tion from scientific endeavour which marks the decline 
 and fall of Greek philosophy. 
 
 It has already been suggested that the theory of Ideas 
 was the fountain-head whence flowed Plato's baleful 
 influence on the growth of knowledge. This influence 
 it would be hard to overrate. The cognitive function of 
 the Concept, which Socrates (if we conceive ourselves to 
 have any really authentic information about his doctrine) 
 may perhaps be said to have discovered, was so exalted 
 and exaggerated by Plato that it became the subtlest and 
 most dangerous of obstacles to the attainment of the end 
 it is its proper function to subserve. And so, wherever 
 there is hypostasisation and idolatry of concepts, and 
 wherever these interpose between the mind and things, 
 wherever they lead to disparagement of immediate experi- 
 ence, wherever the stubborn rigidity of prejudice refuses 
 to adapt itself to the changes of reality, wherever the 
 delusive answers of an a priori dialectic leave unanswered 
 questions of inductive research, wherever words lure and 
 delude, stupefy and paralyse, there Truth is sacrificed to 
 Plato, even by barbarians who have never heard his 
 name. The Ideal Theory resembles a stranger tor- 
 pedo-ray than that to which Plato in the Meno likens 
 Socrates. Itself one of the great achievements of the 
 human intellect, it both electrifies the mind with brilliant
 
 44 STUDIES IN HUMANISM n 
 
 vistas of supra -sensible dominion for the soul, and yet 
 numbs and paralyses some of its highest functions. For 
 it deludes us into thinking that man was made for Ideas, 
 to behold and contemplate them for ever, and not Ideas 
 for man and by man, to serve the ends of action. 
 
 9. Not the least extraordinary fact about this 
 wondrous theory is that, strictly speaking, we do not 
 even know what precisely it was. The culminating point 
 of conceptual Idealism has always been screened by 
 impenetrable clouds from the gaze of the faithful as of 
 the profane, and the former have always had to accept 
 a ' myth ' in lieu of the final revelation of truth absolute. 
 The justification of this assertion is necessarily somewhat 
 technical, but will go far to initiate us into the secret of 
 Plato's fascination. 
 
 That there is some ground for doubting whether any 
 one really knows what exactly the Ideal Theory was, 
 may be perceived when we ask how many Ideal Theories 
 Plato really had. For it seems impossible to trace a 
 single consistent view throughout his writings ; and in 
 the course of fifty or sixty years of authorship even a 
 strenuous denier of the Flux may change his views. It 
 is plain, moreover, that new problems, new difficulties, 
 new methods, and new points of view sprang up in 
 Plato's mind, though it is usually hard to determine how 
 far they modified his earlier convictions. The critics, 
 however, agree that the Ideal Theory is not one, but 
 several, and that an earlier may be distinguished from a 
 later form thereof. 
 
 The earlier theory, as described, e.g. by Zeller, forms 
 the typical or standard Platonism to which the others 
 are referred. It is extracted mainly from the Meno, the 
 Phcedrus, the Ph<zdo, and the Republic, and is certainly 
 the most picturesque and fascinating form of conceptual 
 Idealism. It describes the true home of the soul in a 
 supra-sensible supercelestial world of True Being, where, 
 pure, incorporeal, and without passions, it leads a holy, 
 blessed, and eternal life, contemplating the beauty and 
 excellent harmony of the Ideas, the indivisible and im-
 
 ii FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 45 
 
 mutable archetypes of the fleeting phenomena that flow 
 in multitudinous confusion before our dazzled senses. 
 Thence it is driven (by some inscrutable necessity) to- 
 make periodical descents into the perishable world of 
 Sense, which is not truly real, but is saved from utter 
 unreality by its relation to the ideas in which it can 
 mysteriously ' participate.' To know such a world, but 
 for the Ideas, would be impossible, and to know is really 
 to remember these. 
 
 The weak point in this theory lies in the difficulty of 
 conceiving the connexion between the Ideal world and 
 the phenomenal, i.e. the precise nature of ' participation.' 
 That in some sense Plato felt this weakness is brilliantly 
 attested by the incisive criticism he inflicts on what 
 seems to be his own theory in the Parmenides. On the 
 strength of this it is commonly supposed that Plato must 
 have altered his views ; and the evolution of his ' later 
 theory of Ideas ' is thought to be traceable in a series of 
 critical and ' dialectical ' dialogues, which include also the 
 Theatetus, the Sophist, and the Politicus. 
 
 The puzzle, however, is to find the theory in its developed 
 form. It must lurk either in what are regarded as his 
 latest works, the Laws, the Philebus, and the Timceus, or 
 in the oral lectures, of which Aristotle's Metaphysics give 
 a very obscure and polemical account. But the search 
 through the Laws and the Philebus yields little that is 
 enlightening, while the Timaus is so mythical in form 
 that it is hard or fatally easy to find anything therein. 
 Nevertheless a ' later theory of Ideas ' has been extracted 
 or constructed. Its distinguishing marks are, the substitu- 
 tion of an ideal exemplar (TrapaSeiypa), which is copied 
 or imitated by the sensible, for the discarded notion of 
 ' participation ' (/z,e#e|fi9) ; the restriction of Ideas to 
 ' natural kinds ' ; the reduction of ' not-being ' to differ- 
 ence ; and the recognition of an efficacy or spiritual 
 activity in the Ideas, which converts them into efficient 
 causes. 
 
 Unfortunately this ' later theory of Ideas ' is by no 
 means well authenticated. The external evidence is dead
 
 46 STUDIES IN HUMANISM n 
 
 against it. Aristotle also has a notion of a ' later ' 
 Platonic theory. But he represents his aging master, 
 not as soaring to an absolute idealism, but as sinking 
 into childish habits of pythagoreanising. Prof. Gomperz 
 points out l that this is confirmed by the growing import- 
 ance of mathematics shown in the creative operations 
 of the Timceus, and in the educational methods of the 
 Laws, in which they wholly take the place of ' dialectic.' 
 For the restriction of Ideas to ' natural kinds ' some 
 Aristotelian support may, it is true, be invoked. But is 
 it not unfortunate for this aspect of the ' later theory of 
 Ideas ' that in the Parmenides this very procedure should be 
 derided as a youthful error ? And we shall presently see 
 reason to doubt whether it was an improvement. In any 
 case, Aristotle's account of Platonism does not at all 
 square with the theory of a substantially altered ' later ' 
 theory. The theory he mainly combats is the old one ; 
 and he parades all the old objections of the Parmenides 
 without a doubt of their complete relevance, 2 nay, with an 
 air of having invented them himself. 3 But to suppose that 
 Aristotle misunderstood Plato's fundamental doctrine is a 
 monstrous assumption. And, we may add, a futile one. 
 For it makes out Aristotle to have been either a fool, if 
 
 1 L.c. iii. 246-47. 
 
 2 His objection that the Ideas are not efficient causes would be particularly 
 curious and inept, if Plato had adhered to the alleged discovery of the Sophist 
 (247 E) that substance is activity, and had thereby anticipated Aristotle's own 
 conception of ^/ryeia. But the context shows that Plato had not overcome the 
 antithesis of motion and rest, and the whole passage is only one of those which 
 express his inability to unite the human and the Ideal. Cp. 17. 
 
 3 If we can put the Parmenides so late as 360 B.C., it is just possible that he 
 did. For we can then read this puzzling dialogue as an attempt by Plato to 
 abate the conceit of his obstreperous pupil by narrating a fictitious parallel to an 
 existing situation in the form of a discussion between the venerable ' Parmenides ' 
 and the youthful 'Socrates.' In the self-criticism of 'Parmenides' which 
 follows, depths of metaphysics are sounded which are intended to make the 
 objections to the Ideas seem shallow, and to show that their author still retains 
 his mastery, while an earlier ' Aristotle ' is satirically made to give his later name- 
 sake a lesson in manners by prettily and amiably answering just what is required, 
 because, forsooth, he is too 'young' to raise vexatious objections. But the 
 dates seem a serious obstacle. For even if it be supposed that the genius of 
 Aristotle at twenty-four was capable of propounding posers which the genius of 
 Plato could not cope with, this dating of the Parmenides would leave only a dozen 
 years of Plato's life for the composition of all his later dialogues. And after all, 
 if neither Plato nor his school had ever answered the objections of the Parmenides, 
 Aristotle had a perfect right to reiterate them.
 
 ii FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 47 
 
 he could not understand it, or a knave, if he knowingly 
 misrepresented it. Or rather, in this case, he would have 
 been a fool as well as a knave, if he supposed that his 
 iniquitous procedure could escape exposure at the hands 
 of Plato's other pupils. 
 
 The ' later theory of Ideas ' appeals essentially to 
 internal evidence. But here also its case is none too 
 strong. Prof. Gomperz, who is a friendly critic and 
 accepts the order of the Platonic dialogues which the 
 theory demands, has to call attention to the persistence 
 of phrases characteristic of the ' earlier ' theory, even 
 in the Timceus. And Dr. Horn boldly challenges the 
 fashionable placing of the ' dialectical ' dialogues after 
 the Republic} Far from agreeing with Prof. Gomperz (Hi. 
 357) that the latest of them, the Statesman, is " manifestly 
 the bridge leading from the Republic to the Laws' 1 he 
 argues forcibly that it is quite a preliminary sketch, which 
 would have been pointless after the Republic. The logical 
 point involved when the same author treats the same 
 subject twice with more and less fulness clearly does not 
 admit of absolute decision. The later version may be 
 either an elaboration of an earlier sketch or a succinct 
 reference to a fuller treatment. It is fallacious also to 
 assume that, because a theory has jbeen remodelled, it 
 has been improved. So here. Even Prof. Gomperz, 
 who believes in a ' later ' theory, but holds that it did not 
 answer the Parmenides, and amounted really to " con- 
 signing the Ideas to a sphere of dignified repose in 
 conferring upon them divine rank," 2 has to admit that 
 in some respects its transformation was retrograde. 8 
 
 This possibility is the less negligible because the ' later 
 theory of Ideas ' comes out very badly under logical 
 examination. Its advocates seem unable to show us how 
 it escapes from the dilemmas of the Parmenides. How 
 does the suggestion that the Ideas are models for sensible 
 phenomena to ' imitate,' bridge the dualistic chasm between 
 the worlds of ' reality ' and of ' appearance ' ? If Ideas ' 
 
 1 Platonstudien , ii. 379 foil. 
 2 L.c. iii. 181. 3 L.c. iii. 173.
 
 48 STUDIES IN HUMANISM n 
 
 and ' things ' are different in essence and unrelated in 
 function, how can they be so connected that the things 
 can take cognisance enough of the Ideas to imitate 
 them ? In the Tim&us Plato escapes the difficulty by 
 the divine fiat of his Demiurge ; but this expedient the 
 modern ' friends of the Ideas ' would certainly condemn 
 as ' mythical.' The question is the more urgent because 
 somewhere or other it reappears in all systems of con- 
 ceptual Idealism. 1 
 
 Moreover, it would seem that this later version of the 
 Ideas is very fatal to their logical function. If phenomena 
 become intelligible only by being subsumed under con- 
 cepts, there must be Ideas of everything that can be 
 predicated, of relations and of artefacts, of hair and dirt 
 and evil, of doubleness and if-ness ; their restriction to 
 ' natural kinds,' despite its metaphysical attractiveness, is 
 the grossest logical inconsequence. And that a desire 
 to justify the procedures of predication and to explain 
 the nature of knowledge was one of the main motives of 
 the Ideal Theory seems undeniable, although Plato does 
 not make this as explicit as its metaphysical aspect. 
 Nor can we be wrong in thinking that he intended it to be 
 logically, 2 as well as metaphysically, a via media between 
 Eleaticism and Heracliteanism, both of which seemed to 
 him to render significant assertion incomprehensible. 
 But to serve this logical purpose the Ideas had to be 
 conceived after the fashion of his ' earlier ' theory. They 
 had to be single, stable, self-identical predicates common 
 (i.e. applicable) to an infinite plurality of particulars. 
 They had to live in a world apart in order to transcend 
 the flux that would otherwise have swamped them. 
 They had to have communion inter se, in order that 
 the connexions of our predications might be absolutely 
 validated by conforming to those of their eternal arche- 
 types. They had to be immutable ; for how else could 
 truth be absolute? 
 
 Whatever the difficulties, therefore, which they might 
 seem to involve, they could not be disavowed without, 
 
 1 Cp. p. 177. 2 Especially in the Thecztetus.
 
 ii FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 49 
 
 in Plato's way of thinking, abolishing the very notion of 
 truth and all knowledge of reality. It is quite probable, 
 therefore, that, despite the candour of the Parmenides, he 
 never really made concessions to criticism, and that all the 
 objections he encountered only seemed to him to proceed 
 from a failure to reach his standpoint, and to argue logical 
 incapacity to grasp the cogency of the grounds on which 
 his theory reposed. And in a manner he was right. 
 The logical cohesion of the fabric of his thought was such, 
 that no one, who had once attributed to concepts a reality 
 superior to that of the phenomena they interpret, could 
 question it without succumbing ultimately to the very 
 difficulties brought against himself. 
 
 10. If, therefore, we desire to account both for 
 Plato's self-criticism in the Parmenides, and the reiteration 
 of its arguments, almost in so many words, by Aristotle, 
 and yet to retain the belief that Plato's Ideal Theory was 
 one of the great landmarks in the history of thought, and 
 that its author never quite abandoned it, what shall we 
 do ? We shall have, certainly, to discard the notion of 
 diminishing our difficulties by doubling the Ideal Theories, 
 which have to be grasped, expounded, and defended 
 against substantially the same objections. By trying to 
 extract two theories from Plato we only complicate the 
 situation with the problem of their relation and that of 
 Plato's psychological development ; and we sacrifice the 
 unity of Platonism. 
 
 Let us try rather to find the one theory which in- 
 dubitably is in Plato, and to understand that thoroughly. 
 It may then appear that it leaves no real room for any 
 other. We may then perceive that it forms the soul of 
 Plato's thought, which is neither abandoned, nor altered, 
 nor improved in any points which can be treated as 
 essential, but persists substantially the same throughout. 
 Not that, of course, Plato may not have varied at different 
 times the emphasis and attention bestowed on its various 
 aspects ; but the truth is, that it could not be really 
 altered without renouncing what seemed to Plato the most 
 essential of truths, and that so, however clearly he had 
 
 E
 
 50 STUDIES IN HUMANISM n 
 
 perceived its difficulties, he was equally unable to remedy 
 them or to remodel it. Plato was perfectly aware of his 
 difficulties, and perfectly unable to remove them ; because 
 he was aware also that they were directly connected with 
 what most he valued in his theory. But it is just in this 
 that his greatness appears ; his critics and successors, from 
 Aristotle downwards, have perceived his difficulties, but 
 not their own ; they do not perceive, that is, that their 
 own conception of knowledge is at bottom identical with 
 Plato's, that the difficulties are common to them and him, 
 and that there is no escape from them, except by a 
 complete abandonment of Plato's intellectualistic pre- 
 supposition, and a thorough correction of his fundamental 
 error as to the nature of the Concept's function. And so 
 their gibes recoil upon their own heads, and their im- 
 perfectly thought-out theories of knowledge either stop 
 short of these ultimate difficulties, or, if they reach them, 
 wreck themselves on the same rock, and in the same 
 helpless and inevitable way as Plato's ; while they periodi- 
 cally raise the cry of ' back to Plato,' without perceiving 
 that Plato can teach them nothing if they are not willing 
 to take to heart the lesson of his failure. In short, the 
 grounds of Plato's embarrassments are also those of his 
 success ; but to prove this, it is necessary to hark back 
 much farther than Platonic criticism is wont to go, 
 namely to the beginnings of the Ideal Theory, and to 
 examine its deepest roots. 
 
 ii. Broadly considered, the Ideal Theory has two 
 main aspects, the one metaphysical or ontological, the 
 other logical. It is, on the one hand, Plato's account of 
 the true and ultimate reality, and on the other, his account 
 of the problem of thought, and his solution of ' the 
 predication puzzle,' as to how S can be P. Of these two 
 aspects we have already noted ( 9) that the first has 
 been made more prominent by Plato's readers, rather 
 than by Plato himself. Men are more interested to 
 arrive at ultimate reality than careful to scrutinise the 
 logical soundness of the steps by which they hope to reach 
 it. And yet, from a scientific standpoint, it is probably the
 
 ii FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 51 
 
 logical aspect of the Ideal Theory which is more worthy 
 of admiration ; and it will also prove to be more funda- 
 mental. For the metaphysical difficulties of Platonism, 
 which have attracted such wide-spread attention, are 
 really secondary ; they arise from deeper logical difficulties 
 which have been hardly noticed. Hence the impasse in 
 which the Ideal Theory ends ; hence the perplexities 
 about its meaning, and that of the whole Platonic 
 problem ; hence, too, the predestined failure of the 
 unceasing attempts to repair the metaphysic of Platonism 
 without rectifying its logic. 
 
 Plato could not cure his metaphysical troubles 
 because he could not disavow their logical foundations. 
 He could not disavow these foundations because of his 
 conception of the Concept, to renounce which seemed to 
 him to revert to intellectual chaos ; and rather than 
 provoke this, he was content to recognise a final in- 
 explicability in his theory of reality. After all it might 
 seem better to retain an important and valuable truth, 
 while honestly avowing its shortcomings, than to reject 
 it wholly because it was not complete. Such an attitude 
 is natural and pardonable ; it only becomes indefensible, 
 if the theory which has to confess to final failure originally 
 claimed a completeness which it cannot realise. 
 
 12. Without, therefore, attempting to fathom the 
 vicissitudes of Plato's psychological development, which 
 were doubtless many though not necessarily recorded in 
 his writings, we may follow the logical order of his train 
 of thought, and see how, it conducted him to his final crux. 
 
 It seemed evident to Plato that his philosophic prede- 
 cessors had left knowledge in an impossible position. 
 Neither the ' Flux ' of Heraclitus, nor the one ' Being ' of 
 the Eleatics, admitted of significant assertion. In the one 
 case predication was rendered meaningless ; how could it 
 be asserted that ' 6" tsP'? If neither 5 nor P remain 
 identical for two moments together, how can it be truer 
 to say that 5 is P than that 5 is not P ? Nay, if both 
 are in a continual flux, if 5 is for ever passing into not-S, 
 and P into not-P, how can any assertion mean anything
 
 52 STUDIES IN HUMANISM n 
 
 at all ? The Eleatic alternative is no better. It so 
 emphasises the identity and unity of Being as to exclude 
 all difference ; it cannot be asserted that 5 is P, but only 
 that 6" is S, and necessarily incapable of ' becoming ' P. 
 But is not this to restrict truth to idle tautologies, and to 
 invalidate the very form of judgment ? 
 
 To Plato, as he meditated on this problem, salvation 
 seemed to lie in the Concept, which seemed to mediate 
 between and to reconcile the logical demands of the 
 antagonistic metaphysics. The philosophical discovery of 
 the Concept's function had, perhaps, been effected by 
 Socrates, but it is not probable that he had used it as the 
 basis for a complete Weltanschauung. The Socratic Concept 
 was still used merely in its natural ' pragmatic ' way, 
 as the ideal unity whereby the human mind classifies and 
 controls the confusing and confused multitude of par- 
 ticulars, and orders its experience. It was thus essentially 
 an instrument of human cognition ; but it may be 
 doubted whether Socrates had recognised its fundamental 
 importance for logic. 
 
 Plato was immensely struck with the concept's 
 apparent character as a unity in plurality. Here was 
 a ' one ' which apparently controlled a ' many,' which 
 obediently meant nothing but the ' one ' they exemplified ; 
 a ' one ' which pervaded, instead of excluding a ' many,' 
 and stood related to them, and yet stood aloof, i.e. was 
 not affected by them nor merged in the flux of sense ; a 
 ' one,' therefore, which could form the stable centre for a 
 fixed scheme of classification, whereby the fleeting flux of 
 indefinite and infinite perceptions could be measured and 
 apprehended. The Concept thus became the principle of 
 permanence and knowableness, opposed to change and 
 ignorance, as well as the principle of unity. In so far as 
 anything could be said really to be, and really to be 
 known, it was by predicating some concept of it. The 
 ' is ' of predication was different in kind from the 
 ' becomes ' of sense-perception ; but it was the meaning of 
 the latter and the solution of its mystery. 
 
 The more he meditated on the nature of the concept,
 
 n FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 53 
 
 the clearer it seemed to Plato that it supplied the remedy 
 for the defects of both his predecessors. By it the 
 Heraclitean flux of sense was arrested, and provided with 
 a stable standard of reference, and thereby rendered 
 intelligible. By it was vindicated not only the indepen- 
 dence, but the reality of thought nay, its superior 
 reality, as against the turbulent confusion of the senses. 
 By it, again, was rendered intelligible the rigid unity of 
 the Eleatic One, which now became flexible and adaptable 
 to the world ; for the ' Idea ' could be predicated of the 
 flux without losing its unity and identity. 
 
 Nay, more, what was true of each Idea in its relation 
 to its particulars was a fortiori true of the Ideas in their 
 relation to each other. The World of Ideas formed a 
 system of interrelated concepts, the fixed relations of 
 which could be made to guarantee the truth of the 
 predications which reproduced this order. Thus the 
 undifferentiated unity of Eleaticism was expanded and 
 articulated into a well-knit system of perfectly knowable 
 Ideas. 
 
 Plato, in short, had discovered the function of the 
 Concept in the organisation of experience. He had 
 become aware of ' the ideal network,' by means of which 
 we fish out what is of value for our life out of the swirl 
 of events. And he had not discovered this by halves. 
 It seems impossible to suppose that he had first dis- 
 covered the existence of Ideas, and then realised the 
 need of connecting them into a system, and thereupon 
 improved his former theory. For no first-rate philosopher 
 could have discovered the one without at once inferring 
 the other. The systematic character of the Ideas is 
 implicit from the first in the assertion of the Idea as the 
 ' one ' in the ' many,' as the unity pervading the flow of 
 perceptions. Each concept, that is, is a scheme, or 
 rubric, or pigeon-hole, for the organisation and control of 
 a stream of particulars. It is, in short, a system. And it 
 is equally manifest that these systems are parts of larger 
 ones. Concepts are manifestly related to each other. 
 They congregate into Sciences, and the study of these
 
 54 STUDIES IN HUMANISM 
 
 easily points to the conception of an Ideal which will 
 completely unify our conceptual world. 
 
 Accordingly, it is not in the least surprising that 
 the dialogue which is usually conceived as the cul- 
 minating point of the ' earlier ' theory of Ideas, the 
 wonderful Republic, should already contain in principle the 
 chief points elaborated in the ' later ' theory, or that in it 
 Plato should unequivocally recognise the systematic charac- 
 ter of the Ideas and the need for their unification by an 
 ultimate Ideal. The mutual participation in one another 
 of the Ideas (Koivwvla et'&wi/), which is introduced as a 
 familiar notion in 476 A, is just as essential and integral 
 a postulate of the Ideal Theory as the ' participation ' of 
 the Sensible in the Idea. For it would be of little use 
 to be able to predicate Ideas of sensible things, if Ideas 
 could not be predicated of one another. Such ' participa- 
 tion ' is also a necessary presupposition of the Ideal of the 
 ' Idea of Good,' by which Plato puts the coping-stone on 
 his theory of knowledge. This grand conception is so 
 simple, and has been so completely misinterpreted, that we 
 may devote a section to the elucidation of its ' mystery.' 
 
 13. The ' Idea of Good,' in its actual functioning, is 
 Plato's substitute for ' God,' the Prime Cause of all Good- 
 ness, Beauty, Knowableness, and True Being in the world. 
 But it is exalted to this supreme position by gradual 
 steps which it is possible to trace, and to which the clue 
 lies in an exact translation of the Greek. Its exact 
 meaning is ' the Concept of End.' So translating it we 
 see at once that it represents not only the ideal of unifica- 
 tion of knowledge, but also (what is quite as important) 
 the absorption into Platonism of Anaxagoras's conception 
 of Purposive Reason (Nofc), as the cosmic principle of 
 order and discrimination, or, as we should say, selection. 
 It demands, that is, not only that knowledge shall be 
 unified and ordered, but that its order shall be Ideological, 
 ' rational,' and ' good.' A complete explanation of the 
 world must be in terms of ' ends,' and not of ' causes ' ; the 
 principle of cosmic order must be assimilated to the pro- 
 cedure of human reason and to human recognitions of
 
 ii FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 55 
 
 moral values. It is, in short, the postulate of a complete 
 teleological explanation of the universe. 
 
 Now Plato was quite well aware that this was a pos- 
 tulate which in the existing state of the sciences it was 
 impossible to satisfy. When the time comes for ' Socrates ' 
 in the Republic ($ 3 2 E) to expound to ' Glaucon ' the actual 
 nature of the process whereby the teleological deduction of 
 everything real and intelligible is to be demonstrated, he 
 simply declares that he cannot, because the latter has not 
 studied mathematics far enough. This obviously means 
 that Plato cannot tell us, because Science is not sufficiently 
 advanced. But Plato thought that the discovery of the 
 secret of the universe was not far off; hence the ardour 
 with which he subsequently devoted himself to the pursuit 
 of the sciences, which in his time were most advanced, 
 which seemed most plainly a priori and ' independent of 
 experience/ and appeared to illustrate most lucidly both 
 the ' participation ' of Ideas in one another and their fixed 
 ordering by a superior principle, viz. the mathematical. 
 Can we not see how, e.g. in arithmetic, the numbers stand 
 in fixed and intelligible relations to one another, and are 
 yet pervaded and systematised by the nature of the unit ? 
 What wonder, then, that when Plato essayed to expound 
 the nature of the Good and its relation to the universe, 
 his lectures should grow, as we are told, so clogged with 
 abstruse mathematics as to drive away the throngs which 
 had been attracted by their title ? What wonder, again, 
 that the Good should insensibly degenerate again into the 
 One, and that a bare, formal, intellectual unity should take 
 the place of the purposive harmony which the Ideal of the 
 Good had at first demanded ? For it was most unfor- 
 tunate to try to illustrate the content of the Supreme Pur- 
 pose from mathematics. These sciences, no doubt, are 
 ultimately purposive structures, and admirably illustrate 
 the systematic character of knowledge ; but superficially 
 their procedure is not teleological at all. To reduce the 
 Good, therefore, to a mere demand for a formal unity, 
 verbally implicit in the notion of a universe, was to stultify 
 the whole conception.
 
 56 STUDIES IN HUMANISM 
 
 1 4. Plato had discovered the function of the Concept, 
 and constructed the ideal of perfect knowledge. But his 
 Theory of Ideas overshot the mark in losing sight of the 
 Concept's instrumental character. Consequently he pro- 
 ceeded to misconceive (i) its relation to perception, and 
 (2) the real nature of the Concept itself. 
 
 (i) He had perceived that concepts colligated and 
 classified percepts, which are ' known ' by such conceptual 
 classifications. He perceived also that this ' knowing,' 
 however completely it may satisfy our immediate interest, 
 never exhausts the potential significance of percepts. 
 However many ' Ideas ' are predicated of a percept, it 
 still admits of further predications (should any one have 
 occasion to make them). What this really proves is the 
 excellence of an instrument which cannot be worn out 
 by use. 
 
 But Plato took it as a defect. Not in the concept, 
 however, but in the percept. It meant that the percept 
 was such as to elude the grasp of thought. It was too 
 impermanent, too various, too unstable, too indefinable, to 
 be fully known, to be really knowable. Whatever you 
 might say it was, it was always something else as well ; 
 it was always turning into an ' other.' The perceptual 
 was always changing, that is, always ' becoming ' ; and 
 ' becoming ' set reason at defiance. It could only be 
 thought as an unintelligible union of 'not -being' with 
 ' being.' Hence the perceptual world was stained with an 
 ineradicable taint ; it did not possess true being, nor the 
 permanence which that entailed. It was vitiated through 
 and through by a ' non-existent,' a /i^ ov, which rendered it 
 impermanent, and imperfect, and individual, and in general 
 accounted for the flux of sense. 
 
 It followed that the Sensible was not strictly to be 
 known. Knowledge is only of universals, 'Ideas'; that 
 which eludes the ^universal, the infinite particularity of the 
 ' this,' ' here,' and , r now,' is strictly unknowable. Science 
 takes no account of the differences between one man and 
 another ; * demonstration stops with the least general 
 
 1 Theaetetus, 209. Cp. Essay, iii. 18.
 
 ji FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 57 
 
 ' law ' (which, however, is still a universal) ; 1 there can be 
 no definition of the individual. True knowledge, there- 
 fore, is wholly conceptual, and essentially independent of 
 ' sense,' even though for unreal beings, wallowing in the 
 obscurities of the phenomenal, it may have to be 
 perceived, and extracted from a ' this-here-now.' 
 
 An easy fusion, further, of the ethical with the epis- 
 temological meaning of ' living by the senses,' here forms 
 a natural starting-point for a moral development of the 
 Ideas as Ideals, which made the Platonic disparagement 
 of the world of sense a basis for asceticism and a 
 jumping-off place to a ' heaven ' of pure thought, which 
 assuredly no individual souls could have attained. 2 
 
 I 5. The question which naturally arises at this point 
 is as to why any one should look any further for the 
 source of the Platonic ^apia-pos, the ' transcendence ' or 
 ' hypostasisation ' of the Platonic Ideas. The metaphysical 
 dualism of the Ideal Theory is plainly implicit in its 
 epistemological dualism. The dualistic chasm between 
 the Real and the Phenomenal is merely the translation 
 into ontological language, the application to the meta- 
 physical problem, of the dualistic antithesis between 
 ' thought ' and ' sensation,' ' knowledge ' and ' opinion,' 
 merely a consequence of a formulation of an ideal of 
 knowledge which had abstracted from personality and 
 ignored individuality, and so had constitutionally incapa- 
 citated itself from understanding actual knowing. 
 
 The Platonic Idea has emancipated itself from man ; 
 it has become so ' independent ' as to have lost all intrinsic 
 connexion with human knowing ; it has soared to so 
 ' supercelestial ' an Empyrean that human effort and 
 human aspiration can no longer follow it. Consequently 
 when it revisits the terrestrial scene, it ' descends into the 
 Cave,' and demeans itself by consorting with man, whose 
 whole life, with its interests, individuality, and imper- 
 
 1 Cp. Rep. 511 B. , and Essay, vi. 3, 4. 
 
 2 Whether, however, Plato himself perceived the incompatibility of individual 
 immortality with his theory of knowledge is doubtful. His arguments, as Teich- 
 muller has shown, never ' prove ' more than the immortality of soul as a prin- 
 ciple ; but he may have taken the plurality of souls for granted empirically.
 
 58 STUDIES IN HUMANISM n 
 
 manence, it must heartily despise. For the ' Ideal ' 
 Theory of knowledge has no intrinsic connexion with 
 human life ; man for it is an encumbrance to be over- 
 come, and not a master to be served. The connexion 
 which appears to exist between the two is intrinsically 
 unintelligible, because they are not really related ; it is 
 impossible to explain how man can rise to the contem- 
 plation of eternal truth, or why the Idea should descend 
 and distort itself in human thoughts. And what is the 
 relation of the Ideal archetype to its human ' copies ' is 
 the greatest unintelligibility of all. To shirk this ques- 
 tion by merely remarking that all the copies are imper- 
 fect is plainly insufficient. For this does not explain the 
 various sorts and degrees of inadequacy with which human 
 ideas are afflicted, nor account for their occurrence in the 
 place and at the time they occur. And since ex hypothesi 
 the ideal Idea is never realised on earth, it cannot be 
 appealed to to discriminate between one man's idea, and 
 one man's ideal, and another man's : the whole notion of 
 the eternal Idea is, in short, devoid of application. 
 
 1 6. If, however, undismayed by this logical collapse, 
 we proceed to translate the theory into metaphysics, we 
 inevitably reach the results on which the charge of 
 dualism is commonly based. 
 
 The Ideas are the true Reality which exists eternally 
 in absolute self-sufficing independence {avro Ka0' avro 
 aet 6V) : sensible things, which ' somehow ' are debased 
 unintelligible ' copies ' of them, are not truly real. Human 
 ideas (' opinions ') are in general at a still lower level of 
 imitation (elfcao-ia) ; and yet the philosopher can ' some- 
 how ' rise to a vision of the true Ideas, and, when he does 
 so, he grasps reality, and his ideas are rendered true because 
 they predicate the eternal relations of the absolute Ideas. 
 
 This is all the metaphysical version of the Ideal 
 Theory comes to, the substance of Platonic metaphysics. 
 Only Plato, being a poet, translates the ' somehow ' into 
 brilliantly pictorial imagery and the most gorgeous 
 ' myths.' His modern imitators, who are not poets, can 
 eke out this jejune ' somehow ' only by pseudo-religious
 
 ii FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 59 
 
 homilies on the necessary limitations of human knowledge, 
 and the presumption of trying to understand wholly what 
 is avowedly a theory of absolute truth ; but it is a moot 
 point whether they perceive the grotesque contradiction 
 between the claims and the achievements of their theory. 1 
 
 There is no reason to suppose, however, that Plato 
 himself was, even transiently, deceived. Even without the 
 Parmenides, the variegated metaphors with which he else- 
 where describes the relation which is null, the connexion 
 which is impossible, between the Ideal and the Sensible, 
 the Real and the inexplicable unreality of the Apparent, 
 between Absolute Truth and absolutely incomprehensible 
 Error, should convince us that his language was intended 
 to be pictorial. It does not really matter whether the 
 Sensible is said to ' participate ' in the Real, or to ' imitate ' 
 it, or to ' copy ' it as an archetypal model. It does not 
 really matter whether ' the world of Ideas ' is situated in 
 ' a heavenly place ' or in ' supercelestial space,' whether 
 human knowledge is derived from ' recollections ' of pre- 
 natal visions, or elicited from potentialities of eternal 
 truth inherent in the mind, whether human souls are one 
 or many, incarnated or reincarnated, composed of mortal 
 or immortal ' parts,' or both ; in every case the real diffi- 
 culty is one and the same. The descent from the Ideal 
 is an unmediated, incomprehensible Fall, a submergence 
 of the Real in a Flux of Illusion. 
 
 It is quite superfluous, therefore, to indict Plato's meta- 
 physic for its failure ' to derive the Sensible, 1 to connect 
 the Real with the Transcendent, to bridge the chasm 
 
 1 Prof. J. S. Mackenzie's article in Mind, NS. xv. No. 59, must surely be ironical. 
 For after professing to advocate what he calls his ' old idealism ' (which, as 
 attenuated in his statement, becomes indiscernible from realistic monism) on the 
 ground that ' ' the theory seems to make the universe intelligible to us, and that we 
 cannot think of any alternative theory that does " (p. 323), and alleging that this is 
 " the only ultimate kind of proof that can be given," he goes on to say that " it 
 would be absurd to expect any system of Idealism to show the rationality of the 
 universe in such a sense as this," i.e. by a Ideological explanation of particular 
 events and physical processes, such as Plato himself demanded in the Phaedo ! 
 And finally it turns out that even so ' Idealism ' cannot fulfil the duty to which it 
 has restricted itself, and he will " by no means affirm that it can, in this present 
 life, become completely intelligible to us " (p. 328). Truly, if serious, this would 
 be an amazing confession from a theory which demanded acceptance on the ground 
 of its unique ability to render the world completely intelligible !
 
 60 STUDIES IN HUMANISM n 
 
 between the Ideal and the Human. Habemus confitentem 
 reum ; Plato himself has admitted and deplored the fact, 
 far more completely and compactly, and in far finer 
 language than any of his critics and successors. 1 Plato 
 has anticipated all their difficulties, objections, and sugges- 
 tions for a cure the problem of the ' transcendence ' or 
 ' independence ' of the Idea Aristotle's ' third man,' i.e. 
 the infinite series of impotent mediators between the Idea 
 and the sensible thing the problem of the unity of an 
 Idea which is exemplified in and distributed among in- 
 finite particulars the objection to recognising eternal 
 Ideas of everything that can be named or invented the 
 nullity of a thought which neither is nor can be thought 
 by anyone the vain device of an absolute thinker to 
 retain in thought the Ideas not in human use 2 the fatal 
 divorce between human and Ideal truth the unknowable- 
 ness of the latter and its unconcern about the former the 
 incapacity of the Divine, just because it is divine, to know 
 the human all these were familiar to Plato as conse- 
 quences of his theory. 
 
 But it is fallacious to argue that, because he recognised 
 these difficulties, he was able or willing to remove them. 
 He appears to have regarded them as the price which 
 had to be paid for the Ideal Theory. And he never 
 declares himself unwilling to pay the price. All that in 
 the Parmenides (135 C) he has to set against the objec- 
 tions he has enumerated is, that if the Ideas are abandoned, 
 knowledge is impossible ; and this remark is significantly 
 put into the mouth of ' Parmenides,' who has just played 
 the ruthless critic of the 'Socratic' theory. If the price 
 seems to us stupendous, and the gain incommensurate, we 
 should at least reflect that the cost of an (approximately) 
 consistent intellectualism has not been reduced since Plato's 
 day, and that, even with all its difficulties, Plato might well 
 remain convinced of the fundamental value of his theory. 
 
 For after all was not all knowledge, in the true 
 sense, still manifestly conceptual ? Were not Ideas, and 
 
 1 Cp. especially Parmenides, 131-4. 
 
 2 For this would seem to be implied in the ' thinking Ideas ' of Farm. 132 C.
 
 ii FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 61 
 
 nothing but Ideas, used in all predication ? Was not 
 that which is not ' Idea ' incapable of being thought, or 
 expressed, or understood ? Nay, in the end, what but 
 an Idea could be predicated as existent, i.e. could be at 
 all ? All this was true and most important, and much 
 less specious theories have often been upheld on much 
 feebler grounds. 
 
 What, then, of the charge that Plato has wantonly and 
 vainly duplicated the real world by his Ideal world ? It 
 is simply not true that he has asserted the existence of 
 two real worlds, of which the one is superfluous. He has 
 asserted only one real world, viz. the Ideal world, just as 
 he has asserted only one form of true ' knowledge,' 
 viz. that of concepts. He has had to admit, indeed, that 
 besides the real world there appears to exist also a world of 
 sense, which is a world of illusion, and can be perceived, 
 but is not to be rendered fully intelligible even by the Ideas 
 which pervade it. But his metaphysic is no more really 
 dualistic than that of the Eleatics. Parmenides also had 
 described a ' way of opinion ' to deal with the sensible world 
 which ' somehow ' coexisted with the Absolute One. Plato's 
 account is essentially the same, with two improvements. He 
 has articulated the One into a system of Ideas ; and he 
 has suggested that though the illusion is incomprehen- 
 sible, we can yet in a way comprehend why it should, 
 and that it must, be so. For we can understand that if 
 reasoning as such inevitably predicates Ideas, a rational 
 deduction of what is not Idea is inconceivable. Thus the 
 very existence of the non-existent is to be grasped only 
 by ' a spurious reasoning.' 
 
 And yet it was most natural that the Platonic doctrine 
 should be, at once and persistently, misunderstood. The 
 truth of Plato's theory is evident only to those who can 
 see with Plato's eye and from Plato's point of view. His 
 doctrine must appear as an assertion of two real worlds 
 as soon as ever we presume the initial reality of our 
 phenomenal world of sense. To view it in this way at 
 once renders the Ideal world a second world, which claims 
 superior reality, but is ludicrously unable to make good its
 
 62 STUDIES IN HUMANISM n 
 
 claim, because it fails to establish any real connexion with 
 the primary reality of the world it essays to control. 
 
 But this interpretation is false to Plato's thought. 
 Plato had never admitted the primary reality of our 
 phenomenal world. On the contrary, he had denounced 
 it as tainted with unreality. For Plato, therefore, 
 Platonism is a one-world view ; its dualism lies not in 
 metaphysics, but in epistemology. 
 
 For Aristotle, his unknown predecessors (answered in 
 the Parmenides\ and his successors, it is no doubt a two- 
 world view, split by a metaphysical chasm between the two 
 worlds. 
 
 It all depends, therefore, on the standpoint. The 
 true Platonic standpoint assumes the reality of the Ideal, 
 and starts with it, but is unable to get down to the 
 human world. The Aristotelian standpoint, which is 
 that of common sense, assumes the reality of the human 
 world, starts with that, comes to the brink of the same 
 chasm from the opposite side, and is, of course, unable to 
 leap across it to the Ideal. There is not really any differ- 
 ence of opinion about the actual facts of the situation : 
 both sides come to the same gap, and are stopped by it. 
 
 The sole question is as to which is our proper stand- 
 point. Now this question might be argued with endless 
 subtlety; for on the one hand absolute truth would seem 
 to be visible only from the Ideal standpoint ; on the other 
 human truth would seem to be that proper to man. 
 What, however, cuts the discussion short is the simple 
 fact that before a man can maintain the Ideal standpoint it 
 must be reached from the human by a man. And if man can 
 attain it, he ought to be able to leave it again. If, there- 
 fore, it appears that there is no road back to the human 
 from the Ideal, it clearly cannot possibly have been reached 
 by valid means. And so what Plato has forgotten is the 
 deduction of his standpoint. He must have jumped to 
 his Ideal standpoint. Once he got to it, all went 
 swimmingly, until the time came for a return to earth ; 
 and then he found he could not return, but without under- 
 standing why. Accordingly all he can say is that the Ideal
 
 ii FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 63 
 
 world is certainly real, that the world of sense is not, and 
 that if the Ideas are denied, thinking must stop, because 
 all predication uses concepts. And all these things, 
 which are in a manner true, he says unweariedly from 
 first to last. That his attitude has seemed perplexing 
 and obscure is wholly due to his critics' lack of per- 
 ception. They have not penetrated to the depths of 
 Plato's problem, nor seen that the real difficulty springs 
 from his conception of knowledge. 
 
 And so they have actually thought themselves entitled 
 to scorn Plato's metaphysic while submissively accepting 
 his notion of the concept ! But this is no way of breaking 
 Plato's spell ; and the resulting failures to solve his problem, 
 nay, to avoid repeating his confessions of embarrassment, 
 in almost the same words, are distinctly humorous. 
 Aristotle's devices, for example, for avoiding the tran- 
 scendence of the Idea seem deliciously naive. He 
 declares that, of course, ' universals ' must be conceived 
 as immanent in their ' particulars ' ; but how this can be, 
 he is quite unable to explain. He protests (rightly 
 enough) that individual substances are primary reality, 
 and that universals are only ' second substances ' ; but for 
 lack of insight into the instrumental function of the latter, 
 his theory of knowledge ends in the unresolved contradic- 
 tion that, since knowledge is essentially of universals, the 
 metaphysical order is epistemologically impossible, and 
 individuals, which in metaphysics are ultimate reality, in 
 epistemology are as such unknowable ! It thereupon 
 seems only a secondary mishap that after all his denuncia- 
 tions of Platonic ^tuptoyio? he should have to make his own 
 1/01)9 something ^copta-rov, or to postulate the transcendence 
 of his deity, who is really quite as much dissevered from 
 the universe as the Platonic Idea, and can act on it only 
 by the magic of the world's desire for his perfect ' form.' 
 
 As for Plato's followers, whose name is legion, their 
 labour has been that of Danaids. They have been trying 
 to carry the waters of truth in Plato's conceptual sieve, 
 without so much as perceiving that the vessel leaked. 
 And this, at least, Plato may claim to have perceived,
 
 64 STUDIES IN HUMANISM n 
 
 even though he was at a loss for means to stop the 
 leakages of truth through the holes in his conception of 
 the Concept 
 
 17. For the only real escape from his embarrass- 
 ments lay in a direction in which he could not and would 
 not look for it, viz. in a radical recognition of the func- 
 tional and instrumental nature of the Concept. But this 
 would have involved a rehabilitation of the senses and of 
 immediate experience, and a complete remodelling of 
 Plato's conceptions of Truth and Reality. Even if by 
 some strange chance he had caught a glimpse of this 
 way out, he would have averted his eyes from the im- 
 pious spectacle. The view that concepts are not unalter- 
 able and only relatively constant (like mere material 
 things), being essentially tools slowly fashioned by a 
 practical intelligence for the mastery of its experience, 
 whose value and truth reside in their application to the 
 particular cases of their use, and not in their timeless 
 validity nor in their supra-sensible otium cum dignitate in 
 a transcendent realm of abstractions, would have seemed 
 to him as paradoxical and monstrous and unsatisfying as 
 it still does to his belated followers. And yet it is this 
 notion of Truth, this insight into the function of Ideas, 
 which the working of Science has slowly brought to light, 
 after many centuries of incessant and by no means always 
 successful warfare against the glamour of the gorgeous 
 castles which Platonism has erected in and out of the 
 air. 
 
 There had been a couple of huge mistakes in Plato's 
 conception of the Concept's function : (i) The initial 
 abstraction from its human side was really illegitimate ; 
 and so (2) no provision had been made for the growth 
 of truth. 
 
 (i) Because in ordinary cases our reasoning can often 
 abstract from the personal peculiarities of this man or 
 that, it does not follow that we can abstract from all 
 men that truth as a whole can be dehumanised. Because 
 we make truth what may be, roughly, called ' independent,' 
 it does not follow that it can be absolutely so, or that it
 
 ii FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 65 
 
 is logically irrelevant that we make it so for certain purposes 
 of our own. In point of fact, the whole depersonalising 
 or dehumanising of truth (and of reality) must be con- 
 ceived, and limited, pragmatically. It is a procedure 
 which is useful, and works for certain limited purposes ; 
 but it breaks down woefully and irretrievably when it is 
 conceived as ultimate. ' Pure Reason,' defecated of all 
 human interests, can assert its rationality as little as its 
 existence. 
 
 (2) One of the chief characteristics of human truth is 
 its progressiveness. It is essentially a thing that must 
 grow and develop through stages subsequently known as 
 ' errors.' Ideal truth, on the other hand, is conceived as 
 inerrant, and as fixed and immutable in its perfection. 
 When, therefore, Platonism abstracted from the human 
 side of knowing, it implicitly rejected also the conception 
 of a growth of knowledge. To render such growth con- 
 ceivable, concepts must not be conceived as rigid, but as 
 improvable and adjustable to new conditions. It is 
 here that a priori dogmatism fails. Its fallacy does not 
 lie in its deductive procedure, but in its tacit as- 
 sumption that the conceptions it argues from are final 
 and not to be revised. But for this assumption, a 
 4 contradiction ' might only prove that the conceptions 
 used were insufficient for their work. And if there is 
 always this alternative inference from an apparent case of 
 contradictory conceptions, how can the intellectualist 
 belief in a purely formal criterion of truth, which regards 
 it as mere self-consistency, be sustained, or the pragmatic 
 appeal to consequences be averted ? 
 
 The Platonic Ideas illustrate this situation admirably. 
 Plato had perceived that stable concepts were needed for 
 significant assertion and profitable inquiry. But (as in 
 the similar cases of the ' independence ' of ' reality,' and of 
 ' truth ') this stability was not conceived pragmatically, i,e. 
 as the amount and sort of stability needed by concepts in 
 the fulfilment of their actual function. It was cut loose 
 from human knowing, and taken as absolute. Concepts 
 thereby became immutable. But if our concepts are 
 
 F
 
 66 STUDIES IN HUMANISM n 
 
 immutable, our knowledge cannot grow. And conversely, 
 if our knowledge grows, our concepts cannot be im- 
 mutable. If, therefore, there are immutable concepts, 
 they cannot, at any rate, be ours. They are different in 
 kind, and so cannot explain human knowledge. The 
 inability, in short, of the Platonic Idea to descend to 
 earth is inherent in its construction. 
 
 If, without realising this fundamental divorce between 
 the Ideal and the human, into which Platonism has been 
 beguiled, we try to adjust the Platonic Idea to the growth 
 of knowledge, we at once evolve a tissue of absurdities. 
 
 (1) If the Ideal World is to remain connected with 
 ours, and to be affected by our judgments, it would 
 follow that any change in our world would have to be 
 reflected in the Ideal. Every time anyone hit upon a 
 new predication which could sustain its claim to truth, 
 every time a new reality, say a motor car, was made or 
 generated, or an old one, say a dodo, became extinct, 
 there would have to ensue a responsive readjustment in 
 the eternal system of Ideas. But would not this destroy 
 its eternity, and effectively include it in the sphere of the 
 Sensible ? How could Ideas, thus subject to Becoming, 
 thus perfected in time, any longer function as representa- 
 tive of timeless ' Being ' ? 
 
 (2) But even if a Becoming of the Ideas were admitted, 
 it would not explain the Becoming of the Sensible. The 
 Ideal Bed may be, as we are told in the Republic (596), 
 the eternal ' truth ' and reality, of which all real beds are 
 imperfect copies ; but how does it assist or explain the 
 genesis of the latter ? Humanly speaking, beds were 
 invented by men, in response to human needs, by the 
 exercise of their practical intelligence for the manipula- 
 tion of reality, at a definite stage in the history of man's 
 progress. And it is impossible to see that eternal Ideas 
 had anything to do with any part of this history. How 
 can the eternal nature of the Ideal Bed account for the 
 time, or the place, or the material, or the inventor of the 
 first construction of beds, or for their subsequent im- 
 provements, and the consequent expansion in our notions
 
 ii FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 67 
 
 of what an ideal bed requires ? Shall we assert that the 
 Ideal Bed, e.g. had spiral springs all along, because the 
 best beds now possess them, or deny this, because in 
 Plato's time such modern improvements had not been 
 thought of? 
 
 (3) If, on the other hand, we rigidly maintain the 
 transcendence of the Ideal, we must lose connexion with 
 human knowing. The latter becomes a self-directing 
 process which Pure Reason cannot sanction or understand, 
 while Ideal Truth becomes the meaningless monopoly of 
 Gods who, as Plato said, cannot know the human. 1 How 
 clearly Plato himself had seen this objection is attested 
 also by a remarkable passage in the Sophist (247-249), 
 in which he points out that knowledge of the Ideas 
 implies an interaction between them and us, and so their 
 alteration, and thereby a sacrifice of their independence, 
 absoluteness, and immutability. In return, they are 
 promised motion, life, soul, intelligence, and purposive 
 reason : but what of their stability ? Plato can see a 
 way to reconcile these conflicting postulations as little 
 as in the Parmenides ; he leaves the contradiction un- 
 resolved. 
 
 It is easy, of course, to say that he ought on no 
 account to have put up with it. He ought to have 
 adopted the more tolerable alternative ; he ought to have 
 upheld at all costs the relevance of the Ideas to 
 human knowing ; he ought to have taken account of 
 the growth of knowledge ; he ought to have sacrificed 
 the eternity and immutability of truth. 
 
 It is easy for us to say this, because we can realise 
 that the concepts we use are continuously changing as 
 our knowledge grows, though more slowly than our 
 percepts, and that immutability is neither a fact nor a 
 necessity. We can see, indeed, that so far from postulating 
 immutability, our concepts could not perform their 
 functions if they did not change. We are thus com- 
 pelled to conceive any ' absolute ' truth which is relevant 
 to actual knowing as nothing more than, as it were, 
 
 1 Parmenides, 134 E.
 
 68 STUDIES IN HUMANISM n 
 
 humanly absolute, i.e. as an ideal for us, which we are 
 really making and realising, and which must, for that very 
 reason, not be eternally accomplished. 
 
 But Plato could not see this. 1 He could not see his 
 way to changing his notion of the Concept without 
 abolishing knowledge. He could see no way of com- 
 bining the purity of knowledge per se with its attainment 
 by us. He could not see that the constancy of a concept 
 predicated, need not be greater than sufficed for expressing 
 the purpose and conveying the meaning of a judgment. 
 He could not see this, because the purpose was just part 
 of that Protagorean ' subjectivism ' (i.e. humanism), which 
 he had interpreted and eliminated as scepticism. 
 
 But though he did not see this, he saw far more 
 than his successors. The whole intellectualist theory of 
 knowledge is a washed out replica of Platonism, inferior 
 to it in design and execution and vividness of colouring, 
 and above all in significance. For the clearness with 
 which Plato had pointed to the flaw of his theory ought 
 to have suggested the need for a thorough re-examination 
 of the function of the Concept. In point of fact it did 
 nothing of the kind. The later intellectualists hardly 
 realised how completely they were dependent on Plato 
 for the foundations on which they built ; they hardly ever 
 penetrated to the fundamental difficulty of their common 
 theory. 
 
 1 8. To us at last the way is clear. We must 
 conceive the Concept as an instrument of human know- 
 ledge, and its nature as something relative to, and revealed 
 
 1 Quite recently, however, Prof. J. A. Stewart has propounded (in Mind, N.S. 
 No. 60) a brilliant and original theory that the so-called ' Socratic ' dialogues, 
 so far from being scientifically negligible, are really essential to the complete 
 statement of the Ideal Theory, and should be taken as exemplifying the function 
 of the Concept in use, and as supplementing the account of the abstract concept 
 given in the dogmatic dialogues, on which alone the traditional descriptions of 
 Platonism have been based. If this attractive theory can be substantiated in 
 detail, the current estimates of Plato will have to be profoundly modified, and we 
 also can no longer treat him as a complete intellectualist. He could be charged 
 only with a failure to make clear the logical connexion between his two types of 
 dialogue, and to emphasise the vital importance of the functional view of the 
 Concept. Even on the most favourable interpretation, however, we can hardly 
 ascribe to him a full perception of the fact that the whole meaning of concepts 
 depends on their u*e and application.
 
 ii FROM PLATO TO PROTAGORAS 69 
 
 in, its use, and therefore to be discovered by the 
 attentive study of actual knowing, and not by meditation 
 and dialectical ' criticism ' of abstracted and unmeaning 
 ' forms of thought' Let us go back to Plato, by all 
 means ; but let us go back, not with the intention of 
 repeating his mistake and painfully plunging into the 
 ' chasm ' he has made, but in order to correct his initial 
 error. But to do this we must return from Plato to 
 Protagoras. We must abandon the attempt to de- 
 humanise knowledge, to attribute to it an ' independ- 
 ence' of human purposes, an 'absoluteness' which 
 divorces it from life, an ' eternity ' which is unrelated to 
 time. 
 
 Or rather, if we wish to retain these hallowed terms, 
 we must construe them pragmatically. ' Independence ' 
 must not be construed as a denial of connexion with 
 human life, but as a description of the selective valuation 
 which discriminates some more precious contents in human 
 experience from others of inferior value. ' Absoluteness ' 
 must designate the ideal of complete adequacy for every 
 human purpose, while the ' eternity ' of truth must mean 
 its applicability at whatever time we will. 
 
 But to follow up the promise of these novel courses, 
 we must start once more, with Protagoras, from the ~^ 
 individual judgments of individual men, and study their ) 
 developments, the ways in which they originate under the / 
 promptings of complex psychic forces, the ways in which V 
 they are combined into systems, and are verified, and / 
 claim and secure ' objective ' validity, and engender the ( 
 final ideal of an independence and absoluteness which 
 are so easily misinterpreted into a nullification of the / 
 processes that generated them. We must radically / 
 disabuse our minds of the notion that Humanism means/ 
 Subjectivism, or Subjectivism Scepticism. 
 
 That Subjectivism need not coincide with Scepticism 
 is apparent from the fact that even the extremest 
 Solipsism need not doubt its own sufficiency. In point 
 of fact, it is Intellectualism which is most prone to 
 Scepticism : it engenders Scepticism so soon as the
 
 70 STUDIES IN HUMANISM n 
 
 breakdown of its impossible demands becomes evident to 
 those who cannot bear to part with it. 
 
 As for Subjectivism, no Protagorean would admit the 
 charge. He would not admit that in starting with the 
 individual he had also committed himself to finish up with 
 him. In knowing, also, the beginning and the end of 
 man's career lie far asunder. And he sees, of course, 
 that of the individual judgments made only a small 
 percentage are ever recognised as valid. But he observes 
 also that every one has a strong interest to get his 
 claims validated. Truth is one, of the very few objects 
 of human desire of which no one desires the exclusive 
 rights. 1 For if it could win no recognition, it would so 
 far not work, and so fail to be ' true.' It is easy to see, 
 therefore, that beings who live socially must speedily 
 accumulate large bodies of what they take to be ' objective ' 
 truth, and that such truth must, on the whole, involve 
 and facilitate salutary adjustments of action. In point 
 of fact, the great social problem is not how to control 
 the individual and to secure conformity with existing 
 valuations, but how to secure and promote the individual 
 variations which initiate improvements. 
 
 There is, therefore, nothing in the notion that the two 
 supreme maxims of Hellenic wisdom, Know thyself, and 
 Man is the Measure, are in conflict with each other, 
 with the facts of life, or with their prosperous manipula- 
 tion. They yield, at any rate, a better guidance and a 
 saner inspiration for man than the unattainable phantom 
 of an Ideal which exists eternally, immutably, and 
 absolutely for itself. 
 
 1 Cp. Humanism, p. 58.
 
 Ill 
 
 THE RELATIONS OF LOGIC AND 
 PSYCHOLOGY l 
 
 ARGUMENT 
 
 i . Humanism as logical ' psychologism. ' 2. It is beneficial to a Logic 
 which has lapsed into scepticism, because it has abstracted from actual 
 knowing. 3. Definition of Psychology as a descriptive science of 
 concrete mental process. It can recognise cognitive values an ' claims, 
 though 4 Logic must evaluate them, and thus arises out of Psychology. 
 Impossibility of forbidding it to describe cognitive processes. 5. 
 Definition of Logic, a normative science arising out of the existence 
 of false claims. 6. Interdependence of the two sciences. The risks 
 of abstracting from any psychical fact. 7. (l) Thinking depends 
 essentially on psychological processes, such as interest, purpose, emotion, 
 and satisfaction. 8. (2) The fundamental ' logical ' conceptions, 
 'necessity,' 'certainty,' 'self-evidence,' 'truth' are primarily psychical 
 facts. ' Logical ' certainty due to the extension of potential beyond 
 actual purpose in thinking. 9. (3) The fundamental ' logical ' opera- 
 tions have psychological aspects. E.g. the postulate of ' identity. ' 
 Meaning dependent on context and purpose. The actual meaning vs. 
 the meaning per se. The problem of understanding. The ' logical ' 
 
 1 The necessity of treating this subject from a Humanist point of viesv has 
 long been evident to me. But it was recently borne in upon me with peculiar 
 force by two circumstances. The first was that the excellent articles on ' Prag- 
 matism versus Absolutism,' published by Mr. R. F. A. Hoernle in Mind (xiv. 
 N.S. 55 and 56), though giving the best general account of the Pragmatic move- 
 ment which is extant, yet seemed to imply a serious misapprehension of the con- 
 ception of Psychology which we are bound to entertain. Such misapprehension, 
 however, is so natural and pardonable, so long as no formal treatment of the 
 interrelations of Logic and Psychology is in print, that it seemed imperative to 
 attempt its removal. 
 
 Secondly, being called upon last year to start a discussion before the Aristo- 
 telian Society, in which Professor Bosanquet and Dr. Hastings Rashdall also 
 consented to participate, I selected the question whether Logic can abstract from 
 the psychological conditions of thinking. The discussion which ensued will be 
 found in the Society's Proceedings for 1905-6, and though it was rather at cross 
 purposes, and on the whole illustrates only the difficulty philosophers have in 
 understanding one another, it enabled me to realise what a radical difference 
 exists between the Humanist and the intellectualist conceptions of these sciences. 
 It seemed helpful, therefore, to discuss these conceptions, and so this essay is 
 based in part on the ' symposium ' of the Aristotelian Society. 
 
 71
 
 72 STUDIES IN HUMANISM m 
 
 abstractions as to meaning dangerous and false. Judgment an inti- 
 mately personal affair, which cannot be depersonalised, and is naturally 
 related to questions and postulates. 10. Can even desire be 
 abstracted from? A case of postulatory reasoning examined. II. 
 As meaning always depends on context, and context on personality, is 
 Logic entitled to abstract from the knower's personality? 12. The 
 anti-psychological standpoint of intellectualist logic. Its assumptions. 
 (i) 'Pure,' and (2) 'independent' thought. (3) ' Depersonalisa- 
 tion.' (4) The separation of thinking from 'willing' and 'feeling.' 
 13. Is its standpoint descriptive or normative? or both and either? 
 14. Incompetence of Logic for psychological description : its 
 unjust encroachment on psychology and result, 15, the stultifica- 
 tion of psychology and the suicide of logic, teste Prof. Bosanquet. 
 1 6. The great abstraction which ruins logic. 17. ' Depersonalisa- 
 tion ' involves abstraction from error, which must yet be acknowledged 
 to exist. Mr. Joachim's confessions. Hence 18 the complete break- 
 down of intellectualist logic, owing to a separation of the ideal and the 
 human which renders both meaningless. This is Plato's old error, 
 exemplified in the Theaetetus. 19. The remedy is to refrain from 
 dehumanising knowledge, by (l) etherealising it, i.e. abstracting from 
 its application, and (2) depersonalising it, i.e. abstracting from the 
 knower's purpose. 
 
 i. IT will, probably, be conceded by all philosophers 
 that the sciences are all (in some sense) connected with one 
 another, and that the precise way in which their connex- 
 ion is conceived will depend on the way we conceive the 
 sciences themselves. It will hardly, moreover, be disputed 
 that since the definitions of a growing science must to some 
 extent change with the growth of our knowledge of the 
 data of that science, the relations of such sciences to each 
 other cannot be immutable. Consequently it may be 
 inferred with some confidence that the Humanist move- 
 ment must have introduced some modifications and novel- 
 ties into our conceptions of Logic and of Psychology, and 
 of their relations to each other. This has, indeed, been 
 pretty widely recognised. In Germany, for example, the 
 analogous tendencies are commonly described, and de- 
 nounced, as ' Psychologism,' and if ' Psychologism ' means 
 a demand that the psychical facts of our cognitive func- 
 tioning shall no longer be treated as irrelevant to Logic, 
 it is clear, both that Humanism is Psychologism, and that 
 the demand itself is thoroughly legitimate, and not to be 
 dismissed with a mere nonpossumus. For when Humanism 
 demands that philosophy shall start from, and satisfy, the 
 whole man in his full concreteness, and not exclusively
 
 in LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY 73 
 
 concern itself with a sort of elegant extract, a highly 
 perfumed and sophisticated ' essence ' of man, dubbed ' the 
 rational intelligence,' there is certainly included in its 
 demand a much greater respect for the actual procedures 
 of human cognition and a much less easy-going acceptance 
 of petrified conventions than the traditional Logic will 
 find at all convenient. 
 
 2. And yet a sincere attempt to comply with the 
 demands made upon it, whether in the name of Psycho- 
 logy or of Humanity, would do Logic no harm. Nay, it 
 might even prove its salvation. For its present condition 
 is anything but a happy one. It has lapsed into an 
 impotent scepticism, which is irremediable so long as it 
 cannot, or will not, emancipate itself from intellectualistic 
 presuppositions which render actual knowing inherently 
 ' irrational.' So it has been forced practically to abandon 
 the attempt to account for knowing. It has been driven 
 to represent the processes by which de facto knowledge 
 is increased as logically invalid. Predication has become 
 for it a puzzle, inference a paradox, proof an impossibility, 1 
 discovery a wonder, change a contradiction, temporal 
 succession incompatible with Science (which all the while 
 is busily engaged with predicting the future !), indivi- 
 duality an irrelevance, experience an impertinence, sensa- 
 tion a piece of unmeaning nonsense, thinking ' extra- 
 logical,' and so forth and so on. After delivering itself 
 of these valuable ' criticisms ' of our ordinary cognitive 
 procedures, it has retired into an ' ideal ' world of its own 
 invention, out of space, out of time, out of sight (and 
 almost out of mind !), where it employs its ample leisure 
 with studying ' types ' that never lived on land or sea, and 
 constructing a hortus siccus of ' forms,' and compiling 
 unworkable ' systems,' and concocting unrealisable ' ideals,' 
 of ' Thought,' all of which have about as much relation to 
 actual knowing and to human truth as the man in the 
 moon ! But even in its supra-sensible asylum the Erinyes 
 of the Reality it has abandoned and betrayed pursue it ; 
 
 See Prof. Case's article on ' Logic ' in the Encyclopedia Britannica (loth ed. 
 . 338) for a lucid exposition of this situation, with some excellent comments.
 
 74 STUDIES IN HUMANISM ni 
 
 it cannot manipulate to its satisfaction even the figments 
 and phantoms of the imaginary world which haunt it. 
 Its ' forms ' do not afford it aesthetic satisfaction ; its 
 ' types ' are broken before ever they are used ; its ' systems ' 
 will not hold together ; its ' ideals ' decline to be harmoni- 
 ous. In vain does it cry out to metaphysics to save it 
 from imminent collapse into the abyss of scepticism ; 
 its cognate metaphysics have abundant troubles of their 
 own, and are even more hopelessly involved in morasses 
 that border the brink of the pit ; they find, moreover, all 
 the sciences beset by similar distresses, and can vouchsafe 
 no answer save that the Real, at all events, does not 
 appear, nor can what appears be real. 
 
 In such a desperate plight it is surely not unbecoming 
 to approach the logician with the suggestion that his 
 troubles may be largely of his own making, that possibly 
 his conception of Logic is at fault and capable of amend- 
 ment, and to point out to him that after all what he 
 originally undertook to do, but has now apparently quite 
 forgotten, was to provide a reasoned theory of actual 
 knowing, that the existence of such actual knowing is an 
 empirical fact which is not abolished by his failure to 
 understand it, that this fact constitutes his datum and his 
 raison d'etre, that he may as well accept it as the touch- 
 stone of his theories, and that it is the ' ideals of thought ' 
 which must be accounted wrong if they cannot be rendered 
 compatible with the facts which formed their basis. He 
 may at least be called upon to consider the possibility 
 that, if he consents to start from actual knowing, and 
 refrains from welcoming ' ideals ' until they have been 
 authenticated by their connexion with the facts and veri- 
 fied by their working when applied, he may reach an 
 altogether more profitable and effective conception of 
 Logic than that which is falling to pieces. 
 
 3. Let us make bold, then, to re-define our sciences 
 and to re-conceive their relations. 
 
 And first of all let us consider the wider and lower of 
 these sciences, to wit Psychology. Without concerning 
 ourselves with the questions as to how far Psychology is, or
 
 in LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY 75 
 
 may be, experimental or explanatory, and even as to how far 
 its descriptions should be ' functional ' rather than ' struc- 
 tural,' as not affecting our present purpose, we may most 
 conveniently conceive it at present as a descriptive science, 
 whose aim is the description of mental process as such. 
 It is implied in this, and hardly in need of explicit state- 
 ment, that the mental processes of individual minds are 
 intended. For we cannot experience or observe mental 
 processes in any other way. Still it is worth noting that, 
 in this implication, Psychology gives us a very necessary 
 guarantee that it will do justice to the concreteness of 
 the actual human soul ; so far, at least, as the necessary 
 abstraction of its standpoint consequent on the limitation 
 of its purpose permits it to do. 
 
 The definition we have adopted clearly assigns to 
 Psychology a very extensive field of operations prac- 
 tically the whole realm of direct experience. It recognises 
 a psychological side also to everything that can be known, 
 inasmuch as everything known to exist must be connected 
 with our experience, and known by a psychical process. 
 In so far as any real is known, a process of experiencing 
 is involved in it, and this process appertains to the science 
 of Psychology. Thus all physical objects and questions 
 become psychological, so soon as we ask how they can be 
 experienced, and whether the psychical process of experi- 
 encing them warrants our claiming for them an ' objective 
 reality.' In some cases, as e.g. with regard to the exist- 
 ence of sea-serpents, N-rays, and ghosts, the question 
 about the ' reality ' of these objects is really one as to 
 whether the psychological treatment does not exhaust 
 their significance, or whether the psychical processes are 
 such as to justify our interpreting them as indicative of 
 ' objective reality.' 
 
 Now among mental processes those which may be 
 called ' cognitive ' are very common and predominant, and 
 therefore the description of cognitive process will properly 
 fall into the province of Psychology. It stands to reason, 
 moreover, that it must be described as it occurs, and 
 without arbitrary attempts at reserving some of its aspects
 
 76 STUDIES IN HUMANISM m 
 
 for the exclusive consideration of another science. Now, 
 as cognitive process is naturally productive of ' knowledge,' 
 and valuable as such, it follows that cognitive values are 
 properly subject to psychological description. Mental 
 Life is, naturally and in point of fact, packed with values 
 ethical, aesthetical, and cognitive (' logical '), of which it is 
 the vehicle. 1 It is the plain duty, therefore, of Psychology 
 to record this fact, and to describe these values. Cogni- 
 tive values, as psychical occurrences, are facts for Psycho- 
 logy. It is their specific character which subsequently 
 renders them subjects for Logic. Their specific character 
 is that they are claims to truth, and employ the predicates 
 ' true ' and ' false ' ; precisely, e.g. as ethical judgments use 
 the predicates ' right ' and ' wrong.' 
 
 The special value, however, of these specific valuations 
 and their functions in the organisation of Life form no 
 part of the purpose of Psychology. Having a merely 
 descriptive purpose, it is content to record all values 
 merely as made, and as facts. Thus it is psychologically 
 relevant to recognise that the predication of ' true ' and 
 ' false ' occurs, and that what A judges ' true,' B may 
 judge to be ' false.' But it is psychologically indifferent 
 that A is a much better judge than B. Psychology, that 
 is, does not seek to evaluate these claims, to decide which 
 is really ' right,' or what is really ' true ' ; still less to frame 
 generalisations as to how in general claims are to be sus- 
 tained, and humanly valid judgments to be attained. All 
 processes of immanently and reciprocally criticising, 
 systematising, harmonising, and utilising the claims 
 actually made fall as such without its purpose : they are 
 the business of Logic. 
 
 4. The relation of the two sciences to cognitive process, 
 and to each other, is thus quite simple. Yet it has been 
 woefully misunderstood. Thus it is commonly asserted 
 that Psychology does not recognise values, nor Logic care 
 about psychical existence. Yet if so, how could values enter 
 human minds, and how could truths ever become facts ? 2 
 
 1 Cp. Humanism, p. 163. 
 
 2 No one, probably, has given greater currency to this fallacious notion than
 
 in LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY 77 
 
 Still more extraordinary is the assumption that Psy- 
 chology is not to describe values. Yet this assumption is 
 made without the least consciousness of its monstrosity, and 
 without the slightest attempt to defend it, as if it were 
 self-evident, by writers of repute. Dr. Hastings Rashdall 
 gravely assures us that " the Psychologist . . . knows 
 nothing of the truth or falsity of judgments." l And even 
 Mr. Hoernle takes it for granted 2 that " truth, in fact, is not 
 an object of inquiry to Psychology at all. That certain 
 of the mental processes which it studies have the further 
 character of being 3 true or false, is, for Psychology, an 
 accident," and infers that " this inability to deal with 
 validity seems to beset all psychologies alike." This 
 arbitrary restriction on the functions of Psychology is no 
 doubt in the interest of an impracticable conception of 
 Logic, which instinctively seeks to reduce Psychology to 
 an equal or greater futility ; but we, assuredly, can have 
 no reason to accept it. 
 
 For us the function of Logic develops continuously, 
 rationally, and without antagonism, out of that of 
 Psychology. Cognitive values and claims to truth exist 
 
 Mr. Bradley, by the sharp contrast he drew in his Logic (ch. i. e.g. pp. 7, 8, and 
 p. 526) between the validity of the ' idea ' ( = concept) and the psychical existence 
 of the 'idea' ( = mental image). It has, unfortunately, not been as extensively 
 recognised that his remark in Appearance and Reality (p. 51), that "it is not 
 wholly true that 'ideas are not what they mean,' for if their meaning is not 
 psychical fact, I should like to know how and where it exists," is, inter alia, a 
 scornful self-correction. 
 
 Prof. Bosanquet (Logic, i. p. 5) declares that "in considering an idea as a 
 psychical occurrence we abstract from its meaning" ; but ibid. ii. p. 16 . , he 
 advocates the remarkable doctrine that ' ' when psychical images come to be 
 employed for the sake of a meaning which they convey, they ex hypothesi are 
 not treated as fact. And their meaning is not itself a psychical fact, but is an 
 intellectual activity which can only enter into fact by being used to qualify 
 reality." This is sufficiently oracular, and it would be interesting to hear the 
 reasons why Psychology should be debarred from recognising ' intellectual 
 activities ' as psychical facts. 
 
 1 Arist. Soc. Proc., 1905-6, p. 249. 
 
 J Mind, xiv. p. 473. 
 
 3 This should be ' claiming to be' \ for no one supposes that Psychology is 
 concerned with the decision between conflicting claims to truth. Whether what 
 claims to be true really is true, is admittedly left to Logic. Here, however, it 
 seems to be argued that because Psychology cannot decide between claims, it may 
 not even register them, nor describe cognitive values. I fear that Mr. Hoernle 
 throughout has not steered quite clear of the confusion between claim (psycho- 
 logical fact) and validation (logical fact), which so effectively vitiates the intel- 
 lectualistic theories of truth. For the distinction see Essay v. , especially i.
 
 78 STUDIES IN HUMANISM m 
 
 as empirical facts. If they were all indefeasible, con- 
 gruous, and compatible with each other, as, e.g. my having 
 a toothache is compatible with your not having one, there 
 would be no ground for a further science. But in point 
 of fact false claims to truth are commoner than valid ones, 
 and they not only conflict with ' the truth,' but also with 
 each other, so that the problem of error cries out for 
 further treatment. 
 
 5. There is need, therefore, for a discipline which 
 will evaluate these claims, and try to determine the various 
 degrees of validity and trustworthiness which may be 
 assigned to them. Logic is the traditional name for the 
 science which undertakes this function. It may be defined 
 as the systematic evaluation of actual knowing. It is a 
 normative science, because it not only records, but pre- 
 scribes ; it reflects on the claims actually made, and 
 prescribes methods for their evaluation. But its norma- 
 tive function arises quite naturally out of our actual 
 procedures, from the observation that some cognitive 
 processes are in point of fact more valuable, and from 
 the necessity of selecting the more valuable among con- 
 flicting claims. Thus the need for Logic, its genesis and 
 its procedures, all seem to be essentially empirical, and it 
 is quite conceivable that no special science of Logic should 
 ever have arisen. If all claims were ipso facto true and 
 valid, if we had never been confronted with conflicting 
 claims or driven by our 'errors' to rescind our first 
 assertions, what need were there for Logic ? Our attention 
 would never be called to the problem of values, our primary 
 attributions would stand, and no superior science would be 
 devised to adjudicate between conflicting judgments. 
 
 As it is, the natural process has to be regulated and 
 controlled, and so falls a prey to two sciences. The same 
 cognitive values occur twice over, first in Psychology as so 
 many facts, then in Logic, as subjects for critical evalua- 
 tion. Nor is it difficult to understand how two sciences 
 can work over the same ground : they cultivate it with a 
 different purpose, and so raise different crops. 
 
 6. It is manifest, moreover, that the two sciences must
 
 in LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY 79 
 
 work together hand in glove. Logic requires trustworthy 
 descriptions of cognitive happenings before it can evaluate 
 them with safety ; for these it should be able to rely on 
 the co-operation of Psychology. In other words, the 
 collection and preparation of the material which the 
 logician proposes to use is essentially a psychological 
 function, alike whether it is performed by a psychologist 
 who bears in mind the need of Logic and the needs of 
 Logic, or whether the logician is enough of a psychologist 
 to do it for himself. In the latter case he resembles a 
 painter who, like those of old, makes and mixes his own 
 colours ; the logician, on the other hand, who proposes to 
 dispense with the aid of Psychology is like a painter who 
 will not use anything so gross as colours wherewithal to 
 paint his ' ideal ' pictures. 
 
 Thus Logic and Psychology, though perfectly distinct, 
 are perfectly inseparable. And, moreover, it is because 
 they are so intimately related that they must be so sharply 
 distinguished, and because they have been so clearly dis- 
 tinguished that they can be so closely connected. It is 
 practically impossible to exaggerate the intimacy of their 
 relations. Nothing psychological can be affirmed a priori 
 to be irrelevant to Logic. The logician, no doubt, from 
 motives of practical convenience or necessity, often abstracts 
 provisionally from trivial characteristics of the actual psychic 
 process ; but, except in cases where he has learnt from ex- 
 perience what features are unessential and may safely be 
 neglected, he always takes a certain risk in so doing. 
 Now this risk may be fatal to the validity of his argument, 
 and in any case impairs its theoretical exactness. The 
 formal logician, therefore, can never, as such, claim to be 
 the final judge of the value of any argument. He can 
 never by his ' rules ' preclude the examination of its 
 ' material ' worth ; however formally perfect the syllogism 
 which expresses it, a fatal flaw may lurk in its actual 
 application ; however grotesque its formal fallacy, a road 
 to truth may be barred by its rejection. If he is wise, 
 therefore, he will not magnify his office of reminding 
 reasoners of what they are about, and of how far their
 
 8o STUDIES IN HUMANISM m 
 
 reasonings are attaining the ends they aim at. Thus the 
 burden of proof, at any rate, lies on those who affirm that 
 the logician may assume the irrelevance of any psychic 
 fact. 
 
 Nay, more. One never can tell whether the proper 
 answer to a ' logical ' claim does not lie in the psycho- 
 logical domain, and take the form of a psychological 
 explanation. Thus a claim to have discovered the 
 secret of the universe is not usually met by a ' logical ' 
 refutation, but by an inquiry into the assertor's ' state of 
 mind,' and the revelations of mystic ecstasies are treated 
 as exhibitions of mental pathology. We know, in short, 
 that it is folly to reason with the mentally deranged, and 
 that, even in dealing with the sane, it is usually more 
 effective to persuade than to convince. 
 
 We may take it, therefore, that the logician's ignoring 
 of Psychology, and abstracting from the psychical con- 
 comitants of actual thinking, can only be very hazardous 
 affairs, which must be understood to be strictly conditioned 
 and limited by the requirements of his temporary purpose. 
 When the logician really knows what he is about he does 
 not intend them to be more than provisional, nor dream 
 of transcending human experience by their aid. Unfortun- 
 ately, however, this simple situation has been misappre- 
 hended so long, and so profoundly, that it is imperative to 
 set forth in greater detail the thoroughgoing dependence 
 of Logic on psychological assistance. We shall do well, 
 therefore, to show (i) that without processes which are 
 admittedly psychological the occurrence of cognition, and 
 even of thinking, is impossible ; (2) that all the processes, 
 which are regarded as essentially and peculiarly ' logical,' 
 have a well-marked psychological side to them, and that 
 their logical treatment develops continuously out of their 
 psychological nature. 
 
 7. (i) All actual thinking appears to be inherently 
 conditioned throughout by processes which even the 
 most grasping logician must conceive as specifically 
 psychological. It is difficult to see, therefore, on what 
 principle logic has any business to ignore them, and to
 
 Ill 
 
 LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY 81 
 
 claim to be ' independent ' of what must influence its 
 own structures in every fibre. At any rate the onus 
 probandi would seem to lie on those who affirm that 
 these correlated and interpenetrating processes do not 
 influence each other, and that, therefore, their psychical 
 nature may be treated as logically irrelevant. Without, 
 however, standing on ceremony, let us show by actual 
 examples that our thinking depends for its very existence 
 on the presence in it of (a) interest, () purpose, (c} 
 emotion, (d) satisfaction, and that the word ' thought ' 
 would cease to convey any meaning if these were really 
 and rigidly abstracted from. 
 
 (a) Where can we discover anything deserving of the 
 name of thought which is not actuated by psychological 
 interest ? To affirm this, moreover, seems merely a 
 truism. It is merely to deny that thinking is a 
 mechanical process like, e.g. gravitation. It is to assert 
 that the processes during which the course of conscious- 
 ness comes nearest to being a purposeless flux of mental 
 images are most remote from cognition. It is to deny 
 that thinking proceeds without a motive and without 
 an aim, and to assert that, in proportion as interest grows 
 more disciplined and concentrated, thought becomes more 
 vigorous and more definitely purposive. 
 
 The only way of contesting our inference would seem 
 to be to affirm that the specifically logical interest is 
 sui generis, and not to be confounded with the common 
 herd of its psychological congeners. 1 This contention, 
 however, we must regard as merely an arbitrary fiat. It 
 is merely a refusal to let Psychology describe all interests 
 as such. And this refusal can only be prompted by 
 ulterior motives. Moreover, even if the allegiance this 
 special interest owes to Logic exempted it from psycho- 
 
 1 This I take to be the meaning of Prof. Bosanquet's remarks in Arist. 
 Soc. Proc. 1905-6, p. 238. He insists that it can either be "adequately in- 
 vestigated within the bounds of logic proper," so as to leave nothing for "a 
 further scrutiny of these phenomena as purely psychical disturbances," or that 
 the common psychological element can make no specific difference in the logical 
 interest. But how, as a logician, is he to know all this? And how if the 
 psychologists dispute this claim ? He is setting up as a judge in a case to which 
 he is a party. 
 
 G
 
 82 STUDIES IN HUMANISM m 
 
 logical description, it could do so only qua its specific 
 nature. As an interest it would still fall into the province 
 of the science which describes the generic nature of 
 interests. Lastly, a Humanist Logic can recognise no 
 reasons for relegating the cognitive interest to a world 
 apart, as if it were unconcerned with life and dissociated 
 from personality. On all these grounds, then, we must 
 repudiate the claim that a thought which depends on 
 interest can be independent of Psychology. 
 
 (#) Purpose may be conceived as a concentration of 
 interest, and thinking must be conceived as essentially 
 purposive, and as the more consciously so, the more 
 efficient it grows. Whenever Logic, therefore, seeks to 
 represent the actual nature of thinking, it can never treat 
 of ' the meaning ' of propositions in the abstract. It 
 must note that the meaning depends on the use, and the 
 use on the user's purpose. Now this purpose is primarily 
 a question of psychical fact, which admits of being 
 psychologically determined, and which no theory can 
 safely ignore. If we attribute to logical rules a sort of 
 inherent validity, a sort of discarnate existence apart from 
 their application to cases of actual thinking, we reduce 
 them to phantoms as futile as they are unintelligible. 
 
 (c) Emotion accompanies actual cognition as a shadow 
 does light. Even so unexciting an operation as counting has 
 an emotional tone. The effect of this emotional tone seems 
 to be various, but may be salutary ; we can often observe 
 how love and hate inspire men with an insight to which 
 the fish-like eye of cold indifference could never penetrate. 
 It need not be denied, however, that in some people and 
 in some forms it may have a hurtful effect on the value 
 of the cognitive results. But this must be shown, and 
 cannot be assumed, in any given case. And its alleged 
 hurtfulness is no reason for denying the existence of this 
 emotional bias, except to those who are very far gone in 
 that application of ' Christian Science ' to philosophy 
 which declares all evil to be ' appearance.' Our only 
 chance of counteracting emotional bias, moreover, lies in 
 admitting its existence.
 
 in LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY 83 
 
 (d) If a feeling of satisfaction did not occur in cognitive 
 processes the attainment of truth would not be felt to 
 have value. In point of fact such satisfactions super- 
 vene on every step in reasoning. Without them, logical 
 " necessity," " cogency," and " insight " would become 
 meaningless words. 
 
 It seems clear, therefore, that without these psycho- 
 logical conditions which have been mentioned, thinking 
 disappears, and with it, presumably, Logic. 1 They can- 
 not, therefore, be dispensed with. Purpose, interest, desire, 
 emotion, satisfaction, are more essential to thinking than 
 steam is to a steam-engine. 
 
 8. (2) The most fundamental conceptions of Logic, 
 like ' necessity,' ' certainty,' ' self -evidence,' ' truth,' are 
 primarily descriptions of processes which are psychical 
 facts. They are inseparably accompanied by specific 
 psychical feelings. What is called their ' strictly logical ' 
 sense is continuous with their psychological senses, and 
 whenever this connexion is really broken off, its meaning 
 simply disappears. This need not here be set forth at 
 length. The logician's embarrassments in discriminating 
 ' logical ' from ' psychological ' necessity 2 and self-evidence 
 are well known. It is also beginning to be clear that 
 he had not, until the pragmatic controversy arose, ever 
 seriously considered what was the nature of truth- pre- 
 dication as a psychic process. 
 
 But the conception of ' certainty ' is often considered 
 the essential differentia of logical thought, and, therefore, 
 may deserve a brief discussion. Every one, of course, 
 would have to admit that all ' certainty ' in its actual 
 occurrence was accompanied by a psychical feeling of 
 certainty in various degrees of intensity. An appeal 
 might, however, be made to the distinction of ' logical ' 
 and ' psychological ' certainty. Psychological certainty, 
 we commonly say, is ' subjective,' and exists for in- 
 dividuals ; ' logical ' certainty is ' objective,' and imposed 
 
 1 Some symbolic logicians, however, would seem to regard thinking, i.e. 
 judging and inferring, as so inherently psychological as to be extra-logical. 
 Cp. Personal Idealism, p. 70 n.
 
 84 STUDIES IN HUMANISM m 
 
 on intelligence as such. Again, psychological certainty 
 may set in long before logical proof is complete, often 
 long before it ought ; and conversely our psychological 
 stupidity may rebel against mathematically demonstrated 
 truths. From these current distinctions the logician is 
 apt to infer that psychological and logical certainty have 
 really nothing to do with each other and ought not to be 
 confused. But if this be true, why are they both called 
 by the same name ? Surely, if logicians wished to keep 
 them apart and could afford to do so, they could label 
 them differently. That they have not done so is a 
 strong presumption that it is impracticable. 
 
 Indeed, the truth would seem to be, (a) that if the 
 feeling of certainty is eliminated the word becomes un- 
 meaning, and (b} that ' logical ' is quite continuous with 
 psychological certainty. The notion of ' logical ' certainty 
 arises from the extension of potential beyond actual 
 purpose in thinking. We actually stop at the point at 
 which we psychologically are satisfied and willing to 
 accept a claim to truth as good ; but we can sometimes 
 conceive ulterior purposes which would require further 
 confirmation, and other minds that would be satisfied less 
 easily. This engenders the ideal of a complete ' logical ' 
 proof transcending that which is good enough for us, and 
 capable of compelling the assent of all intelligences. But 
 even if it could be attained, its certainty would still be 
 psychological, as certainly psychological as is our capacity 
 to project the ideal. Both are dependent on the actual 
 powers of individual minds. Thus for the moment 
 mathematical demonstration seems to satisfy the logical 
 ideal of most intellectualist logicians, and is praised as 
 absolutely certain. But that they think it so is merely 
 psychical fact. For the reason simply is that so far they 
 do not seem to have psychologically conceived the thought 
 of varying the postulates on which such demonstration 
 rests. If they had recognised the hypothetical basis of 
 mathematical certainty, they could conceive something 
 more ' certain.' 
 
 9. The fundamental logical operations, like meaning,
 
 in LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY 85 
 
 conceiving, discriminating, identifying, judging, inferring, all 
 have psychological aspects, and could not come about by 
 ' pure ' thought. I have suggested elsewhere 1 that logical 
 identity is always a postulate. It should be stated as that 
 ' what I will shall mean the same, is (so far} the same' 
 And by ' the same ' I do not mean indistinguishable 
 (though this criterion too rests on a psychological property) 
 as Mr. Bradley does in what he considers " the indis- 
 putable basis of all reasoning," the axiom that " what 
 seems the same is the same" which he himself calls " a 
 monstrous assumption." 2 Logical identity emphatically 
 does not rest on an easy acquiescence in appearances or 
 psychical carelessness about noticing differences. It is 
 a conscious act of purposive thinking, performed in spite 
 of observed differences. ' The same ' means a claim, that 
 for our purposes these differences may be ignored, and 
 the two terms treated alike. 
 
 The principle, therefore, is not mere psychological fact, 
 carrying no logical consequences. Nor certainly is it a 
 mere tautology, ' A is A.' It is ultimately one of the 
 devices we have hit upon for dealing -with our experience. 
 As such it may be supposed to have passed through an 
 experimental stage as a mere postulate ; and even now a 
 certain risk remains inherent in its use. That there shall 
 be identity we have good grounds for insisting, but our 
 claim that any A is A may often be frustrated. That 
 therefore every attempted ' identification ' should come 
 true, would be the experience only of an omnipotent 
 being, whose volitions the course of events could never 
 contravene. Only to such a being (if such can be 
 conceived) would it be self -evidently, invariably, and 
 ' necessarily ' true that ' A is A ' ; in our human thinking 
 the identities we select may prove to be mistaken. Thus 
 the validity of the principle in the abstract in no wise 
 guarantees its validity in its actual use, or its application 
 to any particular case. But on the whole the principle 
 is valuable enough for us to ascribe our failures, not to 
 
 1 Personal Idealism, pp. 94-104. 
 2 Principles of Logic, p. 264.
 
 86 STUDIES IN HUMANISM m 
 
 its inapplicability to our world, but to our own stupidity 
 in selecting the ' wrong ' identities. 
 
 Meaning is a psychical fact which should have great 
 interest for Psychology. It is also a fundamental function 
 for Logic. But unfortunately intellectualist logicians, by 
 abstracting too easily from its concrete nature as a 
 psychical process, have involved the whole subject in 
 confusion and completely obscured the problem of under- 
 standing. 
 
 As we saw in Essay i. 2, meaning depends upon 
 purpose, i.e. upon context, as the purpose lies in the con- 
 text. Now that context is of logical importance is, in a 
 manner, recognised. But this recognition takes the form 
 of asserting that the meaning (and truth) of an assertion 
 depends on the totality of knowledge ; and this at once 
 rules out human knowledge. For as we cannot know 
 this totality, if meaning depends on this, it is impossible. 
 This interpretation of context, however, is quite false. 
 Meaning is not in the first instance logical at all, but 
 psychological. It is primarily a question of what the 
 person who made the assertion actually meant. And as, 
 of course, the whole of his concrete personality went to the 
 making of the assertion, and contributed to his actual 
 meaning, a case must be made out for its mutilation 
 by ' Logic.' The next question is the problem of the 
 ' understanding ' or transference of the meaning. We 
 have to discover not merely what the assertor meant, but 
 also how he was understood. The inherent difficulty of 
 this problem, to which since the days of Gorgias ' logic ' 
 has paid little heed, lies in this that practically meaning 
 must be transferred by verbal symbols, and conveyed in 
 ' propositions.' But such propositions must always be 
 ambiguous. They may mean whatever they can be 
 used to mean. They are blank forms to be filled up 
 with concrete meanings according to requirements. They 
 afford, therefore, no security that the meaning which they 
 are taken as conveying is identical with that which they 
 were intended to convey. Until we have assured our- 
 selves of this, it is vain to discuss ' the meaning ' of the
 
 m LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY 87 
 
 assertion, or to attempt its logical evaluation. Conse- 
 quently the logical treatment of meaning is meaningless, 
 until these psychological preliminaries have been settled. 
 
 What now is the way in which these matters have 
 been treated by ' Logic ' ? It has made a series of 
 monstrous abstractions, which break down as soon as 
 they are applied to the facts of actual knowing. 
 
 (i) It has abstracted from context, i.e. from the 
 actual context in which the assertion was made and 
 tried to convey its meaning, as being psychological and 
 irrelevant. This is a gigantic blunder, after which it is 
 vain to seek to provide for the ' logical ' relevance of 
 context. For the ' logical ' context never recovers its full 
 concreteness, and so can never guarantee to ' Logic ' a 
 knowledge of the actual meaning. (2) It has framed 
 the abstraction of ' the logical meaning ' of the assertion, 
 which it has usually conceived also as existing per se 
 and independently of human assertors, and taken it for 
 granted that it could be used as the standard to which 
 to refer the meanings meant and understood. But in 
 actual knowing ' the meaning ' is the problem. It is not 
 what we may presume, but what we must discover. It 
 is an ideal to be reached, and not a presupposition to be 
 started from. It does not exist ; it has to be made by 
 mutual understanding. Moreover, for the reasons given 
 above, the abstract ' meaning per se ' of the assertion 
 reduces itself in practice to the average meaning of a 
 form of words which will probably be used in a certain 
 sense, but may be used in any sense in which any one 
 can convey (or try to convey) his meaning. ' The mean- 
 ing,' therefore, is infinitely ambiguous} And hence to 
 operate with it is always hazardous and often false. (3) 
 In abstracting from the assertor's actual meaning, ' Logic ' 
 always runs the risk of excluding the real point. For 
 this may lie in some of the ' irrelevant ' psychical details 
 of the actual meaning, whose essence may not lie in 
 
 1 Thus the assertion ' Smith is red-haired ' has as many ' meanings ' as there 
 are past, actual, and potential 'Smiths,' of whom it can be (truly or falsely) 
 predicated, and occasions on which it can be made.
 
 88 STUDIES IN HUMANISM m 
 
 its plain surface meaning, but in some subtle innuendo. 
 Moreover, even where ' the logical meaning ' does not 
 miss the real point, it nearly always fails to convey the 
 whole meaning. For the actual meaning is fully concrete, 
 and contains much more than it conveys, and infinitely 
 more than ' the logical meaning ' of the form of words. 
 The latter, therefore, is always something less than what 
 was actually meant, and fails to express it fully. For 
 the appropriateness of an assertion always depends in 
 some degree on the personality of the assertor and the 
 particularity of the occasion. (4) ' Logic,' in abstracting 
 from the psychological problem, has burked the whole 
 question of the communication of meaning. It has 
 assumed that there is only one meaning with which it 
 need concern itself, and that every one must understand 
 it. In point of fact, there are usually two or more 
 meanings concerned in every question. For the assertor 
 commonly fails to convey his meaning, or his whole 
 meaning, and his assertion is taken in a meaning 
 different from that in which it was meant. There are, 
 in consequence, at least as many ' meanings ' as parties 
 to the discussion, and the ' logic ' which is concerned only 
 about ' the meaning ' is troubling about the non-existent. 
 Whereas if it were recognised that what is called ' the 
 meaning ' is an indication, but not a guarantee, of the 
 real meaning, and that the meaning understood may not 
 be that intended, we should take more care to secure a 
 real identity of meaning before beginning to dispute, and 
 so the chances are that many ' logical questions ' would 
 never arise. 
 
 (5) Lastly, 'Logic' has assumed not only that 'the 
 meaning ' of an assertion can be ascertained without 
 regard to the psychological facts, but also that it can 
 be quite dissociated from the personality of its assertor. 
 It becomes, consequently, a matter of indifference whether 
 it was made by A or by B, nay even whether or not it 
 was (or could be) made by any one. Whoever made it, 
 ' it ' is equally true, even though A was a fool or a crank 
 asserting it at random, and B a great authority who
 
 in LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY 89 
 
 knows the subject. Our common-sense accordingly pro- 
 tests against this paradox, and urges that the status of 
 the assertor must make a difference to the assertion. 
 And the practice of science would seem to bear this out. 
 The logical value of an assertion is constantly treated as 
 conditioned by the qualifications of its author. If these 
 are adequate, it is received with respect ; if they are nil, 
 it is treated as scientifically null and disregarded. Thus 
 dozens of sailors have sighted sea - serpents, but the 
 testimony of the two competent naturalists on the 
 Valhalla is far more likely to shake the incredulity 
 of zoologists. 1 On the other hand, when Prof. Curie 
 reported the extraordinary and unparalleled properties 
 of radium, his assertions were at once accepted. The 
 solution of the paradox lies of course in the falsity of 
 the assertion that when two persons ' say the same 
 thing ' (i.e. use the same form of words] they make the 
 same assertion. They really make two assertions, which 
 may (or may not) subsequently be made to coincide and 
 identified with the (usual) meaning of the proposition 
 they use. But they need not mean the same thing, nor 
 understand alike. They will probably make the assertion 
 on different grounds, and will certainly have different 
 motives and aims. What their assertion means will vary 
 accordingly. And so will its logical value, which here 
 plainly shows itself as dependent on psychological circum- 
 stances. Why then should ' Logic ' stubbornly blind itself 
 to these facts, and insist on cutting meaning loose from 
 its psychological roots, and on confounding in its abstract 
 ' forms ' cases which all actual knowing must discriminate ? 
 The practical convenience and rough adequacy of the 
 easy-going convention that ' the meaning ' may be taken 
 as identical with the meanings meant and understood, is 
 surely no defence an intellectualistic logical theory can plead 
 against the charge of false abstraction and inadequate 
 analysis. 
 
 As regards judging, it may suffice to suggest that 
 ' the judgment ' is as dangerous an abstraction as ' the 
 
 1 Cp. Nature, No. 19141 p. 202.
 
 90 STUDIES IN HUMANISM m 
 
 meaning ' which is ascribed to it. For what is called one 
 is usually many. It follows, moreover, from our last dis- 
 cussion both that every judgment, in its actual use, is an 
 intimately personal affair, and that its personal aspects 
 often have (and always may have) important bearings on 
 its logical value. No judgment could come into being, 
 even in the world of thought, if some individual mind 
 were not impelled by its total psychical contents and 
 history to affirm it t upon some suitable occasion, and to 
 stake its fortunes on this personal affirmation. And even 
 after it has come into being, its logical status is still 
 vitally dependent on its relations to the minds which 
 entertain it. The judgment, therefore, essentially presup- 
 poses a mind, a motive, and a purpose. To 'deperson- 
 alise ' it is to do violence to its concrete nature. Similarly, 
 its ' objective validity ' is not a question of the interrelation 
 of absolute static truths in a super-celestial sphere. It 
 depends on its adaptation to our world and its congruous- 
 ness with the opinions and aims of others. Hence every 
 recognition of a judgment by others is a social problem, 
 often of a very complicated character. 
 
 To bring out the unreality of the logician's conception 
 of Judgment, we may note also that ' Logic ' is always 
 held to exclude the evaluation of questions and com- 
 mands. And yet are not postulates often the basis of 
 our reasonings, and most of our judgments the implicit or 
 explicit answers to a question ? Is it not truly ' illogical/ 
 then, to sever the connexion between things which belong 
 so closely together? To confine Logic to categorical 
 statements in the indicative mood, is to abstract at one 
 blow from almost the whole of the actual use of judgments. 
 Contrast with this an intellectualist view of the question's 
 function. Prof. Bosanquet, e.g. is " disposed to doubt 
 whether we can interrogate ourselves " otherwise than 
 rhetorically, and urges that questions which we cannot 
 answer and know that we cannot answer cannot be 
 " genuine questions." He concludes that " thus a question 
 cannot be an act of thought as such, just as a lie is not, 
 and for the same reason, that it is not an attitude that the
 
 in LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY 91 
 
 intellect can maintain within itself. ... It is a demand 
 for information ; its essence is to be addressed to a 
 moral agent, not ourselves, in whom it may produce 
 action " (Logic, i. p. 36). 
 
 Clearly, however, this whole paradox rests on the 
 abstraction of truth from its consequences, on the divorce 
 of ' thought ' from its psychical context. The question is 
 taken as unrelated to anything that precedes and follows. 
 If this is done, only two cases remain ; we ask ourselves 
 a question to which we either do, or do not, know the 
 answer. And of course the question is in both cases 
 futile. In actual knowing, however, we only ask our- 
 selves questions where, though we do not yet know the 
 answers, we want to know them and are willing to take 
 steps to find them out. A question, therefore, is logically 
 futile only if we decline to act on it, and this would be 
 equally true of a question addressed to others, if they, 
 similarly, did not react upon it. Really, therefore, the 
 putting of questions is, as the Greeks well knew, a natural 
 and necessary process as a preliminary to the satisfaction 
 of a cognitive need, and one which may be of the greatest 
 value, if the right questions are clearly formulated. 
 
 10. Lastly, not so much because further illustration 
 should be needed, as in order to force a clear issue, let us 
 consider one more case, that which has been most dis- 
 puted, viz. that of reasoning openly inspired by desire, 
 i.e. of a conclusion affirmed because we should like it to 
 be true. Is it always true that we attain truth only by 
 suppressing desire ? Take the familiar argument : The 
 world is bad, therefore there must be a better. It all rests 
 on the desire for good and the postulate of perfection. 
 Now if postulation is as such invalid, and desire a mere 
 obstacle to truth, it clearly follows that this argument is 
 hopelessly illogical ; which is accordingly what intellectu- 
 alist logicians have everywhere maintained. 1 A bad world 
 
 1 Qua human they have, of course, not infrequently relapsed into the postu- 
 latory way of reasoning. Thus it is a favourite inference from the fact that all the 
 parts of the world are imperfect, that the whole must be perfect. But if in this 
 case it is legitimate to argue to the ideal from the defects of the actual, why not in 
 others ?
 
 92 STUDIES IN HUMANISM m 
 
 is logically evidence against, not for, the existence of a 
 better. 
 
 Now, against such abstract and a priori notions of 
 what is good reasoning, we may lay it down that good 
 reasoning is that which leads us right and enables us to 
 discover what we are willing to acclaim as truth. And 
 so tested the desire-inspired reasoning may clearly often 
 be the better. It may prompt to more active inquiry, to 
 keener observation, to more persevering experiment. The 
 logician who declares de non apparentibus et non existentibus 
 eadem est ratio, who declines to look for what he wants 
 but does not see, who does not seek to penetrate beyond 
 the veil of appearances, is, frankly, an ass. He frustrates 
 his avowed purpose, the discovery of truth, by debarring 
 himself from whatever truth lies beneath the surface. 
 His self-approbation, therefore, of the heroic self-sacrifice 
 of his volitional preferences to ' objective truth ' which he 
 ' feels himself bound ' to commit, is simply silly. What 
 right, indeed, has he even to ' feel bound ' ? Does not the 
 phrase betray the emotional origin also of his attitude to 
 truth ? He accomplishes the sacrifice of ' personal pre- 
 ference ' to ' objective truth ' by dint of an emotional 
 desire to mortify himself (or, more often, others), the 
 satisfaction of which appears to him as a good. How 
 then is he other or better than the voluntarist who makes 
 bold to postulate, and verifies his anticipations? 
 
 Moreover, if we supply the missing premiss in the 
 contention of the intellectualist, we find that it must take 
 a form something like this, that it is wrong to anticipate 
 nature, to go beyond what you can see, wicked to try 
 whether the apparent ' facts ' cannot be moulded or re- 
 moulded into conformity with our desires. He must say 
 " it is wrong" For he cannot say " it is impossible." 
 For it is constantly done, and with the happiest effects. 
 
 If now we ask, Why wrong? we force the intellectualist 
 to reveal the full measure of his prejudice. To defend 
 his assumption he must do one of two things: (i) He 
 may fall back upon his own feeling of the aesthetical or 
 ethical impropriety of the voluntarist's procedure. But if
 
 in LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY 93 
 
 so, his objection ceases to be purely logical. It may be 
 declared to be only his idiosyncrasy, and be met' by the 
 retort " but it does not seem improper to me. I do not, 
 will not, and cannot worship disagreeable fact and un- 
 welcome truth as you do. I do not, cannot, and will 
 not call a universe good which does not satisfy my desires, 
 and I feel strongly that it ought to do so. Whether it 
 does, or can be made to do so, I do not know as yet ; it 
 is one of the chief things I am staying in the universe to 
 find out. If (a) it does, or can, then my desires are to be 
 regarded as a sound, logical indication of the nature of 
 reality and a valid method of penetrating to its core. If 
 (b) it does not, I may have, no doubt, to admit unwelcome 
 truths and unpalatable facts. But I shall do so provision- 
 ally, and with a clear intention of abolishing them as soon 
 and as far as I am able. If (c) it sometimes does, and 
 sometimes not, why then I am entitled, nay bound, to 
 try both methods. I have a right both to treat my wishes 
 as clues to reality, and to subordinate them on occasion 
 to facts which are too strong for me. And I observe that 
 (whether you approve or blame) this is what, in fact, men 
 have always done." 
 
 If (2) the intellectualist tries to find something more 
 objective than his instinctive feeling of the wrongness of 
 the voluntarist's procedure, what resource has he ? Must 
 he not appeal to the consequences of the two methods ? 
 Must he not try to show that the consequences of sub- 
 mission are always, or mostly, good those of postulation 
 always, or mostly, bad ? But can he show this ? 
 Notoriously he cannot. And in either case has he not 
 used the pragmatic test of logical value ? 
 
 It is vain, therefore, to seek an escape from the con- 
 clusion that actual thinking is pervaded and conditioned 
 through and through by psychological processes, and that 
 Logic gains nothing, and loses all vitality and interest, all 
 touch with reality, by trying to ignore them. To em- 
 phasise this is not, of course, to deny that for logical 
 purposes some psychological conditions may sometimes 
 be irrelevant. Thus in using concepts it is generally
 
 94 STUDIES IN HUMANISM m 
 
 possible to abstract from the particular nature of the 
 psychological imagery. The reason is that identity of 
 meaning overpowers diversity of imagery ; if this were 
 otherwise, the use of concepts would be impossible. 
 Again an error, say of counting, may be psychologically 
 a very complex fact ; it may, nevertheless, be logically a 
 very simple error. By my counting 2 and 3 as 6, 
 there may hang a lengthy tale ; but for the logician it 
 may be enough to say that the result ought to have been 
 5. It should be observed, however, even here, that the 
 logical description of this process as an ' error ' involves 
 an appeal to psychology ; the error could not be recognised 
 as such but for my capacity to correct it, or at least to 
 admit the validity of processes which enable others to 
 correct it. If I were psychologically incapable of counting 
 2 + 3 as other than 6, I could not recognise my ' error,' 
 a ' common ' arithmetic would disappear, and there would 
 remain no way of deciding which process was counting 
 and which miscounting, but the experience of the respec- 
 tive consequences and the test of survival. 
 
 11. Whenever, then, the logician abstracts from the 
 concrete facts of reasoning, he should do so with a con- 
 sciousness of the nature and dangers of his procedure. 
 He should feel that he may have left out what is essential, 
 that he may have failed to notice the actual meaning of 
 the thought he examined, and have substituted for it some 
 wholly different imagination of his own. The proposition 
 which he solemnly writes down an ' error ' or a ' fallacy ' 
 may not have been a prosaic affirmation at all ; it may 
 have been poetical hyperbole or an hypothesis, a jest or 
 a sarcasm, a trap or a lie. He will, therefore, get a very 
 little way into the analysis of actual thinking if he 
 declines to recognise that in its actual use the same form 
 of words may serve all these purposes, and cannot be 
 treated logically until he has found out what its actual 
 meaning is. A lie, I presume, is a proposition which 
 claims truth like any other. But the claim is for export 
 only ; the liar himself knows it to be ' false,' and has 
 rejected the claim, even though he has persuaded all the
 
 in LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY 95 
 
 world. How can ' the meaning ' of such a proposition 
 be represented as single and simple ? How can its logical 
 status even be discussed without going into these facts ? 
 Does it not follow that logicians have no right to their 
 habit of speaking of ' the meaning ' of a proposition as if 
 it were a logical fixture ? The actual meaning is always 
 a psychical fact, which in the case of an ambiguity 
 intended, implied, or understood, may be many. The 
 ' logical ' meaning is potential ; it is at best the average 
 meaning with which the proposition is most commonly 
 used. It is only more or less probable, therefore, as the 
 interpretation of an actual judgment. And to build a 
 system of apodictic doctrine on foundations such as these 
 what is it but to build a house of cards ? 
 
 It would be possible to show in this manner, and with 
 the utmost fulness and unlimited examples, that vastly 
 more than the text-books recognise is really relevant to 
 Logic, that every logical process, conception, method, and 
 criterion springs naturally and continuously out of psycho- 
 logical soil, and is essentially a selection from, and valuation 
 of, a more extensive psychical material. But enough has 
 probably been said to suggest that Logic can take nothing 
 for granted, and itself least of all. In view of the complete 
 dependence and reliance of every logical process on the 
 psychical nature of man in general and of men in particular, 
 in view of the manifest adjustment of every logical prin- 
 ciple to the needs of human life, is it not high time that 
 a systematic doubt were cast on the assumption that the 
 theory of knowledge must abstract from the personality of 
 the knowert 
 
 12. It should now be clear what is the meaning, the 
 ground and the aim of our Humanist ' psychologism,' but 
 we may clinch the argument by supplementing it nega- 
 tively by a proof that the antagonistic conception of an 
 ' independent ' Logic ( I ) involves unintelligible and self- 
 contradictory misdescriptions ; (2) assumes a standpoint 
 which it cannot justify, and (3) is so unable to deal with 
 actual knowing, that (4) it ends in scepticism and intel- 
 lectual collapse. It will be seen, in short, that the
 
 96 STUDIES IN HUMANISM m 
 
 intellectualistic treatment of Logic " necessarily conducts 
 to a complete debacle of the intellect." 2 
 
 It has already been implied that it is usual to formulate 
 the conception, and to expound the claims, of Logic in an 
 anti-psychological way radically opposed to ours. One 
 still hears of Logic as the science of ' pure ' thought, 
 endowed with a standpoint and nature of its own, which 
 is ' free ' and ' independent ' of man and human psychology, 
 and anything it may do or say about such merely human 
 processes as ' willing ' and ' feeling,' as a science which by 
 ' depersonalising ' itself has risen to communion with the 
 eternal and immutable Ideal, and of course cares not one 
 jot about our personal interests or attitude towards truth. 
 
 Most of these epithets, however, are clearly ornamental, 
 and as a whole they merely serve to indicate the nature 
 of the assumptions on which it is attempted to rest the 
 science. 
 
 ( i ) The notion of ' pure thought,' for example, must not 
 be pressed. It is not a fact of actual knowing, but a 
 barefaced fiction, which can at most be defended as a 
 methodological necessity for the purposes of intellectualist 
 logicians. Its fictitious nature has nowadays to be 
 avowed, whenever it is directly challenged. Even Mr. 
 Bradley " agrees " with Prof. Dewey, that " there is no 
 such existing thing as pure thought," it is true only 
 just before proceeding to declare that " if there is to be 
 no such thing as independent thought, thought that is 
 which in its actual exercise takes no account of the 
 psychological situation, I am, myself, in the end, led in- 
 evitably to scepticism. The doctrine that every judgment 
 essentially depends on the entire psychical state of the 
 individual, and derives from this its falsehood or truth, 
 is, I presume, usually taken to amount to complete 
 scepticism." z ' Pure thought,' then, clearly is not the 
 
 1 Captain H. V. Knox in Mind, xiv. p. 210. 
 
 2 Mind, xiii. p. 309 n. Italics mine. We learn from this amazing passage 
 that it is complete scepticism to take complete account of the facts in a cognitive 
 procedure, and that if we will not deliberately falsify them, we are doomed to end 
 as sceptics ! It is surely strange that such falsification should be a necessary pre- 
 liminary to the search for truth, and one is tempted to reply, that if ' Logic ' 
 demands this falsification, then the sooner the conception of Logic is amended
 
 in LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY 97 
 
 same as ' independent.' But what is ' pure ' thought pure 
 from ? Psychological contamination ? If so, will it not 
 coincide with ' independent ' thought ? For that too 
 " takes no account of the psychological situation." But 
 if so, has not an imperious need of Logic been equated 
 with a non-existent ? The puzzle grows more perplexing 
 when we recall the pronounced emotionalism which is 
 somehow combined with Mr. Bradley's intellectualism, and 
 to which Mr. Sturt has lately drawn attention. 1 How can 
 an intellect so emotionally conditioned be either ' pure ' 
 or ' independent ' ? 
 
 The truth, however, seems to be that the sacrifice of 
 ' pure thought ' goes greatly against the grain of intellect- 
 ualism. Only constant vigilance can prevent it from 
 wriggling itself back into the claim to be an actual fact, 
 and whether intellectualism can afford wholly to dispense 
 with it, especially in its arguments about ' useless ' know- 
 ledge, seems more than doubtful. 
 
 (2) The ' independence ' of Logic and its standpoint 
 is in every way a most difficult notion. It is hard to 
 understand, harder to derive, hardest to justify. Nay, in 
 the end it will turn out so anarchical as to be fatal to 
 the theory that entertained it. For the present, however, 
 it may suffice to point out the difficulty of ascertaining 
 the meaning of a word which is constantly employed in 
 current discussions, -and never defined. Its meaning 
 appears to vary with the work it has to do. In its most 
 rigorous sense it describes the iniquity of pluralism in 
 claiming ' independence ' for its reals, the impossibility of 
 which provides an a priori refutation of this metaphysical 
 ' heresy.' 2 In this sense it means apparently ' totally 
 unconnected with.' A more lenient sense is in vogue 
 
 the better. But it is evidently Mr. Bradley who is predestined to scepticism : 
 every theory of Logic he touches turns to scepticism in his hands, and even 
 when he flees to metaphysics he fares no better (cp. Essay iv. 3). Probably 
 the peculiarity is, in his case, psychological. I should add that a fuller discus- 
 sion of this passage will be found in Arist. Soc. Proc. 1905-6, pp. 226-8 ; 
 it elicited a defence of Mr. Bradley by Prof. Bosanquet (pp. 242-5), which 
 baffles my understanding. 
 
 1 Idola Theatri, ch. v. 4-7. 
 
 2 Appearance and Reality, ch. x. 
 
 H
 
 98 STUDIES IN HUMANISM m 
 
 when intellectualism has to defend its abstractions against 
 Humanist attacks. For in that case we learn, e.g. that 
 every Logic is ' independent ' of Psychology, nay, that 
 every well-conducted theoretic truth preserves a virtuous 
 independence. Similarly we are told by ' realists,' that 
 in the act of knowing the object of knowledge is quite 
 ' independent ' of the knowing act. And, finally, Mr. 
 Bradley sometimes equates it with ' relative freedom ' ! 1 
 It is clear that if these ambiguities were done away with, 
 either the argument about the impossibility of pluralism, 
 or that about the independence of pure thought and 
 Logic, would have to disappear from the armoury of 
 our intellectualists. 
 
 (3) The ' depersonalisation ' which is regarded as 
 characteristic of an ' independent ' Logic is usually 
 defended by the example of Science, which is said to 
 ignore all human interest as irrelevant. But this assertion 
 is hardly true. The abstraction practised by Science is 
 not analogous to that advocated for Logic. It is not true 
 that Science as such abstracts from all human interest. 
 It does not abstract from the interest in each particular 
 science. And this is still a human interest. For it is 
 what generates the science, and incites men to its study. 2 
 Psychologically it represents, not an absence, but a con- 
 centration of interest, such as is demanded, more or less, 
 for the attainment of every purpose, and for the satisfac- 
 tion of every interest. And it can occur only in a highly 
 developed personality. The ' depersonalisation,' therefore, 
 which is postulated for Logic obtains no support what- 
 ever from scientific procedure. And we shall subsequently 
 see how ill it serves the ends of ' Logic.' 
 
 (4) The analysis of psychic process into 'thinking,' 
 ' willing,' and ' feeling,' in order to justify the restriction 
 of ' Logic ' to the first and the exclusion of the two 
 latter, appears to be an unwarranted piece of amateur 
 psychologising. For the analysis in question is valuable 
 
 1 Mind, xiii. p. 322, and cp. Essay iv. 9 s.f. 
 
 8 This remark, of course, is not inconsistent with the pragmatic doctrine 
 that all science is ultimately useful. For it refers only to the immediate 
 psychological motive.
 
 in LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY 99 
 
 only as a rough reference for popular purposes, and is 
 really a survival from the old ' faculty ' psychology. 
 Scientifically its descriptive, like its explanatory, value 
 is nil. No one nowadays seriously supposes that a 
 soul can actually be put together out of 'thought,' 
 ' will,' and ' feeling,' or that this ' analysis ' represents its 
 actual genesis. 1 For in actual knowing all three always 
 co-operate. There is no thought-process which is not 
 purposively initiated and directed (i.e. more or less 'willed '), 
 or which is not coloured by feelings and emotions. It is 
 false, therefore, to conceive ' thought ' in abstraction from 
 ' will ' and ' feeling,' if we intend to examine actual 
 knowing. But it is just this intention which intellectualism 
 leaves in doubt. It is hard to see, therefore, why a 
 ' thought,' which has abstracted from purpose, interest, 
 emotion, and satisfaction, should any longer be called 
 thought at all ; at any rate, it is no longer human thought, 
 and can have no relation to human life. 
 
 But the unfortunate fact remains that all these phrases 
 have long been taken for granted, with little or no 
 warrant or criticism. They are traditionally part and 
 parcel of an ' independent ' Logic which has begged its 
 ' standpoint' 
 
 13. Formally this standpoint is bafflingly in- 
 determinate. It is neither consistently descriptive nor 
 consistently normative, but either, or both, as suits the 
 occasion. Sometimes it appeals to what logical procedure 
 actually is, sometimes to what it ideally ought to be ; i.e. 
 what by us would be called psychological and logical 
 considerations alternate in the most confusing way. In 
 its own phraseology this confusion is cloaked by its 
 conception of ' the logical Ideal,' which can be represented 
 either as what human thought naturally aspires to, or as 
 what controls its wayward vagaries. 
 
 Let us consider a few representative examples. Mr. 
 Bradley prefaces his Principles of Logic with the confession 
 that he is not sure where Logic begins or ends ; but no 
 attentive reader can fail to see that his ' Logic ' begins in 
 
 1 Cp. Essay iv. 10.
 
 ioo STUDIES IN HUMANISM m 
 
 Psychology and ends in Scepticism. It is, moreover, just 
 because the standpoints of fact and of validity are so 
 inextricably mingled that nothing can save his ' Logic ' 
 from surrender to Scepticism, except a desperate appeal 
 to metaphysics, the aid of which Appearance and Reality 
 was subsequently to prove illusory. 1 
 
 Prof. Bosanquet seems to incline more distinctly 
 to the descriptive standpoint He declines to call Logic 
 normative; but calls its object 'self- normative.' 2 The 
 preface of his Logic tells us that " the conception of 
 Logical Science which has been my guide is that of an 
 unprejudiced study of the forms of knowledge in their 
 development, their interconnexion, and their comparative 
 value as embodiments of truth." In his discussion with 
 me he calls it " the science which considers the nature 
 of thought as manifested in a fully self - consistent 
 form." 3 
 
 Still, even here, both sides are observable. A ' study 
 of the forms of knowledge,' and of ' the nature of thought,' 
 sounds like a purely descriptive undertaking. But the 
 notion of ' comparative value ' is as distinctly normative ; 
 
 1 Cp. Essay iv. 3. It is not, of course, to be denied that nevertheless 
 Mr. Bradley's Logic is a great work, which has exercised a well-deserved 
 influence on English thought. But its defects are so glaring that its influence 
 has been very mixed. The sort of thing complained of may be illustrated, 
 e.g. by comparing Mr. Bradley's criticism of Mill's conception of induction 
 with his criticism of the syllogism. When he objects to the former that 
 induction is not proof, his standpoint is clearly that of validity. But when he 
 protests that the syllogism is not the universal form of (de facto) valid reasoning, 
 and gives ' specimens of inference ' which are not syllogistic as they stand 
 and rest on relations evident to us on empirical and psychological grounds, has 
 he not plainly passed over to the standpoint of description of the actual ? 
 
 2 Arist. Soc. Proc. 1905-6, p. 263. This looks suspiciously like an attempt 
 to run with the hares and to hunt with the hounds. At any rate, it involves 
 the ' depersonalisation ' we have objected to, and ignores the fact that logical 
 norms are values for man, and the offspring of our interests. 
 
 3 L.c. p. 237. He gives as an alternative to this, "as manifest in the 
 endeavour to apprehend truth." But it would appear that, even in these 
 definitions, Logic has not succeeded in manifesting herself in a fully consistent 
 form. For even if we make explicit what is presumably intended, viz. that 
 they take ' truth ' as = ' the fully self- consistent form ' of thought (an 
 essentially formal view which seems to render it a wholly intrinsic affair of 
 thought, and to rule out all testing of our predications on the touchstone of 
 reality), the two definitions cannot be made to coincide. For ' the endeavour 
 to apprehend truth ' adds a consideration wholly extraneous and alien to the 
 formal self - consistency of thought, and one, moreover, which is plainly 
 psychological.
 
 in LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY 101 
 
 so is that of a fixed ideal or ' system ' which claims to 
 regulate and control the natural development of cognitive 
 procedures, quite irrespective of their use as the means to 
 the ends of human knowing. 
 
 14. This whole conception of the logical standpoint 
 is, however, open to the gravest objection. Qua descrip- 
 tive, it either instigates Logic to poach on the preserves 
 of Psychology, and to interfere with its functions, or, if 
 you please, to become itself Psychology. In the latter 
 case it must become bad or ignorant Psychology. In the 
 former case it must either prohibit Psychology from de- 
 scribing cognitive processes, or duplicate the psychological 
 descriptions. We should get, that is, a twofold descrip- 
 tion of the same events, the one dubbed ' Logic ' and the 
 other ' Psychology.' One or the other of these would 
 surely be superfluous or mistaken. Or if both of them 
 could somehow (e.g. by a reference to the different 
 purposes of the two sciences ?) be maintained, it would 
 become necessary to consider their relation to each other. 
 This would be just as necessary, and much more difficult, 
 when both sciences are conceived as descriptive, as when 
 one is conceived as normative. For the attempt to adjust 
 their relations would have to start from an open conflict 
 about the ground each was to cover. 
 
 Moreover, even as descriptive Psychology, this Logic 
 would be defective. It would either have to ignore the 
 ' willing ' and ' feeling ' indubitably present in cognition, or 
 to insist on describing them, as far as its purposes required. 
 In the former case it would be certain, in the latter it 
 would be probable, that the description would be incom- 
 plete. For the descriptive interest would be restricted 
 by the logical purpose, and in any case, would not extend 
 to the whole psychical context. 
 
 But surely, when we describe, we should try to describe 
 completely, without obliterating psychical values and with- 
 out any arriere pense"e. The omission of any feature 
 which de facto accompanies knowing demands caution 
 and an explicit justification., For how can it be taken 
 for granted that anything is unessential ? The context
 
 102 STUDIES IN HUMANISM m 
 
 of any reasoning extends indefinitely into the psycho- 
 logical : and the actual meaning may always depend 
 upon the context. Before any train of thought can be 
 submitted to logical analysis, it must somehow be deter- 
 mined what features in it are important and vital, and 
 what unimportant and unessential. But how can the 
 logician determine this, without the aid either of 
 Psychology or of experience ? There is little prospect 
 then that his descriptions will be adequate, either logi- 
 cally or psychologically. 
 
 Even though, therefore, some one should suggest as a 
 compromise that Logic and Psychology should both de- 
 scribe the actual psychic process, but that Logic should 
 have a monopoly of the cognitive features, the compro- 
 mise would be equally futile and intolerable. For if so, 
 who or what is to decide which is which, and how 
 much of the whole is logically relevant? What if 
 the parties disagree, and the subjects decline to be 
 separated ? 
 
 Finally, in assigning to Logic a descriptive function, 
 a serious concealment has been practised. Its study of 
 cognitive process assuredly was not ' unprejudiced.' It 
 has made de facto, but secretly and unconsciously, very 
 definite and peculiar assumptions as to the nature of the 
 logical standpoint. A big encroachment has been made 
 on the domain of Psychology, which has been robbed of 
 the most valuable portion of its territory. It has been 
 assumed (as we saw in 4) that Psychology has no right 
 to treat cognitive values, and must perforce content itself 
 with what is left over after Logic has claimed all it has 
 a mind to for its province. And this despoliation has 
 been committed by sheer importunity, without the least 
 pretence of a rational delimitation of scientific frontiers, 
 and with no attempt at an equitable arbitration of the 
 dispute ! 
 
 I 5. The results of this monstrous injustice are not 
 slow to show themselves. First of all, Psychology is 
 reduced to absurdity, to the care of the shreds and dregs 
 of a disrupted soul. And then, by a thoroughly deserved
 
 in LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY 103 
 
 Nemesis, the unjust abstraction made by Logic ends in 
 her own paralysis ! 
 
 The first stage of this process, the arbitrary stultifica- 
 tion of Psychology, may best be studied in Prof. 
 Bosanquet's Aristotelian Society papers l ; the second, the 
 suicide of ' independent ' Logic, in Mr. H. H. Joachim's 
 book, The Nature of Truth. 
 
 " Psychological process," says Prof. Bosanquet, " when 
 it differs from the process which is the object-matter of 
 logic, differs by being inarticulate, circuitous, fragmentary. 
 It is the logical process broken up and disguised," " a 
 Glaucus," whose divine original, however, is " never found 
 typically perfect in actual psychological process." 2 Thus 
 " logical process is the psychological process in its 
 explicit and self-consistent form," freed from the " in- 
 terruptions " and " irrelevance " of " purely psychical 
 disturbances." 
 
 And so the 'self- normative,' 'independent' Logic, 
 " dropping out abstract psychical processes," haughtily 
 " goes forward on the path of concrete fulfilment or 
 individuality " 3 to what end will presently appear. 
 
 Now the division of territories propounded in these 
 words should certainly secure to Logic the most 
 brilliantly prosperous career. It appears to give Logic 
 every advantage. It reduces Psychology to such im- 
 potence that its voice can scarce be heard in the Council 
 of the Sciences. One hardly dares to point out in re- 
 monstrance that Prof. Bosanquet's "psychological process" 
 with " pure " and " mere " conditions differs widely from 
 the concrete psychical process of Humanist Psychology, 
 and one has to admit that it is obviously quite incapable of 
 performing the functions of the latter. It is conceived as 
 a miserable abstraction, not (as is legitimate in a special 
 science) as regards limitation of standpoint, but as regards 
 the content it is permitted to treat, and is almost deserving 
 of the contempt poured upon it. For what is it but a 
 mere rubbishy residuum, all that is left behind when its 
 
 1 L.c. pp. 237-247, 262-265. 
 2 L.c. pp. 239, 240. 3 L.c. p. 265.
 
 104 STUDIES IN HUMANISM m 
 
 values have been extracted from the actual psychic process, 
 and its life has been extinguished ? 
 
 Compared with this " misshapen Glaucus " postulated 
 by logical theory, almost anything may claim to be 
 concrete. Even Prof. Bosanquet's ' logic-process,' which 
 has been allowed to select all that seemed to be of value, 
 and to abstract only from the merest and most worthless 
 dross. So at least it seems, in the triumphant self- 
 assertion of an ' independent ' Logic. It seems almost 
 fantastic to suggest a doubt whether after all 'Psychology' 
 has been despoiled enough, whether after assigning to the 
 ' logical ' the whole purposiveness of psychic process and 
 leaving the psychological a purposeless chaos, Prof. 
 Bosanquet has not abstracted from something which was 
 needed to make thought truly purposive. 
 
 1 6. Meanwhile, what can we reply ? Nothing, it is to 
 be feared, our intellectualist logicians will deign to listen to. 
 
 We shall protest in vain that the ' mere ' or ' pure ' 
 psychological conditions, which Prof. Bosanquet flung 
 aside as worthless on the rubbish heap, are pure fictions 
 which bear no resemblance to the psychical processes of 
 actual knowing, that we never meant to relate them to 
 Logic, that what we meant was not this fantastic 
 abstraction, but the most concrete thing imaginable, 
 viz. the actual psychic process in its all-inclusive activity, 
 and with nothing at all, however worthless it might seem, 
 abstracted from. We shall observe in vain that however 
 ' concrete ' the logic-process may appear by comparison 
 with the artificial abstraction of the ' merely psychological,' 
 it is admitted to be an ideal never realised in actual 
 thinking, that therefore it has abstracted from something, 
 and that it remains to be seen whether that was really 
 as unessential as was asserted, or whether an immense 
 abstraction has unwittingly been made, which in the end 
 proves ruinous to Logic. We shall ask in vain how 
 Logic has arrived at a standpoint which gives it such 
 crushing superiority over Psychology, and entitles it to 
 take and leave whatsoever it likes, without condescending 
 to give reasons for its procedure.
 
 in LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY 105 
 
 We shall ask all these questions vainly, because Logic 
 is 'independent,' nay autocratic. It gives an account of 
 its self-normative procedure to no man or science. " It 
 can only be judged by itself at a further stage," its friends 
 haughtily declare. 1 We must therefore perforce let it go 
 its own way. It cannot be refuted ; it can only be 
 developed. 
 
 17. Let us therefore follow the developments of 
 ' Logic.' Having successfully maintained her right to 
 ' depersonalise ' herself, having got rid of the ' merely 
 psychological ' encumbrances of her ' Glaucus,' her ' old 
 man of the sea,' she should be able to soar to the illimit- 
 able heights of an infinite ' ideal ' of a " timelessly self-ful- 
 filled," " all-inclusive, significant whole," " whose coherence 
 is perfect truth." 2 She proceeds to do so, until only 
 our deep-seated British respect for what we cannot under- 
 stand hinders us from declaring that in her Hegelian 
 disguise she has become wholly unintelligible, and that 
 clouds of German metaphysics have rendered her invisible 
 in her ascension. 
 
 But just as we had despaired of ever seeing her again, 
 to our amazement there ensues a catastrophe which brings 
 her back to earth with more than Icarian suddenness, and 
 in as completely shattered a condition. 
 
 There was an error in her calculations which has 
 brought about her fall. Or rather Error'; was not taken 
 into her calculations, when she assumed her standpoint, 
 discarded the merely human as ' merely psychological,' 
 and constructed her ideal. ' The Ideal ' does not admit 
 of Error : and yet on earth Error impudently takes 
 the liberty to exist. It is, of course, a mere illusion, 
 but its persistent phantom yields not to the exorcisms of 
 Logic. 
 
 The situation must be set forth in the words of one 
 who has seen the vision, and suffered its dtnotiment : our 
 own would be suspect and inadequate. 3 " The confused 
 
 1 Prof. Bosanquet (I.e. p. 265). 
 
 2 H. H. Joachim, The Nature of Truth, pp. 169-170 and passim. 
 
 3 Mr. Joachim's Nature of Truth, pp. 167-68. For further selections see 
 Essay vi., which should be compared throughout, especially 2, 3.
 
 io6 STUDIES IN HUMANISM m 
 
 mass of idiosyncrasies," we are told, which are " my and 
 your thinking, my and your ' self,' the particular temporal 
 processes, and the extreme self -substantiation of the 
 finite ' modes,' which is error in its full discordance : these 
 are incidents somehow connected with the known truth, 
 but they themselves, and the manner of their connexion, are 
 excluded from the theory of knowledge" ^ which " must rule 
 out as irrelevant some perhaps most, but certainly not 
 all of the temporal and finite conditions under which 
 truth is known." " Truth, beauty, and goodness " (for all 
 the ideals as conceived by intellectualism must break 
 down in the same way when they try to transcend their 
 reference to man) " are timeless, universal, independent 
 structures ; and yet it is also essential to them to be 
 manifested in the thinking of finite subjects, in the actions 
 and volitions of perishing agents." 2 Hence Error is 
 " unthinkable," " a declaration of independence, where 
 that which declares is nothing real, and nothing real is 
 declared." 2 
 
 But why should not ' Logic ' free herself from these 
 embarrassments by cutting the last thin thread that 
 attaches her to an earthly existence and a human function 
 which are infested with ' merely psychological ' accidents 
 and idiosyncrasies, and vitiated by the errors of human 
 beings of which she ought surely to have divested herself 
 when she proceeded to 'depersonalise' herself? Why do 
 these human trappings cling, like a shirt of Nessus, to 
 the naked Truth ? Can it be that ' Logic ' could not 
 ' depersonalise ' herself completely, nay, that her effort 
 was a sheer delusion ? 
 
 Mr. Joachim makes answer. 3 Logic " must render 
 intelligible the dual nature of human experience. ... It 
 must show how the complete coherence, which is perfect 
 truth, involves as a necessary ' moment ' in its self- 
 maintenance the self-assertion of the finite modal minds : 
 a self-assertion which in its extreme form is Error. It 
 must reconcile this self-assertive independence with the 
 
 1 Italics mine. 2 L.c. p. 163. 
 
 3 L.c. pp. 170-171.
 
 m LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY 107 
 
 modal dependence of the self-asserting minds. . . . Other- 
 wise human knowledge remains, for all we can tell, un- 
 related to ideal experience." * 
 
 In other words, when ' Logic ' commenced her 
 nuptial flight towards ' the Ideal,' she quite forgot that 
 after all human forces raised her, that all her beaute- 
 ous visions were conceived by the eye of human minds, 
 and that she has repaid our devotion by disavowing her 
 creators. 
 
 The natural result is sheer, unmitigated, inevitable, 
 and irreparable contradiction, as Mr. Joachim most 
 honourably recognises. Logic is met by " demands 
 which both must be and cannot be completely satisfied." 2 
 To satisfy them completely, complete truth would have 
 to be manifest to itself. Whereas what we can conceive 
 ourselves as attaining is only complete truth manifest to 
 us. And as manifested in human truth the opposition of 
 subject and object persists ; our knowledge is always 
 thought about an Other : " the opposition of the thought 
 and its Other is apparently vital." It cannot attain to 
 union with its Other ; and so the significant Whole, 
 cleft by a self-diremption, falls into halves. 3 The whole 
 theory, therefore, " falls short of the absolute truth mani- 
 fest to itself." 4 The " theory of truth, based on the 
 coherence-notion, is not itself true qua coherent." 5 It is 
 " not only de facto unaccomplished, but is impossible by 
 the very nature of the case." 5 
 
 And so Mr. Joachim, though he tries to soften the 
 effect of his idol-breaking blows for the benefit of his 
 friends by protesting that their common theory is " as 
 true as a theory can be" 6 finishes up as a sceptic malgrt 
 lui amid the ruins of all the intellectualistic conceptions 
 of Logic, and of his own ' Hegelian ' metaphysic. 
 
 1 8. Of a surety we did well to allow Logic to go on 
 her way, and to be " judged by herself at a further stage," 
 by her " approach to completeness and comprehensive- 
 
 1 L.c. p. 172. 2 L.c. p. 171. The italics are Mr. Joachim's. 
 
 3 L.c. pp. 171-172 (in substance). 
 4 L.c. p. 178. 6 L.c. p. 176. 6 L.c. p. 178.
 
 io8 STUDIES IN HUMANISM m 
 
 ness." l Her debacle has certainly approached complete- 
 ness, and is quite comprehensible to us. 
 
 For there is nothing] either new in her overthrow or 
 obscure in its causes. 
 
 The Hegelian theory of knowledge and reality for 
 Mr. Joachim, taught perhaps by the negative outcome 
 of Appearance and Reality, has rightly renounced the 
 pretence of salving Logic by Metaphysics 2 has broken 
 down completely. It has broken down precisely as it 
 was predicted that it must break down as soon as it was 
 thought out consistently and to the end. 3 It has broken 
 down precisely as every intellectualistic conception of 
 Logic has always broken down, at precisely the same 
 point and for precisely the same reasons. It has not 
 failed, assuredly, for any lack of ingenuity or perseverance 
 in its advocates, who have left no stone unturned to save 
 a hopeless situation, and could no doubt with ease have 
 lifted the burden of Sisyphus to the summit of any hill of 
 hell. But their labour was more than Sisyphean : they 
 had, unfortunately, committed ' Logic ' to a fundamental 
 blunder. It has wilfully, wantonly, and of malice 
 prepense abstracted from humanity. Instead of con- 
 ceiving God as incarnating himself in man, it has sought 
 God by disavowing and belittling man. And as a reward 
 it has itself been terrified to death by an incredible 
 monster the creature of its own unhealthy nightmare ! 
 
 In other words, it has fallen into a ^wptoyio?, a fatal 
 separation between the human and the ideal which 
 renders both unmeaning, but was rendered inevitable 
 and irretrievable by its presuppositions as to the value 
 of human psychology. Once our psychic processes are 
 denied logical value and excluded from the nature of 
 truth, we are playing with abstractions, even though we 
 may not realise this until at the end our ' Ideal ' is 
 required to find room for our errors. Once we exalt the 
 limited and relative, and merely ' pragmatic/ ' independ- 
 ence ' of truth, which remains safely immanent within the 
 
 1 Arist. Soc. Proc. 1906, p. 265. a Cp. Essay iv. 3. 
 
 * Cp. Humanism, p. 48.
 
 in LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY 109 
 
 sphere of human valuations and can always be withdrawn 
 and modified as our needs and purposes require, into an 
 absolute and infinite ' independence ' which entirely trans- 
 cends our human experience, we have ascribed to truth 
 the ' dual nature,' which so perplexes Mr. Joachim, and 
 can by no device be unified. For a dualistic chasm has 
 been constructed between the human and ' psychological,' 
 and the ideal and ' logical.' No real relation can be 
 established between them ; all attempts at connecting 
 them break down so soon as they are tested. Nor can 
 any real theoretic progress be made. The utmost 
 ingenuity only brings ' logicians ' to the brink of the 
 chasm. And that is ' nearer ' to the other side only in 
 an illusory fashion. It remains only to postulate a re- 
 conciliation of the discrepant halves of a knowledge which 
 is rent asunder from top to bottom, by a supreme and 
 mystic act of faith. 1 But as the jejune rationalism of the 
 theory in question had previously prohibited all acts of 
 faith, it has manifestly fallen into a pit of its own digging. 
 
 Or shall we rather say, of Plato's ? 2 For he it was 
 that first led the way into the pit into which, with a few 
 despised exceptions, the whole company of philosophers 
 has followed him, as patiently and submissively as a 
 flock of sheep follows its bell-wether, and out of which no 
 one has been able, and not too many have even tried, to 
 escape. 
 
 Throughout the Theaetetus, for example, Plato has 
 made the assumptions that ' knowledge ' is of ' universals ' 
 and not concerned or connected with the fleeting and 
 variable judgments of individual men about their personal 
 experience, that thought and sense-perception are anti- 
 thetical and hostile, that the logical concept is something 
 wholly superior to and independent of the psychical 
 process (e.g. 152 D), and that the Protagorean suggestion, 
 to start the theory of knowing from the actual knowing 
 of the individual's perceptions is a proposal for the 
 abolition of truth. No wonder after this that it becomes for 
 
 1 Cp. The Nature of Truth, pp. 172, 177. 
 2 Compare the last Essay.
 
 no STUDIES IN HUMANISM m 
 
 him a serious ' contradiction ' when A judges to be warm 
 what B judges to be cold, seeing that ' it ' cannot be both. 
 But ' it ' does not exist in abstraction from the divergent 
 judgments ; ' it ' stands in this case for the problem of 
 constructing a ' common ' perception ; if the two ' its ' are 
 to be brought together into an ' objective ' scheme of 
 temperature, A and B must set to work to construct a 
 thermometer, as to the readings of which they can agree. 1 
 Plato, therefore, has merely debarred himself from under- 
 standing the de facto genesis and development of our 
 common world of subjective intercourse, and by starting with 
 abstraction from the personal character of both judgments, 
 he has manufactured a fallacious contradiction. Can we 
 wonder after this that the Platonic theory of knowledge 
 remains plunged in unmitigated dualism, and that in the 
 end it has to be admitted (209) that ' knowledge ' can 
 never condescend to the particular and personal, and is 
 unable to discriminate between Theaetetus and Socrates ? 
 For had it not pledged itself, ex vi definitionis, to leave 
 out whatever part of reality concerns a ' this} ' here] 
 and ' now ' ? But instead of inferring from this im- 
 potence, and from the self-abnegation of an ' ideal ' of 
 knowledge which is not even ideally adequate, because it 
 renounces the duty of knowing the individual perfectly 
 in its uniqueness? that there must be a radical flaw in a 
 conception of knowledge which has led to this absurdity, 
 what does Plato do ? He proclaims the Sensible un- 
 knowable and unintelligible as such, attributes to all 
 ' phenomenal ' reality an all-pervasive taint of ' Not-being,' 
 and retains his Ideal Theory though well aware that it 
 cannot cross the gulf between the truly Real and the 
 Sensible ! 3 How very human are even the greatest of 
 philosophers ! 
 
 It would never, therefore, occur to us to be surprised 
 that not only should the Theaetetus in the end leave the 
 problem of error unsolved and confess to utter inability 
 to say what knowledge is, but that the whole Platonic 
 
 1 Cp. p. 315-20. 2 Cp. Humanism, p. 126. 
 
 3 Essay ii. 14-16.
 
 in LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY in 
 
 theory of knowledge should remain immersed in obscurity 
 and contradiction. But one thing is clear, viz. that who- 
 ever had learnt the lesson of the Theaetetus could have 
 predicted the failure of all intellectualistic epistemologies 
 down to The Nature of Truth. 
 
 19. And the remedy for this sceptical paralysis of In- 
 tellectualism ? It is simple so simple that it will be 
 hard to get philosophers to look at it. But it cuts very 
 deep. It demands a complete reversal of inveterate 
 assumptions, and a re -establishment of Logic on very 
 different foundations. We have merely to refrain from 
 the twin abstractions which every intellectualistic logic 
 makes, and which must, if carried through consistently, 
 prove fatal to its very existence. These two assumptions, 
 which have troubled us throughout, may now be called 
 (l) the ether ealising, and (2) the depersonalising of truth, 
 and together they effect the complete dehumanising of 
 knowledge. 
 
 ( I ) By the etherealising of truth is meant the abstrac- 
 tion from the actual use and verification of an assertion, 
 which is made in assuming that its truth is independent 
 of its application. This really destroys its whole signi- 
 ficance, although at first it seems to leave its ' truth ' a 
 matter of self-consistency and intrinsic ' coherence.' But 
 if we try to take truth in this purely formal way, we 
 identify truth with claim to truth, 1 and render the testing 
 of claims extralogical. And it is then discovered that all 
 reference to reality has been excluded, 2 that ' self-con- 
 sistency' means nothing but a juggle with words whose 
 meanings are presumed to be perfect and stable in their 
 truth, and that the distinction between truth and error 
 has become incomprehensible. Error (as contrasted with 
 self-contradiction, which destroys the meaning wholly) 
 is nothing inherent in the form of the judgment, but lies 
 in a failure of its application. It is a failure of our 
 
 1 Cp. Essay v. 
 
 2 It is characteristic of intellectualist ' logic ' not to have noticed the dis- 
 crepancy between its two assertions ( i ) that ' truth ' is wholly a matter of the 
 intrinsic 'self-consistency' of its 'ideal,' and independent of all 'consequences' ; 
 and (2) that all judgment involves a ' reference to reality' beyond itself.
 
 112 STUDIES IN HUMANISM m 
 
 thought to attain its object. And as our conception of 
 ' truth ' is determined by its contrast with error, to 
 abstract from error is really to abstract from ' truth.' 
 Hence a Logic which abstracts from error implicitly 
 despairs also of giving an intelligible account of truth. 
 It ceases at any rate to be a theory of real knowledge, 
 and the formal 'truth,' the semblance of meaning, which 
 it verbally retains, no longer possesses relevance to human 
 knowing. 
 
 (2) But the depersonalising of truth deprives the Logic 
 of Intellectualism even of this show of meaning. It 
 makes abstraction from the meaning actually intended, 
 from the purpose of the meaner. Now as every judgment 
 is prompted and kept together by a purpose which forms 
 the uniting bond between its subject and its predicate, 
 the purpose is logically vital. It is also a concrete fact of 
 an intensely personal kind, which ramifies indefinitely 
 into human psychology. Hence it is often logically in- 
 convenient, as complicating the situation beyond the 
 powers of formal analysis. But to abstract from it, 
 wholly and systematically, is to disintegrate the judgment. 
 To do this destroys its intrinsic coherence, as well as its 
 reference to real truth. It amounts to a complete annihila- 
 tion of meaning. 
 
 It is difficult to suppose, therefore, that when in- 
 tellectualist Logic fully realises the situation to which 
 its abstractions lead, it will continue to presume without 
 trial that the full concreteness of psychic process is 
 logical irrelevance, and that man is a negligible quantity 
 in the formation of truth. 
 
 A reformed and rehumanised Logic, on the other 
 hand, will flatly refuse to immolate all human knowledge, 
 all fact, and all reality to intellectualist prejudices. It will 
 conceive and value the old abstractions merely as instru- 
 ments, as methodological simplifications, which may be 
 freely used, so long as the limits of their usefulness are 
 not overlooked, and their authority is not made absolute. 
 
 And here will be the rub. For these abstractions 
 have been misconceived so long ! It is such a time-
 
 in LOGIC AND PSYCHOLOGY 113 
 
 honoured custom with philosophers to believe that ' uni- 
 versals ' are loftier and more sacred than ' particulars,' 
 that their formation is not to be inquired into, that 
 their value is wholly independent of their application, 
 that they would subsist in unsullied excellence and 
 truth, even though they never were, nor could be, used. 
 It will take, therefore, a generation or two for philo- 
 sophers to convince themselves that the essential function 
 of universals is to apply to particulars, that they are 
 actually true only because, and when, they are used, that 
 their abstraction, therefore, from time, place, and in- 
 dividuality is only superficial and illusory, and that in 
 short they are instruments for the control and improve- 
 ment of human experience. 
 
 ' But will not the attempt to build knowledge on so 
 untried and paradoxical a basis be fraught with un- 
 suspected difficulties, and in its turn conduct us back to 
 scepticism ? Is it credible that so many generations of 
 thinkers can have been mistaken in acquiescing in the 
 belief that Protagoreanism necessitates scepticism ? ' 
 
 In view of the outcome of intellectualistic ' Logic,' 
 this menace of scepticism seems a grotesque impertinence, 
 and we might well retort that even an untried basis was 
 better than one which had been tried and found to be 
 self-destructive and impossible. But the threat has been 
 used so often that it will hardly be relinquished all at 
 once : so we had better face it. It is a mere bogey a 
 Chimaera summoned from the House of Hades to scare us 
 back into the Labyrinth of the Minotaur. No proof has 
 ever been vouchsafed of its contention. And seeing that 
 Plato's genius has failed so signally to refute Protagoras, 
 we may await with equanimity the advent of a greater 
 man than Plato to confute the inherent Humanism of 
 man's thought.
 
 IV 
 TRUTH AND MR. BRADLEY 1 
 
 ARGUMENT 
 
 I. Mr. Bradley's attack on Humanism in spite of, 2, the hesitations in 
 his intellectualism. 3. His perception of the difficulties in the 
 ' correspondence ' view of truth. 4. Pragmatism as the way to 
 avoid logical scepticism. 5. Mr. Bradley rejects this way and 
 prefers to stay in 'Jericho.' 6. The total irrelevance of his criti- 
 cism. 7. His reversion to the ' correspondence ' view, and its diffi- 
 culties, which coincide with those of realism. The inability of Abso- 
 lutism to disavow it. 8. Mr. Bradley's troubles with the relations 
 of 'truth' and 'fact,' and with the subjective activity in the appre- 
 hension of 'fact.' The 'double nature of truth.' 9. The antithesis 
 of 'practice' and 'theory.' What does the 'independence' of theory 
 mean? 10. Humanism as overcoming this antithesis and unifying 
 life in voluntarist terms. The advantages of voluntaristic descriptions. 
 II. Mr. Bradley's definition of 'practice.' 12. His failure to 
 distinguish between axioms and postulates. 13. His intellectualistic 
 conceptions of 'will.' 14. His summary of his objections. 15. 
 His attempt to raise the odium theologicum. 1 6. His relapse into 
 agnosticism. 17. His concessions. 18. His preference for a 
 difficult philosophy. 
 
 i. MR. F. H. BRADLEY'S characteristic paper on 
 " Truth and Practice " in the July 1 904 number of 
 Mind (vol. xiii. N.S. No. 51) must be regarded as the most 
 significant, though hardly the most valuable, of the hostile 
 criticisms which the Humanist movement has so far en- 
 countered. For Mr. Bradley is an acknowledged leader of 
 the sect of absolutists which has long dominated philosophic 
 instruction in this country, and is incomparably the most 
 
 1 The substance of this paper appeared as a reply to Mr. Bradley in Mind, 
 vol. xiii. N.S. No. 52 (October 1904). It has, however, been considerably altered, 
 partly by the excision of matters of ephemeral and merely personal interest, partly 
 by some expansion of the argument. Mr. Bradley, as might have been expected, 
 did not reply. 
 
 114
 
 iv TRUTH AND MR. BRADLEY 115 
 
 brilliant and formidable of its champions. Ever since he 
 made his ctibut a quarter of a century ago by triumphantly 
 dragging the corpse of Mill round the beleaguered strong- 
 hold of British philosophy, he has exercised a reign of 
 terror based on an unsparing use of epigrams and sarcastic 
 footnotes, " more polished than polite," as Mr. Hoernle 
 wittily remarks. 1 He has shown also that however 
 much he may despise personalities in his monistic meta- 
 physics, he yet loves them like a pluralist in his polemics. 
 
 2. And yet until this paper appeared, it was quite open 
 to doubt what attitude Mr. Bradley would assume towards 
 the new philosophic movement. It was open to him to 
 disarm revolt by judicious concession, nay to put himself at 
 the head of it, by developing ideas not obscurely implicit 
 in his own writings. It was by no means self-evident that 
 he must utterly condemn even a systematic protest against 
 intellectualism. For though Mr. Bradley no doubt 
 seemed in the end to come down on the intellectualist 
 side of the fence, the reason plainly seemed to be that he 
 had not subjected the notions with which he stopped, those 
 of the ' intellect ' and its ' satisfaction,' to stringent scrutiny. 
 And it was evident that his intellectualism had not 
 desiccated his soul, nor did it seem so deeply ingrained, or 
 of so extreme and naive a type, as that of his more 
 rigidly ' Hegelian ' allies. Nay, it seemed at times to 
 have been only by a distinctly wilful fiat that he had 
 arrested himself on the path to pragmatism, as, for 
 example, in Appearance and Reality, p. 154. And even 
 the final intellectualism of his description of the false as 
 ' the theoretically untenable ' and of the aim of philosophy 
 as 'the satisfaction of the intellect,' might have easily 
 been mitigated into harmony with the Humanist view by 
 shifting the emphasis from the ' intellect ' to the ' satis- 
 faction? and by adopting a pragmatic interpretation of 
 the ' intellect's ' structure and of its ' theoretic ' functioning. 
 
 3. Again, from the position Mr. Bradley had reached 
 at the end of his Principles of Logic, a pragmatic Logic 
 might well have seemed the promised land. Students of 
 
 1 Mind, N.S. No. 55, p. 332.
 
 n6 STUDIES IN HUMANISM iv 
 
 that brilliant and entertaining work will doubtless re- 
 member that the situation Mr. Bradley finally found 
 himself in was one of logical scepticism tempered by 
 prophetic allusions to a not yet extant metaphysic. This 
 plight, however, cannot be said to have been mended 
 when his Appearance and Reality ended in a far more 
 complete scepticism, tempered only by the postulation of 
 an unknowable Absolute invoked to set all things right 
 ( somehow.' 
 
 Yet this whole perplexity arose from a very simple 
 cause. His examination of the function of our thought 
 had irresistibly pointed to the conclusion that knowing, 
 in very many, if not all, cases involves an arbitrary mani- 
 pulation (' mutilation ') of the presented data. Hence if 
 it was assumed that the business of thought was funda- 
 mentally to ' copy ' reality, it was clear that thought was 
 a failure. It did not ' copy ' ; it abstracted, it selected, it 
 mutilated, it recombined, it postulated all in what seemed 
 a thoroughly arbitrary manner. 1 If, therefore, truth 
 meant ' correspondence with reality,' it seemed plain that 
 inference as such was invalid, and truth unattainable. 
 Nowhere could Mr. Bradley discover a case where "the 
 truth of the consequence does not rest upon our interfer- 
 ence " with the data. In vain he clings to the possibility 
 that " though the function of concluding depends upon my 
 intellect, the content concluded may be wholly unhelped, 
 untouched, and self- developed." 2 This possibility is 
 clearly preposterous, even though it is guaranteed by 
 ' logical postulates ' which have constantly to be invoked. 
 " Rightly or wrongly," we are told, " logic assumes that a 
 mere attention, a simple (sic /) retaining and holding 
 together before the mind's eye, is not an alteration," and 
 " we are forced to assume that some processes do not 
 modify their consequence," 3 and that " some operations do 
 but change our power of perceiving the subject and leave 
 the subject itself unaltered . . . even where our wilful 
 and arbitrary choice selects the process and procures the 
 
 1 Prlnc. of Logic, pp. 500-10. 2 L.c. p. 502. 
 
 3 L.c. p. 506.
 
 iv TRUTH AND MR. BRADLEY 117 
 
 result." 1 But, as we saw, these logical postulates 
 were then consigned to metaphysics, and finally entered 
 that cave of the Absolute whence no ' finite ' truths ever 
 issue forth again. 
 
 In short the ' correspondence -with -reality ' view of 
 truth is ' riddled with contradictions ' by Mr. Bradley 
 in the concluding chapters of his Logic, and driven to 
 seek refuge in an arbitrary ' postulate,' to be hereafter 
 established by metaphysics. This feat his metaphysic 
 fails to accomplish : but it solaces the wounds of Logic 
 by riddling everything else with contradictions too. 
 
 4. And yet the remedy was close at hand. Mr. 
 Bradley had merely to grasp his nettle firmly, to take his 
 bull by the horns, to sit down on his praying carpet, in order 
 to effect a magical transformation of the whole situation, in 
 the simplest and most satisfying way ! He remarks : " in 
 A B, B C, the identity of B is the bond of the construc- 
 tion. If I 'made that identity, I should certainly in that 
 case have manufactured the consequence. And it may be 
 contended that it lies in my choice to see or to be blind, 
 and that hence my recognition does make what it per- 
 ceives. Against such a contention I can here attempt no 
 further answer. I must simply fall back on the logical 
 postulate, and leave further discussion to metaphysics." - 
 
 But now suppose that instead of ' falling back ' he had 
 gone on boldly and stayed in logic ? Suppose he had 
 followed the indications of logic and accepted the omens ? 
 Suppose he had allowed himself to see that we make the 
 identity always and everywhere, that selection and 
 voluntary manipulation are of the essence of all cognitive 
 process, and that even our most ' passive ' reception of 
 sensory stimuli is at bottom selective, because it ignores 
 a multitude of other processes in nature, and volitionally 
 so, because determined by the organism's choice of life, by 
 the way in which its ' will to live ' has moulded it ? 
 
 If Mr. Bradley had been willing to do this, to say 
 
 1 L.c. p. 518, where too Mr. Bradley catches a glimpse of the dependence of 
 ' truth ' on possibility of application ( 24). 
 L.c. p. 502.
 
 n8 STUDIES IN HUMANISM iv 
 
 (with me) that logical identity is always made, being a 
 great postulate, by means of which we successfully operate 
 upon our experience, 1 he would have passed easily and 
 naturally on to the pragmatic view of truth and of the 
 nature of logic. If in all thinking identities are ' made,' 
 then this normal procedure cannot possibly be made a 
 reproach to thought. If ' truth ' means successful opera- 
 tion on ' reality,' then reasoning cannot be invalidated so 
 long as it is successful. If thought has not to ' correspond ' 
 or ' copy,' but to be efficacious, then, it need not be despised 
 for failing to do what it was not concerned to do. In 
 short the theory of knowledge is out of the wood. 2 
 
 5. What, then, prevented Mr. Bradley from perceiving 
 all this ? So far as one can see, nothing but sheer pre- 
 judice. He simply will not allow practical success to 
 validate a cognitive process. He will not let us " plead 
 that because logic works, logic cannot be wrong." 3 But 
 at the time when he wrote the Logic, Mr. Bradley was 
 still far from " a blind acquiescence in the coarsest 
 prejudices of popular (i.e. intellectualisf] thought," 4 and 
 it might well seem possible that he would determine to 
 advance instead of retrograding, and hopelessly miring 
 himself in the slough of scepticism. 
 
 Unfortunately Mr. Bradley has chosen otherwise. He 
 has preferred to revert to the correspondence view of 
 truth, of which he had formerly so clearly exposed the 
 absurdities. 5 And when the princes of Moab tempted 
 him, he went and cursed the newcomers with a vehemence 
 which must have well-nigh exhausted the resources even 
 of his vocabulary, perhaps because none of his faithful 
 followers dared to open their mouths to utter a word of 
 warning. He has chosen to conceive the philosophic con- 
 troversy of the day as a mere raid by a horde of vagrant 
 nomads upon the citadel of Absolutism, and mingled 
 
 1 Personal Idealism, pp. 103-4. 
 
 2 Cp. Mr. Sturt's criticism of these notions of Mr. Bradley 's in Idola Theatri, 
 pp. 291-2. 
 
 8 L.c. p. 531. 4 L.c. p. 534. 
 
 6 Mind, N.S. No. 51. P. 311, " If my idea is to work, it must correspond to 
 a determinate being it cannot be said to make." P. 312, "The whole of this is 
 fact to which my idea has got first to correspond. "
 
 iv TRUTH AND MR. BRADLEY 119 
 
 wit with venom in his own inimitable way when he 
 declares, " I forget before how many blasts of the trumpet 
 the walls of Jericho fell, but the number, I should judge, 
 has already been much exceeded. The walls of Jericho, 
 so far as I can see, have no intention of moving, and the 
 dwellers in Jericho tend irreverently to regard the sound 
 as the well-known noise which comes from the setters 
 forth of new pills or plasters." 3 
 
 One knows of course what is the controversial meaning 
 of abusing the plaintiff's attorney, but our appreciation of 
 Mr. Bradley's fun should not deter us, either from regret- 
 ting his retrogression, or from welcoming his simile. We 
 all remember what happened to the walls of Jericho, and 
 can all value Mr. Bradley's testimony to the ' jerry-built ' 
 character of the defences he has done so much to raise. 2 
 Let us therefore accept the omen and proceed to consider 
 the objections which Mr. Bradley seems to think im- 
 portant. 
 
 6. Mr. Bradley boldly begins with an avowal that he 
 has so far failed to understand the new philosophy. 3 This 
 did not seem a very credible or promising premiss for a 
 critic of Mr. Bradley's calibre to set out from, but long 
 before I had finished reading I found myself entirely in 
 agreement with him. What he had failed to understand, 
 that is, or perhaps, as Prof. James suggested, 4 had not 
 sought to understand, was the doctrine I had maintained ; 
 what he had refuted with much superfluous subtlety was 
 a mass of misconceptions which he had developed into 
 misrepresentations, and finally distorted into absurdities 
 
 1 L.c. p. 330. 
 
 2 It may be worth noting that this probably indicates the real derivation of 
 the word. ' Jerry-built ' = ' Jericho-built. ' The mythical ' Jerry and Co. ' probably 
 arose by ' tmesis ' from Jeri-cho, and the term thus embodies a jocular ration- 
 alising of the recorded miracle. 
 
 8 In his controversial methods this does not preclude a subsequent claim to 
 understand it much better than its author, who, he informs us, with marvellous, 
 but too evidently telepathic, insight, ' ' has made no attempt l to realiset he true 
 meaning of his own doctrine" (pp. 322, 333). Afterwards he reaffirms his 
 inability to understand (p. 329), which finally (p. 335), with the agnosticism 
 which seems to be the natural reaction from pretensions to absolute knowledge, 
 extends itself to all things ! 
 
 4 Mind, N.S. No. 52, p. 458. 
 
 1 The italics (mine) indicate the points misapprehended.
 
 120 STUDIES IN HUMANISM iv 
 
 entirely irrelevant to my position. Now if these mis- 
 conceptions had really been contained in a fair interpreta- 
 tion of anything I had said, I should feel duly contrite, 
 and would gladly admit the obligation of removing the 
 occasion for them. In point of fact, however, it is difficult 
 to see how the text of any of my essays anywhere lends 
 itself to any of Mr. Bradley's interpretations, and in the 
 absence of precise references to it, it seems impossible even 
 to conjecture what occasioned them. 
 
 Where, if point-blank questions may be put, has Mr. 
 Bradley ever found it stated that ' no object counts for 
 any more than a worthless means * [! how can a worthless 
 means be a means at all ?] to one's own mere * activity,' 
 or that ' truth consists in the -mere J practical working of 
 an idea,' or that ' the words true and false have not a 
 specific meaning,' or that ' truth everywhere subserves 
 practice directly] * or that ' the entire 1 nature of the situa- 
 tion is first made by the idea,' or that an idea's 'agreement 
 or discord with fact other than my will can be excluded,' 
 or that ' the entire x truth is made by my end and my 
 ideas ' and is ' a mere * deed,' or ' a means to a foreign J 
 end ' or ' merely J what happens to prevail ' ? I do not 
 ask, bien entendu, for literal quotations in support of these 
 allegations (for I know these do not exist), but even for 
 passages which can legitimately be said to countenance 
 them, and meanwhile must question whether Mr. Bradley 
 has at all entered into the pragmatist conception of the 
 ' making ' of ' truth ' and ' reality.' Else he would hardly 
 have wholly ignored or dismissed as unessential 2 such 
 cardinal doctrines as the presence of limiting conditions in 
 each experiment and the voluntary acceptance 3 of a basis 
 taken as factual, the distinction of postulate and axiom, 
 the selection and verification of postulates by subsequent 
 
 1 The italics (mine) indicate the points misapprehended. 
 
 2 Especially Personal Idealism, pp. 54-63 and 95, and Humanism, pp. 12, 
 55-60. Indeed one would not suppose that he had read beyond the Preface in 
 the latter work, but for his strange manipulation of the former. 
 
 3 I am gratified to find the importance of this in the recognition of ' fact ' so 
 strongly emphasised by Prof. Royce in his valuable paper on ' ' The Eternal and 
 the Practical " (Phil. Rev. for March 1904). Strictly, nothing further is needed 
 to establish the pragmatic view of ' fact. '
 
 iv TRUTH AND MR. BRADLEY 121 
 
 experience, and the psychological and social criticism 
 which inevitably purifies the passing wishes of the indi- 
 vidual. 
 
 Now controversially nothing is more embarrassing than 
 a criticism which is totally irrelevant. Absolute irrelevance 
 induces a sort of dazed feeling in its victim, who thinks 
 that his inability to see the application must be due to his 
 own lack of intelligence, especially when it is accompanied 
 by an air of condescension, and a careful avoidance of 
 references. To meet it one must either restate one's own 
 position, 1 or criticise the critic. 
 
 In this case I should have been only too glad to show 
 more explicitly what is actually the contention of Human- 
 ism regarding the conception of ' truth ' and its relation 
 to ' fact,' and how exactly it disposes of Mr. Bradley's 
 difficulties, and achieves what hitherto all idealisms have 
 attempted in vain, viz. the abolishing of the dualisms of 
 1 truth ' and ' fact ' and ' fact ' and ' value.' In view, 
 however, of my critic's reluctance to consider the new 
 doctrines in their connexion, I feel constrained to devote 
 my energies chiefly to showing critically that, whether we 
 are right or wrong, the old doctrine at all events cannot 
 stand. 
 
 7. I must observe, therefore, that even Mr. Bradley 
 can state nothing tenable or coherent on either of the 
 points alluded to. As regards the conception of ' truth,' he 
 seems only just to have realised that there is a question as 
 to the ' specific meaning ' of the attributions ' true ' and 
 ' false ' (p. 311 ). 2 But he excuses himself from telling us 
 what he takes it to be ! Surely so long as our critics 
 have no positive conception of what the predication of 
 truth means, their criticisms have no real locus standi. 
 
 On the relation of ' Truth ' and ' Fact ' he is somewhat 
 more explicit. But he has not realised how deadly a 
 blow at Absolutism Prof. Dewey has dealt by his admir- 
 able proof of the superfluity of an absolute truth-to-be- 
 copied, existing alongside of the human truth which is 
 
 1 Cp. for this Essays xviii. and xix. 
 2 Cp. p. 144.
 
 122 STUDIES IN HUMANISM iv 
 
 made by our efforts. 1 Its peculiar deadliness is due to 
 the fact that the absolute idealist can hardly disavow a 
 contention with which he himself is wont to ply the 
 realist, viz. that an existent beyond human knowledge, 
 which does nothing to explain that knowledge, is invalid, 
 alike whether it is called an ' independent ' reality or an 
 ' absolute ' truth. The fact is that this fundamental 
 difficulty in absolutism and realism is the same. In 
 both cases our knowing has to be related to something 
 which transcends it and claims to be ' independent ' of it 
 and unaffected by it, through the very process of our 
 knowing ; and the ' correspondence '-notion is merely a 
 verbal cover for this crux. It cannot, therefore, be really 
 and wholly discarded. In the last resort human truth 
 must still be conceived as ' corresponding ' to absolute 
 truth, whatever obscurities and absurdities this may 
 involve. It is only when we interpret the transcendence 
 pragmatically that we perceive the nullity of the problem, 
 because the ' independent ' reality and truth are not 
 absolutely so, but alike conceptions immanently evolved 
 in human knowing, and do not therefore require to be 
 forced into relation with it. 2 From his own point of 
 view, therefore, Mr. Bradley is in a manner right in 
 reverting to the correspondence -with -reality view of 
 truth, as we saw above (p. 118). But it is indicative 
 of the intellectual disintegration which Prof. Dewey's 
 bombshell has produced in the intellectualist camp that 
 most of his followers have tried to abandon it. Mr. 
 H. W. B. Joseph admits that " the conception of truth as 
 correspondence " is " a difficult notion " and " open to 
 criticism." 3 Prof. A. E. Taylor goes so far as to suppose 
 that his master has dropped it too, 4 while both he and 
 Mr. H. H. Joachim prefer to rely on the notion of 
 ' system,' without perceiving that the difficulty of the 
 
 1 Mr. Bradley, who (for purposes of contrast ?) praises Prof. Dewey, also does 
 not seem to have noticed that something faintly like the doctrine of ' doing for 
 doing's sake,' which he vainly tries to fasten on me, appears to be upheld by Prof. 
 Dewey, so that in this important respect his form of Pragmatism would seem to 
 be the most radical in the field. 
 
 2 Cp. Essays vii. i and xx. 2. 3 Mind, xiv. N.S. No. 53, p. 35. 
 4 Phil. Rev. xiv. 3, p. 288.
 
 iv TRUTH AND MR. BRADLEY 123 
 
 ' correspondence ' will then occur between the two 
 ' systems,' ideal and human. Hence the latter, after 
 assuming an 'ideal' of a self-supporting systematic 
 coherence, finds himself face to face with the problem 
 of connecting it with actual human knowing. It then 
 turns out that the existence of error is inconsistent 
 with that of his ideal, and so his whole essay on The 
 Nature of Truth ends, avowedly, in failure. But surely 
 it should have been obvious from the first that the 
 notion of ' system ' is not only purely human but also 
 purely formal. It, therefore, could not be expected to 
 throw any light on the nature of ' truth/ until means 
 had been devised for discriminating systematic ' truth ' 
 from systematic ' error.' Thus if Mr. Joachim had conde- 
 scended to start from human knowing, the problem of 
 error would have formed an initial obstacle and not a 
 final crux. These examples may serve to show that the 
 intellectualist theory of knowledge is as completely non- 
 plussed to-day by the notion of truth as Plato was when 
 he wrote the Theaetetus more than 2000 years ago. 1 
 
 8. Mr. Bradley's embarrassments are no less painful. 
 
 (i) By retaining perforce this 'correspondence' view 
 he pledges himself to the assumption that Truth is 
 determined by Fact, by which it is ' dictated.' Fact 
 exists whether we will it or not, whether or not 
 we acknowledge it, and to it our " idea has first to 
 correspond " (p. 3 1 2). It has naturally to be left 
 obscure what part is played by the intelligence which 
 accepts this ' dictation,' and how the facts manage to 
 ' dictate ' to us the ideas with which we work and which 
 we have to acknowledge as true, because they are thus 
 called for. And it is manifestly an unanswerable question 
 how we ascertain the nature of the eternal text, the super- 
 celestial Koran, which the dictation reveals ; nor can we 
 venture to ask how we are to authenticate the correctness 
 of the dictates we receive. For it must clearly be ignored, 
 that the ' facts ' we recognise are always relative to the 
 'truths' we predicate; that of facts -in -themselves and 
 
 1 Cp. Essays vi. and ii. 16.
 
 124 STUDIES IN HUMANISM iv 
 
 independent of our knowledge we can know nothing. 
 Neither must we ask whether these imagined facts in 
 their own right are correctly ' represented ' by the facts as 
 we take them to be. 
 
 (2) But these difficulties are old, and ought to be 
 familiar to all but the naivest realism, of which Mr. 
 Bradley's language here grows strangely redolent. 1 Let 
 us pass, therefore, to a still more perplexing subject, 
 Mr. Bradley's present handling of what puzzled him 
 before, viz. the subjective activity in the apprehension of 
 ' fact.' For ' truth,' it seems, is after all not mere re- 
 production of ' fact ' : the ' right ' idea is not merely 
 'dictated,' it has also to be 'chosen' (p. 311). How 
 then, we ask, can this hapless Truth serve two such 
 different masters ? How can it on the one hand adjust 
 itself to human demands and interests, and yet on the 
 other slavishly copy and respectfully reproduce a con- 
 genitally 'outer,' and already pre-existing, ' fact '? No 
 ' logical postulate ' is invoked to perform this unparal- 
 leled feat, but at times we find this subjective influence 
 which goes to the making of ' Truth ' called merely a 
 congt d'elire (p. 312), i.e. a formality, presumably, which 
 is not held seriously to impair the dependence of truth 
 upon an already determinate ' fact.' And yet in the same 
 breath a ' selection ' is mentioned. If this is not to involve 
 volitional preference and acceptance, what can it mean ? 
 Surely it is something more than a mechanical registration 
 of an outside ' fact ' ? Elsewhere it is admitted that our 
 idea " reacts and then makes the whole situation to be 
 different" (p. 311), that "truth may not be truth at all 
 apart from its existence in myself and in other finite 
 subjects, and at least very largely that existence depends 
 on our wills." 2 Nay, our moral ends in their turn 'dictate' 
 even to truth and beauty (pp. 320-1). Indeed in one 
 aspect at least truth is an ideal construction (pp. 
 
 324-5). 
 
 Now what are we to make of this double nature of 
 
 1 As Mr. Hoernle also notices (Mind, xiv. p. 442, s.f.). 
 3 P. 320, italics mine.
 
 iv TRUTH AND MR. BRADLEY 125 
 
 Truth ? Is it not clear that if there is to be a real selec- 
 tion there must be real alternatives, which can be chosen ? 
 And is it not almost as clear that even in a ' forced ' 
 choice such alternatives are really presented ? Even the 
 poor bread-and-butter fly (now extinct) that would live 
 only on the ' weak tea with plenty of cream in it ' which 
 it could not get, and consequently ' always died,' exempli- 
 fies this. We get then this dilemma : if our ' choice,' 
 ' selection,' or ' congt cTelire ' does not affect the rigidity of 
 ' fact,' it is an illusion which ought not even to seem to 
 exist, and we have certainly no right to talk about it : if, 
 on the other hand, there really is 'selection' (as is asserted), 
 will it not stultify the assumption of a rigid fact, introduce 
 a possibility of arbitrary manipulation, and lead to al- 
 ternative constructions of reality? In other words, how 
 is a belief in a real selection compatible with the denial 
 of a real freedom of human choice and of a real plasticity 
 in reality at large ? 1 
 
 Mr. Bradley's insistence on the ' determinateness ' of 
 being does not help us in the least. For he does not 
 specify whether he conceives the determination to be (a) 
 absolute, or (b] partial. If (a\ then how is it to be altered 
 by our ' reaction ' ? That reaction too, indeed, must be 
 wholly determinate, and the ' selecting ' must be mere 
 illusion. If () the determination is only partial, it will 
 form the starting-point for alternative modes of operating 
 upon ' fact ' and alternative results. That is, ' fact ' will 
 be plastic, and responsive to our will. 
 
 In short, a constructive conception of the relation of 
 Truth to Fact is nowhere to be grasped. Everywhere 
 Mr. Bradley's meaning seems swiftly to evaporate into 
 metaphor or to dissipate into ambiguity. 
 
 Not that these difficulties are likely to prove a per- 
 manent embarrassment. Eventually, no doubt, some 
 subtlety can be requisitioned from the Christological 
 controversies of the sixth century wherewith to reconcile 
 the ' divine ' with the ' human ' nature in the body of 
 the one Truth. But at present what Mr. Joachim signi- 
 
 1 Cp. p. 392.
 
 126 STUDIES IN HUMANISM iv 
 
 ficantly calls " the dual nature of human experience " 
 forms the rock on which the logic of Intellectualism 
 deliberately wrecks itself, and one cannot find that it has 
 anything even apparently coherent to substitute for the 
 pragmatist account it rejects so haughtily. 
 
 9. We pass to Mr. Bradley's second point, which con- 
 cerns the relation of Practice to Theory. The importance 
 of this seems to me to be secondary, because our differences 
 rest largely on the connotation of terms whose meaning 
 is somewhat a matter of convention, and not completely 
 settled. 
 
 I should not dream, however, of denying that the end 
 must be " the fullest and most harmonious development 
 of our being " (p. 3 1 9), and still less that this " coincides 
 with the largest amount of mere doing " except in so far 
 as I repudiate the notion of ' mere doing ' ! It is grati- 
 fying also to find Mr. Bradley so emphatic that " every 
 possible side of our life is practical," that there is nothing 
 "to which the moral end is unable to dictate" (p. 320), 
 " and even truth and beauty, however independent, fall 
 under its sway." These dicta ought to be decisive dis- 
 avowals of the old-fashioned intellectualism, and it may be 
 conjectured that, but for lapses of inadvertence, very little 
 more will be heard of it. 
 
 Difficulties begin when we try to follow Mr. Bradley's 
 attempt nevertheless to provide for an ' independence ' of 
 the theoretical. What precisely does he mean by ' inde- 
 pendence ' ? We are told that though all the ends and 
 aspects of life are practical, yet in a sense they are also 
 not practical. There exists, it seems, an attitude of ' mere ' 
 theory and ' mere ' apprehension, which has indeed to 
 demean itself by ' altering things ' and becoming ' prac- 
 tical,' but " so far as it remains independent " is " essen- 
 tially " not practice. Both truth and beauty therefore are 
 practical " incidentally but not in their essence " and " at 
 once dependent and free " (p. 320), ' free ' in their ' nature,' 
 dependent in their actual functioning. Whether this 
 claims for theoretic truth something like Kant's noumenal 
 
 1 The Nature of Truth, pp. 163, 170, etc.
 
 ,v TRUTH AND MR. BRADLEY 127 
 
 freedom and phenomenal necessity it is hard to say. But 
 it is clearly an important article of Mr. Bradley's faith : 
 " we believe in short in relative freedom " and " this is 
 even dictated by the interest of the spiritual common- 
 wealth " and identified with " the independent cultivation 
 of any one main side of our nature " (p. 322). 
 
 Now, quite humbly and sincerely, I must here beg for 
 further elucidation. I cannot in the least conceive how 
 this semi-detached relation is possible. Evidently there 
 is here between us a divergent use of terms which must 
 breed confusion. What (i) means the antithesis of 
 ' incident ' and ' essence ' ? And how are they related to 
 Aristotle's o-ty-t/Se/fy/eo? and ovcria ? ' Essence ' is a word 
 which had a definite, though highly technical, meaning in 
 the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle and their deriva- 
 tives, but which has now lost this, and lends itself to much 
 looseness of thought. It clearly does not imply to Mr. 
 Bradley, as it does to a pragmatist, a reference to purpose. 
 But I suppose it means something important. And if so, 
 why is it not divulged ? Again (2) does it not evince a 
 serious laxity of terminology to equate a ' relative free- 
 dom ' with ' independence ' ? And it would be instructive 
 to watch Mr. Bradley dealing with the same equation in 
 other contexts, e.g. in pluralistic attempts to derive the 
 ' unity ' of the world. 
 
 I o. However Mr. Bradley may answer these questions, 
 and indeed whether or not he sees his way to answer them 
 at all, it must once more be added that, be the argument 
 coherent internally or meaningless, it is at all events irrele- 
 vant. It attacks a position which has never been defended ; 
 it fails to repel the real attack. For it is not our intention 
 to turn dualists, to prove that Theory and Practice are 
 fundamentally different, and foreign to each other, and 
 then to enslave Theory to Practice, Intellect to Will. 
 Something of the sort may possibly be extracted from 
 that great matrix of the most various doctrines, the philo- 
 sophy of Kant. 1 But we contend rather that there can 
 
 1 I do not say justly, because I am convinced that if Kant had been twenty 
 years younger when he attained his insight (such as it was) into the nature of
 
 128 STUDIES IN HUMANISM iv 
 
 be no independence of theory (except in popular lan- 
 guage) and no opposition to practice, because theory is an 
 outgrowth of practice and incapable of truly ' independent ' 
 existence. And what our epistemology tries to do is to 
 trace this reference to practice throughout the whole 
 structure, and in all the functions, of the intellect. There 
 is no question therefore of degrading, and still less of 
 annihilating, the intellect, but merely one of its reinter- 
 pretation. We deny that properly speaking such a thing 
 as pure or mere intellection can occur. What is loosely 
 so called is really also purposive thought pursuing what 
 seems to it a desirable end. Only in such cases the ends 
 may be illusory, or may appear valuable for reasons other 
 than those which determine their value. 1 What, there- 
 fore, we have really attempted is to overcome the anti- 
 thesis of theory and practice, and to unify human life by 
 emphasising the all -pervading purposiveness of human 
 conduct. 
 
 Such attempts at unification are not new, but they 
 have usually been conducted with an intellectualist bias, 
 and with the purpose of reducing all 'willing' and 'feel- 
 ing ' to cognition. And this has often been supposed to 
 be something magnificent and inspiring. I cannot see, 
 however, that there is any greater spiritual elevation in 
 saying All is Thought than in saying all is Feeling or Will. 
 The only advantage which the voluntarist formulation of 
 the unity of the faculties can claim over its rivals is that 
 ' will ' is de facto conceived as in a manner intermediate 
 between ' thought ' and ' feeling.' Hence it is easiest to 
 describe all mental life in voluntarist terms. If either of 
 the others is taken as fundamental, ' will ' easily succumbs 
 to an illusory ' analysis ' ; it can be termed the strongest 
 ' desire ' or the ' self-realisation ' of ideas. But it is not 
 so easy to describe either of the extremes in terms of 
 
 postulation, he would have rewritten his Critique of Pure Reason on pragmatist 
 lines. At all events he lays the foundations of Pragmatism in a remark no prag- 
 matist would seek to better, when he says that ' ' all interest is ultimately practical, 
 and even that of the speculative reason is merely conditional, and only complete in 
 its practical use" (Krit. d. prak. Vern., II. 2, iii. s.f. ), 
 1 Cp. Humanism, pp. 58-60.
 
 iv TRUTH AND MR. BRADLEY 129 
 
 the other. Hence ' panlogism ' of the Hegelian type 
 is a height to which intellectualism rarely attains, and 
 even this is only achieved by regarding ' feeling ' as 
 irrational ' contingency ' which is ' nothing for thought,' 
 i.e. inexplicable. More commonly intellectualism has to 
 come to terms with ' feeling,' as in Mr. Bradley's own 
 philosophy, which derides the Hegelian's ' unearthly ballet 
 of bloodless categories,' and as Mr. Sturt has shown, in 
 some respects exalts ' feeling ' even above intellect. 1 
 
 But the truth is that the whole question seems merely 
 one of the convenience and use of psychological classifica- 
 tions, and that none of these descriptions have explanatory 
 value. All three ' faculties ' are at bottom only labels for 
 describing the activities of what may be called indifferently 
 a unitary personality, or a reacting organism. 
 
 And so when Mr. Bradley wonders (p. 327) what I am 
 " to reply when some one chooses to assert that this same 
 whole is intelligence or feeling," I am not dismayed. I 
 should merely underline the " chooses" and beg both 
 parties to observe that this is what they are severally 
 ' choosing to assert] and therefore arbitrary. Not more 
 arbitrary, doubtless, than my own choice, but far more 
 awkward for their scheme of classification than for mine. 
 For on mine I should expect to find that ultimate questions 
 sooner or later involved acts of choice ; as indeed I have 
 repeatedly, though perhaps too unobtrusively, pointed out. 2 
 Moreover, I have expressly guarded myself against this 
 particular criticism by passages in Personal Idealism 
 (p. 86) and Humanism (p. 53). These no doubt occur 
 in footnotes, but then Mr. Bradley will hardly accuse me 
 of putting too much into footnotes. 
 
 11. Finally, before leaving this part of Mr. Bradley's 
 argument I must say something about his definition of 
 Practice (p. 317) as an alteration of existence. This seems 
 altogether too narrow. For (i) I cannot possibly assent 
 to Mr. Bradley's proposal 3 to exclude not only theoretic 
 
 1 Idola Theatri, chaps, v. and ix. I do not think, however, that this homage 
 paid to feeling is really anything but a reluctant recognition of the difficulties of the 
 situation. 
 
 3 E.g. Humanism, pp. 49, 153, 157. 3 P. 334. 
 
 K
 
 130 STUDIES IN HUMANISM , v 
 
 interests, but all values, ethical and aesthetical, from the 
 sphere of ' practice.' It is an integral part of the 
 Humanist position to contend that ' truths ' are values, 
 and that values are all - important and really effica- 
 cious, being the real motives which make, unmake, and 
 alter reality, because the whole of our practical activity 
 aims at their attainment. To take the activity in abstrac- 
 tion from the values it aims at, and to conceive the values 
 without reference to the activity which realises them, 
 seems to me equally preposterous. 
 
 Hence (2) the means to an alteration of existence 
 must surely be called practical, and among these are of 
 course included the greater part of what have hitherto 
 been regarded as the ' purely theoretic ' functions. If Mr. 
 Bradley will not concede this, cadit quaestio} I, at any 
 rate, should never have asserted the absorption of the 
 theoretical in the practical, if I had thought that the means 
 to an end were excluded from the practical. And (3) 
 we do not, even in practice, always seem to aim at altera- 
 tion of existence. The preservation of the desirable seems 
 frequently to be our end. 
 
 Again (4) the fruition of the end attained would fall 
 outside Mr. Bradley's definition. Whereas to me it would 
 seem intolerable to exclude from Practice, e.g. the 'Evepyeia 
 'Ajuvifffiaf, which forms the ideal of life and the goal of 
 effort. I could wish only that it were practicable, as well 
 as practical ! 
 
 It seems necessary, therefore, to conceive ' practice' more 
 broadly as the control of experience, and to define as 'practical' 
 whatever serves, directly or indirectly, to control events. So 
 to conceive it will probably render it quite obvious that the 
 aim of the doctrine of the ' subordination ' of ' theory ' to 
 ' practice ' (more properly of the secondary character of the 
 former) is merely voluntarism, merely to make ' practice ' 
 cover practically (i.e. with the exception of certain intel- 
 lectualistic delusions) the whole of life, or in other words 
 to insist on bringing out the active character of experience, 
 
 1 He finally (p. 334 s.f. ) seems to concede this when he says " in a secondary 
 sense anything is practical so far as it is taken as subserving a practical change."
 
 iv TRUTH AND MR. BRADLEY 131 
 
 just as it is the aim of intellectualism, alike in its sensa- 
 tionalistic and in its rationalistic forms, to obscure and 
 exclude this character and to declare the conception of 
 activity unmeaning. 1 Intellectualism, in short, is deeply 
 committed to what Mr. Sturt has well denominated ' the 
 fallacy of Passivism ' in all its forms. 
 
 If, on the other hand, we press Mr. Bradley's remark 
 that " my practice is the alteration by me of existence 
 inward and outward," it would seem that the notion of an 
 ' independent ' theoretic life must speedily collapse. For 
 even the most ' theoretical ' of thoughts will induce at 
 least an inward ' alteration.' And this, presumably, will 
 show itself in differences of ' outward ' action, and so have 
 ' practical consequences.' 
 
 If, again, ' alteration of existence ' is not meant un- 
 equivocally to imply the activity of a human agent, if it 
 is intended to cover the possibility that it may come 
 about of itself, or as the result of an immanent self-develop- 
 ment of a non-human Absolute, it would be interesting 
 to know whether Mr. Bradley would attribute ' practice ' 
 also to his Absolute, or whether it would resemble the 
 Aristotelian ' gods ' in having none. In short, the formula 
 is woefully lacking in explicitness. 
 
 But even if we accepted Mr. Bradley's definition, we 
 should continue to be perplexed by his needlessly ambigu- 
 ous use of ' practical.' We seem to find the ' practical ' 
 subdivided into the practical and the non-practical (p. 319): 
 we are told (pp. 322 s.f. and 333) that Mr. Bradley is 
 clear (!) that in the end there is no distinction between 
 ' theory ' and ' practice ' ; and then again (what I own I 
 had suspected) that there are several senses of ' practical ' 
 such that what in one sense is practical is not so in 
 another (p. 323). 2 But is it not the duty of a writer who 
 
 1 Cp. Mr. Bradley's teaching on this subject {Appearance and Reality? 
 pp. 116-117 and 483-485) and the comments of Prof. James in his admirable paper 
 on ' the Experience of Activity' in the Psychological Review for January 1905 (xii. i). 
 
 2 In his Note on pp. 332-334 Mr. Bradley recurs to the point in a way which 
 seems to betray a feeling that his first treatment was not wholly satisfactory. 
 After again asserting that the distinction of practical and non-practical is ulti- 
 mately one of degree, he lays it down that nevertheless a ' practical ' activity may 
 be so called " when and so far as its product directly qualifies the existence which
 
 132 STUDIES IN HUMANISM iv 
 
 confessedly uses a term in several senses to explain 
 distinctly what those senses are ? 
 
 12. One hardly knows how much notice to take of an 
 apparently casual remark on page 322 to the effect that if 
 I understood my own doctrine, I should have to hold that 
 any end however perverted was rational, and any idea 
 however mad was truth, so soon as any one insisted on it. 
 For subsequently (p. 329) Mr. Bradley seems graciously 
 to decide that he will not attribute so ' insane ' a doctrine 
 even to me. Why then did he mention it as if it were 
 relevant? Did he not know that he was merely dishing 
 up an old objection to Protagoras, the effeteness of which 
 even Plato was candid enough to avow ? l Since then 
 this caricature has often been exposed, most recently in 
 the explicit account of the development of objective truth 
 out of subjective valuations given in Humanism, pages 
 58-60, its reappearance now that the conceptions of 
 variation and selection are in universal use is simply 
 stupefying, and if it is intended as a serious argument, it 
 shows clearly that Mr. Bradley has yet to grasp the essen- 
 tial difference between an axiom and a postulate. And 
 in any case Mr. Bradley could do his followers a great 
 service if, instead of so crudely travestying my argument, 
 he supplied them with an alternative to it, and showed 
 them how to deal with the empirical existence of the 
 infinite variety in ends and ideas. Or does he not admit 
 this to constitute a scientific problem, and is it merely in 
 " appearance " that our views diverge ? 
 
 I 3. Mr. Bradley's article is so rich in provocations of all 
 sorts that I forbear to reply to all of them on this occasion. 
 Still I should have liked to discuss the difficulties he raises 
 
 is altered." This involves a distinct correction of the definition given before. A 
 little later he admits that "in a secondary sense anything is practical so far as it 
 is taken as subserving a practical change." This surely would include every- 
 thing and amply account for the ' perception of a horse ' which Mr. Bradley is 
 pleased to call a 'revelation.' For, as the psychologists are daily showing, our 
 very modes of perception are relative to our practical needs. The human eye is 
 not like the eye of an eagle or a cat, because it is used differently, and the per- 
 ception of the horse would never have been attained, unless it had been useful to 
 such of our ancestors as had acquired eyes. Presumably the eyes of Micromegas 
 would be fitted to see a horse as little as Mr. Bradley's are to see a microbe or a 
 ghost. 
 
 1 Theaetetus, 166-7, and cp. Essay ii. 5-6.
 
 iv TRUTH AND MR. BRADLEY 133 
 
 about the conception of Will, which seems to be the only 
 other point which may be thought to possess some rele- 
 vance to the controversy, did we not seem so far from 
 agreeing on the meaning of the term. And so rather 
 than plunge into a long disquisition on the proper senses 
 of ' Will,' and their proper correlation, I will relinquish 
 the attempt to clear up matters. I will remark only that 
 Mr. Bradley's second definition of (a depersonalised) Will 
 as " a process of passage from idea into existence " is as 
 intellectualistic and as little acceptable as " the self-realisa- 
 tion of an idea," and am curious to know how he gets from 
 one to the other without exemplifying the pragmatist 
 doctrine that definitions are relative to purpose. More- 
 over, it seems exceedingly arbitrary and inconvenient to 
 deny the volitional quality of an achievement simply 
 because the Will has realised itself, and now accepts and 
 sustains the situation it has created. In the theological 
 language Mr. Bradley affects in this article, this would be 
 equivalent to the assertion that because God is the Creator, 
 He cannot also be the Sustainer, of the universe. I con- 
 clude, therefore, by pointing out that all the arguments 
 which Mr. Bradley bases on his conceptions of Will are 
 to me, once more, corrupted by irrelevance. 
 
 I shrink, similarly, from meeting many other interest- 
 ing points (most of them highly barbed !) with which Mr. 
 Bradley's paper bristles. The most relevant of these 
 would seem to be his curiosity about Prof. Bain's theory 
 of belief (p. 315), but I will not attempt to say how 
 far I think he has refuted it, because I have always found 
 it very hard to recognise it in the account given of it in 
 Mr. Bradley's Logic (as usual without specific references). 
 I have, however, sufficiently justified my conviction that, so 
 far from refuting Pragmatism by anticipation, Mr. Bradley 
 appears to me to have very nearly stumbled into it. 
 
 1 4. On page 331 Mr. Bradley appears to summarise 
 under four heads that part of his paper which may be 
 called argumentative. In the first charge that ' the 
 whole essence ' of truth has been subverted, I would read 
 ' analysed ' for ' subverted.' The second calls it ' a thought-
 
 134 STUDIES IN HUMANISM iv 
 
 less compromise ' to treat the result of past volitions as 
 being my will and choice. But why a ' compromise ' ? 
 With whom or what? What have I compromised but 
 Mr. Bradley's preconceptions, by declining to ignore the 
 volitional acceptance in the recognition of ' fact ' or to 
 plunge into the flagrant contradictions of his own 
 account ? And why ' thoughtless ' ? Because it does not 
 lend itself to Mr. Bradley's travesties ? The third charge 
 is partly irrelevant, in so far as it rests on definitions of 
 ' will ' which I reject, partly answered by the account I 
 have given of the factual basis in our cognitive procedure. 
 
 As for Mr. Bradley's fourth difficulty, I must own that 
 I should never have guessed from his very perfunctory 
 and obscure exposition of it that he attached any par- 
 ticular importance to it. And even after I had perceived 
 that it was to be made into a capital charge, it failed to 
 impress me. And so it seems sufficient to point out that 
 if knowledge be conceived as secondary without being 
 divorced from action, and if due reflection is thus rendered 
 a useful habit, there is no paradox in holding that it may 
 also profitably reflect on its own genesis. So far from 
 condemning philosophic reflection, I could even wish that 
 its use, especially when conducted on the right humanist 
 lines, were more extensive. 
 
 15. These replies would perhaps suffice, were it not 
 that Mr. Bradley's paper contains much more than argu- 
 ments. He makes also what looks like an attempt to 
 arouse theological prejudice against us. 
 
 It is very surprising to observe the general air of 
 religiosity in which Mr. Bradley has enveloped himself. 
 I looked in vain for my beloved bete noire, the Absolute, 
 and wondered why it had been sent to dwell with Hegel 
 in eternal night. In its place one found not only the old 
 ambiguous use of ' God ' in all its philosophic deceptive- 
 ness, 1 but even allusions to the Jehovah of Mr. Bradley's 
 youth, and wondered why the Baal of ' Jericho ' received 
 no honourable mention. Now, as I had always respected 
 Mr. Bradley's philosophy for never seeking to curry 
 
 1 Cp. Essay xii. 6.
 
 iv TRUTH AND MR. BRADLEY 135 
 
 favour with theology by playing on ambiguous phrases, 
 I was naturally greatly puzzled by this change of face. 
 Was it to be regarded as a reversion, like the return to 
 the ' correspondence ' view of truth, or respected as an 
 indication of a change of heart, of a pathetic recrudes- 
 cence of what Mr. Bradley had learnt (or, as he says, 
 'imbibed') in his youth about Jehovah (p. 332)? Or 
 were we witnessing a strategic movement of the absolutist 
 host, necessitated by the unexpected force of the enemy, 
 and a recoil of its ' left ' upon its ' right ' wing ? Or lastly, 
 was it to be interpreted, less charitably, as an attempt to 
 enlist religious prejudices against the new philosophy by 
 unfair appeals to a few travestied formulas of a musty 
 theology. 
 
 The last seemed the boldest and riskiest strategy, and 
 I should have thought Mr. Bradley too prudent to attempt 
 it. The controversial maxim verketzern gilt nicht has 
 not yet taken such firm root in Oxford that it should be 
 superfluous for us to safeguard ourselves by repudiating 
 an interpretation and an impression which his language 
 may countenance. I must protest therefore against the 
 insinuation that because our views do not conform with 
 the dogmatic definition of religion it has pleased Mr. 
 Bradley to impose, we may fitly be branded as irreligious 
 and as blasphemers against the deity whom Mr. Bradley 
 so strangely denominates " the lord of suffering and of sin 
 and of death " (p. 315 ). Now I am well aware that the 
 definition of religion is a difficult matter, and that many 
 of its empirical manifestations accord ill with any of its 
 definitions. But since the publication of James's Varieties 
 of Religious Experience, I should have thought that there 
 were two things that even the hardiest apriorist would 
 have shrunk from. The first is dogmatising concerning 
 what religion must mean, without troubling to inquire 
 what psychologically the various forms of religious senti- 
 ment have meant and do mean. Now if Mr. Bradley had 
 condescended for a moment to contemplate the objective 
 facts of concrete religion, he could not but have been 
 struck with the fact that Humanism has the closest
 
 136 STUDIES IN HUMANISM iv 
 
 affinities with such important religious phenomena as 
 Newman's 'grammar of assent' and the widespread 
 theology of Ritschl. And from James also he might 
 have learnt that amid all the varieties of religious feeling 
 the one most constant conception of the divine has been, 
 not some desiccated formula about the Unity of the 
 Universe, but a demand for something to respond to the 
 outcry of the human heart. 
 
 I should have thought, therefore, secondly, that what- 
 ever might be said about the logical subversiveness of the 
 new views, their value for religion was secured against 
 attack. For has not James's doctrine of the Will to 
 believe made manifest the pragmatic value of faith, and 
 put the religious postulates on the same footing with 
 those of science? 1 Nay, has not the common charge against 
 us been that our doctrines pander to all the crudest 
 superstitions of the vulgar ? Mr. Bradley, I suppose, 
 acquits us on this charge ; but his own is far less plausible. 
 
 And when one remembers further how Mr. Bradley 
 has himself described religion as mere ' appearance ' 
 riddled with contradictions and denied that " a God 
 which is all in all is the God of religion," 2 it seems well 
 slightly humorous to find him now setting up standards 
 of ' orthodox ' theology and solemnly anathematising 
 those who have doubted the omnipotence of their ' God ' 
 and the religious value of his (p. 331, cp. p. 316). One 
 is inclined merely to retort in the words of Valentine 
 " Lass unsern Herr Gott aus dem Spass" 
 
 His attacks (p. 331) on the two clerical contributors 
 to Personal Idealism, Dr. Rashdall and particularly Dr. 
 Bussell, are peculiarly invidious as being ad captandum 
 appeals to " the more orthodox theologians " and preju- 
 dicial to their professional status. But it seems some- 
 what doubtful whether he will find any one nai'vely 
 ' orthodox ' enough to reduce Christianity to a sort 
 of Crypto -Buddhism at the behest of the author of 
 Appearance and Reality. 
 
 1 Essay xvi. 2, 9. 
 2 Appearance and Reality ; p. 448 (ist ed. ). Cp. Essay xii. 6.
 
 iv TRUTH AND MR. BRADLEY 137 
 
 Mr. Bradley must have been well aware that his 
 language was wholly ' popular.' He must have known, 
 as well as Dr. Rashdall or I, that the ' omnipotence ' he 
 claims for his Absolute is not the ' omnipotence ' of the 
 theologians, and that his Absolute is not obviously identical 
 with the superhuman power, adequate to all human needs, 
 which the religious sentiments legitimately postulate. 
 He must know too that in no religion is the Divine, the 
 principle of Help and Justice, ever actually regarded as 
 omnipotent in practice. 1 Again, seeing that he has plainly 
 shown us that his Absolute possesses the religious attri- 
 butes only as it possesses all else, and that for all human 
 purposes it is impotent and worthless, was it not most 
 injudicious to attack us on religious grounds ? And has 
 he not justly provoked the retort that we feel his whole 
 Absolutism to be a worthless technicality, if its true 
 character is revealed, and a fulsome fraud upon all man's 
 most sacred feelings, if it is not ? 
 
 1 6. Curiously enough, however, Mr. Bradley's paper 
 does not close with the enigmatic piety which has provoked 
 these strictures. It is followed by a fit of agnosticism 
 which might have come straight out of Herbert Spencer's 
 Autobiography? The promise of philosophy " even in the 
 end is no clear theory nor any complete understanding or 
 vision " ; " its certain reward is a continual evidence and 
 a heightened apprehension of the ineffable mystery of 
 life." Only Spencer and Mr. Bradley tend in opposite 
 directions : the former, more truly, feels that this final 
 incomprehensibility is a " paralysing thought," and inclines 
 towards the authoritative dogma of some , religion that 
 will claim to know ; the latter seems to regard it as 
 edifying, and abandons the religious formulas to dis- 
 burden himself of his contradictions in the bottomless pit 
 of the Absolute. To the one, religion holds out more 
 hopes of knowledge than philosophy, to the other, less. 
 But as a satisfaction to the philosophic craving, to the 
 will-to-know, neither policy, alas, seems to promise much. 
 
 1 Cp. Essay, xii. 6. 
 2 Cp. that work, ii. pp. 469-471.
 
 138 STUDIES IN HUMANISM iv 
 
 The philosopher's reasoning is rewarded merely with the 
 sorry privilege accorded by Polyphemus to Odysseus. 
 
 For what profit is it, if break down it must, that it 
 should perish somewhat later ? What a satire too it is 
 upon a philosophic quest that started with the most con- 
 fident anticipations of the rationality of the universe to 
 have to end in such fiasco ! Can Mr. Bradley wonder, if 
 this is really all his philosophy can come to, that philo- 
 sophy is disregarded and despised, or that other philo- 
 sophers prefer to bend their footsteps in more promising 
 directions ? And it seems still stranger that it should be 
 deemed appropriate to scathe all fresh attempts at ex- 
 ploration with unmeasured contumely a priori. Surely a 
 somewhat humbler and less ' hybristic ' note would better 
 become the actual situation ! 
 
 1 7. One notes indeed with satisfaction that in places 
 Mr. Bradley seems to evince some dim consciousness of 
 the real predicament. At all events he is growing more 
 liberal in throwing open for discussion questions which 
 we have always been assured on his side had been 
 definitively closed. We may welcome, therefore, and note 
 for future use, Mr. Bradley's admission of " well-known 
 difficulties " in the infinity of God (p. 331 ), his description 
 of pluralism as " a very promising adventure," and the 
 " pleasure " it would give him to learn that its diffi- 
 culties can be surmounted (p. 327). The tone of these 
 admissions, it is true, still smacks of the judge who was 
 ' open to conviction, but by Jove would like to see the 
 man who could convince him.' And he hastens to add 
 that there are ' obvious difficulties ' (not stated) on the 
 other side. Nor does he make it clear why, if real anti- 
 nomies exist on these points, he should have so decisively 
 adopted the one alternative, instead of suspending judgment 
 and looking out for a real solution. 
 
 But on the whole I read these admissions as a hopeful 
 sign that the dwellers in ' Jericho ' are not so content with 
 their gloomy ghettoes as they had seemed, nor so sure that 
 it is in very deed the heavenly Jerusalem. Ere long they 
 may come out to parley of their own accord and offer us
 
 iv TRUTH AND MR. BRADLEY 139 
 
 terms, nay themselves dismantle antiquated defences that 
 are useless against modern ordnance ! And when the 
 stronghold of the Absolute is once declared an open town, 
 no longer cramped within walls, nor serving as a strait 
 prison for the human soul, it can be refurbished and 
 extended for those to dwell in whose tastes its habitations 
 please. We too shall then have no further motive to molest 
 an Absolutism which has ceased to oppress us and to be 
 a menace to the liberty of thought. We may still decline 
 to go to 'Jericho,' and prefer the open country, abiding 
 in our tents with the household gods who suffice for our 
 needs and need our co-operation because of their " pathetic 
 weakness." 1 But why should we contend against Absolutes 
 like Prof. Taylor's, which is finally reduced to an emotional 
 postulate, 2 or Prof. Royce's 3 genial conception, which 
 becomes the ultimate satisfaction of our social instincts 
 and forms a sort of salon where all are at home and can 
 meet their friends, so long as we escape the grim all- 
 compelling monster of Mr. Bradley's nightmare ? And 
 when we are no longer treated as Ishmaelites, there will 
 be peace in the land, a peace attained, not by what must 
 surely by this time seem the impossible method of snub- 
 bing and snuffing out the new philosophy, but by a 
 mutual toleration based on respect for the various idio- 
 syncrasies of men. 4 Nor will there then any longer be 
 occasion to reproach Philosophy that its favourite idolon 
 fori is simply Billingsgate. 
 
 1 8. Life will be easier in those days, and with it philo- 
 sophy. For philosophers will have ceased to confound 
 obscurity with profundity, difficulty with truth, and to 
 expect that because some truths are hard, therefore all 
 hard sayings are true. Nor will they any longer feel 
 
 1 In Dr. Bussell's striking phrase (Personal Idealism, p. 341). 
 
 a Elements of Metaphysics, p. 317 ; cp. p. 253, and Professor Taylor's dis- 
 claimer in Mind, N.S. No. 57, p. 86, from which it must be inferred that the 
 claim to universal cogency is maintained and that the argument for a postulated 
 Absolute was only ad hominem. But my objection to a postulated Absolute is 
 not to the principle as such, but merely to the fact that this postulate frustrates 
 itself. 
 
 3 On the Eternal and the Practical. 
 
 4 Cp. Essay xii. 8, 10.
 
 140 STUDIES IN HUMANISM iv 
 
 aggrieved, like Mr. Bradley (p. 335 s.f.} at the prospect 
 of everything that would render philosophy easier and 
 more attractive. For they will realise that the intrinsic 
 difficulties of thinking as an exercise of faculty will always 
 suffice to preserve the ' dignity ' of philosophy, and that it 
 is needless to enhance them by adding unintelligibilities 
 and aimless word-play. 
 
 Philosophy will always be hard, I agree. In some 
 respects and for three reasons : because thinking is the 
 hardest of exercises, because it presupposes much special 
 knowledge to grasp the use of general conceptions which 
 are devoid of meaning in abstraction from the experience 
 they serve to organise, and because to rethink old con- 
 ceptions into new ones is irksome and frequently demands 
 a flash of insight before we can really ' see ' it all. But 
 one might well despair of the human reason if what had 
 once been clearly thought could not always be lucidly 
 expressed. Obscurity of expression is nothing admirable ; 
 it is always a bar to the comprehension of any subject, 
 and it is fatal in a subject where the intrinsic difficulties 
 are so great and the psychological variations of the 
 minds which apprehend them so extreme ; it is, moreover, 
 an easy refuge for confusion of thought. And it is 
 surely one of the quaintest of academic superstitions to 
 think that obscurity and confusion of thought have as 
 such, ' pedagogical value.' In view of these facts what 
 reason can there be for making Philosophy anything 
 like so obscure, hard, repulsive, and unprofitable as the 
 intellectualist systems which have obfuscated us so long?
 
 THE AMBIGUITY OF TRUTH 1 
 
 ARGUMENT 
 
 The great antithesis between Pragmatism and Intellectualism as to the nature 
 of Truth. I. The predication of truth a specifically human habit. The 
 existence of false claims to truth. How then are false claims to be dis- 
 criminated from true ? Intellectualism fails to answer this, and succumbs 
 to the ambiguity of truth (' claim ' and ' validity '). Illustrations from 
 Plato and others. II. Universality and importance of the ambiguity. 
 The refusal of intellectualism to consider it. III. The pragmatic 
 answer. Relevance and value relative to purpose. Hence ' truth ' a 
 valuation. The convergence of values. IV. The evaluation of claims 
 proceeds pragmatically. ' Truth ' implies relevance and usually reference 
 to proximate ends. V. The pragmatic definition of ' Truth ' : its value 
 for refuting naturalism and simplifying the classification of the sciences. 
 VI. A challenge to Intellectualism to refute Pragmatism by evaluating 
 any truth non-pragmatically. 
 
 THE purpose of this essay is to bring to a clear issue, and 
 so possibly to the prospect of a settlement, the conflict of 
 opinion now raging in the philosophic world as to the 
 nature of the conception of ' truth.' This issue is an 
 essential part of the greater conflict between the old in- 
 tellectualist and the new ' pragmatist ' school of thought, 
 which extends over the whole field of philosophy. For, 
 in consequence of the difference between the aims and 
 methods of the two schools, there is probably no intel- 
 lectualist treatment of any problem which does not need, 
 and will not bear, restatement in voluntarist terms. But 
 the clash of these two great antithetical attitudes towards 
 life is certainly more dramatic at some points than at 
 others. The influence of belief upon thought, its value 
 
 1 A revised form, somewhat expanded in i, of a paper which appeared in 
 Jlfindfor April 1906 (N.S. No. 58). 
 
 141
 
 142 STUDIES IN HUMANISM v 
 
 and function in knowledge, the relation of ' theory ' to 
 ' practice,' the possibility of abstracting from emotional 
 interest, and of ignoring in logic the psychological con- 
 ditions of all judgment, the connexion between knowing 
 and being, ' truth ' and ' fact,' ' origin ' and ' validity,' the 
 question of how and how far the real which is said to be 
 ' discovered ' is really ' made,' the ' plasticity ' and deter- 
 minable indetermination of reality, the contribution of 
 voluntary acceptance to the constitution of ' fact,' the 
 nature of purpose and of ' mechanism,' the value of teleo- 
 logy, the all-controlling presence of value-judgments and 
 the inter-relations of their various forms, the proper mean- 
 ing of 'reason,' 'faith," thought,' 'will,' 'freedom,' 'necessity,' 
 all these are critical points at which burning questions 
 have arisen or may arise, and at all of them the new 
 philosophy seems able to provide a distinctive and con- 
 sistent treatment Thus there is throughout the field 
 every promise of interesting discoveries and of a success- 
 ful campaign for a thoroughgoing voluntarism that un- 
 sparingly impugns the intellectualist tradition. 
 
 But the aim of the present essay must be restricted. 
 It will be confined to one small corner of the battlefield, 
 viz. to the single question of the making of ' truth ' and 
 the meaning of a term which is more often mouthed in a 
 passion of unreasoning loyalty than subjected to calm and 
 logical analysis. I propose to show, ( I ) that such analysis 
 is necessary and possible ; (2) that it results in a problem 
 which the current intellectualist logic can neither dismiss 
 nor solve ; (3) that to discard the abstractions of this 
 formal logic at once renders this problem simple and 
 soluble ; (4) that to solve it is to establish the pragmatist 
 criterion of truth 5(5) that the resulting definition of truth 
 unifies experience and rationalises a well-established 
 classification of the sciences ; and (6) I shall conclude 
 with a twofold challenge to intellectualist logicians, failure 
 to meet which will, I think, bring out with all ' desirable 
 clearness that their system at present is as devoid of in- 
 tellectual completeness as it is of practical fecundity. 
 
 This design, it will be seen, deliberately rules out the
 
 v THE AMBIGUITY OF TRUTH 143 
 
 references to questions of belief, desire, and will, and their 
 ineradicable influence upon cognition, with which Volun- 
 tarism has made so much effective play, and this although 
 I am keenly conscious both that their presence as psychical 
 facts in all knowing is hardly open to denial, 1 and that 
 their recognition is essential to the full appreciation of 
 our case. But I am desirous of meeting our adversaries as 
 far as possible on their own ground, that of abstract logic, 
 and of giving them every advantage of position. And so, 
 even at the risk of reducing the real interest of my 
 subject, I will discuss it on the ground of as ' pure,' i.e. as 
 formal, a logic as is compatible with the continuance of 
 actual thinking. 
 
 Let us begin then with the problem of analysing the 
 conception of ' truth,' and, to clear up our ideas, let us first 
 observe the extension of the term. We may safely lay it 
 down that the use of truth is tStov av0pa>7ra), a habit 
 peculiar to man. Animals, that is, do not attain to or 
 use the conception. They do not effect discriminations 
 within their experience by means of the predicates ' true ' 
 and ' false.' Again, even the philosophers who have been 
 most prodigal of dogmas concerning the nature of an 
 ' infinite ' intelligence (whatever that may mean !), have 
 evinced much hesitation about attributing to it the dis- 
 cursive procedures of our own, and have usually hinted 
 that it would transcend the predication of truth and 
 falsehood. As being then a specific peculiarity of the 
 human mind, the conception of ' truth ' seems closely 
 analogous to that of ' good ' and of ' beautiful,' which seem 
 as naturally to possess antithetical predicates in the ' bad ' 
 and the ' ugly,' as the ' true ' does in the ' false.' And it 
 may be anticipated that when our psychology has quite 
 outgrown the materialistic prejudices of its adolescence, 
 it will probably regard all these habits of judging ex- 
 
 1 In point of fact such denial has never been attempted : the inquiries as to 
 how a ' pure ' thought, abstracted from the psychological conditions of actual 
 thinking, can validly be considered by logic have merely been ignored.
 
 144 STUDIES IN HUMANISM v 
 
 periences as just as distinctive and ultimate features of 
 mental process as are the ultimate facts of our perception. 
 In a sense, therefore, the predications of ' good ' and ' bad,' 
 ' true ' and ' false,' etc., may take rank with the experiences 
 of ' sweet,' ' red,' ' loud,' ' hard,' etc., as ultimate facts which 
 need be analysed no further. 1 
 
 We may next infer that by a truth we mean a pro- 
 position to which this attribute ' true ' has somehow been 
 attached, and which, consequently, is envisaged sub specie 
 veri. The Truth, therefore, is the totality of things to 
 which this mode of treatment is applied or applicable, 
 whether or not this extends over the whole of our ex- 
 perience. 
 
 If now all propositions which involve this predication 
 of truth really deserved it, if all that professes and seems 
 to be ' true ' were really true, no difficulty would arise. 
 Things would be ' true ' or ' false ' as simply and un- 
 ambiguously as they are ' sweet ' or ' sour,' ' red ' or ' blue,' 
 and nothing could disturb our judgments or convict them 
 of illusion. But in the sphere of knowledge such, notori- 
 ously, is not the case. Our anticipations are often falsified, 
 our claims prove frequently untenable. Our truths may 
 turn out to be false, our goods to be bad : falsehood and 
 error are as rampant as evil in the world of our ex- 
 perience. 
 
 This fact compels us (i) to an enlargement, and (2) to 
 a distinction, in the realm of truth. For the logician 
 ' truth ' becomes a problem, enlarged so as to include 
 ' falsity ' as well, and so, strictly, our problem is the con- 
 templation of experience sub specie veri etfalsi. Secondly, 
 if not all that claims truth is true, must we not distinguish 
 this initial claim from whatever procedure subsequently 
 justifies or validates it? Truth, therefore, will become 
 ambiguous. It will mean primarily a claim which may or 
 may not turn out to be valid. It will mean, secondarily, 
 such a claim after it has been tested and ratified, by 
 
 1 The purport of this remark is to confute the notion, which seems dimly to 
 underlie some intellectualist criticisms, that the specific character of the truth- 
 predication is ignored in pragmatist quarters.
 
 v THE AMBIGUITY OF TRUTH 145 
 
 processes which it behoves us to examine. In the first 
 sense, as a claim, it will always have to be regarded with 
 suspicion. For we shall not know whether it is really 
 and fully true, and we shall tend to reserve this honour- 
 able predicate for what has victoriously sustained its 
 claim. And once we realise that a claim to truth is 
 involved in every assertion as such, our vigilance will be 
 sharpened. A claim to truth, being inherent in assertion 
 as such, will come to seem a formal and trivial thing, 
 worth noting once for all, but possessing little real interest 
 for knowledge. A formal logic, therefore, which restricts 
 itself to the registration of such formal claims, we shall 
 regard as solemn trifling ; but it will seem a matter of 
 vital importance and of agonised inquiry what it is that 
 validates such claims and makes them really true. And 
 with regard to any ' truth ' that is asserted, our first 
 demand will be to know what is de facto its condition, 
 whether what it sets forth has been fully validated, or 
 whether it is still a mere, and possibly a random, claim. 
 For this evidently will make all the difference to the 
 meaning and logical value of an assertion. That 
 '2 + 2 = 4' and that ' truth is indefinable ' stand, e.g. 
 logically on a very different footing : the one is part of 
 a tried and tested system of arithmetical truth, the other 
 the desperate refuge of a bankrupt or indolent theory. 
 
 Under such conditions far-reaching confusions could 
 be avoided only by the unobtrusive operation of a bene- 
 ficent providence. But that such miraculous intervention 
 should guard logicians against the consequences of their 
 negligence was hardly to be hoped for. Accordingly 
 we find a whole cloud of witnesses to this confusion, 
 from Plato, the great originator of the intellectualistic in- 
 terpretation of life, down to the latest ' critics ' of Pragma- 
 tism with all their pathetic inability to do more than 
 reiterate the confusions of the Theaetetus. For example, 
 this is how Plato conducts his refutation of Protagoras in 
 a critical stage of his polemic : 1 
 
 "Socrates. And how about Protagoras himself? If 
 
 1 Theaetetus, 170 E-i 71 B, Jowett's translation. Italics mine. 
 
 L
 
 146 STUDIES IN HUMANISM 
 
 neither he nor the multitude thought, as indeed they do 
 not think, that man is the measure of all things, must it 
 not follow that the truth (validity] of which Protagoras 
 wrote would be true (claim] to no one ? But if you 
 suppose that he himself thought this, and that the multi- 
 tude does not agree with him, you must begin by allowing 
 that in whatever proportion the many are more than one, 
 his truth (validity] is more untrue (claim] than true ? " (not 
 necessarily, for all truths start their career in a minority 
 of one, as an individual's claims, and most obtain recogni- 
 tion only after a long struggle). 
 
 " Theodorus. That would follow if the truth (validity) 
 is supposed to vary with individual opinion. 
 
 Socrates. And the best of the joke is that he acknow- 
 ledges the truth (as claim, Protagoras ; as validity, Plato) 
 of their opinion who believe his own opinion to be false ; 
 for he admits that the opinions of all men are true (as 
 claims]." (Cp. also p. 309.) 
 
 For a more compact expression of the same ambiguity 
 we may have recourse to Mr. Bradley. "About the truth 
 of this Law" (of Contradiction) " so far as it applies, there 
 is in my opinion no question. The question will be rather 
 as to how far the Law applies and how far therefore it is 
 true^ * The first proposition is either a truism or false. 
 It is a truism if ' truth ' is taken in the sense of ' claim ' ; 
 for it then only states that a claim is good if the ques- 
 tion of ,its application is waived. In any other sense of 
 'truth' it is false (or rather self -contradictory), since it 
 admits that there is a question about the application of 
 the ' Law,' and it is not until the application is attempted 
 that validity can be tested. In the second proposition it 
 is implied that ' truth ' depends, not on the mere claim, 
 but on the possibility of application. 
 
 Or, again, let us note how Prof. A. E. Taylor betters 
 his master's instruction in an interesting article on ' Truth 
 and Practice' in the Phil. Rev. for May 1905. He first lays 
 it down that " true propositions are those which have an 
 unconditional claim on our recognition " (of their validity, 
 
 1 Mind, v. N.S., 20, p. 470. Italics mine.
 
 v THE AMBIGUITY OF TRUTH 147 
 
 or merely of their claim ?), and then pronounces that 
 " truth is just the system of propositions which have an 
 unconditional claim to be recognised as valid" * And lest 
 he should not have made the paradox of this confusion 
 evident enough, he repeats (p. 273) that "the truth of a 
 statement means not the actual fact of its recognition " 
 (i.e. of its de facto validity), " but its rightful claim on our 
 recognition" (p. 27/j.). 2 In short, as he does not distin- 
 guish between ' claim ' and ' right,' he cannot see that the 
 question of truth is as to when and how a ' claim ' is to 
 be recognised as ' rightful.' And though he wisely refrains 
 from even attempting to tell us how the clamorousness of 
 a claim is going to establish its validity, it is clear that 
 his failure to observe the distinction demolishes his 
 definition of truth. 
 
 Even Mr. R. F. A. Hoernle, by far the ablest of the 
 critics of Pragmatism, lapses at times into this confusion. 
 Thus on p. 475 of his excellent article in Mind, xiv., 
 his argument fails to distinguish between ' validity ' and 
 ' claim to validity.' Mr. Joachim's Nature of Truth does 
 not exemplify the confusion so clearly merely because it 
 does not get to the point at which it is revealed. His 
 theory of truth breaks down before this point is 
 reached. He conceives the nature of truth to concern 
 only the question of what ' the ideal ' should be, even 
 though it should be unattainable by man, as indeed it 
 turns out to be. Thus the problem of how we validate 
 claims to truth is treated as irrelevant. 3 Hence it is only 
 casually that phrases like ' entitled to claim ' occur (p. 
 109), or that the substantiating of a claim to truth is said 
 to consist in its recognition and adoption " by all intelligent 
 people" (p. 27). Still on p. I 18 it seems to be implied 
 that a " thought which claims truth as affirming universal 
 meaning " need not undergo any further verification. It 
 is evident, in short, that not much can be expected from 
 theories which have overlooked so vital a distinction. 
 
 1 Pp. 271, 288. Italics mine. 
 
 2 Cp. also pp. 276 and 278. 
 
 3 As it is by Mr. Bradley, who, as Mr. Hoernle remarks, "deals with the 
 question how uv correct our errors in a footnote ! " (Mind, xiv. 321).
 
 148 STUDIES IN HUMANISM v 
 
 Their unawareness of it will vitiate all their discussions 
 of the nature of ' truth,' by which they will mean now the 
 one sense, now the other, and now both, in inextricable 
 fallacy. 
 
 II 
 
 Our provisional analysis, therefore, has resulted in our 
 detecting an important ambiguity in the conception of 
 truth which, unless it can be cleared up, must hopelessly 
 vitiate all discussion. In view of this distressing situation 
 it becomes our bounden duty to inquire how an accepted 
 truth may be distinguished from a mere claim, and how a 
 claim to truth may be validated. For any logic which 
 aims at dealing with actual thinking the urgency of this 
 inquiry can hardly be exaggerated. But even the most 
 ' purely ' intellectual and futilely formal theory of know- 
 ledge can hardly refuse to undertake it. For the 
 ambiguity which raises the problem is absolutely all- 
 pervading. And, as we saw, a formal claim to truth is 
 coextensive with the sphere of logical judgment. We 
 are always liable, therefore, to misinterpret every judg- 
 ment. We may take as a validated truth what in point 
 of fact is really an unsupported claim. But inasmuch as 
 such a claim may always be erroneous, we are constantly 
 in danger of accepting as validly true what, if tested, would 
 be utterly untenable. Every assertion is ambiguous, and 
 as it shows no outward indication of what it really means, 
 we can hardly be said to know the meaning of any 
 assertion whatsoever. On any view of logic, the disastrous 
 and demoralising consequences of such a situation may 
 be imagined. It is imperative therefore to distinguish 
 sharply between the formal inclusion of a statement in 
 the sphere of truth-or-falsity, and its incorporation into a 
 system of tested truth. For unless we do so, we simply 
 court deception. 
 
 This possibility of deception, moreover, becomes the 
 more serious when we realise how impotent our formal 
 logic is to conceive this indispensable distinction and to 
 guard us against so fatal a confusion. Instead of proving
 
 v THE AMBIGUITY OF TRUTH 149 
 
 a help to the logician it here becomes a snare, by reason 
 of the fundamental abstraction of its standpoint. For if, 
 following Mr. Alfred Sidgwick's brilliant lead, we regard 
 as formal logic every treatment of our cognitive processes 
 which abstracts from the concrete application of our logical 
 functions to actual cases of knowing, it is easy to see that 
 no such logic can help us, because the meaning of an asser- 
 tion can never be determined apart from the actual applica- 
 tion. 1 From the mere verbal form, that is, we cannot tell 
 whether we are dealing with a valid judgment or a sheer 
 claim. To settle this, we must go behind the statement : we 
 must go into the rights of the case. Meaning depends upon 
 purpose, and purpose is a question of fact, of the context 
 and use of the form of words in actual knowing. But 
 all this is just what the abstract standpoint of formal 
 logic forbids us to examine. It conceives the meaning 
 of a proposition to be somehow inherent in it as a form 
 of words, apart from its use. And so when it finds that 
 the same words may be used to convey a variety of 
 meanings in various contexts, it solemnly declares the 
 form of judgment to be as such ambiguous, even though 
 in each actual case of use the meaning intended may be 
 perfectly clear to the meanest understanding ! It seems 
 to me extremely doubtful, therefore, whether a genuine 
 admission of the validity of our distinction could be 
 extracted from any formal logician. For it is greatly 
 to be feared that even if he could be induced to admit 
 it in words, he would yet insist on treating it too as 
 purely formal, and rule out on principle attempts to 
 determine how de facto the distinction was established 
 and employed. 
 
 Although, therefore, our distinction appears to be as 
 clear as it is important, it does not seem at all certain 
 that it would be admitted by the logicians who are so 
 enamoured of truth in the abstract that they have ceased 
 to recognise it in the concrete. More probably they 
 would protest that logic was being conducted back to 
 the old puzzle of a general criterion of truth and error, 
 
 1 Cp. Essays i. 2, and iii. 10.
 
 150 STUDIES IN HUMANISM v 
 
 and would adduce the failures of their predecessors as a 
 valid excuse for their present apathy. Or at most they 
 might concede that a distinction between a truth and a 
 claim to truth must indeed be made, but allege that it 
 could not take any but a negative form. The sole 
 criterion of truth, that is, which can be given, is that truth 
 is not self-contradictory or incoherent. 
 
 This statement, in the first place, means a refusal to 
 go into the actual question how truth is made : it is an 
 attempt to avoid the test of application, and to conceive 
 truth as inherent in the logical terms in the abstract. 
 But this is really to render ' truth ' wholly verbal. For 
 the inherent meanings are merely the established meanings 
 of the words employed. It is, secondly, merely dogmatic 
 assertion : it can hardly inspire confidence so long as it 
 precedes and precludes examination of the positive solu- 
 tions of the problem, and assumes the conceptions of ' self- 
 contradiction ' or ' incoherence ' as the simplest things in 
 the world. In point of fact neither of them has been 
 adequately analysed by intellectualist logicians, nor is 
 either of them naturally so translucent as to shed a flood 
 of light on any subject. As, however, I cannot now enter 
 upon their obscurities, and examine whether either 
 ' coherence ' or ' consistency ' really means anything in 
 the abstract, it must suffice to remark that Captain 
 Knox's masterly article in the April (1905) number of 
 Mind 1 contains ample justification for what I have said 
 about the principle of contradiction. If on the other 
 hand the ' negative criterion ' be stated in the form of 
 incoherence, I would inquire merely how intellectualist 
 logic proposes to distinguish the logical coherence, to 
 which it appeals, from the psychological coherence, which 
 it despises. Until this difficult (or impossible?) feat has 
 been achieved, we may safely move on. 2 
 
 1 N.S. No. 54. 2 Cf. also Humanism, pp. 52-53.
 
 v THE AMBIGUITY OF TRUTH 151 
 
 III 
 
 Let us proceed therefore to discard old prejudices and 
 to consider how in point of fact we discriminate between 
 ' claims ' and ' truths,' how the raw material of a science 
 is elaborated into its final structure, how, in short, truth 
 is made. Now this question is not intrinsically a 
 hopeless one. It is not even theoretically particularly 
 difficult to answer. For it concerns essentially facts 
 which may be observed, and with care and attention it 
 should be possible to determine whether the procedures 
 of the various sciences have anything in common, and if 
 so what. By such an inductive appeal to the facts, 
 therefore, we greatly simplify our problem, and may 
 possibly discover its solution. Any obstacle which we 
 may encounter will come merely from the difficulty of 
 intelligently observing the special procedures of the 
 many sciences and of seizing their salient points and 
 general import ; we shall not be foredoomed to failure 
 by any intrinsic absurdity of our enterprise. 
 
 Now it would be possible to arrive at our solution 
 by a critical examination of every known science in 
 detail, but it is evident that this procedure would be 
 very long and laborious. It seems better, therefore, 
 merely to state the condensed results of such investigations. 
 They will in this shape stand out more clearly and better 
 exhibit the trend of an argument which runs as follows : 
 
 It being taken as established that the sphere of logic 
 is that of the antithetical valuations ' true ' and ' false,' 
 we observe in the first place that in every science the 
 truth or falsehood of an answer depends on its relevance 
 to the question raised in that science. An irrelevant 
 answer is justly treated as non-existent for that science, 
 i.e. as, strictly, neither ' true ' nor ' false.' We observe, 
 secondly, that every science has a definitely circumscribed 
 subject-matter, a definite method of treating it, and a 
 definitely articulated body of interpretations. Every 
 science, in other words, forms a system of truths about 
 some subject. But inasmuch as every science is con-
 
 152 STUDIES IN HUMANISM v 
 
 cerned with some aspect of our total experience, and no 
 science deals with that whole under every aspect, it is 
 clear that sciences arise by the limitation of subjects, the 
 selection of standpoints, and the specialisation of methods. 
 All these operations, however, are artificial, and in a 
 sense arbitrary, and none of them can be conceived to 
 come about except by the action of a purposing intelli- 
 gence. It follows that the nature of the purpose which 
 is pursued in a science will yield the deepest insight into 
 its nature ; for what we want to know in the science will 
 determine the questions we put, and their bearing on the 
 questions put will determine the standing of the answers 
 we attain. If we can take the answers as relevant to 
 our questions and conducive to our ends, they will yield 
 ' truth ' ; if we cannot, ' falsehood.' 1 
 
 Seeing thus that everywhere truth and falsehood 
 depend on the purpose which constitutes the science and 
 are bestowed accordingly, we begin to perceive that the 
 predicates ' true ' and ' false ' are not unrelated to ' good ' 
 and ' bad.' For good and bad also (in their wider and 
 primary sense) have reference to purpose. ' Good ' is what 
 conduces to, ' bad ' what thwarts, a purpose. And so it 
 would seem that ' true ' and ' false ' were valuations, forms 
 of the ' good '-or-' bad ' which indicates a reference to an 
 end. Or, as Aristotle said long ago, in a passage the 
 significance of which I am ashamed to have observed 
 only quite recently, " in the case of the intelligence which 
 is theoretical, and neither practical nor productive, its 
 ' good ' and ' bad ' is ' truth ' and ' falsehood.' " 2 
 
 Truth, then, being a valuation, has reference to a 
 purpose. What precisely that reference is will depend 
 on the purpose, which may extend over the whole range 
 of human interest. But it is only in its primary aspect, 
 as valued by individuals, that the predication of ' truth ' 
 will refer thus widely to any purpose any one may 
 entertain in a cognitive operation. For it stands to 
 
 1 But cp. note on p. 154. 
 
 2 Eth. Nic. vi. 2, 3. Cp. De Anim. iii. 7, 431, b 10, where it is stated 
 that "the true and false are in the same class with the good and bad," 
 i.e. are valuations.
 
 v THE AMBIGUITY OF TRUTH 153 
 
 reason that the power of constituting 'objective' truth 
 is not granted so easily. Society exercises almost as 
 severe a control over the intellectual as over the moral 
 eccentricities and nonconformities of its members ; indeed 
 it often so organises itself as to render the recognition 
 of new truth nearly impossible. Whatever therefore 
 individuals may recognise and value as ' true,' the ' truths ' 
 which de facto prevail and are recognised as objective 
 will only be a selection from those we are subjectively 
 tempted to recognise. There is, therefore, no real danger 
 lest this analysis should destroy the ' objectivity ' of truth 
 and enthrone subjective licence in its place. 
 
 A further convergence in our truth-valuations is pro- 
 duced by the natural tendency to subordinate all ends or 
 purposes to the ultimate end or final purpose, ' the Good.' 
 For in theory, at least, the ' goods,' and therefore the 
 ' truths,' of all the sciences are unified and validated by 
 their relation to the Supreme Good. In practice no doubt 
 this ideal is far from being realised, and there arise at 
 various points conflicts between the various sorts of values 
 or goods, which doubtless will continue until a perfect 
 harmony of all our purposes, scientific, moral, aesthetic, 
 and emotional has been achieved. Such conflicts may, of 
 course, be made occasions for theatrically opposing ' truth ' 
 to (moral) ' goodness,' ' virtue ' to ' happiness,' ' science ' to 
 ' art,' etc., and afford much scope for dithyrambic declama- 
 tion. But a sober and clear-headed .thought will not 
 be intolerant nor disposed to treat such oppositions as 
 final and absolute : even where under the circumstances 
 their reality must provisionally be admitted, it will essay 
 rather to evaluate each claim with reference to the highest 
 conception of ultimate good which for the time being 
 seems attainable. It will be very chary, therefore, of 
 sacrificing either side beyond recall ; it will neither allow 
 the claims of truth to oppress those of moral virtue nor 
 those of moral virtue to suppress art. But it will still more 
 decidedly hold aloof from the quixotic attempt to conceive 
 the sphere of each valuation as independent and as wholly 
 severed from the rest.
 
 154 STUDIES IN HUMANISM v 
 
 IV 
 
 We have seen so far that truth is a form of value, and 
 the logical judgment a valuation ; but we have not yet 
 raised the question as to what prompts us in bestowing 
 or withholding this value, what are our guiding principles 
 in thus evaluating our experience. The answer to this 
 question takes us straight into the heart of Pragmatism. 
 Nay, the answer to this question is Pragmatism, and gives 
 the sense in which Pragmatism professes to have a criterion 
 of truth. For the pragmatist contends that he has an 
 answer which is simple, and open to inspection and easily 
 tested. He simply bids us go to the facts and observe 
 the actual operations of our knowing. If we will but do 
 this, we shall ' discover ' that in all actual knowing the 
 question whether an assertion is ' true ' or ' false ' is 
 decided uniformly and very simply. It is decided, that is, 
 by its consequences, by its bearing on the interest which 
 prompted to the assertion, by its relation to the purpose 
 which put the question. To add to this that the conse- 
 quences must be good is superfluous. For if and so far 
 as an assertion satisfies or forwards the purpose of the 
 inquiry to which it owes its being, it is so far ' true ' ; if 
 and so far as it thwarts or baffles it, it is unworkable, 
 unserviceable, ' false.' And ' true ' and ' false,' we have 
 seen, are the intellectual forms of ' good ' and ' bad.' Or 
 in other words, a ' truth ' is what is useful in building up 
 a science ; a ' falsehood ' what is useless or noxious for 
 this same purpose. A ' science,' similarly, is ' good ' if it 
 can be used to harmonise our life ; if it cannot, it is a 
 pseudo-science or a game. To determine therefore whether 
 any answer to any question is ' true ' or ' false,' we have 
 merely to note its effect upon the inquiry in which we 
 are interested, and in relation to which it has arisen. And 
 if these effects are favourable, the answer is ' true ' and 
 ' good ' for our purpose, and ' useful ' as a means to the 
 end we pursue. 1 Here, then, we have exposed to view 
 
 1 Strictly both the ' true ' and the ' false ' answers are, as Mr. Sidgwick says, 
 subdivisions of the ' relevant, ' and the irrelevant is really unmeaning. But the
 
 v THE AMBIGUITY OF TRUTH 155 
 
 the whole rationale of Pragmatism, the source of the 
 famous paradoxes that ' truth ' depends on its conse- 
 quences, that the ' true ' must be ' good ' and ' useful ' and 
 ' practical.' I confess that to me they have never seemed 
 more than truisms so simple that I used to fear lest too 
 elaborate an insistence on them should be taken as an 
 insult to the intelligence of my readers. But experience 
 has shown that I was too sanguine, and now I even feel 
 impelled to guard still further against two possible mis- 
 apprehensions into which an unthinking philosopher might 
 fall. 
 
 I would venture to point out in the first place that 
 when we said that truth was estimated by its consequences 
 for some purpose, we were speaking subject to the social 
 character of truth, and quite generally. What conse- 
 quences are relevant to what purposes depends, of course, 
 on the subject-matter of each science, and may sometimes 
 be in doubt, when the question may be interpreted in 
 several contexts. But as a rule the character of the 
 question sufficiently defines the relevant answer which can 
 be treated as true. It is not necessary therefore seriously 
 to contemplate absurdities such as, e.g., the intrusion of 
 ethical or aesthetical motives into the estimation of mathe- 
 matical truths, or to refute claims that the isosceles 
 triangle is more virtuous than the scalene, or an integer 
 nobler than a vulgar fraction, or that gravitating bodies 
 must move not in ellipses but in circles, because the circle is 
 the most perfect figure. Pragmatism is far less likely to 
 countenance such confusions than the intellectualist 
 theories from which I drew my last illustration. In some 
 cases, doubtless, as in many problems of history and 
 religion, there will be found deep-seated and enduring 
 differences of opinion as to what consequences and what 
 tests may be adduced as relevant : but these differences 
 already exist, and are in no wise created by being 
 recognised and explained. Pragmatism, however, by 
 
 unmeaning seems to be relevant until it is detected ; it baffles our purpose as 
 surely as the ' false, ' and the ' false ' answer does not mean what we meant to 
 get, viz. something we can work with, and is so far unmeaning. Hence there is 
 no great harm in treating all that/aiTr us as 'false.'
 
 156 STUDIES IN HUMANISM v 
 
 enlarging our notions of what constitutes relevant evidence, 
 is far more likely to conduce to their amicable settlement 
 than the intellectualisms which condemn all faith as 
 inherently irrational and irrelevant to knowledge. And, 
 ideally and in principle, such disagreements as to the ends 
 which are relevant to the estimation of any evidence are 
 always capable of being composed by an appeal to the 
 supreme purpose which unifies and harmonises all our 
 ends : in practice no doubt we are hardly aware of this, 
 nor agreed as to what it is ; but the blame, surely, attaches 
 to the distracted state of our thoughts and not to the 
 pragmatic analysis of truth. For it would surely be pre- 
 posterous to expect a mere theory of knowledge to 
 adjudicate upon and settle offhand, by sheer dint of logic, 
 all the disputed questions in all the sciences. 
 
 My second caution refers to the fact that I have made 
 the predication of truth dependent on relevance to a proxi- 
 mate rather than an ultimate scientific purpose. This I 
 have done because I believe it represents our actual 
 procedure. The ordinary ' truths ' we predicate have but 
 little concern with ultimate ends and realities. They are 
 true (at least pro tern.} if they serve their immediate 
 purpose. If any one hereafter chooses to question them, 
 he is at liberty to do so, and if he can make out his case, 
 to reject them for their inadequacy for his ulterior purposes. 
 But even when the venue and the context of the question 
 have thus been changed, and so its meaning, the truth of 
 the original answer is not thereby abolished. It may 
 have been degraded and reduced to a methodological status, 
 but this is merely to affirm that what is true and service- 
 able for one purpose is not necessarily so for another. 
 And in any case it is time perhaps to cease complaining 
 that a truth capable of being improved on, i.e. capable of 
 growing, is so far not absolutely true and therefore some- 
 what false, and worthy of contempt. For such complaints 
 spring from an arbitrary interpretation of a situation that 
 might more sensibly be envisaged as meaning that none 
 of the falsehoods, out of which our knowledge struggles in 
 its growth, is ever wholly false. But in actual knowing
 
 v THE AMBIGUITY OF TRUTH 157 
 
 we are not concerned with such arbitrary phrases, but 
 with the bearing of an answer on a question actually pro- 
 pounded. And whatever really answers is really ' true,' 
 even though it may at once be turned into a stepping- 
 stone to higher truth. 1 
 
 We now find ourselves in a position to lay down some 
 pragmatic definitions. Truth we may define as logical 
 value, and a claim to truth as a claim to possess such 
 value. The validation of such claims proceeds, we hold, 
 by the pragmatic test, i.e. by experience of their effect 
 
 1 Cp. Essay viii. 5. If therefore we realise that we are concerned with 
 human truth alone, and that truth is ambiguous, there is no paradox in affirma- 
 tively answering Prof. A. E. Taylor's question (Phil. Rev. xiv. 268) as to whether 
 " the truth of a newly discovered theorem is created " (it should be " made," i.e. 
 out of earlier 'truth') "by the fact of its discovery." He asks "did the doc- 
 trine of the earth's motion become true when enunciated by the Pythagoreans, 
 false again when men forgot the Pythagorean astronomy, and true a second time 
 on the publication of the book of Copernicus? " The ambiguity in this question 
 may be revealed by asking : ' Do you mean " true " to refer to the valuation of 
 the new ' ' truth" by us, or to the re-vahiation of the old ?' For the ' discovery ' in- 
 volves both, and both are products of human activity. If then we grant (what is, 
 I suppose, the case) that the Pythagorean, Ptolemaic and Copernican systems 
 represent stages in a progressive approximation to an adequate account of celestial 
 motions, it is clear that each of them was valued as ' true ' while it seemed adequate, 
 and re-valued as ' false ' when it was improved on. A very slight improvement, 
 moreover, might occasion such a change in valuation. Prof. Taylor has failed to 
 observe that he has conceived the scientific problem too loosely in grouping 
 together the Pythagorean and the Copernican theory as alike cases of the earth's 
 motion. No doubt they may both be so denominated, but the scientific value of 
 the two theories was very different, and the Ptolemaic system is intermediate in 
 value as well as in time. He might just as well have taken a more modern in- 
 stance and argued that the emission theory of light was true all along because the 
 discovery of radio-activity has forced its undulatory rival to admit that light is 
 sometimes produced by the impact of ' corpuscles.' 
 
 The reason then why it seems paradoxical to make the very existence of truth 
 depend on its ' discovery ' by us, is that in some cases there ensues upon the dis- 
 covery a transvaluation of our former values, which are now re-valued as ' false,' 
 while the new ' truth ' is antedated as having been true all along. This, however, 
 is conditioned by the special character of the case, and would have been impos- 
 sible, but for the human attempt to verify the claim. And so the whole distinc- 
 tion remains within the human evaluation of truth, and affords no occasion for 
 attributing to ' truth ' any real independence of human cognition : the attempt 
 to do so really misrepresents our procedure ; it is a mere error of abstraction to 
 think that because a ' truth ' may be judged ' independent ' after human manipu- 
 lation, it is so per se, irrespectively of the procedure to which it owes its ' inde- 
 pendent ' existence. And to infer further that therefore logic should wholly 
 abstract from the human side in knowing, is exactly like arguing that because 
 children grow ' independent ' of their parents, they must be conceived as essenti- 
 ally independent, and must have been so 'all along.'
 
 158 STUDIES IN HUMANISM v 
 
 upon the bodies of established truth which they affect. It 
 is evident that in this sense truth will admit of degrees, 
 extending from the humble truth which satisfies some 
 purpose, even though it only be the lowly purpose of some 
 subordinate end, to that ineffable ideal which would 
 satisfy every purpose and unify all endeavours. But the 
 main emphasis will clearly fall on the former : for to 
 perfect truth we do not yet attain, and after all even the 
 humblest truth may hold its ground without suffering 
 rejection. No truth, moreover, can do more than do its 
 duty and fulfil its function. 
 
 These definitions should have sufficiently borne out 
 the claim made at the beginning (p. 142), that the 
 pragmatic view of truth unifies experience and rationalises 
 the classification of the normative sciences ; but it may 
 not be amiss to add a few words on both these topics. 
 That, in the first place, the conception of the logical 
 judgment as a form of valuation connects it with our other 
 valuations and represents it as an integral part of the 
 e<eo-9 TOU (i<yaOov, of the purposive reaction upon the 
 universe which bestows dignity and grandeur upon the 
 struggle of human life is, I take it, evident. The theoretic 
 importance of this conception is capital. It is easily and 
 absolutely fatal to every form of Naturalism. For if 
 every ' fact ' upon which any naturalistic system relies is 
 at bottom a valuation, arrived at by selection from 
 a larger whole, by rejection of what seemed irrelevant, and 
 by purposive manipulation of what seemed important, 
 there is a manifest absurdity in eliminating the human 
 reference from results which have implied it at every step. 
 The pragmatic doctrine therefore (at all events in its 
 'Humanist' development) affords a protection against 
 Naturalism which ought to be the more appreciated by 
 those interested in taking a ' spiritual ' view of life now 
 that it has become pretty clear that the protection 
 afforded by idealistic absolutism is quite illusory. For 
 the ' spiritual nature of the Absolute ' does nothing to 
 succour the human aspirations strangled in the coils of 
 materialism : ' absolute spirit ' need merely be conceived
 
 v THE AMBIGUITY OF TRUTH 159 
 
 naturalistically to become as impotent to aid the theologian 
 and the moralist as it has long been seen to be to help 
 the scientist. 1 
 
 And the unification of logic with the other normative 
 sciences is even more valuable practically than theoreti- 
 cally. For it vindicates man's right to present his claims 
 upon the universe in their integrity, as a demand not for 
 Truth alone, but for Goodness, Beauty, and Happiness as 
 well, commingled with each other in a fusion one and 
 indiscerptible ; and what perhaps is for the moment more 
 important still, it justifies our efforts to bring about such 
 a union as we desire. Whether this ideal can be 
 attained, cannot, of course, be certainly predicted ; but 
 a philosophy which gives us the right to aspire, and 
 inspires us with the daring to attempt, is surely a 
 great improvement on monisms which, like Spinoza's, 
 essay to crush us with blank and illogical denials of 
 the relevance of human valuations to the truth of 
 things. 
 
 In technical philosophy, however, it is good form to 
 profess more interest in the formal relations of the 
 sciences than in the cosmic claims and destinies of man, 
 and so we may hasten to point out the signal aid which 
 pragmatism affords to a symmetrical classification of the 
 sciences. If truth also is a valuation, we can understand 
 why logic should be a normative science along with ethics 
 and aesthetics : if all the natural sciences make use of 
 logical judgments and lay claim to logical values, we can 
 understand also how and why the normative sciences 
 should have dominion over them. And lastly we find 
 that the antithetical valuations and the distinction 
 between claims and their selection into norms run 
 through all the normative sciences in a perfectly 
 analogous way. Just as not everything is true which 
 claims truth, so not everything is good or right or 
 beautiful which claims to be so, while ultimately all these 
 claims are judged by their relation to the perfect harmony 
 which forms our final aspiration. 
 
 1 Essay xii. 5.
 
 160 STUDIES IN HUMANISM v 
 
 VI 
 
 This essay was pledged at the outset to conclude with 
 a twofold challenge, and now that it has set forth some of 
 the advantages proffered by the pragmatic view of truth, 
 we must revert to this challenge, in a spirit not of conten- 
 tiousness so much as of anxious inquiry. For it is to be 
 feared that a really resolute adherent of the intellectualist 
 tradition would be unmoved and unconvinced by anything 
 we, or any one, could say. He would simply close his eyes 
 and seal his ears, and recite his creed. And perhaps no 
 man yet was ever convinced of philosophic truth against 
 his will. But there are beginning to be signs (and even 
 wonders) that our intellectualism is growing less resolute. 
 And so perhaps even those who are not yet willing to 
 face the new solutions can be brought to see the gaps in 
 the old. If therefore we bring these to their notice very 
 humbly, but very persistently, we may enable them to 
 see that the old intellectualism has left its victims un- 
 provided with answers to two very momentous questions. 
 Let us ask, therefore, how, upon its assumptions, they 
 propose (i) to evaluate a claim to truth, and (2) to dis- 
 criminate between such a claim and an established truth ? 
 These two questions constitute the first part of my 
 challenge. They are, clearly, good questions, and such 
 that from any theory of knowledge with pretensions to 
 completeness an answer may fairly be demanded. And 
 if such an answer exists, it is so vital to the whole case 
 of intellectualism, that we may fairly require it to be pro- 
 duced. If it is not produced, we will be patient, and hope 
 that some day we may be vouchsafed a revelation of 
 esoteric truth ; but human nature is weak, and the longer 
 the delay the stronger will grow the suspicion that there 
 is nothing to produce. 
 
 The second part of our challenge refers to the intel- 
 lectualist's rejection of our solution. If we are so very 
 wrong in our very plain and positive assertion that the 
 truth (validity) of a truth (claim) is tested and established 
 by the value of its consequences, there ought surely to be
 
 v THE AMBIGUITY OF TRUTH 161 
 
 no difficulty about producing abundant cases in which the 
 truth (validity) of a doubtful assertion is established in 
 some otlier way. I would ask, therefore, for the favour 
 of one clear case of this kind} And I make only one 
 stipulation. It should be a case in which there really 
 was a question, so that the true answer might have, before 
 examination, turned out false. For without this proviso 
 we should get no illustration of actual knowing, such as 
 was contemplated by the pragmatist, whose theory pro- 
 fesses to discriminate cases in which there is a real 
 chance of acquiring truth and a real risk of falling into 
 falsity. If on the other hand specimens merely of 
 indubitable or verbal truths were adduced, and it were 
 asserted that these were true not because they were 
 useful, but simply because they were true, we should end 
 merely in a wrangle about the historical pedigree of the 
 truth. We should contend that it was at one time doubtful, 
 and accepted as true because of its tested utility : our 
 opponent would dispute our derivation and assert that it 
 had always been true. We should agree that it was now 
 indisputable, we should disagree about the origin of this 
 feature ; and the past history would usually be too little 
 known to establish either view. And so we should get 
 no nearer to a settlement. 
 
 By observing on the other hand truth in the making, 
 inferences may be drawn to the nature of truth already 
 made. And whether truth is by nature pragmatic, or 
 whether this is a foul aspersion on her character, it is 
 surely most desirable that this point should be settled. 
 Hitherto the chief obstacle to such a decision has been 
 the fact that while in public (and still more in private) 
 there has been much misconception, misrepresentation 
 and abuse of our views, there have been no serious 
 attempts to contest directly, unequivocally, and outright, 
 any of our cardinal assertions. 2 And what perhaps is 
 
 1 Prof. Taylor attempted to answer an earlier form of this challenge in Mind, 
 N.S. No. 57. My reply appeared in N.S. No. 59, under the name ' Pragma- 
 tism and Pseudo- Pragmatism,' and showed that he had completely misunderstood 
 even the elementary ' principle of Peirce. ' 
 
 * Prof. Taylor may now perhaps be said to have supplied this desideratum, by 
 
 M
 
 162 STUDIES IN HUMANISM v 
 
 still more singular, our critics have been completely 
 reticent as to what alternative solutions to the issues 
 raised they felt themselves in a position to propound. 
 The whole situation is so strange, and so discreditable to 
 the prestige of philosophy, that it is earnestly to be hoped 
 that of the many renowned logicians who so vehemently 
 differ from us some should at length see (and show us !) 
 their way to refute these ' heresies,' as clearly and articu- 
 lately as their OvpoeiBes 1 permits their <J>i\6cro<j>ov, 1 and 
 as boldly as their $>i,\6<ro<f)ov permits their #u/AoetSe9, to 
 express itself. 
 
 denying that psychology has any relevance to logic (Phil. Rev. xiv. pp. 267, 287). 
 And yet immediately after (p. 287) he feels constrained to argue that the 
 efficient cause of his accepting any belief as true is a specific form of emotion ! 
 I should have thought that the fact that no truth could be accepted without this 
 feeling constituted a pretty substantial connexion between psychology and 
 logic. Cp. Essay iii. 
 
 1 The ' spirited ' and ' philosophic ' parts of the soul, according to Plato.
 
 VI 
 THE NATURE OF TRUTH 1 
 
 ARGUMENT 
 
 I. The making of ideals is vain if they are divorced from human life. II. 
 Mr. Joachim's abstraction from the human side of truth. III. The 
 consequent failure of his ' ideal. ' IV. Truth and error in the Hegelian 
 4 Dialectic. ' The ' concrete ' universal really abstract. Scientific ' laws ' 
 truly concrete and not timeless, as alleged. The chasm between the 
 human and the ideal in intellectualist epistemology. V. Contrast with 
 the Humanist solution. The ' correspondence ' and the ' independence ' 
 view of truth. Both are inevitable for intellectualism, as is the scepticism 
 in which they end. 
 
 OF all the animals that creep and breathe upon the earth 
 man is the most iconoclastic because he is also the most 
 iconoplastic. He is ever engaged in forming ideals for 
 his delectation and worship, and continually discovering 
 his worship to be idolatry and shattering his own crea- 
 tions. 
 
 The reason for this absurdly wasteful procedure is 
 always the same. The ideal has been constructed, the 
 idol has been set up, too uncritically. Too little care 
 has been devoted to the foundations of the ideal to build 
 upon them an enduring structure. The requirements 
 which an ideal must satisfy have been ignored. Yet 
 these requirements are simple. They may be formulated 
 as follows : 
 
 i. The ideal must be attainable by a thought which 
 starts from our actual human standpoint. 
 
 1 This essay appeared, as a review of Mr. H. H. Joachim's book with the 
 same title, in the Journal of Philosophy, iii. 20 (27th Sept. 1906). It has been 
 somewhat expanded. 
 
 163
 
 1 64 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vi 
 
 2. When constructed it must be relevant to actual 
 human life. 
 
 3. The ideal must be realisable by the development 
 of man's actual life. 
 
 4. Yet it must have ' independent ' authority over 
 actual human life. Or, more briefly, the ideal must (a) 
 be an ideal for man, and yet (b) have authority over man. 
 
 Unless the first condition is complied with, it is 
 evident that the ideal will be the arbitrary creation of a 
 fancy which uses the actual only as a jumping-off place 
 into cloudlands and dreamlands. And any ideal, which 
 is arrived at thus per saltum, is bound to reveal its illusory 
 nature so soon as an attempt is made to get back from the 
 ideal to the actual, i.e. to apply the ideal to human life. 
 We then find that we cannot get back from the standpoint 
 of the ideal ; with its glamour in our eyes the actual 
 seems hideous and distorted, alien and unintelligible. 
 Whereat, enraged, we may feel tempted to pronounce, not 
 the ideal, but the actual, radically false and vicious, and to 
 build out our ' ideal ' into a veritable paradise of fools. 
 
 Unless the second condition is complied with, our 
 ideal becomes non-functional, and therefore really mean- 
 ingless. A real ideal for man must be applicable to the 
 world of man's experience. An ideal which is not so 
 applicable is no ideal for man, even though it might 
 entrance angels and redeem Absolutes. And clearly an 
 ideal which has been reached by a jump is pretty certain 
 to prove thus inapplicable. As it was not reached by a 
 gradual approach from the actual, it cannot return to the 
 actual world and enlighten its gropings. It owed its 
 being to invalid fancy ; it owes its application to an 
 irrational fiat. 
 
 Unless the third condition is complied with the ideal 
 loses its compelling power. The impossible is no source 
 of obligation, no centre of attraction ; nor is it rational to 
 aim at its attainment. The notion that an ideal would 
 not be an ideal if it were realisable, is a false inference 
 from the fact that ideals are progressive, and expand as 
 actuality approaches the level of what once seemed the
 
 vi THE NATURE OF TRUTH 165 
 
 ideal. It overlooks the fact that throughout this whole 
 process the ideal has to be conceived as essentially 
 realisable. If this belief in its possibility failed us, our 
 devotion would at once be stultified. 
 
 It is, however, to the fourth condition that the other 
 three have usually been sacrificed. Ideals have been 
 unnaturally projected into a non-human sphere, they have 
 been rendered inefficacious and impossible by being dis- 
 sociated from human life, in order to guarantee their 
 independence and to enhance their authority. That this 
 procedure is self-defeating has already been explained. 
 It may be shown also to rest on radically false con- 
 ceptions of the authority and ' independence ' of ideals. 
 Their ' authority ' must not be conceived as imposed on 
 man ; it must be freely constituted and recognised by 
 him. Nor can their ' independence ' be conceived as 
 absolute ; it cannot mean absence of relation to human 
 life. It can at most be relative, a tentative simplification 
 of the actual facts, an exclusion of this or that un- 
 important circumstance, of this or that discrepant desire, 
 of this or that discordant claim. But to set up an 
 ideal wholly independent of terrestrial conditions, human 
 psychology, and individual claims, to argue that because 
 experience shows that some such features may be set 
 aside, all may in a body be excluded a priori^ seems 
 merely to exemplify the fallacy of ' composition.' It 
 should never be forgotten that in any actually working 
 ideal the ' independence ' is functional, and strictly limited 
 to the sense and extent which its efficacy requires. 
 
 II 
 
 These reflections have not been wholly inspired by 
 Mr. Joachim's interesting and instructive essay, but they 
 find in it abundant illustration. It is always an affecting 
 spectacle to behold the good man conscientiously practis- 
 ing the idol-breaking art upon the idols of his soul, but 
 the total failure of Mr. Joachim's investigation of the 
 nature of truth, which he himself confesses in such hand-
 
 166 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vi 
 
 some terms (pp. 171-180), might have been predicted by 
 any one who had examined the functioning of human 
 ideals. 
 
 Mr. Joachim has courted failure by the fundamental 
 assumptions which pervade his ideal of Truth. 
 
 1 i ) He has assumed that the ' Critical ' question is out 
 of date. Nowhere does he betray any consciousness of 
 the need for asking, ' How can I know all this that I have 
 assumed ? How are the facts assumed compatible with 
 my knowing them ? ' He has not in consequence raised 
 the question how his ideal was arrived at. 
 
 (2) He has thereby been enabled to assume an im- 
 possible standpoint, without realising until it was too 
 late that nothing could be said from it that was in the 
 least degree relevant to the facts of human life. Assuming 
 that ' the nature of truth ' concerned " the character of an 
 ideally complete experience," and not the actual procedures 
 of human minds, he inevitably lays it down that " there 
 can be one and only one such experience : or only one 
 significant whole the significance of which is self-con- 
 tained in the sense required. For it is absolute self- 
 fulfilment, absolutely self-contained significance, that is 
 postulated ; and nothing short of absolute individuality 
 nothing short of the completely whole experience can 
 satisfy this postulate. And human knowledge, not merely 
 my knowledge or yours, but the best and fullest knowledge 
 in the world at any stage of its development is clearly 
 not a significant whole in this ideally complete sense. 
 Hence the truth is -from the point of view of the human 
 intelligence an Ideal, and an Ideal which can never 
 as such) or in its completeness, be actual as human 
 experience." x 
 
 (3) Having assumed such an ideal, he is compelled to 
 abstract, as far as possible, from everything human, real, 
 
 1 Pp. 78-79. The ideal described is clearly not an ideal for man. And, 
 naturally, Mr. Joachim finds the resources of human language inadequate to 
 describe it. Cp. p. 83 n. , where he declares that though he calls it 
 'experience,' the word is 'unsatisfactory,' and that he uses it only because 
 1 God ' would be ' misleading,' and ' the Absolute ' and ' the Idea' have become 
 bywords.
 
 vi THE NATURE OF TRUTH 167 
 
 and concrete. But ultimately this abstraction proves 
 impracticable, and when at last his conception of truth is 
 brought into contact with the fact of human error, its 
 breakdown is as irretrievable as it was inevitable : for it 
 is the collapse into its interior emptiness of the bubble 
 of a false ideal under pressure from the real it had 
 scouted. 
 
 That Mr. Joachim has really made all these assump- 
 tions can be made plain in his own words. Thus (i) 
 he describes on p. 178 his assumption of the standpoint 
 " That the truth itself is one and whole and complete, 
 and that all thinking and all experience moves within its 
 recognition and subject to its manifest authority ; this I 
 have never doubted." Perhaps if he had been more 
 willing, not necessarily to doubt, but, let us say, to 
 examine, this assumption, he would not have been forced 
 to doubt so much in the end. For it was decidedly 
 uncritical thus to rule out the question of whence came 
 the features in the ideal he postulated. It was also by 
 definition that he had ruled out the conception of truth 
 as a human ideal. Hence it was quite superfluous to 
 state in the preface that he was not going to discuss 
 the Humanist conception of truth. He could not : from 
 his point of view the Humanist position was invisible, 
 and was bound to seem " a denial of truth altogether." 
 
 From Mr. Joachim's standpoint human knowing 
 could not possibly appear as anything but an inexplicable 
 falling away from the serenity, purity, and perfection of 
 ' the Ideal,' as a chaos of ' unreal abstractions ' which it is 
 his duty ' to do his best to discredit ' (p. 5 9). Or, as he 
 says more fully (pp. 167-68), "The differences of this and 
 that knowing mind a fortiori, the confused mass of 
 idiosyncrasies which together distinguish this ' person ' or 
 ' self from that are recognised only to be set aside and, 
 if necessary, discounted. They are accidental imperfec- 
 tions, superficial irregularities, in the medium through 
 which truth is reflected ; limitations in the vessels 
 through which knowledge is poured. They are, so to 
 say, bubbles on the stream of knowledge ; and the
 
 1 68 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vi 
 
 passing show of arbitrary variation, which they create on 
 the surface, leaves the depths untroubled a current 
 uniform and timeless. My and your thinking, my and 
 your self, the particular temporal processes, and the 
 extreme self-substantiation of the finite ' modes ' which is 
 error in its full discordance : these are incidents somehow l 
 connected with the known truth, but they themselves 
 and the manner of their connexion are excluded from the 
 theory of knowledge." 
 
 The theory of knowledge, then, " studies the known truth 
 qua timeless and universal" (p. 168), and the judgments 
 of science cannot be " concerned with the concrete 
 thinking of the individual mind qua ' this ' or that,' qua 
 differentiated by the idiosyncrasies developed through its 
 particular psychological history" (p. 93), "in all the 
 accidental and confused psychical setting" (p. 115). 
 
 Or lastly and most frankly (p. 1 18), u I do not inquire 
 how the logician can pass from the ' psychological 
 individual ' to the ' logical subject,' from this actual 
 thinking (with all its psychical machinery and particular 
 setting) to the thought which claims truth as affirming 
 universal meaning. The logician, I am convinced, never 
 really starts with this individual thinker in the sense 
 supposed ; and, if he did, the passage from this psycho- 
 logical fiction to the subject of knowledge would be 
 impossible." 
 
 It is clear that Mr. Joachim at any rate has never 
 started with ' this individual thinker,' but equally so 
 that he never gets to him. He has, like Plato, assumed 
 his ' logical ' standpoint, and never doubts, even when it 
 proves unworkable, that the discrepancy of psychical fact 
 is mere irrelevance and confusion. " We have been 
 demanding all along," he says (p. 82), " an entire reversal 
 of this attitude " (of starting from the actual). "In our 
 view it is the Ideal which is solid and substantial and 
 fully actual. The finite experiences are rooted in the 
 
 1 The magic word, to which the logic, like the metaphysic, of intellectualism 
 always in the end appeals, when its false abstractions fail ! A critic's brutal 
 candour is tempted to substitute Humpty Dumpty's favourite word ' Nohow ! ' 
 in all such passages.
 
 vi THE NATURE OF TRUTH 169 
 
 Ideal. They share its actuality l and draw from it what- 
 ever being and conceivability they possess. It is a 
 perverse attitude to condemn the Ideal because the con- 
 ditions under which finite experiences exhibit their 
 fragmentary activity do not as such restrict its being, 
 or to deny that it is conceivable, because the conceiva- 
 bility of such incomplete expressions is too confused and 
 turbid to apply to it." 
 
 Ill 
 
 What, then, is this standpoint of the Ideal ? Page 76 
 tells us that " Truth in its essential nature is that systematic 
 coherence which is the character of a significant whole. 
 A ' significant whole ' is an organised individual ex- 
 perience, self-fulfilling and self-fulfilled. Its organisation 
 is the process of its self-fulfilment, and the concrete 
 manifestation of its individuality." 
 
 Brave words, if only the standpoint of ' the Ideal ' 
 could be maintained, if only the ' individual thinker ' 
 could be wholly dismissed from the inquiry ! Unluckily 
 he cannot. 
 
 The tree of knowledge cannot be guarded against 
 human profanation, even in the logician's paradise, once 
 it is ' somehow ' revealed to man. Nay, the logician is 
 ultimately driven out by the diabolical machinations of 
 " the dual nature of human experience," which has " its 
 universality and independence and yet also its individuality 
 and its dependence on personal and private conditions " 
 (p. 29). " Truth, beauty, goodness are timeless, universal, 
 independent structures ; and yet also is it essential to 
 them to be manifested in the thinking of finite subjects, 
 in the actions and volitions of perishing agents" (p. 163). 
 They "appear in the actual world and exist in finite 
 experience . . . and their life (at least on one side of 
 itself) is judgment, emotion, volition the processes and 
 activities of finite individuals. Truth, if it is to be for me, 
 
 1 This is how Mr. Joachim glides over the ' participation ' difficulty. Plato 
 at least perceived its seriousness.
 
 i/o STUDIES IN HUMANISM vi 
 
 must enter into my intellectual endeavour," however 
 ' independent ' it is " of the process by which 7 come to 
 know it" (p. 21). 
 
 No wonder ' human experience ' is ' paradoxical ' 
 (p. 23), and that in the end its 'dual nature' is too 
 much for ' the Ideal ' ! It has no room for Error ; and 
 yet Error inexplicably exists. Thus Error becomes the 
 " declaration of independence " of the finite, something 
 utterly ' unthinkable ' " where that which declares is 
 nothing real and nothing real is declared" (p. 163). 
 
 And so ' the Ideal ' of ' coherence ' " suffers shipwreck 
 at the very entrance of the harbour" (p. 171). "It must 
 render intelligible ' the dual nature of human experience ' ' 
 (p. 170) ; it fails to meet ' demands ' which " both must be 
 and cannot be completely satisfied " (p. 171). And so the 
 whole " voyage ends in disaster, and a disaster which is 
 inevitable" (p. 171). 
 
 It would be ungenerous in those who declined to 
 commit themselves to the ill-found craft which Mr. 
 Joachim has gallantly navigated to foredoomed failure 
 to crow over this catastrophe ; l but it is permissible to 
 point out why it was inevitable from the start. 
 
 The whole ideal, despite its protestations of ' concrete- 
 ness ' and aspirations towards a ' self-fulfilling individuality,' 
 rested all along on an unjustified abstraction from the 
 most essential features of the only knowledge and truth 
 we are able or concerned to attain and examine. As 
 Prof. Stout says, 2 " The only knowing with which we are 
 primarily acquainted is knowing on the part of individuals, 
 of empirical, historical selves." All actual truth is human, 
 all actual knowing is pervaded through and through by 
 the purposes, interests, emotions, and volitions of a human 
 personality. Mr. Joachim had no right to treat these 
 facts as distorting disturbances : they are the roots of the 
 tree of knowledge. He had no right to treat knowledge 
 as if it were impersonal : the ' personal equation ' is never 
 
 1 But in view of it Mr. Bradley's boasting about the security of ' Jericho ' 
 seems particularly misplaced ! Cp. Essay iv. 5. 
 
 2 Arist. Soc. Proc. 1905-6, p. 350.
 
 vi THE NATURE OF TRUTH 171 
 
 really eliminated even in science, and in philosophy the 
 attempt to abstract from its all-pervasive influence stands 
 self-condemned. He had no right to assume that to take 
 our knowledge in its full concreteness would be fatal to 
 its ' objectivity ' ; he should have studied how men proceed 
 from individual judgments to social agreements about 
 truth, and ultimately construct ideals which are intended 
 to guide our aspirations, but are at once bereft of their 
 significance when they lose touch with human knowing. 
 
 Mr. Joachim has had, of course, to pay the penalty of 
 these uncritical assumptions. He has failed to describe 
 anything at all resembling the actual processes of human 
 knowing. He has failed equally to portray the operations 
 of science. He has failed even to render his abstract 
 ideal self-supporting : it crumbles under its own weight ; 
 for all its claim to absoluteness it possesses no authority ; 
 for all its aspiration to ' coherence ' it does not cohere, 
 even in itself. 
 
 These defects, moreover, are closely intertwined. 
 Because he has assumed the absolute standpoint and 
 abstracted from the personal context of every judgment, 
 he can never seize the actual meaning of any judgment. 
 He cannot see that it lies in the use of the judgment, in 
 its relation to a cognitive end, in its adjustment to a 
 particular case, in its satisfaction of a need. By ignoring 
 (what is obvious from the opposite point of view) that 
 meaning depends on purpose and demands application, 
 he has restricted himself to potential meaning, and moves 
 in a world of impotent phantoms. It is only in such a 
 phantasmagoria of depersonalised, hypostasised abstrac- 
 tions that truth can appear timeless and unalterable, that 
 judgments can bear meaning in isolation (p. 90), and are 
 possessed of a ' truth ' which they ' affirm ' and ' demand ' 
 (pp. 108-9), tnat thoughts move and live and expand out 
 of space and time (p. 176). 
 
 But these are all illusions incidental to an imprac- 
 ticable standpoint, and the whole Witches' Sabbath of the 
 Hegelian Dialectic is really started by the wanton and 
 impossible dehumanising of knowledge.
 
 i;2 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vi 
 
 IV 
 
 The Hegelian Dialectic is essentially an attempt to 
 determine the concatenation of meanings per se and in 
 abstraction from their application and actual function, 
 and in a sense the culmination of all such attempts. 
 But it fails because it too has not realised that per se 
 ' categories ' do not mean anything, and that the meaning 
 of a category lies in the purpose with which it is employed. 
 Hegel had perceived and it is greatly to his credit that 
 he should have done so that taken per se the ' higher ' 
 abstractions were also the emptier : thus in the ' philo- 
 sophic ' (i.e. abstract) contemplation of thought there 
 seemed to occur a progressive loss of meaning, a gradual 
 evisceration of content, until the highest 'category' of all, 
 ' Being,' appeared to be de facto indistinguishable from 
 ' nothing.' Seeing that this was wrong, Hegel set himself 
 to find a remedy for this disease of thought, and prescribed 
 his ' Dialectic ' as the way by which thought might 
 return to the concreteness of ' spirit.' He perceived, 
 that is, that the concrete is really higher than the abstract, 
 and so demanded that a universal which was to be really 
 valuable should be conceived as ' concrete.' The ' con- 
 crete universal ' is thus a demand for a something to 
 rectify the error of abstraction. But unfortunately it does 
 not go far enough. For Hegel did not see (i) that his 
 problem was unreal ; and (2) that his solution of it was 
 illusory. 
 
 (i) The disease of thought which Hegel undertook to 
 cure does not really exist : it is a figment of the philoso- 
 phers, the product of a defective analysis of actual human 
 knowing. If we refrain from abstracting from the actual 
 functioning of thought, there is no need to evolve a 
 concrete universal, by the convolutions of the Dialectic. 
 For in their actual use all universals are concrete. For 
 they are applied to a concrete situation. And this is as 
 true of ' Being ' as of ' Spirit' Whenever we actually 
 have occasion to predicate ' being,' i.e. to include anything 
 in that summum genus^ we mean to relate it to the concrete
 
 vi THE NATURE OF TRUTH 173 
 
 whole of reality r , not to include it in an empty category. 
 And if the purpose of the train of thought which led to 
 the predication had not been abstracted from, this would 
 have been evident throughout. All abstractions are made 
 for a purpose, and are meant to be applied, and recover 
 full concreteness in their power over the particular cases 
 of their application. Their ' abstractness,' therefore, con- 
 stitutes no problem for a pragmatic theory of knowledge, 
 and the 'error of abstraction' is cured simply by a 
 perception of the use of abstraction. 
 
 (2) Even if Hegel's difficulty had not been one of 
 those which one gets out of by never getting into, his 
 ' concrete universal ' is no way out of it. In its unapplied 
 condition, it is never fully concrete. The ' Dialectic ' no 
 more gets back to the concrete individual, from which 
 the (purposive) process of abstraction started, than the 
 Platonic Idea. It stops short with the ' category ' of 
 ' Spirit,' the application of which to concrete ' spirits ' is the 
 real problem. The ' concrete universal's ' claim to be con- 
 crete, therefore, is a mere ' bluff.' It is and remains a rank 
 abstraction, because it has not comprehended the function 
 of abstractions. It has abstracted from the personal aspects 
 of the knowing process, without perceiving that in so 
 doing it has abolished its own raison d'etre. Nor is it 
 what it pretends to be in other respects. It is not even a 
 true universal, because it has no power over particulars ; 
 and, for all its theoretical assurances, in practice it repels 
 them as confusing and irrational. Whereas the ' universals ' 
 which are really functional and are used in actual knowing 
 are always particulars, i.e. they are applied to a ' this ' in a 
 ' here ' and ' now? 
 
 Hence the Hegelian ' universal ' never occurs either in 
 ordinary or in scientific knowing. The ' universals ' 
 (' laws ') of the sciences live only in their application to 
 particular cases ; they try to formulate the habits of 
 things, and are intended to be rules which guide us in our 
 treatment of them. It is, therefore, the less important 
 half of the truth to assert (p. no) that " scientific thought 
 moves in universals " and that " in the science of botany
 
 174 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vi 
 
 a judgment of perception like ' this tree is green ' finds, 
 as such, no place." For in reality the universals are 
 applied universals, and the science of botany would be 
 valueless if it did not deal with the behaviour of particular 
 trees, nor would it value the more abstract judgments if 
 they did not show their pragmatic power by applying 
 to a greater number of ' particulars.' Our scientific pro- 
 cedure, in short, gives no sanction whatever to the notion 
 that universals which cannot be applied have any value, 
 and the alleged ' eternity ' of scientific truth is merely an 
 illusion engendered by the abstraction from purpose. 1 
 
 The Hegelian ' universal,' however, not merely mis- 
 represents the scientific ' law,' it no less distorts our vision 
 of the ' particular.' An abstraction itself, it constructs 
 the bogey of ' the individual mind,' presumably in order 
 that something more monstrous than itself may deter us 
 from acknowledging plain facts. But its ' individual 
 mind ' is a figment, formed by expunging all values from 
 the concrete mind. 2 In actual minds the values are all 
 present, as psychical facts, with the ideals and the idiosyn- 
 crasies, all capable of contributing harmoniously to the 
 conservation of the individual life. 3 
 
 There is no occasion or temptation, therefore, to oppose 
 ' particular ' to ' universal,' and to reject any of the mind's 
 actual contents as ' accidental,' ' irrelevant,' or ' confused.' 
 For one, that is, who really starts from the ' finite ex- 
 periences.' But it is only an amiable delusion of Mr. 
 Joachim's to imagine that he has tried to do so (p. 115). 
 His assumption of ' the Ideal ' has really incapacitated 
 him from describing human experience as it is. He has 
 in reality dissevered it into a part which is (to his think- 
 ing) superhuman, and another which is despicable, if not 
 bestial. But the two will not cohere, nor even come into 
 contact, and between them his theory of knowledge 
 founders. 
 
 1 As Mr. Hoernle neatly says, " Science only formulates its conceptions and 
 laws apart from their temporal setting in any given case, that it may be the 
 better able to understand and control the succession of phenomena in time " 
 (Mind, xiv. 329). Cp. Humanism, pp. 103-5. 
 
 2 Cp. Essay iii. 14. 3 Cp. Essay iii. 3.
 
 vi THE NATURE OF TRUTH 175 
 
 In other words, Mr. Joachim has contrived to reopen 
 an old wound that was never really healed. In every 
 absolutist theory of knowledge, when it is really thought 
 out to the end, there is and must be a dualistic chasm 
 gaping between the ' human ' and the ' absolute ' aspects 
 of truth. Across this chasm there is no bridge ; but the 
 mystic often fancies that he can be wafted across it on 
 the wings of desire. Mr. Joachim is too sceptical and too 
 honest to play such tricks, but the old mistakes have 
 conducted him to the old impasse. Once more the ideal 
 has been severed from its roots in the real ; once more it 
 has been incited to transcend our experience ; once more 
 it has refused to return to earth and to redeem it. It 
 is vain to protest (p. 62) that "a universal is not another 
 entity existing alongside of its particulars." He himself 
 has made it such, by refusing to conceive it as human and 
 as humanly inhabiting them. 
 
 If he will not conceive the universal as a human 
 instrument, as existing in and for its use, if he will insist 
 that it must be ' independent,' it must be so exalted as to 
 lose all real significance for us. Thus the old Aristotelian 
 protest against the Platonic Idea has still to be reiterated 
 against the Hegelian universal. If it holds aloof from 
 human knowing, it manifestly fails, because it becomes a 
 vain duplication, which has no meaning or interest for us : 
 if it essays to deal with human knowing, it becomes an 
 inhuman monster which tries to absorb the human and, 
 still more manifestly, fails, and then revenges itself by 
 abusing and depreciating us. In neither case can the 
 human and the ideal be harmoniously combined, or their 
 ' duality ' overcome. But this duality was produced by 
 the initial assumption of a non-human standpoint ; if the 
 inquiry had commenced by investigating how ' truths ' 
 are verified and errors detected, no ' duality ' need ever 
 have arisen to bar the way. 1 
 
 1 Cp. for all this the argument in Essays ii. 16-18, and iii. 17-18.
 
 1/6 STUDIES IN HUMANISM V i 
 
 V 
 
 To discuss Mr. Joachim's standpoint really implies 
 the highest praise that could be bestowed on Mr. Joachim's 
 essay. For it means that having assumed it, he has 
 worked out its implications with consistency and rigour 
 to the bitter end. Indeed, it seems that of all the writers 
 of the ' Anglo - Hegelian ' school he has most firmly 
 grasped their central problem, most honestly faced their 
 difficulties, most clearly shown what their doctrines really 
 mean and to what they really lead. That his conclusions 
 should be welcome to all (or even to any) of the members 
 of the school is not, perhaps, to be expected ; but it is no 
 slight service to philosophy to have set the issue in so 
 clear a light. Other philosophers, who stand remote 
 enough to enjoy the light of Mr. Joachim's criticism 
 without being scorched by its fire, will appreciate that 
 service at its true value. Humanists, in particular, 
 will derive much instruction from the uncompromising 
 and almost inhuman expression Mr. Joachim has given 
 to an attitude diametrically opposed to theirs. They will 
 note with satisfaction how close is the parallel, and how 
 complete the antithesis, between him and them on all 
 essential points, and regard this as testimony to the 
 inner consistency of rival views whose divergence springs 
 from different answers to the same question. They will 
 rejoice that Mr. Joachim has unequivocally expressed a 
 multitude of notions they had long suspected their 
 opponents of harbouring, and desired to see stated in cold 
 print. Nor will they have any reason to regret the 
 negative outcome of Mr. Joachim's labours. On the 
 contrary, the more extensively it is recognised as the final 
 breakdown of intellectualistic attempts to explain ' how 
 knowledge is possible' without regard to the actual 
 functioning of knowledge in human life, the better they 
 will be pleased. 
 
 In view of the fundamental value of Mr. Joachim's 
 work it seems ungracious to allude to secondary blemishes. 
 But it is a pity that instead of starting from the simplest
 
 vi THE NATURE OF TRUTH 177 
 
 form of the ' correspondence-with-reality ' view of truth, 
 he has altogether omitted to consider it. For it is in its 
 sensationalists form, as referring thoughts to the test of 
 perceptions, that this view is most plausible and least 
 inadequate. Indeed, apart from ulterior interpretations, 
 it is plainly descriptive of processes which actually occur 
 in our knowing, and is not so much false as incomplete. 
 It ordinarily means no more than that when our 
 judgments anticipate perceptions, the perceptions do not 
 belie them. 
 
 Again, one feels that the most consistent attempt to 
 work out the notion of the ' independence ' of reality on 
 intellectualistic lines, viz. that made by Messrs. Bertrand 
 Russell and G. E. Moore, is rejected rather than refuted 
 on pp. 51-55. At any rate the objections urged against 
 the theory seem to press equally upon that to which, in 
 spite of its collapse, Mr. Joachim remains attached : the 
 fundamental assumption is the same for both, viz. that 
 experiencing ought not to make a difference to the ' facts'; 
 so is their fundamental difficulty, that of getting this 
 ' independent ' truth into relation with human minds after 
 it has been postulated. Now such a relation has to be 
 conceived as a ' correspondence ' somehow ; a and so it 
 would seem that in criticising the correspondence 
 notion Mr. Joachim has once more refuted his own 
 assumptions. 2 
 
 This, indeed, would seem to be the conclusion of the 
 whole matter : when we find the logic of Mr. Joachim 
 and Mr. Russell failing just where that of Plato had 
 failed in the Theaetetus, viz. over the existence of error, 
 and failing just for the same reason, viz. on account of 
 its wanton abstraction from the human knowing which 
 falls into error, failing just where that of Mr. Bradley had 
 
 1 Cp. Essay iv. 7. 
 
 2 Of course the problem has, in both cases, been wrongly formulated. 
 Instead of asking, ' How can our judgments reveal independent facts?' we 
 ought to have inquired when and why and in virtue of what intrinsic peculiarities, 
 some of our judgments have this transcendent ' reference to an independent fact ' 
 ascribed to them. It would then appear that the reason is pragmatic : those 
 judgments refer to ' independent facts ' which have reached (relative) stability 
 and pragmatic trustworthiness. 
 
 N
 
 i;8 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vi 
 
 failed, failing just where its failure was predicted ; l when 
 we find logicians unable to account for the empirical fact 
 of knowledge, and plunging deeper and deeper into the 
 quicksands of scepticism the more they try to explain 
 it, when inference becomes a ' paradox ' and a mystery 
 exceeding those of theology, when our reasoning has 
 to be treated as either ' irrational ' or extra-logical, and 
 when we contrast the fact to which Prof. A. W. Moore 
 has justly drawn attention, 2 that all the time our actual 
 knowledge is growing and progressively ameliorating the 
 lot of man, is it not high time that we should stop and 
 bethink ourselves of a possible alternative to a course 
 which is both fatal and ridiculous ? Has not the time 
 come when Kant's ' Copernican change of standpoint ' 
 might at last be put into practice seriously, and when 
 Truth, instead of being offered up to idols and sacrificed 
 to ' ideals,' might at length be depicted in her human 
 beauty and simplicity ? 
 
 1 Cp. Humanism, p. 48, and Essay iv. 3-5. 
 
 2 The Functional versus the Representational Theory of Knowledge in Locke's 
 Essay, ch. i.
 
 VII 
 THE MAKING OF TRUTH 
 
 ARGUMENT 
 
 I. The problem of relating ' truth ' to ' fact.' Difficulties of conceiving 
 ' fact ' as ' independent ' of our knowing : (a) The paradoxes of realism ; 
 (b) the additional contradictions of rationalism. The old assumptions 
 to be given up. (l) Truth is human ; (2) fact is not ' independent ',' but 
 (3) dependent and relative to our knowing, 2. The problem of vali- 
 dating claims to truth, and avoiding error. 3. Actual knowing our 
 starting-point : its seven features dominated by the pragmatic test of 
 truth, 4. The fact of previous knowledge. 5- The acceptance of 
 a basis of fact. The ambiguity of fact : ' real ' fact evolved from 
 ' primary,' by a process of selection. Individual variations as to 
 acceptance of fact. Fact never merely objective. 6. The problem of 
 'objectivity.' It does not = unpleasantness. Pragmatic recognition of 
 ' unpleasant fact ' and its motives. 7. The place of interest and 
 purpose in our knowing. ' Goods' and ' ends.' 8. The validation of a 
 claim by its consequences. 9. (a) Complete success ; (6) partial and 
 conditional success leading to methodological or practical ' truth ' ; (c) 
 failure, to be variously explained. 10. The growth of knowledge a 
 growth of efficiency as well as of ' system,' but ' system ' tested by its 
 efficiency. n. The making of truth in its application to the future 
 and the past. Antedating and re-valuing of truth. Can all truth be con- 
 ceived as ' made ' ? Difficulties. No ' creation out of nothing. ' The 
 problems of 'previous knowledge' and 'acceptance of fact.' 12. The 
 ' previous knowledge ' to be treated pragmatically. Uselessness of funda- 
 mental truths which cannot be known. 13. The 'making of truth' 
 ipso facto a ' making of reality ' : (a) beliefs, ideas, and desires, as real 
 forces shaping the world ; (b) the efficacy of ideals ; (c) the dependence 
 of ' discovery ' upon endeavour. 14. The further analysis of the factual 
 basis is really metaphysics, and pragmatic method need not be carried 
 so far. Conflict between the pragmatic value (i) of the real world of 
 common-sense, and (2) of the making of truth. But (2) is of superior 
 authority because ( i ) is a pragmatic construction. Also the real making 
 of reality may be analogous to our own. 
 
 i. THE problem of 'the making of truth' issues from 
 the epistemological situation of the day at two points. 
 It arises out of two burning questions ( i ) how ' truth ' is 
 
 179
 
 i8o STUDIES IN HUMANISM vn 
 
 related to ' fact ' ; and (2) how ' truth ' is discriminated 
 from ' error,' or how ' claims ' to truth are ' validated.' 
 
 On both these questions we have already abundantly 
 seen that the intellectualistic theories of knowledge have 
 argued themselves into a complete impasse. They have 
 put the questions in such a way that no answer is 
 possible. Their ' doctrines ' in the end amount merely to 
 confessions of failure. They cannot understand how 
 error is possible, or how, if it nevertheless exists, it can be 
 discriminated from truth ; and the only answer they can 
 give to the question how truth is made, is to declare that 
 it is never really made> but must pre-exist ready-made as 
 an eternal ideal (whether in a non-human mind, or a 
 supercelestial space, or in independent being, is a matter 
 of taste), to which our human truths have to approximate. 
 But when it turns out on their own showing that the 
 attainment of this ideal by us is eternally impossible, what 
 option have we but to treat this answer as no answer at 
 all? 
 
 Again, they involve themselves in insuperable diffi- 
 culties as to the relation of truth to fact. They start 
 from an uncriticised assumption that truth must be the 
 apprehension of ' independent ' fact ; but they cannot 
 understand how ' fact ' can be ' independent ' of our 
 knowing. For how, if it is in any way dependent on us, 
 can it remain ' fact,' or ' truth ' remain true ? Can we 
 make ' truth ' and ' fact ' ? Away with the monstrous, 
 impious thought ! And yet it is too plain that our 
 human knowing seems to do these very things. And 
 that in what must seem to them the most dubious ways. 
 For it employs a multitude of arbitrary processes, 
 commended only by the psychological hold they have 
 over our mortal nature, and, when these are abstracted 
 from, it simply ceases to work. But how, Intellectualism 
 must ask, can such processes be more than subjective, 
 how dare we attribute them to an eternal mind, to an 
 independent reality ? It would be flat absurdity. But if 
 they are merely subjective, must they not hopelessly 
 vitiate the facts, distort the image of reality, and utterly
 
 vii THE MAKING OF TRUTH 181 
 
 unfit our ' truth ' to be the passionless mirror of reality 
 which it is assumed it has to be ? 
 
 Nor does it matter from what side this puzzle is 
 approached. If it is approached from the ' realist ' side, 
 we come upon the sheer, unmitigated, incredible paradoxes 
 that the ' independent fact 'is ( i ) to be known by and 
 in a process which ex hypothesi it 'transcends'; (2) to 
 be apprehended by a subjective activity which is confessed 
 to be largely, if not wholly, arbitrary ; that (3) this is to 
 make no difference whatsoever to the fact ; and (4) that we 
 are to know this also, to know, that is, that the ' correspond- 
 ence ' between the ' fact,' as it is in itself and outside 
 our knowledge, and the fact as it appears in our knowledge, 
 is somehow perfect and complete ! 
 
 If we come upon it from the absolutist side, we find 
 an ' eternal ideal of truth ' supervening upon, or perhaps 
 taking the place of, the ' independent fact.' In the 
 former case we have, evidently, achieved nothing but a 
 complication of the problem. For it will now be a 
 question how ' eternal truth ' is related to ' independent 
 fact,' and also how both of them are to be related to 
 ' truth ' and ' fact ' for us. But even in the latter case 
 there is no gain, because this ideal also is still supposed 
 to be ' independent ' of us and our doings. The difficul- 
 ties, therefore, remain precisely the same. Nay, they 
 are added to by the demand that we are to know that 
 the ' correspondence ' between the human and the ideal 
 must be imperfect as well as perfect \ For the ideal has 
 been so constructed that our knowledge cannot fully 
 realise it, while yet it must fully realise it, in order that 
 we may assure ourselves of its ' truth,' by observing its 
 ' correspondence ' with the ideal ! Absolute truth, there- 
 fore, as conceived by absolutism, is not merely useless as 
 a criterion of our truth, because we do not possess it, and 
 cannot compare it with our truth, nor estimate where and 
 to what extent our truth falls short of its ' divine ' 
 archetype ; it is not merely the adding of one more to 
 the multitude of (human) truth-conceptions which have to 
 be accommodated to one another, and out of which there
 
 182 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vn 
 
 has to be compounded the ' objective ' truth and the 
 ' common ' world of practical life. It is positively noxious, 
 actively disruptive of the whole notion of truth, and 
 pregnant with self-destructive consequences. 
 
 Surely this situation, the development of which has 
 been traced in Essays ii., iii., iv., 3-5 and 7-8, and vi., 
 should be painful and irrational enough to stagger even 
 the most rationalistic faith in the sufficiency of intel- 
 lectualistic assumptions, and to impel it at least to 
 investigate the alternative conception of the problem which 
 Pragmatism has had the boldness to propound ! 
 
 To us, of course, it will be as clear as daylight that 
 the old assumptions are wrong, proved to be wrong by the 
 absurdity of their consequences, and must be given up. 
 We shall infer frankly (i) that whether or not we can 
 succeed in constructing a wholly unexceptionable theory 
 of knowledge, it is folly any longer to close one's eyes 
 to the importance and all - pervasiveness of subjective 
 activities in the making of truth. It must frankly be 
 admitted that truth is human truth, and incapable of 
 coming into being without human effort and agency ; that 
 human action is psychologically conditioned ; that, there- 
 fore, the concrete fulness of human interests, desires, 
 emotions, satisfactions, purposes, hopes, and fears is 
 relevant to the theory of knowledge and must not be 
 abstracted from. 
 
 (2) We shall perceive that the futile notion of a really 
 ' independent ' truth and fact, which cannot be known or 
 related to us or to each other, even by the most gratuitous 
 of miracles, must be abandoned. If we insist on preserving 
 the word, it must at any rate be used no longer as a 
 label for the problem of relating the human to a non- 
 human which cannot possibly be related to it. It must, 
 at least, be interpreted pragmatically, as a term which 
 discriminates certain behaviours, which distinguishes 
 certain valuations, within the cognitive process which 
 evolves both ' truth ' and ' fact ' for man. 1 
 
 (3) Instead of wasting our ingenuity, therefore, in 
 
 1 Cp. Essay xix. 10.
 
 vii THE MAKING OF TRUTH 183 
 
 trying to unite contradictory conceptions which we have 
 ourselves made so, let us try the alternative adventure of 
 a tJwroughly and consistently dependent truth, dependent, 
 that is, on human life and ministering to its needs, made 
 by us and referring to our experience, and evolving 
 everything called ' real ' and ' absolute ' and ' transcendent ' 
 immanently in the course of its cognitive functioning. 
 It will have at least this great initial advantage over 
 theories which assume an antithesis between the human 
 and the ' ideal ' or the ' real,' that its terms will not have 
 to be laboriously brought into relation with each other 
 and with human life. 
 
 2. The second question, as to how claims to have 
 judged ' truly ' are to be made good, and how ' truth ' is 
 to be distinguished from ' error,' raises the problem of the 
 ' making of Truth ' in a still more direct fashion. Indeed 
 it may in this form be said to be the pragmatic problem 
 par excellence, and we have already taken some steps 
 towards its solution. We have seen the nature of the 
 distinction between ' claim ' and ' validity ' and its im- 
 portance (Essay v.). We may also take it for granted 
 that as there is nothing in the claim itself to tell us 
 whether it is valid or not (Essay iii. 18), the validation 
 of claims must depend on their consequences (Essay L). 
 We have also vindicated the right of our actual human 
 knowledge to be considered by Logic in its full concrete- 
 ness (Essay iii.). We have noted, lastly, that the 
 collapse of the rationalistic theory of truth was to be 
 traced to its inveterate refusal to do this (Essays v., ii., vi., 
 and iii.), and more particularly to recognise the problem of 
 error, and to help human reasoners to discriminate 
 between it and truth. 
 
 But all this is not enough to give us a positive grasp 
 of the making of truth. To do this we must analyse a 
 simple case of actual knowing in greater detail. But this 
 is difficult, not so much because of any intrinsic difficulty 
 of being aware of what we are doing, as because the con- 
 templation of actual human knowledge has fallen into 
 such disuse, and the simplest facts have been translated
 
 1 84 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vn 
 
 into the language of such weird fictions, that it is hard to 
 bespeak sufficient attention for what actually occurs. 
 Philosophers have strained their ingenuity to prove that 
 it is impossible, or at least indefensible, to test the simplest 
 truth in the most obvious manner, without dragging in 
 ' the a priori Deduction of the Categories/ or the 
 ' Dialectic of the Notion.' And all the while they are 
 oblivious of the very real presuppositions of our knowing, 
 and systematically exclude from their view the fact that 
 all our ' truths ' occur as personal affirmations in the life 
 of persons practically interested to attain truth and to 
 avoid error. Thus, when I take some one coming 
 towards me from a distance to be my brother, and 
 subsequently perceive that he is not, this correction of a 
 false claim seems an act of cognition well within the 
 powers of any man : it seems gratuitous to regard it as a 
 privilege reserved for the initiates of ' the higher Logic,' 
 the seers of ' the Self - development of the Absolute 
 Idea,' while totally ignoring such facts as that I was (a) 
 anxiously expecting my brother, but also (b} unfortunately 
 afflicted with short-sightedness. 
 
 3. Let us begin, then, quite simply and innocently, 
 with our immediate experience, with the actual knowing, 
 just as we find it, of our own adult minds. This pro- 
 posal may seem hopelessly ' uncritical,' until we realise 
 (i) that our actual minds are always the de facto starting- 
 points, from which, and with the aid of which, we work 
 back to whatever ' starting-points ' we are pleased to call 
 'original' and 'elementary'; (2) that we always read 
 our actual minds into these other starting-points ; (3) 
 that no subtlety of analysis can ever penetrate to any 
 really certain and undisputable principles to start with ; 
 (4) that such principles are as unnecessary as they are 
 impossible, because we only need principles which will 
 work and grow more certain in their use, and that so 
 even initially defective principles, which are improved, 
 will turn out truer than the truest we could have started 
 with ; (5) that in all science our actual procedure is 
 inductive, experimental, postulatory, tentative, and that
 
 vii THE MAKING OF TRUTH 185 
 
 the demonstrative form, into which the conclusions may 
 afterwards be put, is merely a trophy set up to mark the 
 victory. If we are met with reluctance to accept these 
 very reasonable contentions, let us not delay in order to 
 argue them out, but proceed with the pragmatic confidence 
 that, if they are provisionally assumed, the usefulness 
 of the resulting view of knowledge will speedily establish 
 them. 
 
 By tentatively assuming, then, this ' common-sense ' 
 starting-point, we are enabled to observe that even one 
 of the simplest acts of knowing is quite a complicated 
 affair, because in it we are (i) using a mind which has 
 had some prior experience and possesses some knowledge, 
 and so (2) has acquired (what it greatly needs) some 
 basis in reality, which it is willing to accept as 'fact,' 
 because (3) it needs a 'platform' from which to operate 
 further on a situation which confronts it, in order (4) to 
 realise some purpose or to satisfy some interest, which 
 defines for it an ' end ' and constitutes for it a ' good.' 
 (5) It consequently experiments with the situation by 
 some voluntary interference, which may begin with a 
 mere predication, and proceed by reasoned inferences, but 
 always, when completed, issues in an act. (6) It is 
 guided by the results (' consequences ') of this experiment, 
 which go to verify or to disprove its provisional basis, 
 the initial ' facts,' predications, conceptions, hypotheses, 
 and assumptions. Hence (7) if the results are satisfac- 
 tory, the reasoning employed is deemed to have been 
 pro tanto good, the results right, the operations performed 
 valid, while the conceptions used and the predications 
 made are judged true. Thus successful predication 
 extends the system of knowledge and enlarges the 
 borders of ' fact.' Reality is like an ancient oracle, and 
 does not respond until it is questioned. And to attain 
 our responses we make free to use all the devices which 
 our whole nature suggests. But when they are attained, 
 the predications we judge to be 'true' afford us fresh 
 revelations of reality. Thus Truth and Reality grow for 
 us together, in a single process, which is never one of
 
 186 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vn 
 
 bringing the mind into relation with a fundamentally 
 alien reality, but always one of improving and extending 
 an already existing system which we know. 
 
 Now this whole process is clearly dominated by the 
 pragmatic test of truth. The claims to truth involved 
 are validated by their consequences when used. Thus 
 Pragmatism as a logical method is merely the conscious 
 application of a natural procedure of our minds in actual 
 knowing. It merely proposes (i) to realise clearly the 
 nature of these facts, and of the risks and gains which 
 they involve, and (2) to simplify and reform logical theory 
 thereby. 
 
 4. We may next consider some of these points in 
 greater detail. First as to the use of an already formed 
 mind ( 3 (i)). That empirically knowledge arises out of 
 pre-existing knowledge, that we never operate with a raw 
 and virgin mind, has been an epistemological common- 
 place ever since it was authoritatively enunciated by 
 Aristotle, though the paradox it involves with regard to 
 the first beginning of knowledge has never quite been 
 solved. For the present, however, we need only 
 emphasise in addition that the development of a mind 
 is a thoroughly personal affair. Potential knowledge 
 becomes actual, because of the purposive activity of a 
 knower who brings it to bear on his interests, and uses it 
 to realise his ends. The growth of knowledge is not by 
 a mechanical necessity, nor by the self-development of 
 abstract ideas in a psychological vacuum. 
 
 5. Next, as to the acceptance of a basis of fact 
 ( 3 ( 2 ) ) It i s extraordinary that even the most blindly 
 hostile critic should have supposed Pragmatism to have 
 denied this. It has merely pointed out that the acceptance 
 must not be ignored, and that it is fatal to the chimera 
 of a ' fact ' for us existing quite ' independently ' of our 
 ' will.' 
 
 It is, however, important to notice the ambiguity of 
 'fact' (i) In the wider sense everything is 'fact,' qua 
 experienced, including imaginings, illusions, errors, hal- 
 lucinations. ' Fact ' in this sense is anterior to the
 
 vii THE MAKING OF TRUTH 187 
 
 distinction of ' appearance ' and ' reality,' and covers both. 
 To distinguish it we may call it ' primary reality.' l Its 
 existence is undeniable, and in a sense most important. 
 For it is the starting-point, and final touchstone, of all 
 our theories about reality, which have for their aim its 
 transformation. It may, certainly, in a sense, be called 
 ' independent ' of us, if that comforts any one. For it is 
 certainly not ' made ' by us, but ' found.' But, as it 
 stands, we find it most unsatisfactory and set to work to 
 remake it and unmake it. And it cannot possibly be 
 taken as ' real fact ' or ' true reality.' For, as immediately 
 experienced, it is a meaningless chaos, merely the raw 
 material of a cosmos, the stuff out of which real fact is 
 made. Thus the need of operating on it is the real 
 justification of our cognitive procedures. 
 
 These make it into (2) 'fact' in the stricter and more 
 familiar sense (with which alone scientific discussion is 
 concerned), by processes of selection and valuation, which 
 segregate the ' real ' from the ' apparent ' and the ' unreal.' 
 It is only after such processes have worked upon ' primary 
 reality ' that the distinction of ' appearance ' and ' reality ' 
 appears, on which intellectualism seeks to base its meta- 
 physic. But it has failed to observe that the ground it 
 builds on is already hopelessly vitiated for the purpose of 
 erecting a temple to its idol, the ' satisfaction of pure 
 intellect.' For in this selection of ' real reality ' our 
 interests, desires, and emotions inevitably play a leading 
 part, and may even exercise an overpowering influence 
 fatal to our ulterior ends. 
 
 Individual minds differ as greatly in their acceptance of 
 ' facts ' as in other respects. Some can never be got to 
 face unpleasant ' facts,' or will accept them only at the 
 point of the sword. Most prefer to contemplate the 
 more agreeable alternative. A few are driven by their 
 fears unduly to accept the worse alternative. The 
 devices for ideally rectifying the harshnesses of actual 
 experience are endless. We console ourselves by pos- 
 tulating ideal realities, or extensions of reality, capable 
 
 1 Cp. Humanism, pp. 192-3, and Essays viii. n, ix. 4.
 
 188 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vn 
 
 of transfiguring the repugnant character of actual life. 
 We so conceive it, or interpret it, as to transform it into 
 a ' good.' Or sometimes plain and generally recognised 
 ' facts ' are disposed of by a sheer assertion of their 
 ' unreality,' as is, e.g., the existence of pain by ' Christian 
 Science,' and of evil by absolutist metaphysics. It is 
 clear that psychologically all these attitudes towards 
 ' fact ' more or less work, and so have a certain value. 
 
 It is clear also that the recognition of 'fact' is by no 
 means a simple affair. ' Facts ' which can be excluded 
 from our lives, which do not interest us, which mean 
 nothing to us, which we cannot use, which are ineffective, 
 which have little bearing on practical life, tend to drop 
 into unreality. And, moreover, our neglect really tends 
 to make them unreal, just as, conversely, our preference 
 for the ideals we postulate makes them real, at least as 
 factors in human life. 
 
 The common notion, therefore, that ' fact ' is some- 
 thing independent of our recognition, needs radical 
 revision, in the only sense of ' fact ' which is worth 
 disputing. It must be admitted that without a process 
 of selection by us, there are no real facts for us, and that 
 this whole process is immensely arbitrary. It would, 
 perhaps, be infinitely so, but for the limitations of human 
 imagination and tenacity of purpose in operating on 
 apparent fact. 
 
 6. Through this atmosphere of emotional interest, 
 how shall we penetrate to any ' objective ' fact at all ? 
 Where shall we find the ' hard facts ' our forefathers 
 believed in, which are so whether we will them or not, 
 which extort recognition even from our sturdiest reluc- 
 tance, whose unpleasantness breaks our will and does not 
 bend to it ? 
 
 Certainly it may not be quite easy to discern the old 
 objective facts in their new dress, but that is a poor 
 reason for denying them the subjective atmosphere in 
 which they have to live. 
 
 (i) We may begin, however, by remarking on the 
 curious equating of ' objective ' with ' unpleasant ' facts
 
 vii THE MAKING OF TRUTH 189 
 
 and truths. Its instinctive pessimism seems to imply a 
 mind which is so suspicious of fact that it can be driven 
 to recognise the reality of anything only by pains and 
 penalties, which is so narrowly contented with its 
 existing limitations as to be disposed to regard all 
 novelties as unwelcome intrusions, which has, in short, to 
 be forced into the presence of truth, and will not go forth 
 to seek it and embrace it. Such, certainly, is not the 
 frame of mind and temper of the pragmatist, who prefers 
 to conceive ' the objective ' as that which he aims at and 
 from, and contends that though ' facts ' may at times 
 coerce, it is yet more essential to them to be ' accepted,' 
 to be ' made,' and to be capable of being ' remade' 
 
 (2) At all events, he thinks that the coerciveness of 
 ' fact ' has been enormously exaggerated by failure to 
 observe that it is never sheer coercion, but always 
 mitigated by his acceptance, by which it ceases to be de 
 facto thrust upon him, and becomes de jure ' willed.' 
 Even a forced move, he feels, is better than no power to 
 move at all ; and the game of life is not wholly made 
 up of forced moves. 
 
 (3) He finds no difficulty, therefore, in the conception 
 of unpleasant ' fact.' It indicates the better of two 
 disagreeable alternatives. And he can give good reasons 
 for accepting unpleasant fact, without on that account 
 conceiving ' fact ' as such to be unpleasant and coercive. 
 He may (a) accept it as the less unpleasant alternative, 
 and to avoid worse consequences, much as man may wear 
 spectacles rather than go blind. He may (&) prefer to 
 sacrifice a cherished prejudice rather than to deny, e.g., 
 the evidence of his senses, or to renounce the use of his 
 ' reason.' He may (c) accept it provisionally, without 
 regarding it as absolute, merely for the purposes of the 
 act or experiment he is contemplating. For to recognise 
 the pragmatic reality of an unpleasant fact means nothing 
 metaphysical, and entails no serious consequences. It 
 only implies willingness to accept it for the time being, 
 and is quite compatible with a disbelief in its ultimate 
 reality, and with its subsequent reduction to unreality or
 
 190 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vn 
 
 illusion. Hence (d} such a pragmatic acceptance of 
 unpleasant fact does not impair our liberty of action ; it 
 is no obstacle to subsequent experimentation, which may 
 ' discover ' the illusoriness of the presumed ' fact.' But 
 even where it does not lead to this, it may (e) be a 
 preliminary to making the unpleasant fact unreal, and 
 putting something better in its place ; thus proving, in 
 another way, that it never was the absolute hard fact it 
 was supposed to be, but dependent on our inaction for 
 its continued existence. 
 
 Thus (4) it turns out that the existence of unpleasant 
 fact, so far from being an objection to the pragmatic 
 view of fact, is an indispensable ingredient in it. For it 
 supplies the motive for that transformation of the existing 
 order, for that unmaking of the real which has been made 
 amiss, which, with the making fact of the ideal and the 
 preservation of the precious, constitutes the essence of 
 our cognitive endeavour. To attain our ' objective,' the 
 ' absolutely objective fact,' which would be absolutely 
 satisfactory, 1 we need a ' platform ' whence to act and 
 aim. ' Objective fact ' is just such a platform. Only 
 there is no need to conceive it as anchored to the eternal 
 bottom of the flux of time : it floats, and so can move 
 with the times, and be adjusted to the occasion. 
 
 7. As to 3 (4), we have already seen that interest 
 and purpose can be eliminated from cognitive process 
 only at the cost of stopping it (Essay iii. 7). A being 
 devoid of interests would not attend to anything that 
 happened, would not select or value one thing rather than 
 another, nor would any one thing make more of an 
 impression on its apathy than any other. Its mind and 
 its world would remain in the chaos of primary reality 
 ( 5), and resemble that of the 'Absolute' 2 (if it can be 
 said to have a mind). 
 
 The human mind, of course, is wholly different It is 
 full of interests, all of which are directly or indirectly 
 referable to the functions and purposes of life. Its 
 
 1 Cp. Essay viii. 12 ; and Humanism, pp. 198-203. 
 2 Cp. Essay ix. 5.
 
 vii THE MAKING OF TRUTH 191 
 
 organisation is biological and teleological, and in both 
 cases selective. If we except a few abnormal and morbid 
 processes such as idiocy, insanity, and dream, mental life 
 may be called wholly purposive ; that is, its functioning 
 is not intelligible without reference to actual or possible 
 purposes, even when it is not aiming at a definite, clearly- 
 envisaged end. Definite purposes are, it is true, of 
 gradual growth. They arise by selection, they crystallise 
 out from a magma of general interestedness and vaguely 
 purposive actions, as we realise our true vocation in life, 
 much as ' real ' reality was selected out of ' primary.' 
 Thus we become more and more clearly conscious of our 
 ' ends,' and more and more definite in referring our 
 ' goods ' to them. But this reference is rarely or never 
 carried through completely, because our nature is never 
 fully harmonised. And so our ' desires ' may continue to 
 hanker after ' goods ' which our ' reason ' cannot sanction 
 as conducive to our ends, or our intelligence may fail to 
 find the ' good ' means to our ends, and be deceived by 
 current valuations of goods which are really evils. Thus 
 the ' useful ' and the ' good ' tend to fall apart, and 
 ' goods ' to seem incompatible. But properly and ideally, 
 there are no goods which are not related to the highest 
 Good, no values which are not goods, no truths which 
 are not values, and therefore, none which are not useful in 
 the widest sense. 
 
 8. As to 3 (5), Experience is experiment, i.e. active. 
 We do not learn, we do not live, unless we try. Passivity, 
 mere acceptance, mere observation (could they be con- 
 ceived) would lead us nowhere, least of all to knowledge. 
 
 (i) Every judgment refers sooner or later to a 
 concrete situation which it analyses. In an ordinary 
 judgment of sense-perception, as, e.g., ' This is a chair,' the 
 subject, the ' this,' denotes the product of a selection of 
 part of a given whole. The selection is arbitrary, in that 
 it ignores all the rest of the situation ' given ' along 
 with the ' this.' If taken in abstraction, as intellectualism 
 loves to do, it seems wholly arbitrary, unintelligible, and 
 indefensible. In the concrete, however, the judgment
 
 192 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vn 
 
 when made is always purposive, and its selection is 
 justified, or refuted, by the subsequent stages of the ideal 
 experiment. The ' objective control ' of the subjective 
 freedom to predicate is not effected by some uncom- 
 prehended pre-existing fact : it comes in the consequences 
 of acting out the predication. And so our analyses are 
 arbitrary only if and in so far as we are not willing to 
 take their consequences upon us. Similarly the predicate, 
 which includes the ' this ' in a conceptual system already 
 established, is arbitrary in its selection. Why did we 
 say ' chair,' and not ' sofa ' or ' stool ' ? To answer this 
 we must go on to test the predication. 
 
 For (2) every judgment is essentially an experiment, 
 which, to be tested, must be acted on. If it is really 
 true that ' this ' is a chair, it can be sat in. If it is a 
 hallucination, it cannot. If it is broken, it is not a chair 
 in the sense my interest demanded. For I made the 
 judgment under the prompting of a desire to sit. 
 
 If now I stop at this point, without acting on the 
 suggestion contained in the judgment, the claim to truth 
 involved in the assertion is never tested, and so cannot be 
 validated. Whether or not ' this ' was a chair, cannot be 
 known. If I consent to complete the experiment, the 
 consequences will determine whether my predication was 
 ' true ' or ' false.' The ' this ' may not have been a chair 
 at all, but a false appearance. Or the antique article of 
 ornamental furniture which broke under my weight may 
 have been something too precious to be sat in. In either 
 case, the ' consequences ' not only decide the validity of 
 my judgment, but also alter my conception of reality. 
 In the one case I shall judge henceforth that reality is 
 such as to present me with illusory chairs ; in the other, 
 that it contains also chairs not to be sat in. This then is 
 what is meant by the pragmatic testing of a claim to 
 truth. 1 
 
 9. As to the reaction of the consequences of an 
 experimental predication upon its ' truth ' ( 3 (6) ), the 
 
 1 Cp. Dewey's Logical Studies for the experimental nature of predication, 
 especially ch. vii.
 
 vii THE MAKING OF TRUTH 193 
 
 simplest case is that (i) of a successful validation. If, 
 in the example of the last section, I can sit in the 
 ' chair,' my confidence in my eyesight is confirmed and I 
 shall trouble little whether it ought not rather to have 
 been called a ' sofa ' or a ' stool.' Of course, however, if 
 my interest was not that of a mere sitter, but of a 
 collector or dealer in ancient furniture, my first judgment 
 may have been woefully inadequate, and may need to be 
 revised. ' Success,' therefore, in validating a ' truth,' is a 
 relative term, relative to the purpose with which the truth 
 was claimed. The ' same ' predication may be ' true ' for 
 me and ' false ' for you, if our purposes are different. As 
 for a truth in the abstract, and relative to no purpose, it is 
 plainly unmeaning. For it never becomes even a claim, and 
 is never tested, and cannot, therefore, be validated. Hence 
 the truth of ' the proposition ' ' S is P,' when we affirm it 
 on the strength of an actually successful predication, is 
 only potential. In applying it to other actual cases we 
 always take a risk. The second time 'this' may not be 
 a ' chair,' even though it may look the ' same ' as the first 
 time. Hence even a fully successful predication cannot 
 be converted into an ' eternal truth ' without more ado. 
 The empirical nature of reality is such that we can never 
 argue from one case to a similar one, which we take to be 
 ' the same,' with absolute assurance a priori, and hence no 
 ' truth ' can ever be so certain that it need not be veri- 
 fied, and may not mislead us, when applied. But this only 
 means that no truth should be taken as unimprovable. 
 
 (2) Experiments, however, are rarely quite successful. 
 We may (a) have had to purchase the success we attain 
 by the use of artificial abstractions and simplifications, or 
 even downright fictions, and the uncertainty which this 
 imports into the ' truth ' of our conclusions will have to 
 be acknowledged. We shall, therefore, conceive ourselves 
 to have attained, not complete truths without a stain 
 upon their character, which there is no reason to doubt, 
 but only ' approximations to truth ' and ' working hypo- 
 theses,' which are, at most, 'good enough for practical 
 purposes.' And the principles we used we shall dub 
 
 O
 
 194 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vn 
 
 methodological ' truths ' or ' fictions,' according to our bias. 
 And, clearly, the cognitive endeavour will not in this case 
 rest. We shall not have found a ' truth ' which fully 
 satisfies even our immediate purpose, but shall continue 
 the search for a more complete, precise, and satisfactory 
 result. In the former case, the cognitive interest of the 
 situation could be renewed only by a change or growth 
 of purpose leading to further judgments. 
 
 (3) The experiment may fail, and lead to unsatisfac- 
 tory results. The interpretation then may become 
 extremely complex. Either (a) we may put the blame 
 on our subjective manipulation, on our use of our cognitive 
 instruments. We may have observed wrongly. We may 
 have reasoned badly. We may have selected the wrong 
 conceptions. We may have had nothing but false con- 
 ceptions to select from, because our previous knowledge 
 was as a whole inadequate. Or we may be led to doubt 
 (ft) the basis of fact which we assumed, or (c) the 
 practicability of the enterprise we were engaged in. In 
 either of the first two cases we shall feel entitled to try 
 again, with variations in our methods and assumptions ; 
 but repeated failure may finally force even the most 
 stubborn to desist from their purpose, or to reduce it to 
 a mere postulate of rationality which it is as yet impossible 
 to apply to actual experience. And, needless to say, there 
 will be much difference of opinion as to where, in case of 
 failure, the exact flaw lies, and how it may best be 
 remedied. Herein, however, lies one reason (among 
 many) why the discovery of truth is such a personal 
 affair. The discoverer is he who, by greater perseverance 
 or more ingenious manipulation, makes something out of 
 a situation which others had despaired of. 
 
 10. We see, then, how truth is made, by human 
 operations on the data of human experience. Knowledge 
 grows in extent and in trustworthiness by successful 
 functioning, by the assimilation and incorporation of fresh 
 material by the previously existing bodies of knowledge. 
 These ' systems ' are continually verifying themselves, 
 proving themselves true by their 'consequences,' by their
 
 vii THE MAKING OF TRUTH 195 
 
 power to assimilate, predict and control fresh ' fact.' But 
 the fresh fact is not only assimilated ; it also transforms. 
 The old truth looks different in the new light, and really 
 changes. It grows more powerful and efficient. Formally, 
 no doubt, it may be described as growing more 'coherent ' 
 and more highly ' organised,' but this does not touch the 
 kernel of the situation. For the ' coherence ' and the 
 1 organisation ' both exist in our eyes, and relatively to 
 our purposes : it is we who judge what they shall mean. 
 And what we judge them by is their conduciveness to 
 our ends, their effectiveness in harmonising our experience. 
 Thus, here again, the intellectualist analysis of knowledge 
 fails to reach the really motive forces. 
 
 II. It is important, further, to point out that looking 
 forward the making of truth is clearly a continuous, 
 progressive, and cumulative process. For the satisfaction 
 of one cognitive purpose leads on to the formulation of 
 another ; a new truth, when established, naturally becomes 
 the presupposition of further explorations. And to this 
 process there would seem to be no actual end in sight, 
 because in practice we are always conscious of much that 
 we should like to know, if only we possessed the leisure 
 and the power. We can, however, conceive an ideal 
 completion of the making of truth, in the achievement of 
 a situation which would provoke no questions and so 
 would inspire no one with a purpose to remake it. 
 
 Looking backwards, the situation, as might have been 
 expected, is less plain. In the first place there are 
 puzzles, which arise from the natural practice of re-valuing 
 superseded ' truths ' as ' errors,' and of antedating the new 
 truths as having been ' true all along.' And so it may 
 be asked : ' What were these truths before they were 
 discovered ? ' But this query is essentially analogous to 
 the child's question : ' Mother, what becomes of yesterday? ' 
 and by any one who has understood the phraseology of 
 time in the one case and of the making of truth in the 
 other, the difficulty will be seen to be merely verbal. If 
 ' true ' means (as we have contended) ' valued by us,' of 
 course the new truth becomes true only when ' discovered ' ;
 
 196 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vn 
 
 if it means ' valuable if discovered,' it was of course hypo- 
 thetically ' true ' ; if, lastly, the question inquires whether 
 a past situation would not have been altered for the better, 
 if it had included a recognition of this truth, the answer 
 is : ' Yes, probably ; only, unfortunately, it was not so 
 altered.' In none of these cases, however, are we dealing 
 with a situation which can be even intelligibly stated 
 apart from the human making of truth. 1 Again, it is by 
 no means easy to say how far our present processes of 
 making truth are validly to be applied to the past, how 
 far all truth can be conceived as having been made by 
 the processes which we now see in operation. 
 
 (1) That we must try to conceive it thus is, indeed, 
 obvious. For why should we gratuitously assume that 
 the procedure by which ' truth ' is now being made differs 
 radically from that whereby truth initially came into 
 being ? Are we not bound to conceive, if possible, the 
 whole process as continuous, truth made, truth making, 
 and truth yet to be made, as successive stages in one and 
 the same endeavour ? And to a large extent it is clear 
 that this can be done, that the established truths, from 
 which our experiments now start, are of a like nature 
 with the truths we make, and were themselves made in 
 historical times. 
 
 (2) Before, however, we can generalise this procedure, we 
 have to remember that on our own showing we disclaimed 
 the notion of making truth out of nothing. We did not 
 have recourse to the very dubious notion of theology 
 called ' creation out of nothing,' which no human opera- 
 tions ever exemplify. We avowed that our truths were 
 made out of previous truths, and built upon pre-existing 
 knowledge ; also that our procedure involved an initial 
 recognition of ' fact.' 
 
 (3) Here, then, would seem to be two serious, if 
 not fatal, limitations upon the claim of the pragmatic 
 ' making of truth ' to have solved the mystery of know- 
 ledge. They will need, therefore, further examination, 
 though we may at once hasten to state that they cannot 
 
 1 Cp. p. 157 note, and Essay viii. 5.
 
 vii THE MAKING OF TRUTH 197 
 
 affect the validity of what the pragmatic analysis pro- 
 fessed to do. It professed to show the reality and 
 importance of the human contribution to the making of 
 truth ; and this it has amply done. If it can carry us 
 further, and enable us to humanise our world completely, 
 so much the better. But this is more than it bargained 
 to do, and it remains to be seen how far it will carry us 
 into a comprehension also of the apparently non-human 
 conditions under which our manipulations must work. 
 
 1 2. Now as regards the previous knowledge assumed 
 in the making of truth, it may be shown that there is no 
 need to treat it in any but a pragmatic way. For (i) 
 it seems quite arbitrary to deny that the truths which we 
 happen to assume in making new truths are the same in 
 kind as the very similar truths we make by their aid. 
 In many cases, indeed, we can show that these very 
 truths were made by earlier operations. There is, there- 
 fore, so far, nothing to hinder us from regarding the 
 volitional factors which actual knowing now exhibits, viz. 
 desire, interest, and purpose, as essential to the process 
 of knowing, and similarly the process by which new 
 truth is now made, viz. postulation, experiment, action, as 
 essential to the process of verification. 
 
 Moreover (2), even if we denied this, and tried to 
 find truths that had never been made, it would avail us 
 nothing. We never can get back to truths so funda- 
 mental that they cannot possibly be conceived as having 
 been made. There are no a priori truths which are 
 indisputable, as is shown by the mere fact that there 
 is not, and never has been, any agreement as to what 
 they are. All the 'a priori truths,' moreover, which are 
 commonly alleged, can be conceived as postulates 
 suggested by a previous situation. 1 
 
 (3) Methodologically, therefore, it leads us nowhere 
 to assume that within the truth which is made there 
 exists an uncreate residuum or core of elementary truth, 
 which has not been made. For we can never get at it, 
 or know it. Hence, even if it existed, the theory of our 
 
 1 Cp. ' Axioms as Postulates ' in Personal Idealism.
 
 198 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vn 
 
 knowing could take no note of it. All truth, therefore, 
 must, methodologically, be treated as if it had been 
 ' made.' For on this assumption alone can it reveal its 
 full significance. In so far, therefore, as Pragmatism does 
 not profess to be more than a method, it has no occasion 
 to modify or correct an account of truth which is 
 adequate .to its purpose, for the sake of an objection 
 which is methodologically null. 
 
 (4) It seems a little hard on Pragmatism to expect 
 from it a solution of a difficulty which confronts alike all 
 theories of knowledge. In all of them the beginning 
 of knowledge is wrapped in mystery. It is a mystery, 
 however, which even now presses less severely on 
 Pragmatism than on its competitors. For the reason 
 that it is not a retrospective theory. Its significance 
 does not lie in its explanation of the past so much as 
 in its present attitude towards the future. The past is 
 dead and done with, practically speaking ; its deeds have 
 hardened into ' facts,' which are accepted, with or with- 
 out enthusiasm ; what it really concerns us to know is 
 how to act with a vieiv to the future. And so like life, 
 and as befits a theory of human life, Pragmatism faces 
 towards the future. It can adopt, therefore, the motto 
 solvitur ambulando, and be content if it can conceive a 
 situation in which the problem would de facto have dis- 
 appeared. The other theories could not so calmly 
 welcome a ' psychological ' solution as ' logically ' satisfac- 
 tory. But then they still dream of ' theoretic ' solutions, 
 which are to be wholly ' independent ' of practice. 
 
 1 3. The full consideration of the problem involved 
 in the initial ' acceptance of fact ' by our knowing will 
 have to be reserved for a later essay on the ' Making of 
 Reality,' in which we shall have to examine the meta- 
 physical conclusions to which the Pragmatic Method 
 points. At present it must suffice to show (i) that the 
 ' making of truth ' is necessarily and ipso facto also a 
 ' making of reality ' ; and (2) what is the exact nature of 
 the difficulty about accepting the making of truth as a 
 complete making also of reality.
 
 vn THE MAKING OF TRUTH 199 
 
 (i) (a) It is clear, in the first place, that if our beliefs, 
 ideas, desires, wishes, etc., are really essential and integral 
 features in actual knowing, and if knowing really trans- 
 forms our experience, they must be treated as real forces, 
 which cannot be ignored by philosophy. 1 They really 
 alter reality, to an extent which is quite familiar to ' the 
 practical man,' but which, unfortunately, ' philosophers ' 
 do not yet seem to have quite adequately grasped, or to 
 have ' reflected on ' to any purpose. Without, however, 
 going into endless detail about what ought to be quite 
 obvious, let us merely affirm that the ' realities ' of 
 civilised life are the embodiments of the ideas and desires 
 of civilised man, alike in their material and in their social 
 aspects, and that our present inability wholly to subdue 
 the material, in which we realise our ideas, is a singularly 
 poor reason for denying the difference between the 
 present condition of man's world and that of his miocene 
 ancestors. 
 
 (b) Human ideals and purposes are real forces, even 
 though they are not yet incorporated in institutions, and 
 made palpable in the rearrangements of bodies. For 
 they affect our actions, and our actions affect our world. 
 
 (c) Our knowledge of reality, at least, depends largely 
 on the character of our interests, wishes, and acts. If 
 it is true that the cognitive process must be started by 
 subjective interest which determines the direction of its 
 search, it is clear that unless we seek we shall not find, 
 nor ' discover ' realities we have not looked for. They 
 will consequently be missing in our picture of the world, 
 and will remain non-existent for us. To become real 
 for us they (or cognate realities for we do not always 
 discover just what we went forth to find, as witness Saul 
 and Columbus) must have become real objects of interest 
 hypothetically ; and as this making of ' objects of 
 interest ' is quite within our power, in a very real sense 
 their ' discovery ' is a ' making of reality.' 2 Thus, in 
 
 1 Cp. Prof. Dewey's article on ' Beliefs and Realities ' in Phil. Rev. xv. 2, 
 which makes this point very forcibly. 
 
 2 For the reason why we distinguish between these two cases at all, see Essay 
 xix. 5.
 
 200 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vn 
 
 general, the world as it now appears to us may be 
 regarded as the reflexion of our interests in life : it is 
 what we and our ancestors have, wisely or foolishly, 
 sought and known to make of our life, under the 
 limitations of our knowledge and our powers. And 
 that, of course, is little enough as compared with our 
 ideals, though a very great deal as compared with our 
 starting-point. It is enough, at any rate, to justify the 
 phrase ' the making of reality ' as a consequence of the 
 making of truth. And it is evident also that just in so 
 far as the one is a consequence of the other, our remarks 
 about the presupposition of an already made ' truth ' 
 will apply also to the presupposition of an already made 
 ' reality.' 
 
 1 4. The difficulty about conceiving this ' making of 
 reality/ which accompanies the ' making of truth,' as more 
 than ' subjective,' and as affording us a real insight into the 
 nature of the cosmic process, lies in the fact that it is 
 complicated with the difficulty we have already recognised 
 in trying to conceive the making of truth as a completely 
 subjective process, which should yet be self-sufficient and 
 fully explanatory of the nature of knowledge ( 1 1). It 
 is because the making of truth seemed to presuppose a 
 certain ' acceptance of fact,' which was indeed volitional 
 qua the ' acceptance ' and even optional, but left us with 
 a surd qua the ' fact,' that it seems impossible to claim 
 complete objectivity for the making of reality, and that 
 our knowing seems to many merely to select among 
 pre - existing facts those which we are interested to 
 ' discover.' 
 
 It is inevitable, moreover, that the pre-existing facts, 
 which the making, both of truth and of reality, seems to 
 presuppose as its condition, though, properly speaking, it 
 only implies the pre-existo^ft of 'primary reality' ( 5), 
 should be identified with the ' real world ' of common- 
 sense, in which we find ourselves, and which we do not 
 seem to have made in any human sense. In other words, 
 our theory of knowledge is confronted at this point with 
 something which claims ontological validity, and is
 
 viz THE MAKING OF TRUTH 201 
 
 requested to turn itself into a metaphysic in order to 
 deal with it. 
 
 This, of course, it may well refuse to do. It can insist 
 on remaining what it originally was, and has so far pro- 
 fessed to be, viz. a method of understanding the nature of 
 our knowledge. And we shall not be entitled to censure 
 it, however much we may regret its diffidence, and desire 
 it to show its power also in coping with our final 
 difficulties. 
 
 We ought, however, to be grateful, if it enables us to 
 perceive from what the difficulty really arises. It arises 
 from a conflict between pragmatic considerations, both of 
 which are worthy of respect. For (i) the belief in the 
 world theory of ordinary realism, in a ' real world ' into 
 which we are born, and which has existed ' independently ' 
 of us for aeons before that event, and so cannot possibly 
 have been made by us or any man, has very high 
 pragmatic warrant. It is a theory which holds together 
 and explains our experience, and can be acted on with 
 very great success. It is adequate for almost all our 
 purposes. It works so well that it cannot be denied a 
 very high degree of truth. 1 
 
 (2) On the other hand, it is equally plain that we 
 cannot deny the reality of our cognitive procedure and of 
 the human contribution it imports into the making of 
 reality. It, too, is a tried and tested truth. The two, 
 therefore, must somehow be reconciled, even though in so 
 doing we may have to reveal ultimate deficiencies in the 
 common-sense view of the world. 
 
 The first question to be raised is which of the two 
 pragmatically valuable truths should be taken as more 
 ultimate. 
 
 The decision, evidently, must be in favour of the 
 second. For the ' reality of the external world ' is not an 
 original datum of experience, and it is a confusion to 
 identify it with the ' primary reality ' we recognised in 5. 
 It cannot claim the dubious ' independence ' of the latter, 
 just because it is something better and more valuable 
 
 1 Cp. Essay xx. 6.
 
 202 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vn 
 
 which has been ' made ' out of it. For it is a pragmatic 
 construction within primary reality, the product, in fact, 
 of one of those processes of selection by which the chaos 
 is ordered. The real external world is the pragmatically 
 efficient part of our total experience, to which the 
 inefficient parts such as dreams, fancies, illusions, after- 
 images, etc., can, for most purposes, be referred. But 
 though this construction suffices for most practical 
 purposes, it fails to answer the question how may 
 ' reality ' be distinguished from a consistent dream ? And 
 seeing that experience presents us with transitions from an 
 apparently real (dream) world into one of superior reality, 
 how can we know that this process may not be repeated, 
 to the destruction of what now seems our ' real world ' ? l 
 
 We must distinguish, therefore, between two questions 
 which have been confused ( I ) ' Can the making of truth 
 be conceived as a making also of " primary reality " ? ' and 
 (2) ' Can it be conceived also as a making of the real 
 " external world " of ordinary life ? ' and be prepared to 
 find that while the first formulates an impossible problem, 2 
 an answer to the second may prove feasible. In any case, 
 however, it cannot be affirmed that our belief in the 
 metaphysical reality of our external world, which it is in 
 some sense, or in no sense, possible to ' make,' is of higher 
 authority than our belief in the reality of our making of 
 truth. The latter may pervade also forms of experience 
 other than that which gets its pragmatic backbone from 
 the former. Indeed, one cannot imagine desiring, purpos- 
 ing, and acting as ceasing to form part of our cognitive 
 procedure, so long as ' finite ' minds persist at all. All we 
 can say, therefore, is that so long as, and in so far as, our 
 experience is such as to be most conveniently organised 
 by the conception of a pre-existing real world, (in a 
 relative sense) ' independent ' of us, it will also be con- 
 venient to conceive it as having been to a large extent 
 ' made ' before we took a part in the process. 3 
 
 Nevertheless, it is quite possible (i) that this 
 
 1 Cp. Essay xx. 19-22. 2 Essay xix. 7. 
 
 3 Cp. Riddles of the Sphinx, chap. .ix. 32.
 
 vn THE MAKING OF TRUTH 203 
 
 ' pragmatic ' recognition of the external world may not be 
 final, because it does not serve our ultimate purposes ; and 
 (2) that the human process of making reality may be a 
 valuable clue also to the making of the pragmatically real 
 world, because even though it was not made by us, it was 
 yet developed by processes closely analogous to our own 
 procedure, which this latter enables us to understand. If 
 so, we shall be able to combine the real ' making of reality ' 
 and the human ' making of reality ' under the same concep- 
 tion. But both of these suggestions must be left to later 
 essays to work out. 1 Before we embark upon such adven- 
 turous constructions, we must finally dispose of the meta- 
 physical and religious pretensions of the Absolutism whose 
 theory of knowledge has ended in such egregious failure. 
 
 1 Essays xix. and xx.
 
 VIII 
 
 ABSOLUTE TRUTH AND ABSOLUTE 
 REALITY 
 
 ARGUMENT 
 
 I. The Conception of Absolute Truth. i. The sceptical tendency of the 
 
 historical study of Thought is due to reflection on the falsifying of 
 human truths. 2. The Ideal of an absolute truth as a standard to 
 give stability to human truths. 3. But, being conceived as separate, 
 it turns out to be futile. (i) It guarantees nothing, and (2) it is 
 different in kind. 4. It is also pernicious, as leading either to 
 scepticism or to stagnation. 5. The real growth of Truth is by a 
 constant revaluation of truths which are ' verified ' as well as falsified. 
 6. The real meaning of ' absolute ' truth. 
 
 II. The Conception of Absolute Reality. 7. The character of scientific 
 reality which absolute reality is supposed to guarantee. 8. It is, 
 however, futile, because (i) its notion is no help to finding it de 
 
 facto, and (2) it must be kept away from our reality. 9. It is also 
 pernicious, as disintegrating human reality and discouraging efforts to 
 improve it. 10. The real growth of reality never involves the notion 
 of absolute reality. 1 1 . ' Primary ' would be accepted as ultimate 
 reality by ' purely ' cognitive beings. .12' Real ' reality selected by 
 human interests. The real meaning of ' absolute ' reality. 
 
 I. THE CONCEPTION OF ABSOLUTE TRUTH 
 
 i. The Sceptical Tendency q/ the Historical Study of 
 Thought. 
 
 THE reflective student of the history of human know- 
 ledge is apt to receive an overwhelming impression of 
 the instability of opinion, of the mutability of beliefs, of 
 the vicissitudes of science, in short of the impermanence 
 of what is, or passes for, 'truth.' Despite the boastful 
 confidence of Platonically- minded system -builders that 
 they have 'erected monuments more perennial than 
 
 204
 
 via ABSOLUTE TRUTH AND REALITY 205 
 
 bronze ' and coerced ' eternal ' truth to abide immutably 
 within the flimsy shelters which their speculations have 
 erected, the universal flux of reality sways the world of 
 ideas even more rapidly and visibly than the world of 
 things. What truths have lasted like the Alps, or even 
 like the Pyramids ? All human truth, as it actually is 
 and historically has been, seems fallible and transitory. 
 It is of its nature to be liable to err, and of ours to 
 blind ourselves to this liability. The road to truth (if 
 such a thing there is) grows indiscernible amid the many 
 bypaths of error into which it branches off on either side, 1 
 and whichever of these mazes men adopt, they plunge 
 into it as gaily, follow it as faithfully, and trust it as 
 implicitly, as if it were the one most certain highroad. 
 But only for a season. For sooner or later they weary 
 of a course that leads to nothing, and stop themselves 
 with a shock of distressed surprise at the discovery that 
 what they had so long taken to be ' true ' was really 
 ' false.' And yet so strong is the dogmatic confidence 
 with which nature has endowed them, that they start 
 again almost at once, all but a very few of the wisest, 
 upon the futile quest of a truth which in the end always 
 eludes their human grasp. 
 
 Thus human truth cannot substantiate its claim to 
 absoluteness : the truths of past ages are at present 
 recognised as errors ; those of the present are on the way 
 to be so recognised. They can inspire us with no more 
 confidence, they ought to inspire us with far less, than 
 that with which exploded and superseded errors inspired 
 our forefathers, who in their day were equally con- 
 temptuous of the errors of an earlier age. We have no 
 right to hold that this universal process will be arrested 
 at this single point, and that our successors will find 
 reason to spare our present truths and shrink from 
 discarding them when they have had their day. 
 
 Nor can the feeling of conviction which has gathered 
 
 1 Cp. Poincarg, La Valeur de la Science, p. 142 : toute vrit6 particuliere peut 
 6videmment 6tre6tendue d'une infinite de manieres. Entre ces mille chemins qui 
 s'ouvrent devant nous, il faut faire un choix, au moins provisoire.
 
 206 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vm 
 
 round our present ' truths ' guarantee them permanent 
 validity. All ' truths ' claim to be ' true ' without a 
 hint of doubt, and come upon the scene with similar 
 assurance and similar assurances. And all alike evoke 
 the feeling of loyalty which truth-seeking men are 
 anxious to bestow upon whatever comes to them in the 
 guise of truth. But all too often our trust is woefully 
 misplaced. The truths we trusted are transformed into 
 hideous errors in our hands, and after many bitter dis- 
 appointments we are driven to grow wary, and even 
 sceptical. 
 
 Thus our faith in the absoluteness of our truth grows 
 ever fainter, shrinks ever more into an unreasonable 
 instinct, until, in our most lucid intervals, we may even 
 come to doubt whether our ' truth ' is ever more than 
 the human fashion of the ruling fancy. 
 
 2. The Conception of Absolute Truth. 
 
 In this distress, for man by nature is the most credulous 
 of creatures, the thought of an absolute truth, serenely 
 transcending all this turmoil, so distinct in nature as to be 
 independent of the misfortunes and exempt from the vicis- 
 situdes of human truth, presents itself as a welcome refuge 
 from the assaults of scepticism. If such a thing can be 
 conceived, it will form a model for human truth to imitate, 
 a standard for evaluating our imperfect truths, and an 
 impregnable citadel into which no change can penetrate. 
 The wish is so urgent, the thought is so natural, that we 
 are not disposed to be critical, and it is no wonder that 
 it has become nearly universal. And yet when we force 
 ourselves really to scrutinise the habitation which our 
 hopes have built, we may have reason to fear that it is 
 founded on illusion, and results in disaster to the very 
 hopes to which it promised satisfaction. 
 
 The notion of an absolute truth suggested itself as 
 an expedient for escaping from the continuous revaluation 
 and transvaluation of truths, which forms the history of 
 human knowledge. The efficacy of the expedient con-
 
 vin ABSOLUTE TRUTH AND REALITY 207 
 
 sists essentially in constituting a distinction between 
 actual or human, and absolute or ideal truth, and in so 
 separating them that the latter can be fished up out of 
 the flux of reality and set up aloft on an immutable 
 pedestal for the adoration of the faithful. But in this 
 very separation lurk the dangers which render vain our 
 idolatry and our sacrifices, and in the end conduct the 
 whole conception to failure and futility. 
 
 For the conception of an absolute truth was not won 
 without cost We had to value it above our human 
 truth, and so to derogate from the latter's authority, and 
 yet to keep the two related ; and so these sacrifices will 
 be vain if we fail to show (i) that the conception of 
 absolute truth solves our original problem and really 
 guarantees our truths ; and (2) that the new problem it 
 provokes as to the relation of the actual changing human 
 truth to its superhuman stable standard is capable of 
 satisfactory solution. 
 
 3. The Futility of Absolute Truth 
 
 Now as to ( I ) we soon see reason to doubt whether the 
 conception of an immutable truth really gives our actual 
 truths the guarantee we sought. Rather it seems to leave 
 the problem where we found it. For manifestly we cannot 
 argue that because absolute truth exists and is immutable, 
 therefore our truths do not need correction. On the 
 contrary, we shall have to admit as a general principle 
 that, just because human, they cannot be absolute. Still 
 less can we assume that any particular truth that is 
 recognised at a particular time is absolute and destined to 
 be permanent. Even though therefore the logician's 
 heaven were packed tight with a mass of absolute and 
 eternal verities, rigid and immutable, they could not 
 miraculously descend to transform our truths and to cure 
 the impermanence of our conceptions. Neither could the 
 latter aspire to their superhuman prerogatives. Or even 
 if they could so descend, we could never discover this, and, 
 like other deities, they would have lost heaven without 
 redeeming earth.
 
 208 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vm 
 
 Absolute truth, therefore, to benefit human truths, 
 must be conceived as capable of being identified with 
 them. So long as it is not so conceived, it does nothing 
 to redeem them from suspicion. And conversely, so long 
 as human knowledge is not absolute, so long as it cannot 
 even seriously claim to be so, absolute truth is irrelevant 
 to human knowledge, and it is gratuitous to assume its 
 existence. 
 
 (2) To save the conception, therefore, we must 
 examine the relation of human to absolute truth, in 
 order to see whether they may not be so connected that 
 some divine virtue from the latter may magically be 
 instilled into the former. Let us try to conceive, that is, 
 human truth as a reflexion of absolute, imperfect indeed 
 but valid, being mysteriously transubstantiated by the 
 immanence of the absolute and sharing in its substance. 
 
 The first point which, on this assumption, must excite 
 surprise is that the appearance of our truth, in spite of 
 the sanctification it is said to have undergone, remains 
 strangely unregenerate. Its salient features are in com- 
 plete contrast with those of the original it claims to 
 reproduce. It is fluid, not rigid ; temporal and temporary, 
 not eternal and everlasting ; arbitrary, not necessary ; 
 chosen, not inevitable ; born of passion and sprung (like 
 Aphrodite) from a foaming sea of desires, not ' dis- 
 passionate ' nor ' purely ' intellectual ; incomplete, not 
 perfect ; fallible, not inerrant ; absorbed in the attaining of 
 what is not yet achieved ; purposive and struggling towards 
 ends, and not basking in their fulfilment. Surely if the 
 two are really one, and the distortion which dissevers 
 them lies only in the human eye that sees amiss, our trust 
 in the competence of our cognitive apparatus will be worse 
 shaken than before. 
 
 And secondly, these features of human truth seem 
 definitely bound up with the conditions that make it 
 truth at all. Human truth is discursive, because it cannot 
 embrace the whole of reality ; it is fallible, because it 
 never knows the whole, and so may ever need correction 
 by wider knowledge. It is, in a word, essentially partial.
 
 vin ABSOLUTE TRUTH AND REALITY 209 
 
 Absolute truth, on the other hand, extends to and depends 
 on a knowledge of the whole. Its absoluteness rests on 
 its all-embracingness. If there is not completely adequate 
 knowledge of a completed system of reality there can be 
 no absolute truth. 
 
 But can such knowledge be ascribed to human 
 minds? Can we conceive ourselves as contemplating the 
 whole from the standpoint of the whole ? If not, our 
 truth, just because it is partial, and rests on partial data, and 
 is generated by the partialities of selective attention, and 
 is directed upon partial ends, which it achieves by playing 
 off parts of the universe against the others, can never 
 aspire to the absoluteness which pertains only to the 
 whole. 
 
 Thus the chasm of a difference in kind begins to yawn 
 between truth human and truth absolute. And this 
 perhaps we ought to have expected. For did we not 
 succeed in postulating an absolute truth by exempting it 
 from all the defects that seemed to mar our truth ? We 
 have been only too successful ; the separation we enforced 
 has been too effectual ; absolute truth is safe from con- 
 tamination, but it can do nothing to redeem our truth : 
 the two are different in kind, and have no intercourse or 
 interaction. 
 
 Must we not conclude, therefore, that our assumption 
 of absolute truth is futile and has availed us nothing? 
 Even if it existed, it could not help us, because we could 
 not attain it. Even if we could attain it, we could not 
 know that we had done so. Even, therefore, if it could 
 remove doubt, it would not do so to our blinded eyes. 
 
 4. The Pernidousness of the Conception of Absolute 
 
 Truth 
 
 But there is more to be said against the notion of 
 absolute truth. Its futility, perhaps, will seem no serious 
 drawback. It does but little harm, and induces at the 
 worst a loss of time which leisurely philosophy can well 
 afford to part with. What is that compared with the 
 
 P
 
 210 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vm 
 
 delight of rolling in our mouths such dainty words as 
 ' absolute ' and ' truth ' ? 
 
 To which it may be replied that those who conceive 
 philosophy, not as a game for indolent spectators of the 
 battle of life, but as the culmination of our efforts to grasp 
 and control the struggle, will not easily condone a futile 
 waste of time. 
 
 But they will condemn the conception of an absolute 
 truth also on more weighty grounds. They will proceed to 
 urge against it (i) that it leads to a shipwreck of the 
 theory of knowledge ; that (2) it interposes itself between 
 us and the truth we need ; and (3) by obfuscating the real 
 nature of the problem, it prevents us from recognising the 
 true solution. 
 
 (l) The pernicious influence of the notion of absolute 
 truth on our theory of knowledge will differ according as 
 the difference between it and human truth is (a) perceived, 
 or () not. 
 
 If (a) it is perceived (in the manner shown above), we 
 shall of course be tempted to suppose that absolute truth 
 is something grander and more precious than ours. It 
 will, therefore, cast a slur upon all human knowledge, which 
 will be despised as a ludicrous and vain attempt to 
 achieve the impossible, viz. to reflect the absolute. To 
 the pain and loss of discovering that our ' truths ' are null 
 the malady which afflicted us before there is now added 
 contempt for the human presumption which tries to inflate 
 man into a measure of the universe. 
 
 The more clear-sighted of absolutists therefore will to 
 all practical intents be sceptics, and even though they will 
 contend that it is only for the greater glory of the 
 Absolute that they have shattered human truth, they will 
 find it hard, even theoretically, to draw the very fine 
 line which marks them off from the downright sceptic. 
 The most eminent of absolutists, Mr. F. H. Bradley, has 
 signally illustrated this inevitable consequence. 1 
 
 1 To him may now be added Mr. Joachim, whose ' ideal ' of knowledge breaks 
 down just in the way anticipated, although this was written before his book 
 appeared. Cp. Essay vi.
 
 vin ABSOLUTE TRUTH AND REALITY 211 
 
 () If the difference is not perceived, if by drugs and 
 prayers the eye of the soul is sufficiently dimmed to take 
 our truth for absolute, the consequences will be very 
 nearly as disastrous. It will not indeed be all truth that 
 will run the risk of rejection, but all new truth. For if a 
 recognised ' truth ' is regarded as ' absolute,' it is naturally 
 stereotyped, (i) Alteration will become impossible, the 
 effort to improve it will be discouraged and will cease ; 
 in short, the path of progress will be blocked. And even 
 formally, a theory of knowledge which cannot account for 
 its growth has no great claim upon our veneration. (2) 
 The belief that our truth is absolute is pernicious, not 
 only as checking its development, but also as incapacitating 
 us from understanding its real nature, and (3) the true 
 nature of the problem presented by the growth of know- 
 ledge, and its true solution. For it renders us impatient 
 of following the real clues to the development of truth, 
 and so prevents us from perceiving that, properly under- 
 stood, this affords no ground for the sceptical inferences to 
 escape from which we vainly appealed to the notion of 
 absolute truth. 
 
 5. The Real Nature of the Growth of Truth 
 
 If we adopt the Humanist view that ' truth ' is 
 essentially a valuation, a laudatory label wherewith we 
 decorate the most useful conceptions which we have 
 formed up to date in order to control our experience, 
 there is not the slightest reason why the steady flow 
 of the stream of ' truths ' that pass away should inspire 
 us with dismay. That a ' truth ' should turn out ' false ' 
 is a calamity only if we are unable to supplant it by 
 a ' truer.' But if instead of practising dialectics in the 
 study, we condescend to observe the actual growth of 
 knowledge, we find that this latter is what usually occurs. 
 We are enabled to declare an old ' truth ' ' false ' because 
 we are able to find a new one which more than fills its 
 place. We do not discard a valuable and serviceable 
 conception, until we have something more valuable and
 
 212 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vm 
 
 convenient, i.e. truer, to serve us in its stead. Even where 
 it is necessary to condemn the old truth as ' false,' and 
 this harsh necessity is commonly imposed on us only by 
 the pertinacity with which unprogressive thinkers cling to 
 it, its ' falsity ' does not mean revolution so much as 
 development. The ' false ' is absolute as little as the 
 ' true.' It is commonly a term attached to an earlier 
 phase of the process which has evolved the ' truth.' Hence 
 to regard the discarded ex-truth as merely ' error ' is to 
 fail to do justice to its record, to fail to express the 
 continuity of the process whereby knowledge grows. 
 
 Thus the abstract intellectualist view of truth creates 
 a dialectical difficulty which does not really exist. Our 
 ' truth ' is not merely being ( falsified,' but also being 
 ' verified ' in one and the same process ; it is corrected 
 only to be improved. And so the Humanist can recognise 
 necessary errors as well as necessary truths, errors, that 
 is, which are fruitful of the truths which supersede 
 them. 
 
 Herein lies the explanation also of the otherwise 
 paradoxical fact that those who have most experience of 
 the fallibility of human truth are least disposed to be 
 sceptical about it. For being actively engaged in ' making ' 
 or ' discovering ' truth, they are too busy with anticipating 
 achievement to reflect upon the failures that strew the 
 path of every science. It is not to the invalidation of the 
 old truths, but to the establishment of the new, that they 
 are attending. And thus the whole procedure carries with 
 it a feeling of fulfilment, which is encouraging and not 
 depressing. They see the new truth continuously growing 
 out of the old, as a more satisfactory mode of handling 
 the old problems. The growth of truth cannot therefore 
 suggest to them a growth of doubt, as it naturally does 
 to the indolent spectator. 
 
 Nor is it really a paradox to maintain that our ' errors ' 
 were ' truths ' in their day. For they were the most 
 adequate ways we then had of dealing with our ex- 
 perience. They were not, therefore, valueless. Nor were 
 they gratuitous errors. More commonly they were natural,
 
 vin ABSOLUTE TRUTH AND REALITY 213 
 
 or even indispensable, stages in the attainment of better 
 ' truths.' 
 
 And so the prospect of further improvements in the 
 formulas whereby we know the world, which will supersede 
 our present truths, does not appal us. They will be 
 welcome when and as they come. They will not put us 
 to intellectual confusion, unless we narrow-mindedly 
 exclude them : on the contrary they will mean a more 
 adequate fulfilment of what we now desire. 
 
 Viewing truth in this way, we shall regard it neither 
 disdainfully nor unprogressively. We shall regard no 
 truth as so rigidly ' absolute ' as to be incapable of 
 improvement. But we shall not despise it for displaying 
 so convenient a flexibility. We shall honour it the more 
 for thus adjusting itself to the demands of life. It will 
 fulfil its function, even if it perishes in our service, pro- 
 vided that it has left behind descendants more capable of 
 carrying on its salutary work. 
 
 6. Absolute Truth as an Ideal 
 
 Shall we conclude, then, that the conception of an 
 absolute truth is a mere will-o'-the-wisp ? 
 
 No ; rightly conceived, it has inestimable value as a 
 valid ideal for human knowledge. The ideal of a truth 
 wholly adequate, adequate that is to every human purpose, 
 may well be called truth absolute. Nor did the absolutist 
 err in describing its formal character. It would be, as he 
 says, stable, immutable, and eternal. His fatal mistake 
 is merely to conceive it as already actual. For by thus 
 attributing actual existence to it in a non-human sphere, 
 he spoils it as an ideal for man ; he dissevers it from the 
 progress of human knowledge, and disables it as an en- 
 couragement to human effort. 
 
 Moreover, so to conceive it is at one blow to reduce 
 our actual knowledge to superfluity and illusion. If the 
 truth is already timelessly achieved, what meaning can 
 our struggles to attain it ultimately claim ? They cannot 
 make a truth already made, they cannot add to a perfection
 
 2i 4 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vm 
 
 already possessed, they cannot enrich a significance already 
 complete. They must inexorably be condemned as 
 unmeaning surplusage. Thus the real function of the 
 ideal has been destroyed by untimely haste to proclaim 
 its reality. 
 
 II. THE CONCEPTION OF ABSOLUTE REALITY 
 
 7. It is an integral part of the Humanist theory of 
 knowledge that the System of Truth and the world of 
 Reality are constructed by one and the same purposive 
 manipulation out of the materials provided by crude or 
 immediate experience, and that consequently the processes 
 of knowing reality and of establishing truth must not be 
 separated even in statement. The discussion, therefore, 
 of the conception of Absolute Reality will naturally run 
 parallel to that of Absolute Truth ; but as the pragmatic 
 handling of this theme is still sufficiently novel to be fre- 
 quently misunderstood, it will be advantageous to reiterate 
 the general argument in its special application to a distinct 
 question. 
 
 And to begin with, we must consider the characteristics 
 of Reality which our science recognises and de facto deals 
 with. Scientific reality, i.e. as it enters into and is treated 
 in the sciences, normally exhibits the following features. 
 
 (1) It is not rigid, but plastic and capable of development; 
 
 (2) it is not absolute nor unconditionally real, but relative 
 to our experience and dependent on the state of our 
 knowledge ; (3) our conception of it changes, and so (4) 
 often reduces to unreality what had long been accepted as 
 real ; (5) initial reality (like initial truth) is claimed by 
 everything in experience ; (6) we need therefore a principle 
 which acts selectively to discriminate between initial reality, 
 or primary experience, and ' real ' reality which has 
 survived the fire of criticism and been promoted to superior 
 rank ; (7) even more markedly than in the case of 
 truth, the constant substitution of more for less adequate 
 conceptions of reality does not engender scepticism. At 
 every step we are confident that here at last we have
 
 via ABSOLUTE TRUTH AND REALITY 215 
 
 reached the real ; but even though the next step may show 
 that we were too sanguine, we are never undeceived and 
 never doubt our powers to attain reality. 
 
 Nevertheless the idea of an Absolute Reality has 
 cropped up here also as a device for avoiding the restless- 
 ness of a dynamic reality, and as a short cut to intellectual 
 repose. Here also it is supposed to support and guarantee, 
 to round off and confirm, the realities we actually deal 
 with. 
 
 8. The Futility of Absolute Reality 
 
 Here also the notion is delusive. For ( i ) the Absolute 
 Reality gives us no aid in dealing with the realities we 
 actually recognise ; (2) it cannot be related to these realities ; 
 (3) it therefore disparages the value of our realities, and (4) 
 forms an obstacle to a more adequate knowledge of reality ; 
 (5) as before, the mistake consists in the attempt to project 
 into reality a misconceived ideal, with the result that 
 the ideal loses its value, and the nature of the real is 
 obscured. 
 
 (1) It is an entire mistake to suppose that the general 
 conviction that there is absolute reality is a reason for 
 declaring absolute any apparent reality. It is not even a 
 ground for discriminating between conflicting realities 
 which claim to be truly real. For how are we to decide 
 that anything in particular is (or is not) as real as it 
 seems ? The belief in an absolute reality will but justify 
 us in looking for it ; the risk in identifying it when found 
 will remain precisely what it was. And will it not always 
 be presumptuous to assume that we have attained it ? 
 And if we had Jassumed it, how could we prove it ? All 
 the old difficulties which arise from the growth of our 
 knowledge of reality, from the discarding of old supersti- 
 tions, from the ' discovery ' of new facts, would beset us 
 as before. Beyond the satisfaction of believing that 
 absolute reality existed somewhere in the world, our 
 practical gain would be nil. 
 
 (2) It would be very difficult, moreover, to establish 
 any effective connexion between the absolute reality we
 
 2i6 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vm 
 
 had postulated, and our own. Our reality seems in all 
 respects to fall short of the ideal of a reality, stable, 
 immutable, perfect, unconditional, self-sufficing, such as 
 alone could be dignified with the title of ' absolute.' The 
 reals we know all seem corruptible and transitory ; they 
 are incessantly changing ; they are penetrated through 
 and through with imperfections ; it is their nature to 
 be dependent on others and to be as little able to satisfy 
 them as themselves. To realise our ideal, therefore, they 
 would have fundamentally to change their nature. 
 
 These defects the notion of absolute reality does 
 nothing to alleviate. It cannot even affect them, for it 
 can never get into touch with them. Absolute reality 
 must in self-defence eschew all relation with ours. For 
 such relation would involve a dependence on the imperfect 
 which would disturb its own perfection. Relation among 
 realities implies interaction, and interaction with the un- 
 stable and changing must import a reflected instability 
 into the nature of the absolute reality and destroy its 
 equipoise. The only way therefore for the perfect to 
 preserve its perfection is to keep aloof : but if it does that, 
 how, pray, shall it be known by us ? 
 
 9. The Perniciousness of the Notion of Absolute Reality 
 
 (3) The mere notion, moreover, of an absolute reality 
 has a disintegrating effect on the realities of human 
 knowledge. The more glowing the colours, the greater 
 the enthusiasm, with which absolute reality is depicted, 
 the more precarious grows the status of human reality. It 
 sinks into the position of an illusion, adjusted no doubt 
 to the imperfection of ' finite ' being, but for this very 
 reason ineradicable and irremediable. For from the 
 standpoint of absolute reality there is no difficulty to sur- 
 mount. Sub specie absoluti there is no imperfection at all. 
 We have no case against absolute reality, because our 
 woes are illusory. So are we. It need not and cannot 
 help us, because neither they nor we exist for it. If we 
 start from the other side, we come upon the same
 
 vin ABSOLUTE TRUTH AND REALITY 217 
 
 impasse : if, in defiance of all that is rational, finite beings 
 nevertheless seem to themselves to exist and to battle 
 with imperfect realities, this shows that such illusion is not 
 repugnant to the perfection of absolute reality. But if 
 such illusion does not impair this perfection now, there is 
 no reason why it ever should in times to come (if it is not 
 nonsense to speak of future times in connexion with the 
 Absolute) : for all the Absolute knows or cares, ' finite ' 
 beings may continue to seem to exist and continue to seem 
 imperfect to themselves and to each other for evermore. 
 We have not therefore altered the dimensions or the 
 urgency of our troubles : we have merely denied the cosmic 
 significance of human life. 
 
 Or, looking at it in another way, from the standpoint 
 of human reality, all that the thought of an absolute 
 reality effects is subtly and all -pervasively to discredit 
 whatever reality we have felt it right to recognise. It 
 merely warns us that there is something more real, but 
 unattainable, beyond. 
 
 The conclusion therefore is inevitable, that the notion 
 of an absolute reality is doubly pernicious : (a) as 
 reducing our reality to unreality in comparison with a 
 higher reality, and () as making the ideal of reality 
 seem unattainable. These results follow if the disparity 
 between absolute reality and reality for us is perceived. 
 
 (4) If there is no perception of the difference, if, that 
 is, there is confusion between the notion of the two, all 
 sorts of realities will be taken for absolute merely because 
 they happen to exist. They will accordingly be regarded 
 with the respect due to absolute reality, and the disastrous 
 consequence will ensue that it will be almost impossible 
 to experiment with the purpose of (i) rendering them 
 unreal, (2) improving them, and (3) discovering further 
 realities to supersede or supplement them. 
 
 The effects of this superstition will indeed here be 
 more deleterious than in the parallel case of ' absolute ' 
 truth. For the old ' truths ' which could not be got rid 
 of because they were taken to be absolute, were, after all, 
 not wholly bad. If they had not been valuable, they
 
 2i8 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vm 
 
 would never have been called truths ; they worked and 
 served our purposes fairly well, and faute de mieux we 
 could get on with them. The realities we have to accept, 
 on the other hand, are often intrinsically abominable and 
 worthy of destruction, and to perpetuate their reality is 
 wantonly to inflict unnecessary suffering. The belief, 
 therefore, that they are ultimate and sanctioned by a fixed 
 order of things, prevents the attainment of what is good, 
 as well as preserving what is evil. 
 
 In order to symbolise numerically the extent of this 
 mischief, we might represent the known and accepted 
 realities as, say, one million. But these, as we have 
 learnt from past experience, do not exhaust the possi- 
 bilities of the universe. There may ( I ) exist in addition, 
 say, ten million other realities which may be ' discovered,' 
 i,e. found to be ' real,' if certain experiments are per- 
 formed which are in our power. Moreover (2) of the 
 million known realities one -half, say 500,000, may 
 deserve to be rendered unreal, and may be removable 
 from the world which they contaminate. (3) There may 
 be as many more potential realities, unreal at present, 
 but capable of being brought into existence by our efforts. 
 
 Now all these three desirable operations are barred 
 by the notion that our existing realities are absolute. 
 The rigidly monistic way of conceiving the universe is 
 singularly unimaginative and lacking in variety. It cuts 
 down the possibilities to the actualities of existence. It 
 shuts us off from infinite possibilities of things beautiful, 
 good, and true, by the wanton dogmatism of its assump- 
 tion that the absolute is already real, and that the attempt 
 to remake it is as vain as it is blasphemous. 
 
 Consider, on the other hand, the advantages of dis- 
 carding this notion. We can then permit ourselves to 
 recognise that reality is still in the making. Nothing is 
 absolutely settled. Human operations are real experi- 
 ments with a reality that really responds, and may 
 respond differently to different manipulations. Reality 
 no doubt has its habits, good and bad, useful and 
 inconvenient (as we have), and is not easily induced to
 
 viri ABSOLUTE TRUTH AND REALITY 219 
 
 change them. But at bottom they are habits, and leave 
 it plastic. Consequently at every point at which we 
 have alternative ways of manipulating either ourselves or 
 other reals there exists a choice between two really, and 
 for ever, divergent universes. Thus our actual experience 
 contains literally infinite possibilities of alternative uni- 
 verses, which struggle for existence in the minds of 
 every agent who is capable, in however limited a degree, 
 of choosing between alternatives. 1 Every impulse we 
 repress or yield to, every act we do or leave undone, 
 every inquiry we pursue or neglect, realises a new uni- 
 verse which was not real, and need never have become so. 
 Thus it is our duty and our privilege to co-operate in the 
 shaping of the world ; among infinite possibilities to 
 select and realise the best. That is not much perhaps, 
 though it is as much as God could do in the intellectual- 
 istic scheme of Leibniz ; but it is enough to encourage us 
 and to confirm our faith. For herein surely lies the 
 most bracing of responsibilities, the chief attraction of 
 pluralism, and the most grievous wrong which monism 
 has inflicted upon our aspirations and our self-respect. 
 
 I o. How Reality really grows 
 
 (5) After proving that the assumption of absolute 
 realities is futile, i,e. unnecessary and self-defeating, and 
 pernicious, it might seem superfluous to show that they 
 are also ' untrue,' i.e. that they caricature the development 
 of reality as it actually takes place in our knowledge. 
 
 But it is so difficult to get even ' philosophically- 
 trained ' minds to look at the simple facts of actual 
 knowing that no means of illumination should be 
 neglected. 
 
 It is a simple fact that the conception of absolute 
 reality does not enter into our actual knowing of reality. 
 The conceptions of ' primary,' ' ulterior ' and ultimate, 
 of ' lower ' and ' higher ' realities do. Yet our episte- 
 mology has hitherto allowed itself to be so dazzled by the 
 
 1 Cp. Essay xviii. 9-12.
 
 220 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vm 
 
 supernatural effulgence of the former as to blind itself to 
 the really important .function of the latter. And so the 
 attainment of epistemological knowledge has been sacri- 
 ficed to the pursuit of metaphysical will-o'-the-wisps. 
 
 11. The Conception of Primary Reality 
 
 We start uncritically with the acceptance of whatever 
 seems to be. ' Whatever is, is real/ is what we begin with. 
 If we were purely cognitive beings, we should also stop 
 with this. For it is utterly false to imagine purely intel- 
 lectual ' contradictions of appearance ' as initiating the 
 process of real knowing, and the dialectical diversions of 
 the young men of Athens some 2000 years ago have been 
 treated far too seriously by staid philosophers who did not 
 appreciate Platonic humour. The problem as to how 
 Socrates, being greater than a flea and less than a whale, 
 can be both greater and less, has very little to do with 
 the difficulties of real knowing. But there are no con- 
 tradictions in appearance so long as you are merely 
 contemplating it : so long as you do not care what 
 appears, no course of events can be any more ' contra- 
 dictory' than the shifting scenes of a kaleidoscope. 
 Whatever appears ' is,' even though it lasts only for a 
 second. 1 Its reality, such as it is, is not impaired by its 
 impermanence, nor by the fact that something else comes 
 up and takes its place in the twinkling of an eye. 
 
 There is no contradiction in change until we have 
 ourselves imported it by developing a desire to control 
 the changes by means of identities we trace in them. 
 For until then we do not seek for identities in the 
 changeful ; change, taken merely as such, is merely what 
 Kant called ' alternation.' As it presents nothing 
 ' identical ' either in the object or in the subject, the 
 problem as to how anything can ' change,' and yet remain 
 
 1 Mr. Bradley here bears us out by saying (Appearance and Reality, p. 132) 
 "what appears, for that sole reason, indubitably is; and there is no possibility 
 of conjuring its being away from it." Capt. H. V. Knox has, however, shown 
 that the coherence of this doctrine with the rest of Mr. Bradley's metaphysic is 
 very dubious (Mind, xiv. 217).
 
 vm ABSOLUTE TRUTH AND REALITY 221 
 
 ' the same,' does not arise. Events flit across the stage 
 of Reality in the theatre of Being, to adapt Hume's 
 famous simile ; but a merely intellectual spectator would 
 have no reason for rejecting anything, for selecting some 
 things as more real and important than others, no 
 occasion to criticise and to wonder how things got there. 
 Even though he were privileged to become a ' spectator 
 of all time and all existence,' he would not be able to 
 ' spectate ' to any purpose, nor be really an intelligent 
 spectator. Having no interest to guide his contempla- 
 tions he would not analyse the flow of events, because 
 he would not attend to anything in particular. He 
 would not even be interested to distinguish ' subject ' from 
 ' object.' This distinction too is teleological, and rooted 
 in feeling. 
 
 In short, at the level of primary reality, conceived as 
 ' purely ' cognitive, everything would be, and remain, in 
 an unmeaning, undiscriminated flow. 
 
 12. 'Real* Reality versus Appearance 
 
 But the mind is not of such a nature as to put 
 up with this imaginary situation. It is interested, 
 and purposive, and desirous of operating on, and con- 
 trolling, its primary reality. And so it proceeds to 
 discriminate, to distinguish between ' appearance ' and 
 ' reality,' between ' primary ' and ' real ' reality, to accept 
 what appears with mental reservations and provisionally, 
 to operate upon it, and to alter it. And as interests 
 grow various and purposes are differentiated, ' real 
 reality' grows more complex. It is differentiated into 
 a series of realities which are referred to a series 
 of systems co-ordinated and subordinated to each 
 other. But as yet only imperfectly. The ultimate 
 reality which we envisage as the goal of our interpreta- 
 tions of primary reality, recedes into a more and more 
 distant ideal. It forms the further pole of our cog- 
 nitive attitude towards the primary reality, the control 
 of which is the motive for the whole procedure, and ever
 
 222 STUDIES IN HUMANISM vm 
 
 forms our final criterion. For it is upon this touchstone 
 of direct experience that we test the value of the assumed 
 realities which claim authority to interpret it. 
 
 And so by a painful and laborious process we supple- 
 ment the inadequacies of our actual experience by 
 assumed realities whose reality is assured to us by their 
 value, by the salutary transformations which they help us 
 to effect in our life. The process is as unending as the 
 pursuit of happiness. We are never wholly satisfied ; we 
 are never therefore wholly willing to accept reality as it 
 appears. So we conjure into existence the worlds of the 
 ' higher ' realities, from mathematics to metaphysics, from 
 the idealised abstractions of the humblest science to the 
 heaven of the loftiest religion. Their function, one and all, 
 is to control and to transform the reality we have. But 
 to do this they have to remain related to it, to sympathise 
 with its career, to share in its vicissitudes. And so 
 long as they succeed in this, they will have their reward : 
 they are not called in doubt, however much, and however 
 often, they are required to transform themselves. For at 
 every transformation we can feel ourselves to be advancing 
 from a less to a more adequate plane of operations, and 
 can say, ' This then, which we mistook until now, was real 
 all along.' 
 
 So soon, however, as this dependence on and inter- 
 action with immediate experience is renounced, i.e. so 
 soon as the higher reality is taken to be something apart 
 and absolute, its whole function is destroyed. It can no 
 longer serve even as an ideal ; for an ideal can only be 
 functional if it is conceived as attainable, though not 
 attained. 1 If therefore absolute reality is either unattain- 
 able, or already attained, or, worst of all, both (i.e. 
 attained, but unattainable by us), it ceases to be a valid 
 ideal. 
 
 And yet it was a beautiful ideal until it was miscon- 
 ceived. It could inspire our efforts to reach a perfect 
 harmony, and justify our aspirations. For the pragma- 
 tist also may cherish the ideal of an absolute Reality. 
 
 1 Cp. Essay vi. i.
 
 vin ABSOLUTE TRUTH AND REALITY 223 
 
 Nay, he can even determine its formal character. 
 Nothing is easier. That reality (and that alone) will 
 be pragmatically absolute, which every one will accept 
 as real and no one will seek to alter. For a universe 
 completely satisfied would not seek to change itself, and 
 indeed could not so much as entertain the thought of 
 change. 
 
 The real difficulty lies not in framing ideals, but in 
 achieving them, and this is a difficulty, not of philosophy, 
 but of life. And the noblest service philosophy can 
 render us is to pass a self-denying ordinance, and to draw 
 our attention away from idle and inactive speculation 
 about reality in the abstract, to the real ways in which 
 ideals are realised and the world of reality is rendered fit 
 to live in.
 
 IX 
 EMPIRICISM AND THE ABSOLUTE 1 
 
 ARGUMENT 
 
 I. The conflict between Evolutionism and a static metaphysic. The back- 
 sliding of Spencer. 2. The protest of Humanism. Its acceptance of 
 common-sense, and criticism of metaphysical, assumptions. The new 
 issues. Prof. Taylor's attempts at compromise. 3. Can purpose be 
 ascribed to the Absolute ? The external contemplation of purpose false. 
 Hume's trick. 4. Prof. Taylor on selective attention and Berkeley's 
 passivism. 5. His own Berkeleian basis. The impossibility of 
 selection in the Absolute, which cannot be ideological. 6. Other 
 mitigations of intellectualism. 7. Impossibility of combining Absolut- 
 ism and Humanism, exemplified (a) in the doctrine of appearance and 
 reality ; 8 (b) of the dual criteria of reality ; 9 (c) the relations of 
 axioms and postulates ; 10 (d) intellectualism ; and n the Absolute. 
 Its derivation, which, 12, depends wholly on the validity of the 
 ' ontological ' argument. 13. The Absolute is really a postulate, 
 14, intended to satisfy the craving for unity, and to yield an a priori 
 guarantee for the future. The fear of the future as the root of 
 rationalism. 15. The inadequacy of the postulated Absolute. 
 
 i. PHILOSOPHY just now is in a very interesting 
 condition. For Evolutionism, the great scientific move- 
 ment of the nineteenth century, is at length investing the 
 last well-nigh inaccessible stronghold of ' pure ' meta- 
 
 1 This essay, which was intended to clear up the situation created by Prof. 
 A. E. Taylor's Elements of Metaphysics, and appeared in Mind for July 1905 
 (N.S. 55), in its original form treated his views as possibly intended to be 
 crypto-pragmatic. After his reply, however, in N.S. 57, he must be ex- 
 onerated from the charge of talking Pragmatism (except in the way in which 
 M. Jourdain talked prose) ; his utterances can now only be treated as ' pseudo- 
 pragmatic,' and as in some respects seriously inconsistent. The reasons for 
 these statements may be found set out in full in N.S. 59, pp. 375-390 ; but the 
 whole discussion, though amusing and instructive also for its bearing on the 
 question of 'useless knowledge, 1 of which Prof. Taylor attempted to produce 
 some examples (cp. pp. 384-8), grew too minutely controversial to be included 
 here. I have, however, profited by it to make some modifications, additions, 
 and omissions, and have tried to note the gist of Prof. Taylor's replies in foot- 
 notes. 
 
 224
 
 ix EMPIRICISM AND THE ABSOLUTE 225 
 
 physics, 1 and systematically grappling with the ultimate 
 abstractions which human thought has recognised and 
 respected for ages, but has never succeeded in rendering 
 really useful and intelligible. In saying this I am of 
 course well aware that the application of Evolutionism to 
 metaphysics is supposed to have been accomplished by 
 the Synthetic Philosophy of Herbert Spencer. This 
 popular belief, however, is easily shown to be a mis- 
 apprehension. If we take as the essence of Evolutionism 
 the doctrine that the world is in process, and as its chief 
 corollaries its vindication of the reality of change and of 
 the belief that real (and not merely apparent) novelties 
 occur, it is easily seen (i) that the old metaphysic must 
 ultimately reject these doctrines, and (2) that Spencer's 
 final surrender to its prejudices involves a failure to work 
 out a truly evolutionist philosophy. 
 
 As to the first point, it has always been assumed 
 that ultimately Reality must be a closed system, a fixed 
 quantity, immutable substance, or absolute whole. What 
 has not always been perceived to be an inevitable con- 
 sequence is that Reality must, in the last resort, be 
 stationary^ that if so, there can be neither increase nor 
 decrease in Being, and that the changes, processes, and 
 novelties we suppose ourselves to experience and observe 
 do not really mean alterations in the substance of the 
 All. They must, in other words, be human illusions (or, 
 more politely, " appearances "), which do not penetrate to, 
 or affect, the eternally complete and immutable Reality. 
 If, resenting this paradox of metaphysics, we plead that 
 these " appearances " are inextricably intertwined with 
 the whole reality of human life, we are baffled by the retort 
 that this only shows that we too are ' appearance.' 
 
 Such metaphysic plainly is not to be silenced by mere 
 common-sense : it must be fought with its own weapons. 
 And so it is probably more profitable to point out that in 
 strict consistency these metaphysicians should demand, 
 not merely that change, etc., should be illusions, but also 
 that such illusions should be impossible. As Prof. Stout 
 
 1 Felicitously entitled 'Jericho' by Mr. Bradley {Mind, xiii. p. 330). 
 
 Q
 
 226 STUDIES IN HUMANISM ix 
 
 has pointed out, you can call all ' reality ' illusion, but in 
 so doing you imply the reality of the illusion. If then 
 change is truly irrational and unthinkable, it should not 
 be able to maintain even an illusory existence in a 
 rational universe ; and the very existence of such an 
 illusion is itself as irrational and unthinkable as the reality 
 which was condemned as illusory. Abstract metaphysic, 
 therefore, is unable to explain, and unwilling to accept, 
 phenomenal change, process, and novelty : if it desires to 
 be consistent, it must simply deny them, and revert as 
 nearly as possible to its earliest form, viz. Eleaticism. To 
 evoke a philosophic meaning from the everyday facts of 
 change and novelty and from the scientific testimonies to 
 vast cosmic processes, we need a different method, which 
 will deign to consider whether we should not do as well, 
 or better, by frankly accepting the apparent facts of 
 ordinary life and science, and regarding rather our prefer- 
 ence for the constant and immutable as an artificial 
 device which is susceptible of derivation and limited in 
 application. In other words, we need Humanism. 
 
 (2) Now Spencer, in his attempt at an evaluation of 
 the idea of Evolution, unfortunately committed himself to 
 a use of physical principles which belong inalienably to> 
 the static series of conceptions, and are designed to satisfy 
 our craving for constancy. The indestructibility of matter 
 and the conservation of energy (' persistence of force ') 
 are constitutionally incapable of yielding a justification 
 for the belief in a real process, a real progress, and a real 
 alteration in the meaning of the world. In consequence, 
 the phenomena of life and consciousness, in which the 
 reality of such evolution is most manifest (for psychically 
 every experience is more or less ' new '), have to be reduced 
 by Spencer to physical terms. And thus the whole 
 evolutionary process becomes nugatory in the end. 
 Spencer has to admit that the differentiation -process 
 which forms the cosmic diastole has for its counterpart a 
 systole which restores all things to homogeneity, and that 
 throughout both processes the axiom of the Persistence of 
 Force remains uninfringed. In terms of ultimate reality,
 
 ix EMPIRICISM AND THE ABSOLUTE 227 
 
 therefore, both processes mean the same, and at the end 
 of the infinite toil and struggle of the cosmic agony, the 
 universe is where it was, neither richer nor poorer, neither 
 better nor worse. Evolution therefore has turned out a 
 merely subjective illusion, engendered by our incapacity 
 to follow the giant swing of the cosmic pendulum. 
 
 2. But can we hesitate to declare this result to be, 
 humanly speaking, most unsatisfactory, and indeed pro- 
 foundly irrational ? And is it not worth while at least 
 to entertain proposals for the radical revision of the meta- 
 physical prepossessions that have brought us to such a 
 pass ? Why, after all, should we insist on starting from 
 the conception of an absolute Whole presumed to be 
 unalterable? Why should we not set out rather from 
 the facts of our ' finite ' struggling life, and pluck up 
 courage to scrutinise the construction of the scientific, or 
 rather metaphysical, bogies that stand in the way of a 
 thorough-going Evolutionism ? So at least the Humanist 
 must argue. He takes for granted all those features of 
 our experience which are undeniable on the common- 1 
 sense level of life. He takes as the sole essential problem 
 of philosophy the harmonising of a life, which is as yetj 
 inharmonious, but which he is willing to believe may be 
 transmuted into harmony. And instead of contenting 
 himself with a verbal ' proof that all evil is ' appearance ' 
 which is ' transcended ' sub specie aeternitatis, and then 
 submitting tamely to the cosmic nightmare in saeciila- 
 saeculorum, he accepts all the apparent features of life, its 
 transitoriness, cruelty, ignorance, uncertainty, struggle ; 
 the reality of its chances and changes, of its gains and 
 losses, of its pains and pleasures, of its values, ethical, 
 logical, and aesthetical, of its goods and evils, truths and 
 errors, as alike data for thought to grapple with and to 
 transform, and holds that only by achieving this does our 
 thought vindicate its use, and our truth become truly 
 true. Not that the Humanist imagines that all these 
 features will in the end turn out to be equally significant : 
 he contends only that they cannot be proved delusions 
 a priori, that the sole way of proving them unreal is by
 
 228 STUDIES IN HUMANISM ix 
 
 abolishing them, and that until they have been so 
 abolished they must be reckoned with as facts. 
 
 In the rationalistic intellectualism, 1 on the other hand, 
 in which the method of abstract metaphysics culminates, 
 all these initial facts of common life are contemptuously 
 ignored. Nothing less than the absolute totality of 
 existence is worthy of its notice or worth assuming. This 
 totality it supposes itself to demonstrate by some version 
 of the ontological proof, and aims at developing, by 
 a priori reasoning, into a coherent and consistent, self- 
 determined and unalterable system. 
 
 To the Humanist, on the other hand, this whole pro- 
 cedure seems a tissue of fallacious and futile assumptions. 
 Why should he assume that experience necessarily forms 
 a whole before he has got it all together ? that it forms a 
 system before he has traced it out, that the system is one, 
 before he has found that his actual world can intelligibly 
 be treated as such, that the system is perfect (in any but 
 a verbal, intellectualist sense) before he has tried it ? And 
 if he assumes these things because he would like them to 
 be true, what does he make the totality of Reality but a 
 conceptual postulate, perhaps of rationality, perhaps of a 
 subtler irrationality, which can be tested only by its work- 
 ing, and can in no case be argued from a priori? What 
 in general are the a priori truths but claims, what are 
 axioms but postulates ? As for the complete determina- 
 tion of the universe, is not both the fact and its value 
 open to doubt ? As for its unity, is not its value emotional 
 and illusory rather than scientific, so long as we can neither 
 avoid assuming a plurality of factors in all scientific 
 calculation, nor identify our actual world with the one 
 immutable universe, so long as it seems to us subject to 
 
 1 It is better to avoid the term ' idealism," as being too equivocal to be useful. 
 There are too many ' idealisms ' in the market, many of them more essentially 
 opposed to each other than to views classified as ' realism. ' Plato, e.g. , has 
 an indefeasible claim to the title of 'idealist,' but Mr. G. E. Moore, in reviving 
 the Platonic hypostasisation of abstract qualities in an extreme form, prefers 
 to call himself a ' realist. ' Berkeley again is firmly established in the histories 
 of philosophy as the typical idealist, but his sensationalism constitutes a most 
 irritating challenge to the rationalists' claim to monopolise the name. In 
 addition, there are 'subjective' and 'personal' and 'empirical' 'idealists' 
 galore.
 
 ix EMPIRICISM AND THE ABSOLUTE 229 
 
 irruptions from without its known limits and to the erup- 
 tion of novelties within them ? l As for its immutability, 
 is it not a direct defiance of our primary experience and 
 a wanton stultification of the evolutionist method ? And 
 finally, is not the fundamental intellectualism of the old 
 metaphysic a gross parody of our actual thought, which 
 proceeds from a purposive intelligent activity, and was 
 not, and is not, and never can be, separated from the 
 practical needs of life ? 
 
 Humanism therefore challenges all the assumptions on f 
 which rationalistic intellectualism has reposed ever since 
 the days of Plato. Against such a challenge the old 
 catchwords of its warfare with the sensationalistic intel- 
 lectualism of the British empiricists are no longer adequate. 
 They are as plainly outranged by the novelty as its pre- 
 judices are outraged by the audacity of the voluntarist 
 attack. A complete change of front, and a thorough re- 
 arrangement of its forces, have become imperative. And 
 by the younger men among its exponents this is begin- 
 ning to be perceived. Prof. A. E. Taylor has not yet 
 perhaps fully realised the magnitude and difficulty of the 
 readjustment which is needed in his camp, and he has 
 certainly not succeeded in repelling the attack ; but he has 
 perceived that the creed of the ' Anglo-Hegelian ' 2 Intel- 
 lectualism rests on a dangerously narrow basis. The lucid 
 and agreeable form of his Elements of Metaphysics, his 
 manifest anxiety to assimilate at least as much of the new 
 material as may be needed to leave the old positions 
 tenable, and the importance of making clear just where 
 the difficulties of mediating between Absolutism and 
 Humanism lie, amply warrant a detailed examination of 
 this side of his work. 
 
 As the result of such examination, it will be found that 
 though Prof. Taylor has not been able to bridge the gulf 
 between the old philosophy and the new indeed, he has 
 hardly been invested with full authority by his party he 
 has effected some instructive modifications, and discovered 
 some interesting jumping-off places. 
 
 1 Cp. Essay xii. 9. 2 As he calls it (Mind, xv. p. 90).
 
 230 STUDIES IN HUMANISM ix 
 
 3. (i) Perhaps the most striking of Prof. Taylor's 
 innovations is his constant use of the language of purpose 
 and teleology. 1 For, in words at least, this seems to 
 concede the main principle for which Humanism has 
 contended, viz. the purposiveness of human thought and 
 experience. 
 
 Unfortunately, however, for the fruitful application of 
 this principle, Prof. Taylor hardly seems to conceive pur- 
 pose in the natural way. He habitually regards it rather 
 from the external standpoint of the contemplative spectator 
 than from that of the purposing agent, and it will always 
 be found that a philosophy which refuses to enter into 
 the feelings of the agent must in the end pronounce 
 the whole conception of agency an unmeaning mystery. 
 Now this external way of conceiving agency from the 
 standpoint of a bystander was Hume's fundamental trick, 
 the root of all his naturalism, and the basis of his success 
 as a critic of causation. It seems curious, therefore, that 
 rationalists should never try to emancipate themselves 
 from it, but should accept it meekly and without question, 
 the more so as their ' answers to Hume ' are always upset 
 by it. For it would be possible to show that once this 
 assumption is made, there is (i) no real answer to Hume, 
 (2) no escape from naturalism, and (3) no room left for 
 the conception of agency ; and it may be suggested that 
 the radical unsoundness of the transcendentalists' position 
 at this point is the real reason for the obscurity and 
 unsatisfactoriness of their own treatment of causation ever 
 since the days of Kant. So long as Hume's specious 
 arguments against our immediate experience of agency 
 are accepted, agents and activities cannot be recognised 
 anywhere in the universe, and we are driven to the desperate 
 contradiction of ascribing an ' activity ' to the whole which 
 is denied to all its parts and ought not to exist, even as a 
 word ; it is a fortiori impossible, therefore, to see how we 
 
 1 Cp. especially pp. 55, 58, 66, 106, 162, 204. Prof. Taylor retorted that 
 his debt was to Professors Ward and Royce (Mind, N.S. xv. 88). I replied (i) 
 that neither of these fitted into a Bradleian metaphysic ; (2) that it was necessary 
 to have an explanation with Humanist teleology ; and (3) that he had been 
 challenged to explain how an Absolute could have a purpose (Mind, xv. p. 377).
 
 ix EMPIRICISM AND THE ABSOLUTE 231 
 
 could be active enough to lay down ' rules ' for the appre- 
 hending of events. 1 
 
 Prof. Taylor, therefore, seems to fall into an insidious 
 but far-reaching error when he says (p. 55) "all that I 
 mean is that the processes of conscious life are as a matter 
 of fact only intelligible with reference to the results in 
 which they culminate ... or again that they all involve 
 the kind of continuity of interest which belong (sic] to 
 attention." 2 Similarly in defining spirit (p. 99) " where 
 you have a connected system of factors which can only 
 be understood " (why not understand tJiemselves ?) " by 
 reference to an explicit or implicit end which constitutes 
 their unity, you have spirit" 3 On this it seems obvious 
 to remark that unless 'you' were an actively purposing 
 spirit, you could never regard any connexion of things as 
 teleological. And the human spirit is, of course, teleo- 
 logical, because it attends and operates selectively. But 
 these very facts suggest the deepest doubt as to the 
 transfer of these features to the Whole. Can an Absolute 
 attend or act selectively, can it be ' teleological ' or 
 ' spiritual ' in any humanly intelligible sense ? 
 
 4. To answer this question, let us examine Prof. 
 Taylor's treatment of selective attention. It is most 
 instructive. The conception does not occur in his master, 
 Mr. F. H. Bradley, who is too much under the spell of 
 Hume to admit the notion of activity. He has taken it 
 from Prof. Stout, and is eager to use it as a good stick 
 for beating the elder (and saner) brother, whom ' absolute ' 
 idealists are always so anxious to disparage and so unable 
 to dispense with, viz. Berkeleian idealism. Accordingly 
 he points out (p. 66) what is true of intellectualism as 
 such, but less patently applicable to Berkeleianism than 
 to most rationalistic forms of intellectualism viz. that 
 Berkeley conceived the mind as passive, and did not allow 
 for its interests and purposes. " Berkeley," he says, 
 " omits selective attention from his psychological estimate 
 of the contents of the human mind. He forgets that it 
 
 1 Cp. James on ' The Experience of Activity ' in Psych. Rev. xii. i. 
 - Italics mine. s P. 3 ; cp. also pp. 5 and 44. Italics mine.
 
 232 STUDIES IN HUMANISM ix 
 
 is the interests for which I take note of facts that in the 
 main determine which facts I shall take note of, an over- 
 sight which is the more remarkable, since he expressly 
 lays stress on ' activity ' as the distinguishing property of 
 ' spirits.' When we make good the omission by empha- 
 sising the teleological aspects of experience, we see at 
 once that the radical disparity between the relation of the 
 supreme and the subordinate mind to the world of facts 
 disappears. I do not receive my presented facts passively 
 in an order determined for me from without by the 
 supreme mind ; in virtue of my power of selective atten- 
 tion, on a limited scale, and very imperfectly, I recreate 
 the order of their succession for myself. . . . 
 
 The very expression ' selective attention ' itself carries 
 with it a reminder that the facts which respond to my 
 interests are but a selection out of a larger whole. And 
 my practical experience of the way in which my own 
 most clearly defined and conscious purposes depend for 
 their fulfilment upon connexion with the interests and 
 purposes of a wider social whole possessed of an organic 
 unity, should help me to understand how the totality of 
 interests and purposes determining the selective attention 
 of different percipients can form, as we have held that it 
 must, the harmonious and systematic unity of the absolute 
 experience. ... It is hardly too much to say that the 
 teleological character which experience possesses in virtue 
 of its unity with feeling is the key to the idealistic inter- 
 pretation of the universe." 
 
 5. Philosophy would become delightfully easy if the 
 fundamental deficiencies of intellectualism could be cured 
 in the facile fashion of this passage ; but Prof. Taylor's 
 whole procedure is, alas, illusory. It should be observed, 
 in the first place, that in spite of his continual protests 
 against Berkeley, he himself has to proceed from a subjec- 
 tive basis. He has to argue, that is, from the behaviour 
 of his mind to that of the Absolute. His mind attends 
 selectively, he finds, and thereby constitutes reality ; ergo 
 the Absolute is conceived to act similarly. 
 
 It is difficult to refrain from conjecturing that when
 
 ix EMPIRICISM AND THE ABSOLUTE 233 
 
 Prof. Taylor argued thus, he must have completely ' for- 
 gotten ' the nature of the absolute mind and the meaning 
 of which it is the expression. Otherwise he could not 
 but have been impressed by the difference between its 
 functioning and that of a human mind. 
 
 A human mind initially commences its career in a 
 jumble resembling a chaotic rag-bag. It finds itself con- 
 taining things valuable, worthless, and pernicious, dreams, 
 illusions, fancies, delusions, incongruities, inconsistencies, 
 etc., all jostling the materials for what are subsequently 
 construed as realities. If, therefore, anything approaching 
 a harmonious life is to be constructed out of such stuff, 
 a large amount of selection is necessary. The pernicious 
 contents must be kept under and as far as possible elimin- 
 ated ; the worthless and useless must be neglected ; and 
 so chaos must be turned into something like a cosmos. 
 This we do by selectively attending to what turns out to 
 be valuable, and by ignoring those elements in our experi- 
 ence which we cannot use. 
 
 And similarly in our actions we never operate with or 
 upon the universe as a whole. We choose our ends and 
 select our means ; we dissect out ' effects ' and ' causes ' 
 from the unaccentuated flow of events ; it is essential to 
 our science to select limited and partial subjects of inquiry. 
 In short, 'action' seems to connote selection, and selec- 
 tion must seem arbitrary and indefensible if human pur- 
 poses have been abstracted from. 
 
 Now compare the ' absolute mind ' of philosophic 
 theory. It was conceived as all-inclusive ; its business 
 and function is to contain everything. It must therefore 
 ex officio and ex vi termini include all the rubbish every 
 human mind is encumbered with and has such trouble to 
 get rid of. For though we can condemn it as ' appear- 
 ance,' the Absolute cannot. For ultimately even ' appear- 
 ance ' is a sort of ' reality,' and must be included in its 
 proper place. And this place is the Absolute, which has 
 room for all things, for which all things are valuable, nay 
 essential, seeing that if they were not, they would not 
 exist ! Or if it be maintained that the Absolute can
 
 234 STUDIES IN HUMANISM ix 
 
 purify itself by recognising nothing but ' reality ' in the 
 fullest sense, will it not inevitably follow that the human 
 mind and all its belongings are cast out upon the rubbish- 
 heap of appearances which are unworthy of the Absolute's 
 notice? And in that case of what value is the Absolute 
 .as a conception to explain our experience ? 
 
 If, then, the Absolute has to include everything to 
 fulfil its function, if it exists for us in order to include 
 what we reject, how can it selectively attend to part of its 
 contents ? Must not all that is be valuable to All-that- 
 is ? What private, limited, and partial interests can it 
 have to compel it .to ' select ' facts out of a larger whole ? 
 It is itself the ' larger whole,' and its sole interest must be 
 to represent that. It cannot abnegate this function, and 
 
 * select ' like ' finite ' man, without becoming partial and 
 ceasing to be itself. 
 
 Manifestly, therefore, no argument holds from selective 
 attention in us to selective attention in the Absolute. 
 For one can hardly press Prof. Taylor's language as 
 seriously advocating a naive fallacy of composition to the 
 effect that because all (distributively) are interested in 
 some things, therefore all (collectively) are interested in a 
 totality in which all special emphasis has disappeared. 
 
 And his further procedure in arguing from selective 
 attention in the individual to the recognition of a social, 
 and ultimately of an absolute, environment is equally 
 fallacious. He has failed to observe that the mere prac- 
 tice of selective attention does not carry him off the 
 subjective ground he started on. We have seen that a 
 selective ordering of experiences is a vital necessity. It 
 would be so equally to a solipsist who had refrained from 
 postulating an ' external world ' populated by ' other ' 
 minds. He too would have to order his experiences 
 and to discriminate their values. Only he would reach 
 analogous results by different methods. It is only when 
 our various postulates have been made and found to work, 
 that our experience can be systematised in ways which 
 recognise them by name, and that so we can speak of our 
 
 * social ' environment.
 
 ix EMPIRICISM AND THE ABSOLUTE 235 
 
 And even then the taking account of wider environ- 
 ments must, it would seem, stop short of the whole. The 
 Absolute, strictly and properly conceived, can never be 
 the explanation of anything in particular. It can there- 
 fore enter any valid purpose as little as it can itself have 
 a purpose, or aim at completing what is already the whole. 
 Neither, therefore, has it teleological value itself, nor is its 
 own nature teleological. What warrant, then, has any 
 absolutist philosophy to treat human purposiveness as 
 more significant than anything else included in the whole, 
 or to attribute cosmic value to human teleology ? 
 
 We must conclude, therefore, that Prof. Taylor's recog- 
 nition of the purposiveness of human thought and action 
 is either illusory or so inconsistent with his fundamental 
 views that it could not but lead him away from the 
 absolutism he professes, if he would work it out. And 
 the objections to this particular syncretism have turned 
 out to be sufficiently general to render it one of the most 
 urgent desiderata of absolutist metaphysics to show how 
 the typically human conception of purpose can be attri- 
 buted to the Absolute and conceived as a specific function 
 of the Absolute. But the omens augur ill for such an 
 undertaking. 
 
 6. (2) His psychological studies seem to have some- 
 what emancipated Prof. Taylor from the fatal fiction of a 
 disinterested intellect. He even dares to represent meta- 
 physics as the product of an " instinctive demand of our 
 intellect for coherency and consistency of thought." 1 In 
 science this interest is definitely practical, and its original 
 object " is practical success in interference with the course 
 of events" (p. 226). Historically, therefore, science is an 
 offshoot of the arts (p. 385), and to this day " the ultimate 
 object of all physical science is the successful formulation 
 of such practical rules for action " (p. 284). 2 
 
 Hence (3) Science, Prof. Taylor agrees, makes use of 
 
 1 P. 3 ; cp. also pp. 5 and 44. Italics mine. 
 
 - Cp. , however, pp. 121-2, where to aim at "practical success in action 
 rather than at logical consistency in thinking " is called a pre-scientific attitude, 
 and the aim of Science is reduced to that of ' metaphysics, ' viz. consistent 
 systematisation.
 
 236 STUDIES IN HUMANISM 
 
 Postulates, which serve its practical purposes without 
 being ultimately true. Thus the principle of causality 
 " must be pronounced to be neither an axiom nor an 
 empirical truth, but a postulate, in the strict sense of the 
 word, i.e. an assumption which cannot be logically justi- 
 fied, but is made because of its practical value, and depends 
 for confirmation on the success with which it can be 
 applied. In the sense that it is a postulate which experi- 
 ence may confirm but cannot prove, it may properly be 
 said to be a priori, but it is manifestly not a priori in the 
 more familiar Kantian sense of the word" (p. I67). 1 
 
 Similarly (pp. 175-6) the analysis of events into in- 
 dependent series, and their mathematical calculability, 
 are postulates. It is too " a practical methodological 
 postulate that the reign of law in physical nature is 
 absolute" (p. 223), and a possible failure of experience 
 to confirm it is disregarded because of our interest to 
 discover such uniformities. " We treat all sequences as 
 capable, by proper methods, of reduction to uniformity, 
 for the same reason that we treat all offenders as possibly 
 reclaimable. We desire that they should be so, and we 
 therefore behave as if we knew that they were so " (p. 
 200). " Space and Time are phenomenal, the result of 
 a process of construction forced on us by our practical 
 needs" (p. 23o). 2 
 
 1 Cp. also pp. 227-229. It is difficult to estimate how far this doctrine is 
 modified in Prof. Taylor's interesting "Side Lights on Pragmatism" (in the 
 M'Gill University Magazine, iii. 2). For though Prof. Taylor again instances 
 (p. 61) among the "beliefs which are useful but cannot be proved independently 
 to be true," "our scientific beliefs in causation or in the existence of laws of 
 nature," and tells us that " for the purpose of formulating practical rules for the 
 manipulation of bodies it is advantageous to be assured that . . . whatever 
 happens . . . will happen again without variation," he is by no means clear 
 about the logical position of this postulate. Immediately after he goes on to say 
 that because such assumptions are merely considered true because they are con- 
 venient, "we have no right to say that they are true except within the limits in 
 which they have been verified by actual experience. " This would again invalidate 
 them as methods of prediction, and exactly parallels Mill's famous stultification 
 of the causal principle when he admitted that it might not hold in distant parts 
 of the stellar regions. Prof. Taylor exhibits this contradiction in a more compact 
 form, but with as profound an unconsciousness of its logical import. 
 
 2 I cannot see why after this Prof. Taylor should insist on treating the Con- 
 servation of Mass and of Energy as only empirical generalisations (p. 177). In 
 his reply he treats the recognition of postulates as something which might have 
 occurred to any one, but denies that they are found in arithmetic (Mind, xv. 
 p. 89). I commented on the awkwardness of the anomaly, etc. (I.e. p. 378).
 
 ix EMPIRICISM AND THE ABSOLUTE 237 
 
 It will be clear from the above that Prof. Taylor has 
 no mean grasp of the epistemological convenience of pos- 
 tulates, and though their relations to the axioms are far 
 from clear, and he does not apparently perceive their 
 importance as an epistemological clue, it seems indisput- 
 able that he has surrendered some of the most characteristic 
 features of the Kantian and post-Kantian apriorism. 1 
 
 (4) Occasionally Prof. Taylor catches still deeper 
 glimpses of the function of thought in the service of 
 humanity. Rightly denying the possibility of an a priori 
 theory of knowledge, he remarks (p. 1 7) that " the instru- 
 ment can only be studied in its work, and we have to 
 judge of its possibilities by the nature of its products." 2 
 
 After two such apercus a relapse into intellectualism 
 would hardly seem logically possible, the more so as 
 Prof. Taylor also recognises the teleological character of 
 the construction of identity, and regards it as a metho- 
 dological assumption that " there are situations in the 
 physical order which may be treated, with sufficient 
 accuracy for our practical purposes, as recurring iden- 
 tically " 8 (p. 284). It is difficult not to take this as subor- 
 dinating the conception of ' identity ' to practical purposes. 
 In the physical order, at all events, ' identity ' would seem 
 to be not ' found ' but ' made ' or ' taken ' with a purpose 
 which conditions its existence, and when we remember the 
 terrible embarrassments in which the fact of this ' arbitrary 
 making ' of identities involves intellectualistic logic, 4 it will 
 seem strange that after departing so far from the spirit of 
 Mr. Bradley's scepticism, he should have stopped short of 
 recognising all logical identifying to be a pragmatically 
 justified experiment. 5 
 
 1 Kant personally he is only too eager to throw overboard, accusing his 
 epistemological position of confusion (pp. 40, 134, 242). 
 
 2 Cp. p. 32 ; italics mine. Prof. Taylor denies that this was intended to bear 
 a pragmatic meaning, but proceeds to explain what he meant in a way which 
 seems to me to bring out still more clearly the pragmatism logically implicit in 
 his dictum. 
 
 3 Cp. also pp. 335 and 98. 
 
 4 Cp. Essays, iii. 8, iv. 4. 
 
 5 In spite of saying that " all identity appears in the end to be teleological" 
 (EUm. of Met. p. 335), he denies, however, that he meant to conceive logical 
 identity as a postulate. Cp. Pers. Ideal, pp. 94-104 ; and Mind, xv. p. 380.
 
 238 STUDIES IN HUMANISM ix 
 
 And so finally (5) Prof. Taylor is sometimes beguiled 
 into what looks suspiciously like the most radical empiri- 
 cism. He says (p. 23) that "the real is experience, and 
 nothing but experience [!], and experience consists of 
 psychical matter-of-fact. Proof of this proposition can 
 only a be given in the same way as of any other l ultimate 
 truth, by making trial of it? Again (p. 38) "the true 
 character of any scientific method can of course only * be 
 discovered by the actual use of it." 3 
 
 Prof. Taylor hereupon explains (Mtnd,-xv. 91) that the 
 remark only means that " you cannot analyse the methods 
 of a science properly until you have them embodied before 
 you in examples," and has no bearing on the issue between 
 rationalists and empiricists. After this one is more at a 
 loss than ever to understand how the definition of truth 
 can be laid down a priori and the nature of logic be 
 determined without reference to their actual functioning 
 when applied to experience. Are we to suppose that a 
 methodological rule which applies to the sciences is not 
 to be applied to knowledge in general ? 
 
 7. It should be sufficiently apparent from the above 
 samples that Prof. Taylor's book exhibits an interesting 
 development of Absolutism, which, until he disclaimed 
 the intention, and protested his innocence, might well be 
 conceived as an attempt to transfer to it some of the 
 most distinctive features of Humanism, in order to enrich 
 the barren doctrine that the Absolute is absolute. In 
 view of his disclaimer, however, it must be assumed 
 that the approximations are more apparent than real, 
 and that his ' pragmaticoid ' utterances are in reality 
 pseudo-pragmatic, even where they seem incompatible 
 with his system, and where pragmatism would seem to be 
 their logical implication. It remains, therefore, only to 
 show that Absolutism and Humanism cannot be com- 
 bined, and that Prof. Taylor's work, so far from affording 
 a basis for such a combination, really remains open to all 
 
 1 Italics mine. 
 
 2 Cp. p. 319 s.f. and p. 351 n. 
 
 3 Italics mine. Prof. Taylor now wishes it to be understood that " the trial 
 referred to was purely logical and a priori."
 
 ix EMPIRICISM AND THE ABSOLUTE 239 
 
 the insuperable objections which have often been urged 
 against the Absolute from a human point of view. 
 Fortunately Prof. Taylor's lucidity greatly facilitates the 
 proof of this fundamental incompatibility : he has not 
 cared to remember that there are views which flourish 
 best, like fungi, in obscurity, and which it is fatal to 
 expose to the light, and so has probably done Absolutism 
 doubtful service by making too clear its constitutional 
 inability to meet the demands either of the human intel- 
 lect or of the human heart. 
 
 In proof of which let us select for consideration (A) 
 Prof. Taylor's account of the relations of ' appearance ' 
 and ' reality,' (Z?) his criteria of ultimate reality, (C) his 
 conception of axioms and postulates, (D) his intellectualism, 
 and (E} his derivation of the Absolute, with the doctrine 
 of ' degrees of reality ' and the ' ontological proof.' 
 
 (A} The antithesis of ' appearance ' and ' reality ' is 
 the bed-rock of Prof. Taylor's as of Mr. Bradley 's philo- 
 sophy. But its assumption seems inadequately justified 
 by the simple remark that we must rid experience of its 
 contradictions (p. 2). Getting rid of contradictions is no 
 doubt one aspect of our efforts to harmonise our experi- 
 ence, but it is by no means the easiest or most logical 
 starting-point. For ( I ) before we can use the test of con- 
 tradiction we have to make sure that we know what ' self- 
 contradiction ' is to mean. (2) We have to make sure 
 that it does not mean that what we have to get rid of is,, 
 not the ' self-contradictory ' ' appearance,' but the concep- 
 tions by which we have tried to know it. And (3) as 
 regards the self-contradiction itself, before we can get rid 
 of a contradiction we have to make sure that we have a 
 real contradiction to get rid of. Before making contra- 
 diction our criterion, therefore, we must find a criterion to 
 discriminate between real and apparent contradictions. 
 Thus the antithesis, which it was to transcend, breaks out 
 again within the ' absolute criterion ' itself. 1 
 
 1 The levity with which these difficulties have been ignored is admirably 
 brought out in Mind, N.S. xiv. 54, by Capt. Knox's masterly paper on "Mr. 
 Bradley 's Absolute Criterion," and it is to be hoped that henceforth appeals to it 
 will be more cautious.
 
 240 STUDIES IN HUMANISM ix 
 
 Nor again is success in removing contradictions quite 
 the alpha and omega of philosophy as intellectualists are 
 fond of assuming. If it were, philosophy would be in a 
 bad way. A severe construction of the principle would 
 work sad havoc with most philosophic systems, and Prof. 
 Taylor also would have been more judicious not to plume 
 himself upon a consistency too great for mortal logic. 
 For to a harsher stickler for literal consistency than 
 myself, many of Prof. Taylor's statements would seem to 
 need a good deal of reconciling. 
 
 What does appear to me to be somewhat deplorable 
 is the way in which he misconceives the logical implica- 
 tions of his doctrine. He fails to make it clear that (i) 
 Nothing whatsoever can be condemned as ' appearance,' 
 unless the superior reality which corrects it, is already 
 known ; and (2) that even then, whenever the superior 
 reality is not a matter of immediate experience, its validity 
 has to be established by the control it gives us over the 
 ' appearance.' x It is fallacious, therefore, to claim ulti- 
 mate reality for anything that is not (i) known or know- 
 able, and (2) useful in operating on our apparent realities. 
 Now as the Absolute has never yet been shown to be 
 capable of satisfying either of these tests, this would 
 conduct us to the distressing dilemma that we must 
 either renounce the Absolute or the favourite antithesis 
 between appearance and reality. 
 
 8. (H] Incidentally it has already been mentioned 
 that Prof. Taylor liberally allows himself two criteria of 
 metaphysical reality. This seems to exceed the legiti- 
 mate luxury of speculation, and may perhaps seem as 
 gross a self-indulgence to the strict metaphysician as 
 bigamy does to the moralist. There is, however, no 
 doubt of the fact. 2 The first of Prof. Taylor's criteria 
 is empirical, and its formulations have been quoted 
 in 6. Its ultimateness cannot be doubted, either as 
 stated or intrinsically. For any principle can be con- 
 
 1 For both these points see my essay on "Preserving Appearances," 
 Humanism, pp. 191, 195. 
 
 2 Prof. Taylor's reply on this point has seemed to me so unconvincing that I 
 have not altered this passage. Cp. Mind, xv. p. 91, with p. 381.
 
 ix EMPIRICISM AND THE ABSOLUTE 241 
 
 ceived as a postulate, the value of which is established 
 by trial. It must be supposed therefore that Prof. Taylor, 
 when he states it, really means what he says, and is not 
 merely lax in his language. But Prof. Taylor retains 
 also an intellectualistic criterion which announces itself as 
 ultimate, and is put forward independently and indeed 
 with more formal pomp. It is Mr. Bradley's familiar 
 maxim that Reality is not self-contradictory. This Prof. 
 Taylor argues (p. 22) must be a metaphysical as well as 
 a logical principle. For to think truly about things is to 
 think in accord with their real nature. But to think 
 them as contradictory is not to think them truly. 
 
 In its essence this would seem to be a form of the 
 ' ontological ' argument whereby a claim of our thought is 
 turned into a revelation about reality. But in addition 
 there is surely involved a twofold fallacy, viz. (i) an 
 equivocation in the word ' truth,' which is used both of 
 the internal self-consistency of thought and of its ' corre- 
 spondence with reality,' and (2) the unworkable view of 
 truth as the correspondence of thought with reality. 1 
 
 And so it must surely be suggested that the principle 
 of Non-contradiction is a postulate, if ever there was one. 
 At one time (p. 19) Prof. Taylor seems to perceive this, 
 and speaks of the audacity 2 of making " a general state- 
 ment about the whole universe of being " as resulting 
 from our " refusing 2 to accept both sides of a contradic- 
 tion as true." But on the next page his faith in the 
 infallibility of postulation has become so robust that he 
 proceeds to treat it as knowledge about reality, and as 
 justifying a " confident " assertion that " it is positively 
 certain that Reality or the universe is a self-consistent 
 systematic whole ! " A mere pragmatist would gasp at 
 the audacity of such expeditious modes of overleaping all 
 distinctions between wish and fact, assertion and proof, 
 postulate and axiom ; but when Prof. Taylor is in the 
 mood no obstacles can check him. 
 
 9. (Q It seems doubtful whether he has quite 
 
 1 For the first point see Humanism, p. 98 ; for the second, pp. 45-6. 
 
 2 Italics mine. 
 
 R
 
 242 STUDIES IN HUMANISM IX 
 
 arrived at the perfect clearness which is so desirable with 
 regard to the relations of axioms and postulates. His 
 procedure, however, is instructive. Without formal 
 discussion he assumes (i) that there are axioms which 
 belong to the fundamental structure of our intellect (pp. 
 I 9> 378) > ( 2 ) th a t postulates are methodological 
 assumptions, defensible on the ground of their practical 
 usefulness, but only so far as they actually succeed (pp. 
 227, 167, 169), and sometimes to be spoken of con- 
 temptuously as " mere practical postulates" (p. 239) ; (3) 
 that questions of ' origin ' (i.e. past history) have no 
 bearing on the ' validity ' of our conceptions. Origins, 
 indeed, he concedes whole-heartedly to the pragmatists 
 (P- 385): historically the true is the useful, science an 
 offshoot of the arts (and why not all axioms promoted 
 postulates ?). But this does not matter, once the in- 
 tellectual ideal has been developed. It can judge, and 
 condemn, the very process which constituted the tribunal. 
 Hence (4) it is more likely than not that postulates do 
 not yield us final truth, as is indeed the case with the 
 postulates of which Prof. Taylor makes most explicit 
 mention. Hence (5) it appears that not only do logical 
 defects not impair the usefulness of a conception (p. 168), 
 but (p. 182) "any form of the causal postulate of which 
 we can make effective use necessitates the recognition of 
 that very Plurality of Causes, which we have seen to be 
 logically excluded by the conception of cause with which 
 science works " (or rather doesrit \ ), and " any form of the 
 principle in which it is true is useless, and any form in 
 which it is useful is untrue." This sweeping affirmation 
 of the validity of useless truth and methodological fiction 
 may be commended to the timid souls who shrink from 
 the more moderate inferences from the facts of postulation, 
 which are drawn by the pragmatists, viz. that the true is 
 useful and that the useless is untrue} To others it will 
 seem queer that a doctrine of the thorough rationality of 
 the universe should reach the result that the highest 
 truths (e.g. the metaphysics of the Absolute) should be 
 
 1 Cp. Humanism, p. 38.
 
 ix EMPIRICISM AND THE ABSOLUTE 243 
 
 useless, while the useful, viz. the postulates, are mostly 
 untrue ! It should be noted (6) as a final perplexity that 
 on the same page (29) the psychical nature of Reality is 
 called both an initial postulate and a fundamental meta- 
 physical principle. Are we to infer from this that the 
 fundamental principles are seen to be postulates, or that 
 Prof. Taylor's language has relaxed under the strain of 
 accommodating his theory to the actual procedure of our 
 minds ? 
 
 These, then, are Prof. Taylor's dicta on the subject of 
 axioms and postulates, and certainly they seem variegated 
 beyond necessity. A living and rapidly growing philo- 
 sophy will no doubt always find it hard to sustain the 
 appearance of a rigid verbal consistency, and I do not in 
 the least hold with the cynics that demanding consistency 
 from a metaphysician is as absurd as demanding demon- 
 stration from a logician because in neither case will you 
 get it ! A certain amount of inconsistency, therefore, is 
 human and pardonable. But I somewhat doubt whether 
 Prof. Taylor has not occasionally exceeded these limits. 
 I am more interested to observe (i) that it seems a 
 great exaggeration of the pragmatist doctrine of methodo- 
 logical assumptions to infer that because they are useful 
 they are probably untrue. For usefulness is no presumption 
 of untruth, but rather the reverse. It is not qua useful 
 that our assumptions are judged untrue, but qua useless. 
 To assume a principle, therefore, for methodological 
 reasons, i.e. as conducive to some proximate purpose, in 
 nowise prejudices its claim to ulterior truth. It is ' true ' 
 as far as it goes, and whether it goes all the way is still 
 an open question. The more useful, therefore, it turns 
 out to be, the truer we judge it : whatever limitations it 
 develops render it useless for our ulterior purposes, and 
 become pro tanto motives for judging it untrue, and for 
 trying to recast it into a more widely applicable form. 
 It is therefore for pragmatism the reverse of true that 
 logical defects do not matter : only it contends that in 
 abstraction from its use a conception has no actual 
 meaning, and that it is the limitations which its use
 
 244 STUDIES IN HUMANISM ix 
 
 reveals which persuade us of its logical defectiveness, 
 rather than vice versa. 
 
 (2) Prof. Taylor hardly seems to dispose of the strong 
 appeal which Pragmatism makes to the history of our 
 axioms by merely trotting out the musty old antithesis 
 of origin and validity. For in the first place to say that 
 ' origin ' does not decide ' validity ' gives no positive in- 
 formation on the very vital questions as to what it does 
 decide, and what is the connexion of the two ; and, 
 secondly, overlooks the fact that the appeal is not really 
 to origin so much as to past history} 
 
 Concerning the origin indeed of anything whatsoever 
 not more than two fundamentally distinct views can be 
 entertained. We may either (i) welcome its novelty and 
 originality, and ascribe its appearance to a providential 
 interposition (Oeia polpa), hailing it as a gift of the gods, 
 or we may reluctantly recognise it as an ' accidental 
 variation.' Metaphysically these explanations are equiva- 
 lents. Or (2) we may sacrifice the recognition of novelty 
 to the vindication of systematic connexion, and labour to 
 show that, much as the apparent novelty has perturbed 
 us, nothing has occurred that was not fully contained in, 
 and determined by, its antecedents, so that the identical 
 content of Reality has suffered no alteration from the 
 occurrence. It is easy to predict that Intellectualism is 
 sure to prefer the second of these views, and to regard 
 the first as the very acme of irrationality. 
 
 But when it argues thus, it only shows, perhaps, how 
 far it is from understanding wherein irrationality consists 
 for its opponents. For to a pragmatist there is nothing 
 essentially irrational in the first account, because he has 
 not assumed that the value of a thing depends on, and is 
 eternally determined by, its origin. If the value of 
 everything depends on its efficiency in use, it is clear that 
 the rationality of the universe will consist not in its 
 a priori inclusion in a metaphysical Absolute, but just in 
 the actual way in which things manage to fit and work 
 together. Things, therefore, neither acquire nor lose any 
 
 1 Cp. Personal Idealism, pp. 123-5.
 
 ix EMPIRICISM AND THE ABSOLUTE 245 
 
 real rationality by their mode of origin. Axioms may arise 
 as postulates, thoughts as wishes, values as ' accidents ' 
 their real validation in every case comes from subsequent 
 experience. Not that our Humanism can be indifferent 
 to the pragmatic equivalents ' chance or purposing in- 
 telligence.' Only it seems that this further question also 
 can only be decided ex post facto, when the novelties that 
 burst into the dull routine of a mechanically calculable 
 world have run their course, and we can judge them by 
 their fruits whether indeed they were of God. 
 
 Thus Pragmatism can rebut the charge of irrationality, 
 and indeed retort it, by pointing out that desirable as it 
 is for all bur scientific purposes to regard the world as 
 wholly calculable, our anxiety may yet involve us 
 ultimately in absurdity, if it leads us totally to deny 
 the occurrence of real novelty. What should, therefore, 
 be pointed out to Prof. Taylor is that Pragmatism, in 
 appealing to the past history of conceptions for light upon 
 their value, is not laying stress on their origin. It is 
 assuming merely that the nature of a thing is revealed 
 empirically in its behaviour, and that therefore to under- 
 stand it, we should do well to make the most extensive 
 study of that behaviour. If, moreover, it should be in 
 process, it will be from a study of its history that we shall 
 see the drift of that process, and if that process should 
 admit of, or demand, teleological interpretation, we shall 
 thus be enabled to forecast its end, and to anticipate its 
 future, sufficiently for our purposes, even though the 
 whole nature of a thing could only be fully expressed in 
 its whole history. The attempt, on the other hand, to 
 determine the ' validity ' of a thing apart from its history 
 and prospects would seem sheer folly. For it tries to 
 contemplate in abstraction a mere cross-section of Reality 
 and claims final validity for what may only be a mis- 
 leading present phase of its total evolution. 
 
 Of course, however, the comparative merits of these 
 two procedures might be completely altered if it were 
 possible to pronounce upon the nature of a thing a priori. 
 For in that case there would be no need to wait upon
 
 246 STUDIES IN HUMANISM , x 
 
 experience, and science and history would have no 
 bearing upon ultimate Reality. This, no doubt, would 
 be convenient, and forms perhaps the hidden motive for 
 the anxiety of metaphysicians to attain some sort of 
 a priori at any cost. 
 
 (3) Just as Prof. Taylor failed to see the full logical 
 force of the pragmatist treatment of axioms, so too, I 
 fear, he has not quite apprehended the place which the 
 new views assign to intellection. For he appears to 
 think that pragmatist appeals to practical results can 
 be sufficiently met by saying that the intellect is not 
 wholly practical (pp. 121-2). It aspires beyond practical 
 success in action to logical consistency in thinking, and so 
 the ideals of truth and moral goodness fall asunder, and 
 metaphysics ' plays its game ' according to its own rules, 
 and demands that ultimate truth shall satisfy the intellect, 
 and that alone (pp. 384-6). 
 
 Unfortunately, however, these propositions do not 
 meet the pragmatist contentions, and, in so far as relevant, 
 are disputable. Not only does Prof. Taylor appear to 
 confuse the proposition that every (valid) thought aims at 
 a practical end with the assertion that it aims at moral 
 goodness (p. 385), but he has not realised that the 
 position he has to refute is that the intellect itself is 
 practical throughout. If this be true, the truths of meta- 
 physics (if there are any) will be just as practical as the 
 rules of conduct and the methods of science, and it is vain 
 to pit ' logic ' against ' practice.' For the reference to 
 the use which verifies them can no more be eliminated 
 from the logical than from the ethical valuations. 1 
 
 10. (Z?) As a natural result of his failure to perceive 
 the full scope of Pragmatism, Prof. Taylor can never 
 really overcome the intellectualism of his school. He 
 does not indeed carry it to the extreme of denying the 
 rationality of the existence of anything but thought, and 
 follows Mr. Bradley in recognising the existence of 
 ' Feeling,' though he too leaves its relation to intellect in 
 obscurity. But the aim of philosophy is still for him to 
 
 1 Cp. Humanism, pp. 55, 160-3.
 
 ix EMPIRICISM AND THE ABSOLUTE 247 
 
 understand, and not to transform and improve experience, 
 and that there is an inherent connexion between the two, 
 that we ' understand ' in order to transform, and that it 
 is the ' transforming ' which assures us of the ' understand- 
 ing,' has not yet dawned upon him. He too, that is, has 
 not yet asked himself by what tests other than the prag- 
 matic we can or do pronounce upon the claim of a 
 proposition to validity. The intellectualist prejudice 
 which he has consequently been able to retain oozes out 
 spontaneously in all sorts of places. Thus (i) the 
 purposive operations of our intelligent manipulation of 
 experience are constantly striking him as ' arbitrary ' (e.g. 
 PP- 35. US. 175. 1/8, 256). He regards (2) an 
 ' indefinite regress ' as a mark of unreality or ' appearance,' 
 without discriminating between the cases where it means 
 the defeat of a purpose, and those in which it means a 
 successful accomplishment of the same, and indicates 
 that an intellectual operation (e.g. ' counting ' or assigning 
 what for our purpose is the ' cause ' of an event) can be 
 performed as often as we please and need. Again (3), to 
 be free, he says, is to know one's own mind (p. 381). 
 And lastly, and most flagrantly, (4) Evil is merely the 
 intellectual incompleteness incident to the restricted purview 
 of 'finite' beings (pp. 113-5. 121-2, 340, 387, 389, 393, 
 396). 
 
 II. (E) And so we come to the infinite being to 
 which all else is ' appearance.' The Absolute appears 
 early in Prof. Taylor's philosophy and stays to the bitter 
 end. It is regarded as so axiomatic a principle that its 
 derivation is somewhat perfunctory (pp. 53-61). We 
 may, however, represent the steps of this derivation and 
 the assumptions they involve as follows : 
 
 1. The universe is ultimately a system [= an applica- 
 tion a priori of a human conception to reality, depending 
 on the validity of the ' ontological proof ']. 
 
 2. If it is a system at all, it must be a rigid system, 
 and " must finally have a structure " (why only one ?) " of 
 such a kind 'that any purpose which ignores it will be 
 defeated." [But must not the sort of system which the
 
 248 STUDIES IN HUMANISM ix 
 
 universe is be determined by experience rather than a 
 priori ? And why should a system be absolutely rigid ? 
 Might it not be plastic, with no predetermined structure, 
 but with potentialities of varying response to varying 
 efforts ? Determinism (which, by the way, Prof. Taylor 
 professes to reject in Book iv. chap, iv.) is not so absolute 
 a postulate that a determinable indetermination in 
 Reality should be inconceivable. And why, lastly, 
 should the purposes which ignore the Absolute be 
 defeated by it? Why should there not be purposes 
 which, though they ignore the Absolute, are ignored by 
 it ? Where, indeed, is there an indisputably valid 
 purpose which needs to take the Absolute into account ?] 
 
 3. Hence to deny the Absolute would be to reduce 
 the world to a mere chaos. [I have never found this 
 to be so. And do we as a matter of fact ever import 
 order into our experience by arguing down from the 
 Absolute ? Do we not rather start from apparent 
 chaos, and work our way out by the most empirical 
 experiments ?] 
 
 4. The whole of Reality is the one and only perfect 
 and complete individual (p. 113). [' Complete] however, 
 we must be careful to understand in a merely intellectual 
 way as = ' all-embracing,' ' not omitting anything,' rather 
 than as ' feeling no want.' And yet I doubt whether 
 Prof. Taylor's readers will always succeed in distinguish- 
 ing these two senses when they peruse his eulogies on 
 the perfection and harmony of the Absolute.] 
 
 5. The Absolute is infinite experience, not like ours 
 limited, and still less collective. 1 Though neither a self 
 nor a person, 2 it is a conscious life which embraces the 
 totality of existence all at once and in a perfect, 
 harmonious, systematic unity, 3 as the contents of its 
 experience. [But how, if it is not limited, can ' purpose ' 
 be ascribed to it? The time has surely come when the 
 apparently self-contradictory notion of an infinite purpose 
 should be either explained or dropped. How again can 
 one life embrace another, i.e. not merely -know it, but 
 
 1 P P- 343. 39 6 - 2 Pp- 343> 346- 3 p - 6o -
 
 ix EMPIRICISM AND THE ABSOLUTE 249 
 
 experience it with its unique limitations ? And this in 
 an indefinite number of conflicting and mutually con- 
 tradictory cases ! Surely the difficulties of the Kenosis 
 in Christian theology, of the combination of divine 
 omniscience with human ignorance, are child's play in 
 comparison with these vagaries of what calls itself a 
 rational metaphysic !] 
 
 6. The Absolute is out of Time and Space and 
 cannot evolve. Hence all things in our experience are 
 for it contradictory appearance. But this does not mean 
 ' illusion.' For (p. 1 09) there are degrees of Reality or 
 individuality, and those things which are more complete 
 and more systematic are more real. Or, put otherwise, 
 things are more real the more they approximate to the 
 ideal of perfect self-consistency and the less the modifica- 
 tion which our knowledge would require to transform them 
 into complete harmony with themselves (pp. 37, 105, 108). 
 
 On this I remark that by the time Prof. Taylor has 
 proved Space and Time ' appearances ' which cannot be 
 attributed to the Absolute, he appears to have quite 
 forgotten the vital distinction between perceptual and 
 conceptual Space and Time which he began (p. 243) by 
 calling of ' fundamental importance.' 
 
 This, however, is a slight matter compared with the 
 ' saving doctrine ' of the Degrees of Reality, in stating 
 which Prof. Taylor does not seem to have materially 
 improved its Bradleian form, (i) It still seems to be a 
 pure assumption that what appears to us to be the order 
 of ascertained reality, must coincide with the absolute 
 order of merit. (2) Nor is it in the least self-evident 
 that what seems to need less modification is actually 
 nearer to ultimate Reality and more likely to attain it. 
 The little more may be unattainable, and something 
 worlds away may be on the right line of development. 
 If, e.g., Prof. Taylor had cast his prophetic eye on the 
 Jurassic age would he not have prognosticated the 
 descent of the fowls of the air from soaring Pterodactyls 
 of the period rather than from clod-hopping Dinosaurs? 
 And yet it is certain that the former never evolved into
 
 250 STUDIES IN HUMANISM 
 
 the true avian form, while the latter very probably did ! 
 (3) How, we may ask, are we to know how much 
 ' modification ' or ' transformation ' a thing may need 
 to become ultimate reality ? Is this also to be known 
 a priori, or judged by casual appearances ? How can 
 we tell what the difficulties really are until we have 
 overcome them ? For our finite apprehension, therefore, 
 the doctrine of degrees is quite unworkable, and indeed 
 unmeaning. And (4) the criterion in any case is quite 
 delusive. For ex hypothesi it fails us : nothing ever de 
 facto reaches ultimate reality, or can be conceived as so 
 doing. We are carefully warned that a ' finite ' appear- 
 ance could do so only by ceasing to be finite. But 
 impossibility has no degrees, and hence to say ' you shall 
 become perfectly harmonious and fully real when you 
 become the Absolute ' is like saying ' you shall catch the 
 Snark on the Greek Kalends.' 
 
 7. Despite, however, the manifestly illusory character 
 of our hopes of becoming real by becoming the Universe, 
 we are still bidden to believe (p. 16) that the Absolute 
 realises our aspirations and satisfies our emotions. 
 Even though (p. 411) "the all-embracing harmonious 
 experience of the Absolute is the unattainable^ [!] goal 
 towards which finite intelligence and finite volition are 
 alike striving," we must have faith (p. 394) that "all 
 finite aspiration must somehow^- be realised in the 
 structure of the Absolute whole, though not necessarily 
 in the way in which we ... actually wish it to be 
 realised"! For (p. 386) "it is simply inconceivable in 
 a rational universe that our abiding aspirations should 
 meet with blank defeat." It is not to this final 
 apocalypse that Prof. Taylor applies the incisive words 
 " an uncritical appeal to unknown possibilities " : but 
 the phrase seems singularly apt. 
 
 12. Now that we have seen what the claims of the 
 Absolute are, we can proceed to examine its logical 
 foundations. No great acuteness is needed to perceive 
 that the whole tissue of affirmations concerning the 
 
 1 Italics mine.
 
 ix EMPIRICISM AND THE ABSOLUTE 251 
 
 Absolute depends logically on the question whether the 
 conception of a whole can be applied to Reality a priori, 
 and whether consequently it can validly be taken as 
 certain that Reality forms a harmonious system. 
 
 In other words, the ' ontological proof,' z.e. the trans- 
 mutation of a conceptual ideal into absolute fact, is a 
 vital necessity for Prof. Taylor's metaphysic. He him- 
 self is well aware of this, and furnishes us (pp. 402-3) 
 with a revised version of it, drawn from the armoury of 
 Bradleian logic. 
 
 Every idea, he tells us, has a reference to reality, 
 outside its own existence, which it means or stands for. 
 " In its most general form, therefore, the ontological 
 argument is simply a statement that reality and meaning 
 for a subject mutually imply each other." But (as we 
 saw) thoughts represent the reality they mean with very 
 different degrees of adequacy, and so, of reality. Only 
 the thought of a perfectly harmonious system can be an 
 adequate representation of the reality which it means. 
 As therefore we have in the Absolute a way of thinking 
 about Reality " which is absolutely and entirely internally 
 coherent, and from its own nature must remain so, however 
 the detailed content of our ideas should grow in complexity^- 
 we may confidently say that such a scheme of thought 
 faithfully represents the Reality for which it stands." 
 
 In this form, then, the 'ontological proof satisfies Prof. 
 Taylor ; but it hardly brings out what is really its 
 cardinal feature, viz. the a priori character of its claim. 
 Unless reality can be predicated a priori of its ideal, the 
 'proof is worthless for the purposes of absolutist meta- 
 physics. For the conception of the Absolute must be 
 valid of any and every course of experience in a wholly 
 non-empirical and a priori way, to enable us to pro- 
 nounce our knowledge and our opinion of it to be 
 incapable of modification by the course of events. It 
 follows that the Absolute must be rigid, and its con- 
 ception one which differs radically in its nature and 
 meaning from any other idea. For other ideas acquire 
 
 1 Italics mine.
 
 252 STUDIES IN HUMANISM ix 
 
 their meaning in the process of experience, which moulds 
 and modifies them, and is continually testing the validity 
 of their ' reference to reality.' Their ' objective reference ' 
 is at first no more than a formal claim, which experience 
 must confirm and develop and show to be really 
 applicable. Whereas in the Absolute's case, the mere 
 making of a claim, by reason, I suppose, of its peculiarly 
 sweeping and impudent character, is held to be sufficient 
 warrant of its a priori truth. 
 
 In other words, Prof. Taylor's argument is a petitio 
 principii \ it amounts only to a covert re-statement of the 
 contested claim. The dispute was whether a subjective 
 demand of ours could authenticate the existence of 
 something which satisfies that demand. 1 The 'proof 
 consists in reiterating that the meaning of the conception 
 involves this same claim to reality. But what we still 
 want to know is whether this claim can be sustained, 
 whether reality will actually conform itself to our con- 
 ceptions, whether the meaning we attribute to them is 
 actually true. And to assure us of this we are given 
 nothing but the Absolute's own assurance ! This may 
 be rationalism, but it does not look rational. 
 
 13. And yet, of course, the facts are plain enough. 
 The Absolute is a postulate of the extremest and most 
 audacious kind. And so far from its being true that our 
 concept's claim to reality is in this instance independent 
 of experience, it is dependent upon every experience and 
 distinguished from other such claims only by the greater 
 difficulty of subjecting it to any adequate verification. 
 The question of whether, say, my idea of ' dog ' ' corre- 
 sponds with the reality,' is easily settled by observing 
 whether what I take to be a ' dog ' behaves in the 
 manner I expect a ' dog ' to behave. But to establish 
 that all Reality behaves in a manner conformable with 
 my notion of a perfectly harmonious system, and that 
 my notion may consequently be safely predicated of 
 
 1 It is amusing that this should turn out to be the essence of the ' onto- 
 logical proof,' when one remembers how wroth rationalists get when they 
 imagine that pragmatists are attempting this very feat !
 
 ix EMPIRICISM AND THE ABSOLUTE 253 
 
 Reality, is a desperate undertaking. Well might rational- 
 ists imagine that if it was not done a priori, it could not 
 be done at all ! For the claim is so large that its 
 empirical proof might well seem impracticable : because 
 the Absolute is all-embracing, the claim has to be 
 substantiated in the case of all things in existence. 
 
 Of course it can still be postulated, and indeed this 
 may be expedient. For it is doubtless methodologically 
 just as judicious to give the universe, as the dog, a good 
 name, if you do not wish to quarrel with it. But to prove 
 my postulate, to make sure that the universe really 
 deserves my praises, and that my eulogy is not a fabric 
 of adulation on a basis of desire, I should have to be in a 
 position to explain away every trace and appearance of 
 disharmony ! It is only our interested bias, therefore, that 
 leads us to argue l that the apparent evil must be really 
 good. If we were quite impartial, i.e. void of interest in 
 the matter, it would be intellectually just as easy, and as 
 tenable, to infer from our mixed universe that the apparent 
 good was really evil. 
 
 That the Absolute is really a postulate is all but con- 
 ceded by Prof. Taylor in one passage, 2 where he argues 
 that as it is the satisfaction of a human aspiration, and 
 as his peace of mind depends on speculation about it, it 
 must be regarded as pragmatically ' useful,' and therefore 
 valid. 
 
 To which I reply that the path from usefulness to 
 validity leads through verification. Not that Pragmatism 
 has the slightest objection to the principle of an Absolute 
 conceived as a postulate. And if it makes Prof. Taylor 
 happy to believe that there is such a thing, and he won't 
 be happy till he gets it, by all means let him try it, and 
 see whether it will give him his heart's desire. In matters 
 of postulation all are called, and all may hope to be 
 
 1 As Prof. Taylor does on p. 396. 
 
 - P. 317 n. The passage may be read as an argumentum ad hominem, but 
 fails as such, because (i) we have always conceded the fullest liberty to postulate, 
 and (2) Prof. Taylor has ignored, as our critics have usually done, the necessity 
 of verifying postulates. Besides, the Absolute is palpably a postulate, so mistaken 
 and ineffective that it never develops into the ' necessity of thought ' it is assumed 
 to be.
 
 254 STUDIES IN HUMANISM JX 
 
 chosen. But this reduces the claim originally made to 
 quite modest dimensions. The Absolute was put forward 
 as an actually existing reality which no sane intelligence 
 could deny. What, therefore, we have rejected was a 
 pretended axiom of universal cogency ; what it may yet 
 be possible to retain is a queer sort of emotional postulate. 
 14. And yet I wonder whether the Absolute, after 
 undergoing so capital a diminution of its logical status, 
 will continue to find favour with our metaphysicians. It 
 was cherished for two reasons. In the first place, as a 
 response to a supposed necessity of thought, that of 
 conceiving the universe as one, i.e. as a systematic order. 
 This has turned out to be a mere craving, and a doubt 
 has arisen as to whether this postulate fully understands 
 its own nature. Is it really all that we need demand of 
 our experience that it should be an ordered whole ? Do 
 we not demand also that its order should be worthy of our 
 approbation ? To any one not pledged to intellectualism 
 at all costs, the thesis must seem indefensible. For the 
 demand for intellectual order is but part of a greater moral 
 claim, without which it is not really intelligible. For 
 what has happened ? We claim to have been enabled by 
 the ' Absolute ' to think the universe as a whole : but only 
 by leaving out, as irrelevant and unreal ' appearance,' all 
 of its initial features. The result is the self-contradiction 
 that the world is said to become a whole only by extruding 
 its parts. Surely a grotesque derision of our postulate ! 
 To satisfy its real meaning, therefore, we must retrace our 
 steps, and argue either that the world is not a whole at 
 all, if that conception involves the reduction of all 
 empirical reality to illusion, or that if it is, the conception 
 has been grossly misconceived, and must be amended in 
 such wise as to admit of a real interaction of the world's 
 constituents, of a real purpose, and a real history, and a 
 real achievement of a good end. Either, therefore, it is 
 no use to postulate an Absolute, because as conceived it 
 cannot explain the facts of experience, or we must 
 postulate an Absolute which is plastic, and not rigid, and 
 not subversive of the ' appearances ' in which we live.
 
 ix EMPIRICISM AND THE ABSOLUTE 255 
 
 But this latter alternative is ruled out by the other 
 main incentive to Absolutism. The Absolute was 
 cherished, in the second place, as a means to what all 
 Rationalism craves, viz. an indefeasible guarantee against 
 the contingency of experience. This needs, perhaps, a 
 word of explanation. When we have seen that as there 
 is no such thing as ' pure reason ' we can no longer define 
 the rationalist as one who is guided by it, it becomes 
 necessary to redetermine his essential type of mind in 
 pragmatic terms. And when we make a psychological 
 study of his character and his works, we shall find that 
 his master passion is not so much a love of reason as a 
 fear of experience. I should define him, therefore, as 
 essentially a person who will not trust experience, who 
 wants at all costs to be insured against the risks, surprises, 
 and novelties of life, and to feel that, in principle, nothing 
 can occur which has not been provided for in the closed 
 circle of existence. What he has failed to perceive is .merely 
 that such a guarantee can be obtained only at the cost of 
 rendering all change and process unmeaning and illusory. 
 For he can only obtain it by dissociating the stable, 
 immutable, ideal Reality from the flux of human reality ; 
 but once these are dissevered, what power can the former 
 retain over the latter ? The Absolute is set above change 
 and process ; certainly : but change and process as illusions 
 continue to dominate the illusory world wherein we are 
 involved inextricably, nor can any demand for their cessa- 
 tion be urged upon an Absolute which already possesses 
 eternally the absolute reality to which we everlastingly 
 aspire in vain. 
 
 Regarding them, then, from this point of view we see 
 that all the infinite convolutions and contortions of a priori 
 philosophies mean just this, that the contingency of the 
 future, the dependence on experience of what most we 
 value, must ' somehow ' be eliminated. It was thus as 
 a method of satisfying a natural (and not wholly ignoble) 
 instinct that rationalists had recourse to the Absolute. 
 But its power to satisfy this emotional demand depended 
 on its strict apriority to all experience. It is not enough
 
 256 STUDIES IN HUMANISM IX 
 
 that the universe should really be a harmonious system 
 and that we should gradually come to ' discover ' this. It 
 is not enough that the potential harmony should be a 
 valid postulate which we may help to realise. What was 
 demanded was an initial .and absolute assurance beyond 
 all possibility of peradventure. And if the ontological 
 argument is disallowed, the Absolute no longer yields 
 this. Why then should it continue to be postulated ? 
 
 15. But may not the Absolute still retain its place 
 as a postulated satisfaction for other desires ? I hardly 
 think so. Man craves no doubt for an object of worship, 
 and when in sore distress will worship almost anything. 
 But how can the Absolute afford him this satisfaction, if 
 finite minds can hardly worship it without " a certain 
 element of intellectual contradiction" (p. 399)? Again, 
 we desire a moral ideal : but though Prof. Taylor 
 desperately invokes the doctrine of degrees to show that 
 goodness possesses more reality than badness, and that 
 therefore the Absolute is not morally indifferent, he is 
 driven to confess that it is " not one of the combatants ; 
 it is at once both the combatants and the field of combat." * 
 Again, those of us in whom intellectual abstractions have 
 not dried up the fount of human sympathy and feeling 
 desire at least an explanation of the existence of Evil 
 (pending the achievement of its entire obliteration) : but 
 what is the response to this demand which Absolutism 
 proffers ? It regards Evil merely as the necessary incom- 
 pleteness of the parts of a whole ! 
 
 It is difficult to discuss this proposition in a temperate 
 manner. For all I know there may be people intel- 
 lectualist enough to contemplate without a twinge the 
 dismembered corpses on a reeking battlefield and to say : 
 ' That only shows how incapable the parts are of becoming 
 the whole.' But that this defect is regarded as the source 
 of all evil is certainly not true, psychologically, of ordinary 
 human feeling. Man is not miserable because he is not 
 the universe, but because he seems to be flung without 
 rhyme or reason into a discordant scheme of things, and 
 
 1 P. 399 n.
 
 ix EMPIRICISM AND THE ABSOLUTE 257 
 
 exposed to cruelty, injustice, and disappointment, disease, 
 decay, and death. I should imagine too that a desire 
 to be the Absolute was a sufficiently rare idiosyncrasy. 
 Certainly I myself have no trace of it ; the prospect 
 would appal me, not only because of its responsibilities, 
 but also on account of its dulness. 1 Prof. Taylor, of 
 course, may be differently constituted. If so, psychologic 
 science should certainly record this curious fact about 
 him ; but I sincerely hope that there may be an error in 
 his auto-diagnosis, and that his grievances are really of a 
 more human calibre. And logically also the proposition 
 that because the Whole is perfect, all its parts must be im- 
 perfect seems far from obvious : to me it would seem far 
 more plausible that if the Whole were perfect, all its parts 
 must be perfect too, and that if any part so much as seems 
 imperfect, the Whole cannot be perfect. And why, to 
 raise a prior question, should it be assumed, apart from 
 our interests and desires, that a whole is necessarily perfect? 
 Why should not the intrinsic scheme of things be evil at 
 the core, i.e. utterly discordant or imperfect in any nameable 
 degree ? Has any philosopher the right to allow his 
 intellectualist proclivities to burke the whole question of 
 pessimism in this flagrant way ? 
 
 It would seem, then, that regarded as a postulate, the 
 Absolute is a bad one, because it does not work, nor secure 
 us what we wanted : regarded as an axiom it stands 
 and falls with the ontological fallacy. Is it not there- 
 fore as a mere private fad, rooted in the idiosyncrasy of 
 a few philosophic minds, that it can continue to figure, 
 and that we must continue to respect it ? But will not 
 those who desire real answers to the real questions of life 
 more and more audibly protest against the imprisonment 
 of all human thought in the dismal void of the conception 
 of a Whole which can neither be altered nor improved, 
 and demand the liberty to think the world as one in which 
 progress and goodness can be real ? 
 
 1 For the Absolute, were it conscious, would have to be a solipsist. Cp. 
 Essay x.
 
 X 
 
 IS 'ABSOLUTE IDEALISM' SOLIPSISTIC ? l 
 
 ARGUMENT 
 
 i. The affinity of solipsism to idealism as such. 2. An amended defi- 
 nition of solipsism ; 3, applies to the Absolute ; and, 4, escapes 
 the stock objections. 5- The difficulties of absolute solipsism ; 6, 
 destroy absolute idealism ; and, 7, are avoided only by its self- 
 elimination. 
 
 I. THE possibility of solipsism and its consequences is 
 one of many important philosophic questions which after 
 long and undue neglect seem now at length to be attract- 
 ing attention. The question of solipsism in its various 
 aspects really has a most vital bearing on the ultimate 
 problems of metaphysics. It is easy to see that every 
 idealistic way of interpreting experience cannot honestly 
 avoid an explicit and exhaustive discussion of its relations 
 to solipsism. For every approach to idealism is so closely 
 beset on either side by the precipices of solipsism that 
 every step has to be careful, and a false step must at once 
 be fatal. The course of realistic philosophies, no doubt, 
 is in this respect less dangerous ; but they, too, are 
 interested in the problem. They have a direct interest 
 in precipitating all idealisms into solipsism. They tend, 
 however, to treat it too lightly as a reductio ad absurdum, 
 without sufficiently explaining why. Its absurdity 
 appears to be regarded as practical rather than as 
 theoretical, but even so the instinctive feeling that solip- 
 sism ' won't do ' should be elaborated into a conclusive 
 
 1 This appeared in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific 
 Methods for Feb. 15, 1906 (vol. iii. No. 4). 
 
 2 5 8
 
 x ABSOLUTISM AND SOLIPSISM 259 
 
 proof that it must of necessity lead to impracticable con- 
 sequences. And this might not prove to be quite so easy 
 as it is customary to assume. Lastly, as a final proof of 
 the prevalent vagueness of philosophic thought on this 
 subject, it may be mentioned that it has even been 
 debated whether radical empiricism is not solipsistic. 1 
 
 It would seem, therefore, decidedly opportune to 
 inquire further into the philosophic affinities of solipsism, 
 and more particularly into its unexplored relations to 
 absolute idealism. For that form of idealism has hitherto 
 escaped suspicion by reason of the loudness of its pro- 
 testations against solipsism. But such excessive protests 
 are themselves suspicious, and it should not be surprising 
 to find that whether or not solipsism is a bad thing and 
 an untenable, whether or not other idealisms can escape 
 from it, absolute idealism, at all events, contains implica- 
 tions which reduce it to a choice between solipsism and 
 suicide. 
 
 2. To show this, our first step will have to be the 
 amending of the current definition of solipsism. For by 
 reason, doubtless, of the scarcity or non-existence of 
 solipsists interested in their own proper definition, its 
 statement is usually defective. When solipsism is defined 
 as the doctrine that as all experience is my experience, I 
 alone exist, it is taken for granted (i) that there can be 
 only one solipsist, and (2) that he must be ' I ' and not 
 ' you.' 
 
 Both of these assumptions, however, are erroneous. 
 Indeed, the full atrocity of solipsism only reveals itself 
 when it is perceived that solipsists may exist in the 
 plural, and attempt to conceive me as parts of them. 
 The definition, therefore, of solipsism must not content 
 itself with providing for the existence of a single solipsist, 
 i.e. with stating how ' I ' could define ' my ' solipsism (if I 
 were a solipsist). It should provide me also with a basis 
 for argument against ' your ' solipsism and that of others. 
 For that is the really intolerable annoyance of solipsism. 
 If I felt reckless or strong enough to shoulder the respon- 
 
 1 See the Journal of Philosophy, vol. ii. No. 5 and No. 9.
 
 260 STUDIES IN HUMANISM x 
 
 sibility, I might not object to a solipsism that made me 
 the all by emphasising the inevitable relation of experience 
 to an experient ; the trouble comes when other experients 
 claim a monopoly of this relation in the face of conflicting 
 claims, and propose to reduce me to incidents in their 
 cosmic nightmare. 
 
 Solipsism, therefore, should be conceived with greater 
 generality. It should cover the doctrine that the whole 
 of reality has a single owner and is relative to a single 
 experient, and that beyond such an experient nothing 
 further need be assumed, without implying that I am the 
 only ' I ' that owns the universe. Any '/' will do. Any 
 I that thinks it is all that is, is a solipsist. And solipsism 
 will be true if any one of the many ' I's ' that are, or may 
 be, solipsists is right, and really is all that is. Provided, 
 of course, he knows it. 
 
 3. How, now, can this amended definition be applied 
 to the case of absolute idealism ? We must note first that 
 my (our) experience is not to be regarded as wholly 
 irrelevant to that philosophy. Indeed, in all its forms it 
 seems to rest essentially on an argument from the ideality 
 of my (our) experience to the ideality of all experience. 
 For the former is taken as proof that all reality is 
 relative to a knower, who, however, is not necessarily 
 the individual knower, but may (or must) be an all- 
 embracing subject, sustaining us and all the world besides. 
 Indeed absolute idealists have so convinced themselves of 
 the moral and spiritual superiority of their absolute 
 knower that they habitually speak in terms of con- 
 temptuous disparagement of their 'private self as 'a 
 miserable abstraction.' * And from the standpoint of their 
 private self such language is no doubt justified ; it inflicts 
 on it salutary humiliations and represses any tendency it 
 might otherwise have to expand itself solipsistically into 
 the all. 
 
 But how does it look from the standpoint of the 
 absolute self? For that, too, has been conceived as 
 a self, and therefore as capable of raising solipsistic 
 
 1 E.g. Mr. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 259.
 
 x ABSOLUTISM AND SOLIPSISM 261 
 
 claims. Can the absolute self be deterred from excesses 
 of self-elation by the reflection that it is not, after all, the 
 totality of existence ? Assuredly not ; for ex hypotJiesi 
 that is precisely what it is. It includes all things and is 
 all things in all things. If it cannot be said to ' create ' 
 all things, it is only on the technical ground that since a 
 subject implies an object, and the world must be coeternal 
 with its ' creator,' ' creation ' is an impossible idea. Never- 
 theless, the dependence of all things on the absolute self 
 must be absolute. And if it is conscious, it 'must know 
 this. For else the ultimate truth about reality would be 
 hidden from the absolute knower, though apparently re- 
 vealed to the (comparative) ignorance of quite a number 
 of philosophers. 
 
 But is not this equivalent to saying (i) that the 
 Absolute must be a solipsist, and (2) that solipsism is the 
 absolute truth ? 
 
 4. The inference is plain, and confirmed also by the 
 admirable fitness of the Absolute to play the solipsist in 
 other ways. For the arguments against solipsism have 
 derived what success they have achieved from the habit of 
 conceiving it as the freak of an individual self; they recoil 
 helplessly from an absolute solipsism. Even Mr. Bradley 
 would probably admit, e.g. that the Absolute, being out of 
 time, would not be perplexed by the necessity of trans- 
 cending its present experience in order to complete itself. 
 
 Indeed, it may here be remarked that Mr. Bradley's 
 refutation of solipsism in Appearance and Reality, ch. xxi., 
 seems to fail for (at least) three reasons, (i) Solipsism 
 no doubt does not rest upon ' direct ' experience merely, 
 i.e. it is not a congenital, but an acquired, theory. Still 
 ' indirect ' experience must sooner or later return to and 
 enter into direct present experience, under penalty of 
 ceasing to be ' experience ' at all. And so the solipsistic 
 hypothesis, though doubtless it is not what any one starts 
 with, may suggest itself as the explanation of experience 
 and be confirmed, even as the solipsistic interpretation of 
 part of it, viz. our dream-experience, is now confirmed, 
 namely by the discovery that there is after all nothing
 
 262 STUDIES IN HUMANISM x 
 
 in direct experience which forbids its adoption. Mr. 
 Bradley, therefore, fails to pin solipsism down to the 
 alternative 'based either on direct or on indirect experience.' 
 It can rest on both. (2) He objects to the enriching of 
 the ' this ' of direct experience by the results of indirect 
 experience, on the ground that they are imported, i.e. were 
 not originally in it (p. 251). Yet immediately after, on 
 p. 254, he disavows the relevance of the argument from 
 origins ! (3) His argument never really gets to, and 
 consequently never really gets at, the solipsistic stand- 
 point, and he always presupposes the more usual assump- 
 tions as to " a palpable community of the private self 
 with the universe." But the solipsist has not, and can- 
 not have, a private self to distinguish (except in appear- 
 ance) from the universe, just because he is a solipsist and 
 includes all things. His position, therefore, leaves no 
 foothold for Mr. Bradley's argument. 
 
 5. But though the inference from absolute idealism 
 to solipsism thus seems unavoidable, it would be affec- 
 tation to pretend that it involves no difficulties. We need 
 not count among these the fact that it will probably be 
 exceedingly unpalatable to many absolute idealists, and 
 may even compel them to temper their denunciations 
 of subjective idealism. For, after all, they are men (by 
 their own confession) accustomed to follow truth where- 
 soever she flits, and to sacrifice their personal feelings. 
 But there does seem to arise a deplorable difficulty about 
 bringing into accord the Absolute's point of view with 
 our own. 
 
 For the Absolute, solipsism is true and forms a stand- 
 point safe, convenient, and irrefragable. But for us there 
 arises an antinomy. We have on the one hand to admit 
 that solipsism is absolute truth, seeing that the stand- 
 point of the Absolute is absolute truth, and that our im- 
 perfect human truth is relative to this standard. Now 
 it is highly desirable, from the standpoint of absolute 
 idealism, that human truth should be identified with 
 absolute wherever this is possible. For to admit any 
 divergence between the two is very dangerous. If such
 
 x ABSOLUTISM AND SOLIPSISM 263 
 
 divergence should culminate in the assertion that human 
 truth can never attain to absoluteness, it would at once 
 destroy the value of absolute truth as a human ideal. 1 
 An absolute truth which no human mind can enunciate 
 and hold to be true acts only as a sceptical disparagement 
 of human knowledge, which, moreover, would be gratuitous 
 and untenable. The absolute idealist, therefore, must seek 
 to maintain that every absolute truth which human minds 
 can entertain is also human truth. And here, fortunately, 
 this is feasible. Solipsism is a view which human minds 
 can entertain. If, therefore, solipsism is true sub specie 
 Absolutiy and we can know it to be so, we ought to think 
 it so. We ought, that is, to think it true that ' I am all 
 that is.' The Absolute has proved it. And not only for 
 itself, but equally for any other ' I.' For regarded as a 
 function to which all experience is related, no ' I ' differs 
 from any other. Any ' I,' therefore, may claim to profit 
 by the truth of solipsism. It will be awkward, no doubt, 
 at first, to have to conceive a plurality of solipsists, each 
 claiming to be the sole and sufficient reason for the exist- 
 ence of everything but I suppose we might get used to 
 that. 
 
 6. It seems, however, a more serious implication that 
 each of them, if his claim were admitted, would render 
 superfluous the assumption of an Absolute Knower 
 beyond himself. Instead of being absorbed in the 
 Absolute, as heretofore, each individual solipsist would 
 swallow up the Absolute. This consequence may seem 
 bizarre, but in metaphysics at least we must not refuse to 
 follow valid arguments to the queerest conclusions. 
 
 The same conclusion follows also in another way. 
 The Absolute ex hypothesi is and owns each ' private self.' 
 And the Absolute is a solipsist. This feature, therefore, 
 of the truth must be reflected in each private self. They 
 must all be solipsists. But this is merely the truth of 
 solipsism looked at from the standpoint of the private 
 self. It must claim to be all because the Absolute is all 
 and it is the Absolute as alone the Absolute can be 
 
 1 Cp. Essay viii. 4.
 
 264 STUDIES IN HUMANISM x 
 
 known. The absorption of the Absolute and the indi- 
 vidual thus is mutual, because it is merely the same truth 
 of their community of substance differently viewed. 
 
 On the other hand, it seems most unfortunate that in 
 practice we all negate the truth of solipsism, and, Absolute 
 or no, must continue so to do. Even if the impractic- 
 ability of solipsism had been exaggerated, and philosophy 
 had been too hasty in assuming this, the working 
 assumptions of ordinary life would be rendered ridiculous, 
 and our feelings would be hurt, if solipsism were true. 
 It may be contended, however, that the practical absurdity 
 and inconvenience of a theory is no argument against it, 
 at least in the eyes of a thoroughgoing intellectualism. 
 And a thoroughgoing intellectualism would be a very 
 formidable philosophy, if any one had had the courage to 
 affirm it. 
 
 But even waiving this, does it not remain an intellectual 
 difficulty that we have ourselves destroyed the path that 
 led from idealism to the Absolute ? The Absolute was 
 reached (rightly or wrongly) as a way of avoiding the 
 solipsistic interpretation of experience, which it was 
 feared idealism might otherwise entail. It now turns out 
 that the Absolute itself is the reason for insisting on the 
 truth of solipsism. And yet if solipsism is true, there is 
 no reason at all for transcending the individual experience 
 of each solipsist ! It would seem, therefore, that we can- 
 not admit the truth of solipsism without ruining our 
 Absolute, nor admit our Absolute without admitting the 
 truth of solipsism. We are eternally condemned, therefore, 
 either to labour under an illusion, viz. that that is false 
 which is really true, and which we really know to be 
 true though we cannot treat it as true without leaving our 
 only standpoint, the human, or to reject the very source 
 and standard of truth itself. 
 
 7. In conclusion, I can only very briefly indicate what 
 seems to me to be a way by which absolute idealism can 
 escape these difficulties, even though it may perhaps lead 
 it into further troubles. Of course, from the standpoint 
 of absolute idealism the truth of solipsism is only valid
 
 x ABSOLUTISM AND SOLIPSISM 265 
 
 if the Absolute is assumed to be conscious. We can, 
 therefore, avoid the fatal admission by assuming that it is 
 not. The Absolute, that is, is unconscious mind, as 
 von Hartmann long ago contended. But what is un- 
 conscious mind? The inherent weakness of the 'proof 
 of absolute idealism lies in its proceeding from the finite 
 human mind, which we know, to an ' infinite ' non-human 
 mind very imperfectly analogous to it, and (apparently) 
 incapable of being known by us. This transition becomes 
 more and more hazardous the further Hve depart from the 
 analogy with human minds. It may fairly be disputed, 
 therefore, whether there is any sense in calling an un- 
 conscious mind a mind at all. But if the unconscious 
 Absolute ceases to be conceived as mind, what becomes 
 of the idealistic side of absolutism ? Among the ab- 
 solutists many, no doubt, would be quite willing (under 
 pressure) to move towards the conclusions thus outlined ; 
 but would not this involve a final breach with their 
 theological allies, to whom the chief attraction of absolute 
 idealism has always been that it appeared to provide for 
 a ' spiritual ' view of existence ? But it might possibly be 
 contended, on the other hand, that neither philosophy nor 
 theology would suffer irreparable loss by the self-elimina- 
 tion of absolute idealism. And this contention is at 
 least deserving of attention.
 
 XI 
 
 ABSOLUTISM AND THE DISSOCIATION OF 
 PERSONALITY 1 
 
 ARGUMENT 
 
 I. The discrepancy between absolutist theory and the apparent facts of life 
 arising from (l) the imperviousness and (2) the discords of the individual 
 minds supposed to be included in the Absolute. II. But if experience 
 is appealed to, a plurality of minds can be conceived as subliminally 
 united, and communicating ' telepathically.' III. The possibilities of a 
 ' dissociated personality ' as exemplified in the ' Beauchamp ' family. 
 
 IV. These may be transferred to the Absolute. Its dissociation = the 
 ' creation of the world. ' The solution of the ' one and many ' problem. 
 
 V. Would a dissociated Absolute be defunct or mad ? 
 
 i. AMONG the major difficulties which Absolutism en- 
 counters in its attempts to conceive the whole world as 
 immanent in a universal mind, must be reckoned what 
 may be called the imperviousness of minds, which seem 
 capable of communicating with each other only by 
 elaborate codes of signalling and the employment of 
 material machinery, and the very unsatisfactory character 
 of the relations between the subordinate minds which are 
 supposed to be included in the same Universal Conscious- 
 ness. There appear, indeed, to exist very great contrasts 
 between the internal contents of the alleged Universal 
 Mind and the contents of a typically sane human mind. 
 In a sane human mind the contents of its consciousness 
 exist harmoniously together ; they are not independent 
 of, nor hostile to, each other ; they succeed or even 
 supplant each other without a pang, in a rational and 
 
 1 This essay appeared in the Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific 
 Methods for Aug. 30, 1906 (iii. 18). 
 
 266
 
 xi DISSOCIATION OF PERSONALITY 267 
 
 agreeable way ; even where there is what is meta- 
 phorically called a mental ' struggle,' the process is not 
 painful to the contents, but if to any one, to the mind as 
 a whole which feels the struggle and the distress. If, on 
 the other hand, we conceive ourselves as thoughts of a 
 Universal Mind, what a chaos we must think that mind 
 to be ! How strangely dissevered into units which seem 
 independent and shut up in themselves ! How strange 
 that each of its thoughts should fight for its own hand 
 with so little regard for the rest, and fight so furiously ! 
 How strange, in short, upon this hypothesis that the 
 world should appear as it does to us ! Well may 
 absolutists be driven to confess " we do not know why 
 or how the Absolute divides itself into centres, or the 
 way in which, so divided, it still remains one." l 
 
 On the face of the apparent facts, therefore, it cannot 
 be denied that the assertions of absolute idealism are not 
 plausible. In contrast with its monism the world on the 
 face of it looks like the outcome of a rough-and-tumble 
 tussle between a plurality of constituents, like a coming 
 together and battleground of a heterogeneous multitude 
 of beings. It seems, in a word, essentially pluralistic in 
 character. And if, nevertheless, we insist on forcing on it 
 a monistic interpretation, does it not seem as though that 
 monism could only be carried through on the lowest 
 plane, on which existences really seem to be continuous, 
 viz. as extended bodies in space ? In other words, must 
 not our monism be materialistic rather than idealistic ? 
 The ideal union of existences in an all-embracing mind 
 seems a sheer craving which no amount of dialectical 
 ingenuity can assimilate to the facts, and no meta- 
 physic can a priori bridge the gulf between them and 
 this postulate. 
 
 There are, however, so many to whom the idealistic 
 monism of Absolutism forms a faith which satisfies their 
 spiritual needs, that it should be doing them a real service 
 to aid them in thinking out their fundamental conception 
 with the utmost clearness and precision, and it should not 
 
 1 F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality 1 , p. 527.
 
 268 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xi 
 
 be taken as an impertinence to point out how much more 
 there is to be said in its favour than its advocates appear 
 as yet to have discovered. For if only ' absolute idealists ' 
 will consent to appeal to experience and empirical evidence, 
 modern psychology puts at their disposal analogies which 
 can remove some of the difficulties which most embarrass 
 them. 
 
 2. The imperviousness and mutual exclusiveness of 
 individual minds may be conceived and explained by an 
 extended use of the conception of the threshold of con- 
 sciousness. It is, of course, well known that this is vari- 
 able, that, e.g., the raising of the limen which accompanies 
 intense mental concentration, thrusts into subconscious- 
 ness a multitude of processes which normally are conscious. 
 On the other hand, much that normally goes on in the 
 organism without consciousness, or full consciousness, 
 may become conscious by an abnormal lowering of the 
 threshold. There is nothing absurd, therefore, in the 
 idea that we might become conscious again of every 
 function of the body, say, of the circulation of the blood, 
 of the growth of every hair, of the life of every cell. 
 Indeed, the only reason why we are not now so conscious 
 would seem to be that no useful end would be served 
 thereby, and that it is teleologically necessary to restrict 
 consciousness to those processes which cannot yet be 
 handed over with impunity and advantage to a material 
 mechanism. 
 
 Now it is clearly quite easy to push this conception 
 one step further, and to conceive individual minds as 
 arising from the raising of the threshold in a larger mind, 
 in which, though apparently disconnected, they would 
 really all be continuously connected below the limen, so 
 that on lowering it their continuity would again display 
 itself, and mental processes could pass directly from one 
 mind to another. Particular minds, therefore, would be 
 separate and cut off from each other only in their visible 
 or supraliminal parts, much as a row of islands may 
 really be the tops of a submerged mountain chain and 
 would become continuous if the water-level were suddenly
 
 xi DISSOCIATION OF PERSONALITY 269 
 
 lowered. Or to use a more dynamic analogue, they 
 might be likened to the pseudopodia which an amoeba 
 puts forth and withdraws in the course of its vital 
 function. Empirically this subliminal unity of mind might 
 be expected to show itself in the direct transmission of 
 ideas from one mind to another, of ideas, moreover, that 
 would spring up casually, mysteriously, and vaguely in a 
 mind in which they do not seem to originate. Now this 
 is on the whole the character of the alleged phenomena 
 of ' telepathy,' and if absolutists really want to convince 
 men of the plausibility of their ideas, they could adopt no 
 more effective policy than that of establishing the reality 
 of telepathy on an irrefragable basis. 
 
 3. Abnormal psychology, moreover, yields further 
 enlightenments. No one can read Dr. Morton Prince's 
 fascinating book on the Dissociation of a Personality? 
 without being dazzled by the light thrown on the nature 
 of personality by the tribulations of the ' Beauchamp ' 
 family. Here were B. I., 'the Saint'; B. III., 'Sally'; 
 and B. IV. ' the Idiot ' (not to mention the minor 
 characters) all apparently complete beings with ex- 
 pressions, beliefs, tastes, preferences, etc., of their own, so 
 diverse and distinctive that no one, who had once dis- 
 criminated them, could doubt which of them was at any 
 time manifesting through the organism they shared in 
 common. And yet they were all included in a larger 
 self, which was sometimes aware of them and through 
 which knowledge occasionally passed from one to the 
 other. ' The Saint ' and ' the Idiot ' were shown to be 
 nothing but products of the dissociation of ' the original 
 Miss Beauchamp,' who, when she was recalled into exist- 
 ence by the astute manipulations of Dr. Prince and put 
 together again, remembered the careers of both, and 
 recognised them as morbid states of herself. In the 
 relations between ' Sally ' and ' the real Miss Beauchamp ' 
 the common ground lay apparently still deeper, and the 
 restoration of the latter did not mean the reabsorption of 
 the former, but only her suppression ; still it may fairly 
 
 1 Longmans, 1906.
 
 270 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xi 
 
 be assumed that their common relation to the same 
 body must indicate the existence of a plane on which (if 
 it could be reached) ' Sally ' and ' the real Miss Beau- 
 champ ' would be unified, and would coalesce into a 
 single being. It was thereby shown that a large amount 
 of superficial diversity and dissociation might co-exist 
 with a substantial unity beneath the surface. The several 
 ' Miss Beauchamps ' were to all appearance independent 
 personages, variously cognitive of each other, hating, 
 loving, despising, pitying, fearing, fighting each other, 
 capable of combining together or opposing each other, 
 and so enjoying their troubled life that most of them 
 were determined to maintain their existence, and resented 
 the restoration of ' the real Miss Beauchamp ' as their 
 own extinction. The amusing history of their contentions 
 reads very much like that of a very disorderly girls' school ; 
 but we can hardly flatter ourselves that the case is too 
 abnormal to have any application to ourselves, because 
 our normal life too plainly exhibits the beginnings of 
 similar dissociations of personality in us, e.g. in dreams, 
 which the ' Sallies ' within us clearly weave out of the 
 contents of our minds whenever we are sufficiently 
 disturbed to be susceptible to their wayward pranks. 
 
 The great philosophic lesson of the case is, however, 
 this, that the unity of a common substance only con- 
 stitutes a very partial and imperfect community of 
 interests, and is no sort of guarantee of harmony in the 
 operations and aspirations of the personalities that 
 possess it. 
 
 4. If now we apply this lesson to the universe, it is 
 clear that we have only to multiply indefinitely the pheno- 
 mena presented by this remarkable case to get an exact 
 representation of the cosmic situation as conceived by 
 Absolutism. On this theory all existences would be 
 secondary personalities of the one Absolute, differing 
 infinitely in their contents, character, and capacity, and 
 capable of co-existence and concurrent manifestation to a 
 much greater extent than were the members of the 
 ' Beauchamp ' family, in which this power was possessed
 
 xi DISSOCIATION OF PERSONALITY 271 
 
 only by ' Sally.' We should accordingly all be the 
 ' Idiots,' ' Saints,' and ' Sallies ' of the Universal Beau- 
 champ Family which had been engendered by the ' dis- 
 sociation ' of the Absolute. This might not be altogether 
 pleasing to all of us (especially to those who, like the 
 writer, would seem to have been predestined to be among 
 the ' Sallies ' of the Absolute) ; but the idea itself would 
 be quite conceivable and free from theoretical objection. 
 
 Indeed, it would throw much light upon many 
 theoretic problems. If discordance of contents is no bar 
 to unity of substance, the extraordinary jumble of con- 
 flicting existences which the world appears to exhibit 
 would become intelligible, and would cease to be a cogent 
 argument in favour of pluralism. The disappearance, 
 again, of personalities at death might merely portend that 
 they were temporarily driven off the scene like ' B. I.' 
 or ' B. IV.,' when the other, or ' Sally,' controlled the 
 organism ; ' dead,' that is, in the sense of unaware of what 
 was going on and unable to manifest, but yet capable of 
 reappearing and resuming the thread of their interrupted 
 life after ' losing time.' And so support might here be 
 found for the doctrines of palingenesia and of a cyclic 
 recurrence of events in an unchanging Absolute. 
 
 Again, it would become possible to explain the nature 
 and to define the date of ' Creation ' better than hitherto. 
 The ' Creation of the World ' would mean essentially the 
 great event of the ' dissociation ' of the original ' One ' 
 into a ' Many,' and would be comparable with the 
 catastrophe which broke up ' the original Miss Beauchamp ' 
 in 1893. I n tne Absolute's case the date itself could not, 
 of course, be fixed with such precision, but the date of 
 the creation (or, perhaps, rather ' emanation ') of the world 
 might be defined as the date at which its present ' dis- 
 sociation ' set in. This change itself it would hardly be 
 possible, and would certainly not be necessary, to regard as 
 an intelligible event. For we should be absolved from the 
 duty of trying to explain it by the fact that ex kypothesi 
 it was the dissociation of the rational repose of the One. 
 
 As regards that One again some very pretty problems
 
 272 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xi 
 
 would arise, e.g. as to whether it continued to exist 
 subliminally, able though not willing to recover its unity 
 and to reabsorb the world, or whether its existence was 
 really suspended, pending the restoration of its unity and 
 the reabsorption of the Many, or whether its ' dissociation ' 
 into a plurality of related beings was to be regarded as a 
 final and irretrievable act entailing the permanence of the 
 plural world thus generated. The last alternative no 
 doubt would be that most directly indicated by the 
 analogy of the ' Beauchamp ' case. For Miss Beauchamp 
 could hardly have recovered her unity without the skilful 
 intervention (from the outside) of Dr. Morton Prince. 
 But in the world's case nothing analogous would seem to 
 be conceivable. As by definition the Absolute is the 
 totality of things, it can never be exposed to outside 
 stimulation, and therefore could not, if once ' dissociated,' 
 reunite itself, under curative suggestions from without. 
 
 The same conclusion results from a comparison of this 
 conception of the relation of the One and the Many with 
 the very interesting anticipation of it which may be found 
 in Mainlander's Philosophic der Erlosung. Mainlander 
 very acutely pointed out that in order to explain the 
 unity of the universe it was quite superfluous to assume a 
 still existing One. It was quite enough to ascribe to the 
 Many a common origin, a common descent from the One. 
 Being a pessimist, he further suggested, therefore, that the 
 One had committed suicide, i.e. dissolved itself into a 
 Many, who sharing in its original impulse were also 
 slowly dying out, so that the aimless misery of existence 
 would in the end be terminated by a universal death. 
 By substituting, however, the notion of a ' dissociation ' of 
 the One for that of its ' suicide,' it is possible not only to 
 adduce a definite psychological analogy, but also to render 
 the process more intelligible and to safeguard the con- 
 tinuance of the world. Altogether, therefore, the vexed 
 problem of the One and the Many, the puzzle of how to 
 conceive the reality of either without implicitly negating 
 that of the other, seems to be brought several steps nearer 
 to an intelligible solution by these empirical analogies.
 
 xi DISSOCIATION OF PERSONALITY 273 
 
 5. Not that, of course, these conceptions would entail 
 no drawbacks. It is a little startling, e.g., at first to have 
 to think of the Absolute as morbidly dissociated, or even 
 as downright mad. But a really resolute monist would not 
 allow himself to be staggered by such inferences. 
 
 For, in the first place, the objection to a mad Absolute 
 is only an ethical prejudice. And he would have read 
 Mr. Bradley to little purpose, 1 if he had not learnt that 
 ethical prejudices go for very little in the realm of high 
 metaphysics, and that the moral point of view must not be 
 made absolute, because to make it so would be the death 
 of the metaphysic of the Absolute. The fact, therefore, 
 that to our human thinking a dissociated Absolute would 
 be mad, would only prove the limitations of our finite 
 intelligence and should not derogate from its infinite perfec- 
 tion. Moreover, secondly, if the Absolute is to include the 
 whole of a world which contains madness, it is clear that, 
 anyhow, it must, in a sense, be mad. The appearance, 
 that is, which is judged by us to be madness, must be 
 essential to the Absolute's perfection. All that the 
 analogy suggested does is to ascribe a somewhat higher 
 ' degree of reality ' to the madness in the Absolute, and 
 to render it a little more conceivable just how it is 
 essential. 
 
 Less stalwart monists may, no doubt, be a little dis- 
 mayed by these implications of their creed, and even dis- 
 posed to develop scruples as to whether, when pursued 
 into details, its superiority over pluralism is quite as 
 pronounced as they had imagined ; but in metaphysics 
 at least we must never scruple to be consistent, nor 
 timorously hesitate to follow an argument whithersoever 
 it leads. It must, therefore, be insisted on that absolutism 
 is in these respects a perfectly thinkable, if not exactly 
 an alluring, theory. And we may well display our 
 intellectual sympathy with it by helping to work out its 
 real meaning more clearly than its advocates have hitherto 
 succeeded in doing, or the public in understanding. 
 
 1 See Appearance and Reality, ch. xxv.
 
 XII 
 ABSOLUTISM AND RELIGION 
 
 ARGUMENT 
 
 I. The philosophic 'breakdown of Absolutism. But may it not really be a 
 religion, and to be judged as such ? 2. The pragmatic value of 
 religion, and academic need of a religious philosophy. 3. The history 
 of English Absolutism : its importation from Germany as an antidote to 
 scientific naturalism. 4. Its success and alliance with theology. Its 
 treatment of its own ' difficulties.' 5. Its revolt against theology. 
 The victory of ' the Left. ' 6. The discrepancy between Absolutism 
 and ordinary religion, exemplified in (i) its conception of 'God,' and (2) 
 its treatment of 'Evil.' 7- The psychological motives for taking 
 Absolutism as a religion. 8. Its claim to have universal cogency 
 compels us, 9, to deny its rationality to our minds, (i) The 'craving 
 for unity ' criticised. (2) The guarantee of cosmic order unsatisfactory. 
 (3) An a priori guarantee illusory. (4) The meaninglessness of monism. 
 An ' Infinite whole ' a contradiction. The inapplicability of absolutist 
 conceptions. 10. The inability of Absolutism to compromise its claim 
 to universality, leads it to institute a Liberum Veto and to commit 
 suicide. 
 
 i. WE have constantly had occasion to criticise the 
 peculiar form of rationalistic intellectualism which styles 
 itself Absolute Idealism and may conveniently be called 
 Absolutism, and to observe how it has involved itself 
 in the most serious difficulties. It has been shown, for 
 example (in Essay ix.), that the proof of the Absolute 
 as a metaphysical principle, and its value when assumed, 
 were open to the gravest objections. It has been shown 
 (in Essays ii.-vii.) that the absolutist theory of knowledge 
 has completely broken down, and must always end in 
 scepticism. It has been shown (in Essay x.) that if the 
 idealistic side of the theory is insisted on, it must develop 
 into solipsism. It has been shown (in Essay xi.) that 
 
 274
 
 xii ABSOLUTISM AND RELIGION 275 
 
 if a serious attempt is made to derive the Many from the 
 One, to deduce individual existences from the Absolute, 
 the result inevitably is that the Absolute is either ' dis- 
 sociated,' or mad, or defunct, because it has committed 
 suicide in a -temporary fit of mental aberration. 
 
 In short, if a tithe of what we have now and formerly 1 
 had to urge against the Absolute be well founded, 
 Absolutism must be one of the most gratuitously absurd 
 philosophies which has ever been entertained. And if 
 so, how comes it that men professedly and confessedly 
 pledged to the pursuit of pure unadulterated truth can 
 be found by the dozen to adhere to so indefensible a 
 superstition ? 
 
 To answer this question will be the aim of this essay. 
 
 It is not enough to reply, in general terms, what at 
 once occurs to the student of human psychology, viz. 
 that intellectual difficulties are hardly ever fatal to 
 an attractive theory, that logical defects rarely kill 
 beliefs to which men, for psychological reasons, remain 
 attached. This is doubtless true, but does not enable us 
 to understand the nature of the attraction and attachment 
 in this case. Nor can it be reconciled with the manifest 
 acumen of many absolutist thinkers to suppose that they 
 have simply failed to notice, or to understand, the objec- 
 tions brought against their theory. If, therefore, they 
 have failed to meet them with a logical refutation, the 
 reason must lie in the region of psychology. 
 
 And this reflection may suggest to us that we have, 
 perhaps, unwittingly misunderstood Absolutism, and done 
 it a grave injustice. 
 
 For we have treated it as a rational theory, resting its 
 claim on rational grounds, and willing to abide by the 
 results of logical criticism. But this may have been a 
 huge mistake. What if this assumption was wrong? 
 What if its real appeal was not logical, but psychological, 
 not to the ' reason ' but to the feelings, and more 
 particularly to the religious feelings ? Does not Mr. 
 Bradley himself hint that philosophy (his own, of course) 
 
 1 Cp. Humanism, pp. 2-4, 14, 59, 191, 286-7 and Riddles of the Sphinx, ch. x.
 
 276 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xn 
 
 may be " a satisfaction of what may be called the 
 mystical side of our nature " ? l 
 
 If so, a fully-developed case of Absolutism would 
 never yield to merely philosophic treatment. It might 
 be driven to confess the existence of logical difficulties, 
 but these would not dismay it. It would go on believing 
 in what to its critics seemed the absurd and impossible, 
 with a pathetic and heroic faith that all would ' some day ' 2 
 be explained ' somehow.' 3 
 
 2. This possibility, at any rate, deserves to be 
 examined. For religions are as such deserving of re- 
 spectful and sympathetic consideration from a Humanist 
 philosophy. They are pragmatically very potent influ- 
 ences on human life, and the religious instinct is one of 
 the deepest in human nature. It is also one of the 
 queerest in the wide range of its manifestations. There 
 are no materials so unpromising that a religion cannot be 
 fashioned out of them. There are no conclusions so 
 bizarre that they cannot be accepted with religious 
 fervour. There are no desires so absurd that their satis- 
 faction may not be envisaged as an act of worship, lifting 
 a man out of his humdrum self. 
 
 There is, therefore, no antecedent absurdity in the 
 idea that Absolutism is at bottom a religious creed, a 
 development of, or a substitute for, or perhaps even a per- 
 version of, some more normal form of religious feeling, such 
 as might well be fomented in an academic atmosphere. 
 
 Once this theory is mooted, confirmations pour in on 
 every side. The central notion of Absolutism, the 
 Absolute itself, is even now popularly taken to be 
 identical with the ' God ' of theism. It seems, at any 
 rate, grand and mysterious and all-embracing enough to 
 evoke, and in a way to satisfy, many of the religious 
 feelings, as being expressive of the all-pervasive mystery 
 of existence. 
 
 There is, moreover, in every university, and especially 
 
 1 Appearance and Reality, p. 6. 
 
 2 Cp. Dr. McTaggart's Hegelian Dialectic, ch. v. 
 
 3 Cp. Mr. Bradley's Appearance and Reality , passim.
 
 xii ABSOLUTISM AND RELIGION 277 
 
 in Oxford, a standing demand for a religious, or quasi- 
 religious, philosophy. For, rightly or wrongly, established 
 religions always cater in the first place for the unreflective. 
 They pass current, and are taught, in forms which cannot 
 bear reflection, as youthful minds grow to maturity. Con- 
 sequently, when reflection awakens, they have to be 
 transformed. This is what gives his opportunity to the 
 religious philosopher. And also to the irreligious phil- 
 osopher, who ' mimics ' him. They both offer to the 
 inquiring minds of the young a general framework into 
 which to fit their workaday beliefs a framework which 
 in some respects is stronger and ampler, though in others 
 more meagre and less lovely, than the childlike faith 
 which reflection is threatening to dissolve, unless it is re- 
 modelled. Hence the curious fascination, at a certain 
 stage of mental development, of some bold ' system ' of 
 metaphysics, which is accepted with little or no scrutiny 
 of its wild promises, while in middle age the soul soon 
 comes to crave for more solid and less gaseous nutriment. 
 It is proper, then, and natural, that an absolutist meta- 
 physic should take root in a university, and flourish 
 parasitically on the fermentation of religious instincts 
 and beliefs. 
 
 3. The history of English Absolutism distinctly bears 
 out these anticipations. It was originally a deliberate 
 importation from Germany, with a purpose. And this 
 purpose was a religious one that of counteracting the 
 anti-religious developments of Science. The indigenous 
 philosophy, the old British empiricism, was useless for 
 this purpose. For though a form of intellectualism, its 
 sensationalism was in no wise hostile to Science. On the 
 contrary, it showed every desire to ally itself with, and to 
 promote, the great scientific movement of the nineteenth 
 century, which penetrated into and almost overwhelmed 
 Oxford between 1850 and 1870. 
 
 But this movement excited natural, and not un- 
 warranted, alarm in that great centre of theology. For 
 Science, flushed with its hard -won liberty, ignorant of 
 philosophy, and as yet unconscious of its proper limitations,
 
 278 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xn 
 
 was decidedly aggressive and over-confident. It seemed 
 naturalistic, nay, materialistic, by the law of its being. 
 The logic of Mill, the philosophy of Evolution, the faith 
 in democracy, in freedom, in progress (on material lines), 
 threatened to carry all before them. 
 
 What then was to be done ? Nothing directly ; for on 
 its own ground Science seemed invulnerable, and had 
 a knack of crushing the subtlest dialectics by the knock- 
 down force of sheer scientific fact. But might it not be 
 possible to change the venue, to shift the battle-ground 
 to a region ubi instabilis terra innabilis unda, where the 
 land afforded no firm footing, where the frozen sea could 
 not be navigated, where the very air was thick with mists, 
 so that phantoms might well pass for realities the 
 realm, in short, of metaphysics ? Germany in those days 
 was still the promised land of the metaphysical mystery- 
 monger, where everything was doubted, and everything 
 believed, just because it had been doubted, and the 
 difference between doubt and belief seemed to be merely 
 a question of the point of view : it had not yet become 
 great by the scientific exploitation of ' blood and iron ' 
 (including organic chemistry and metallurgy). 
 
 Emissaries accordingly went forth, and imported 
 German philosophy, as the handmaid, or at least the 
 ally, of a distressed theology. Men began to speak with 
 foreign tongues, and to read strange writings of Kant's 
 and Hegel's, whose very uncouthness was awe-inspiring 
 and terrific. Not that, however, it should be supposed 
 that the Germanisers were all consciously playing into 
 the hands of clericalism, as Mark Pattison insinuated. 
 T. H. Green, for example, was, by all accounts, sincerely 
 anxious to plunge into unfathomed depths of thought, 
 and genuinely opposed to the naturalistic spirit of the 
 age ; and if there was anything transparent about his 
 mind, it was assuredly its sincerity. His philosophy so 
 it was commonly supposed by Balliol undergraduates in 
 the eighties was encouraged by the Master (Jowett) on 
 the ground that, inasmuch as metaphysics was a sort of 
 intellectual distemper incidental to youth, it was well
 
 xir ABSOLUTISM AND RELIGION 279 
 
 that it should assume a form not too openly divergent 
 from the established religion. 1 
 
 Others, again, welcomed the new ideas on pedagogical 
 grounds, being haunted by the academic dread lest Mill's 
 Logic should render philosophy too easy, or at least 
 contrast too markedly with the crabbed hints of the 
 Posterior Analytics. And so German Absolutism con- 
 cluded its alliance with British theology, soon after its 
 demise in its native country. 
 
 4. The results at first seemed excellent, theologically 
 speaking. The pressure of ' modern science ' was at once 
 relieved. It soon began to be bruited abroad that there 
 had been concocted in Germany a wonderful ' metaphysical 
 criticism of science,' hard to extract and to understand, 
 but marvellously efficacious. It was plain, at any rate, that 
 the most rabid scientists could make no reply to it because 
 they had insuperable difficulties in comprehending the terms 
 in which it was couched. Even had they learnt the 
 language, the coarser fibre of their minds would have 
 precluded their appreciating the subtleties of salvation by 
 Hegelian metaphysics. So it was rarely necessary to do 
 more than recite the august table of the a priori categories 
 in order to make the most audacious scientist feel that he 
 had got out of his depth ; while at the merest mention 
 of the Hegelian Dialectic all the ' advanced thinkers ' of 
 the time would flee affrighted. 
 
 The only drawback of this method was that so few 
 could understand it, and that, in spite of the philosophers, 
 the besotted masses continued to read Darwin and 
 Spencer, Huxley and Haeckel. But even here there 
 were compensations. What can never be popularised, 
 can never be vulgarised. What cannot be understood, 
 cannot be despised or refuted. And it is grateful and 
 comforting to feel oneself the possessor of esoteric 
 knowledge, even when it does not go much beyond 
 ability to talk the language and to manipulate the catch- 
 words. 
 
 1 In reality, however, he seems latterly to have deplored Green's influence as 
 tending to draw men away from the practical pursuits of life.
 
 280 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xn 
 
 As regards the direct support German philosophy 
 afforded to Christian theology, on the other hand, it would 
 be a mistake to lay too much stress on it. Kant's three- 
 fold postulation of God, Freedom, and Immortality could 
 not add much substance to an attenuated faith. And 
 besides the agnostic element in Kant, which had seemed 
 well enough so long as Mansel used it to defend orthodoxy, 
 was recognised as distinctly dangerous, when Spencer, 
 soon afterwards, proceeded to elaborate it into his 
 doctrine of the Unknowable. Hegel's ' philosophy of 
 religion,' indeed, promised more. It professed to identify 
 God the Father with the ' thesis,' God the Son with the 
 ' antithesis,' and God the Holy Ghost with the ' synthesis ' 
 of a universal ' Dialectic/ and thus to provide an 
 a priori rational deduction of the Trinity. But it could 
 hardly escape the acuteness of the least discerning 
 theologians that, though such combinations might seem 
 ' suggestive ' as ' aids to faith,' they were not quite 
 demonstrative or satisfactory. The more discerning 
 realised, of course, the fundamental differences between 
 Hegelian philosophy and Christian theology. They 
 recognised that the Hegelian Absolute was not, and 
 could not be, a personal God, that its real aim was the 
 self-development, not of the Trinity, but of an immanent 
 ' Absolute Idea,' and that the world, and not the Holy 
 Ghost, was entitled to the dignity of the Higher Synthesis. 
 They felt also the awkwardness of supporting a religion 
 which rested its appeal on a unique series of historical 
 events by a philosophy which denied the ultimate 
 significance of events in Time. 
 
 So, on the whole, Absolutism did not prove an 
 obedient handmaid to theology, but rather a useful ally : 
 their association was not service so much as symbiosis, 
 and even this was eventually to develop into hostile 
 parasitism. 
 
 The gains of theology were chiefly indirect. Phil- 
 osophy instituted a higher, and not yet discredited, court 
 for the trial of intellectual issues, to which appeal could 
 be made from the decisions of Science. And it checked,
 
 xii ABSOLUTISM AND RELIGION 281 
 
 and gradually arrested, the flowing tide of Science, if 
 not among scientific workers, yet among the literary 
 classes. 
 
 It supported theology, moreover, by a singularly useful 
 parallel. Here was another impressive study of the 
 abstrusest kind, with claims upon life as great and as 
 little obvious as those of theology, and yet not open to 
 the suspicion of being a pseudo-science devised for the 
 hoodwinking of men. For was not philosophy a purely 
 intellectual discipline, a self-examination of Pure Reason ? 
 If it was abstract, and obscure, and unprofitable, and 
 hard to understand, and full of inherent ' difficulties,' 
 why then condemn theology as irrational and fraudulent 
 for exhibiting, though to a less degree, the like character- 
 istics ? 
 
 Thus could theologians use the defects of philosophy 
 to palliate those of theology, and to assuage the doubts 
 of pupils, willing and anxious to clutch at whatever 
 would enable them to retain their old beliefs, by repre- 
 senting them as inevitable, but not fatal, imperfections 
 incidental to the make-up of a ' finite ' mind. 
 
 To a large extent, moreover, these services were 
 mutual. It was the religious interest, and the need of 
 studying theology, which brought young men to college, 
 and so provided the philosophers with hearers and 
 disciples. 
 
 And theology reciprocated also by infusing equanimity 
 into philosophy with regard to its own intrinsic ' diffi- 
 culties.' For, alas, nothing human is perfect, not even 
 our theories of perfect knowledge ! The new philosophy 
 soon developed most formidable difficulties, which would 
 have appalled the unaided reason. It was taught 
 to ' recognise ' these ' difficulties ' (when they could no 
 longer be concealed), and to plead the frankness of 
 this recognition as an atonement for the failure to 
 remove them, to analyse their grounds, or to reconsider 
 the assumptions which had led to them. Or, if more 
 was demanded, it was shown that they were old, that 
 similar objections had been brought ages ago (and
 
 282 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xn 
 
 remained similarly unanswered) ; and, finally, the philo- 
 sophic exposition of the nature of Pure Reason would end 
 in an exhortation to a reverent agnosticism, based on 
 a recognition of the necessary limitations of the human 
 mind ! Only very rarely did bewildered pupils note the 
 discrepancy between the mystical conclusion and the 
 initial promise of a completely rational procedure : after 
 a protracted course of abstract thinking the exhausted 
 human mind is only too apt to acquiesce in a confession 
 of failure, which seems to equalise the master's and the 
 pupil's intellect. Lest we should seem, however, to be 
 talking in the air, let us adduce a notorious example of 
 such a ' philosophic ' treatment of a ' difficulty.' 
 
 It has now for more than a quarter of a century been 
 recognised by absolutist philosophy that there exists at 
 its core a serious gap between the human and the super- 
 human ' ideal ' which it deifies, and that it possesses no 
 logical bridge by which .to pass from the one to the other. 
 Thus T. H. Green professes to discover that knowledge is 
 only possible if the human consciousness is conceived as 
 the ' reproduction ' in time of an Eternal Universal Con- 
 sciousness out of time. But as to the nature of the 
 connexion and interaction between them, as to how the 
 Eternal Consciousness renders human minds its ' vehicles,' 
 he can, of course, say nothing. Nay, he is finally driven 
 to confess that these two ' aspects ' of consciousness, 
 qua human and qua eternal, " cannot be comprehended in 
 a single conception." l In other words, ' consciousness ' 
 is merely a word used to cover the fundamental dis- 
 crepancy between two incompatible conceptions, and an 
 excuse for shirking the most fundamental of philosophic 
 problems. 
 
 This being so, it is interesting to see what his friends 
 and followers have made of a situation which ought 
 surely to be intolerable to a rational theory. Has its 
 rationalistic pride been in any way abated ? Not a whit. 
 
 1 Prolegomena to Ethics, 68. Capt. H. V. Knox has drawn attention to 
 the vital importance of this extraordinary passage (Mind, x. N.S. No. 33, vol. ix. 
 p. 64), and Mr. Sturt has also commented on it in Idola Theatri, p. 238.
 
 xii ABSOLUTISM AND RELIGION 283 
 
 Has its doctrine ceased to be taught ? Not at all. Has 
 it been amended ? In no wise. Have attempts been 
 made to bridge the chasm ? No ; but its existence has 
 repeatedly been ' recognised.' Mr. Bradley ' recognises ' 
 it as the problem how the Absolute ' transmutes ' 
 ' appearances ' ( = the world of our experience) into 
 ' reality ' ( = his Utopian ideal) ; but his answer is merely 
 that the trick is achieved by a gigantic ' somehow.' Mr. 
 Joachim ' recognises ' it as ' the dual nature of human 
 experience,' l but will not throw over it even a mantle of 
 words. Prof. J. S. Mackenzie ' recognises ' it by remark- 
 ing " that a truly conceptual object cannot, properly 
 speaking, be contained in a divine mind, any more than in 
 a human mind, unless the divine mind is something wholly 
 different from anything that we understand by a mind." : 
 Has the difficulty led to any analysis of its grounds, or 
 revision of its assumptions ? Not to my knowledge. It 
 has been ' recognised,' and is now recognised as ' old ' ! 
 and familiar and venerable ; and what more would you 
 have ? Surely not an answer ? Surely not a Rationalism 
 which shall be rational ? It is, and remains, a ' difficulty,' 
 and that is the end of it ! 
 
 5. But though in point of intellectual achievement 
 our ' Anglo-Hegelian ' philosophy must be pronounced to 
 be stationary, its mundane history has continued, and its 
 relations to theology have undergone a startling change. 
 As it has become more firmly rooted, and as, owing to 
 the reform of the universities, the tutorial staff of the 
 colleges has ceased to be wholly clerical, the alliance 
 between Absolutism and theology has gradually broken 
 down. Their co-operation has completely disappeared. 
 It now sounds like an untimely reminiscence of a bygone 
 era when Mr. Bradley vainly seeks to excite theological 
 odium against his philosophic foes. 4 
 
 In part, no doubt, the need for the alliance has grown 
 less. Science is far less aggressive towards theology than 
 
 1 Cp. Essay vi. 3. 
 
 2 Mind, xv. N.S. 59, p. 326 . Italics mine. 
 
 8 As we have seen, it is essentially as old as Plato. 
 4 Cp. Essay iv. 15.
 
 284 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xn 
 
 of yore. It has itself probed into unsuspected depths of 
 being, which make blatant materialism seem a shallow 
 thing, and have destroyed the illusion that it knows all 
 about ' matter.' It has become humble, and begun to 
 wonder whether, after all, its whole knowledge is more 
 than ' a system of differential equations which work ' ; in 
 other words, it has ceased to be dogmatic, and is dis- 
 covering that its procedure is, in truth, pragmatic. 
 
 Absolutism, on the other hand, has grown secure and 
 strong and insolent. It has developed a powerful ' left 
 wing,' which, as formerly in Germany, has triumphed 
 within the school, and quarrelled with theology. Mr. 
 F. H. Bradley, Dr. McTaggart, Prof. B. Bosanquet, Prof. 
 A. E. Taylor, Mr. H. H. Joachim, Prof. J. S. Mackenzie are 
 among its best-known representatives. The ' right wing ' 
 seems to have almost wholly gone from Oxford, though 
 it still appears to flourish in Glasgow. As for the ' centre,' 
 it is silent or ambiguous. 1 
 
 But about the views of the Left there can be no 
 doubt. It is openly and exultingly anti-theological. It 
 disclaims edification. It has long ago made its peace with 
 Naturalism, and boasts that it can accept all the conclu- 
 sions of the latter, and reproduce them in its own language. 
 It has now swallowed Determinism whole and without a 
 qualm. 2 As a whole, it has a low opinion of ethics, and 
 it has even lapsed into something remarkably resembling 
 hedonism. 3 In short, its theological value has become a 
 formidable minus quantity, which is mitigated only by the 
 technicality of its onslaughts, which in their usual form can 
 be appreciated only by the few. Still, even this consola- 
 tion fails in dealing with Dr. McTaggart's most recent 
 and entertaining work, Some Dogmas of Religion, which 
 puts the case against Christianity quite popularly, with a 
 lucidity which cannot be surpassed, and a cogency which 
 can be gainsaid only by extensive reliance on the pragmatic 
 
 1 Prof. J. A. Stewart's invitation to the school to refute Mr. Bradley before 
 continuing the use of edifying phrases has met with no response whatever (see 
 Mind, N.S. xi. p. 376). 
 
 2 T. H. Green was a ' soft ' determinist. 
 
 3 Cp. F. H. Bradley's Appearance and Reality, ch. xxv. ; A. E. Taylor's 
 Problem of Conduct ; and J. M. E. McTaggart's Hegelian Cosmology.
 
 xii ABSOLUTISM AND RELIGION 285 
 
 considerations which EJr. McTaggart has conspicuously 
 neglected. He has, indeed, relented in some few respects, 
 and no longer defines ' God ' as an impossible being, as he 
 did in his Hegelian Cosmology, and now admits that a 
 finite God is thinkable ; but he still prefers to call himself 
 an atheist, and there is no saying how much mischief his 
 popular style might not do among the masses were not 
 his book published at half-a-guinea net. 
 
 All this is very sad in many ways ; but one could 
 pardon these attacks on theology if only they advanced 
 the cause of truth. For we, of course, in no wise hold a 
 brief for theology, which we have reason to regard as in 
 the main an intellectualistic corruption of an essentially 
 pragmatic religion. Unfortunately, however, the prosperity 
 of Absolutism does not mean an end to our intellectual 
 troubles. We have already seen that, when consistently 
 thought out, it ends in scepticism. And it has not merely 
 quarrelled with theology, but is undermining a far greater 
 thing, namely, religion, in its ordinary acceptance, as we 
 must now try to understand. 
 
 6. Absolutism may be itself a religion, but it diverges 
 very widely from what is ordinarily known as such, and 
 relies on motives which are not the ordinary religious feel- 
 ings. This may be shown as regards the two most crucial 
 cases the problem of ' God ' and the problem of Evil. 
 
 ( i ) There is an essential difference as regards the con- 
 ception of ' God ' between the absolutist and the religious 
 man. The term ' God ' is used by philosophers, perhaps 
 unavoidably, with a great latitude of meanings, and so 
 disputants too often finish with the confession " your ' God' 
 is my ' devil ' ! " But still, if we apply the pragmatic 
 test, it must be possible to discover some points in which 
 the consequences of a belief in a ' God ' differ from those 
 of a belief in no ' God.' ' God,' that is, if we really and 
 honestly mean something by the term, must stand for 
 something which has a real influence on human life. And 
 in the ordinary religious consciousness ' God ' does in 
 point of fact stand for something vital and valuable in 
 this pragmatic way. In its most generalised form ' God '
 
 286 STUDIES IN HUMANISM XI1 
 
 probably stands for two connected principles. It means 
 (a) a human moral principle of Help and Justice ; and (b} 
 an aid to the intellectual comprehension of the universe, 
 sometimes supposed to amount to a complete solution of 
 the world-problem. In the ordinary religious conscious- 
 ness, however, these two (rightly) run together, and coalesce 
 into the postulate of a Supreme Being, because no intel- 
 lectual explanation of the world would seem satisfactory, if 
 it did not also provide a moral explanation, and a response 
 to human appeals. 
 
 But in Absolutism these two sides of ' God ' fall hope- 
 lessly asunder. In vain does T. H. Green, after conceiving 
 ' God ' as a purely intellectual principle, declare that ' God ' 
 for religious purposes must also be such as to render 
 morality possible. 1 For Absolutism conceives pure in- 
 tellectual satisfaction as self-sufficing, and puts it out of 
 relation to our moral nature, nay, to all human interests. 
 But if so, the moral side of ' God ' must wholly disappear. 
 If the Absolute is God, ' God ' cannot be personal, or 
 interested in persons as such. Its relation to persons 
 must be a purely logical relation of inclusiveness. The 
 Absolute includes everything, of course, and ex officio. 
 But the Whole cannot be partial, in either sense of the 
 term. It must sustain all its ' parts ' impartially, because 
 it approves of them all alike inasmuch as it maintains 
 them in existence. 
 
 The ordinary religious consciousness, on the other 
 hand, definitely postulates a partial God, a God to succour 
 and to sympathise with us poor ' finite ' fragments of a 
 ruthless Whole. As Mr. Bradley scornfully but quite 
 truly puts it, 2 "the Deity, which they want, is of 
 course finite, a person much like themselves, with 
 thoughts and feelings mutable in the process of time. 3 
 They desire a person in the sense of a self, among 
 and over against other selves, moved by personal 
 relations and feelings towards these others feelings 
 
 1 Works, ii. p. 74 . 
 
 2 Appearance and Reality 1 , p. 532. Italics mine. 
 
 8 Cp. Plato's description of an ' Idea ' which should be really human in the 
 Sophist, 249 ; and p. 67.
 
 xii ABSOLUTISM AND RELIGION 287 
 
 and relations which are altered by the conduct of 
 the others. And, for their purpose, what is not this, is 
 really nothing. Of course for us to ask seriously if the 
 Absolute can be personal in such a way, would be quite 
 absurd." The absolutist ' God,' therefore, is no moral 
 principle. Neither has it scientific value, even when taken 
 as an intellectual principle. For it is not the explanation 
 of anything in particular, just because it is the explana- 
 tion of everything in general ; and what is the meaning of 
 a general explanation which explains nothing in particular, 
 is apparently a question it has not yet occurred to our 
 absolutists to ask. 
 
 It is quite clear, however, that the Absolute is not 
 God in the ordinary sense, and many of our leading 
 absolutists are now quite explicit in avowing this, and 
 even in insisting on it. As we have already seen what 
 Dr. McTaggart thinks ( 5), let us once more consult Mr. 
 Bradley's oracle. " We may say that God is not God, 
 till he has become all in all, and that a God which is all 
 in all, is not the God of religion." " We may say that 
 the God, which could exist, would most assuredly be no 
 God." " Short of the Absolute, God cannot rest, and 
 having reached this goal, he is lost and religion with 
 him." * 
 
 (2) The problem of Evil is probably the most funda- 
 mental, and certainly the most pressing, of religious 
 problems ; it is also that most manifestly baffling to 
 ordinary religious feeling. It is, however, divisible into a 
 practical and a theoretic problem. The former of these 
 is simply the problem of how de facto to get rid of evils. 
 This is a difficult, but not a desperate or irrational, 
 endeavour. The theoretic problem, on the other hand, has 
 been mainly manufactured by theology. It arises from 
 the impossibility of reconciling the postulated goodness 
 with the assumed omnipotence of God. This problem 
 troubles the religious consciousness only in so far as it 
 assents to these two demands. Now this in a manner it 
 may certainly be said to do. The postulate of God's 
 
 1 Appearance and Reality 1 , pp. 448, 449, 447.
 
 288 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xu 
 
 goodness is, as we have seen, essential. But the assent 
 to the notion of divine omnipotence is never more than 
 verbal. In practice no real religion can ever work with 
 a single, unrestricted principle. Without a duality, or 
 plurality, of principles the multiplicity of the cosmic 
 drama cannot be evolved. Hence the religious conscious- 
 ness, and all but the most ' philosophic ' forms of theology, 
 do in point of fact conceive evil as due to a power which 
 is not God, and somehow independent : it is variously 
 denominated ' matter,' ' free-will,' or ' the devil.' The 
 more ' philosophic ' theologians try to conceive a ' self- 
 limitation ' either of the divine power or of the divine 
 intellect ; in the latter case following Leibniz's suggestion 
 that in creating the world God chose the best universe 
 he could think of. But on the whole the theoretical 
 explanation of Evil is acknowledged to form more or less 
 of a ' difficulty.' 
 
 What now has Absolutism to say on the subject? 
 It cannot, of course, construe God's omnipotence with the 
 amiable laxity of popular religion ; it must insist on the 
 strictest interpretation. Its ' God ' must be really all in 
 all ; the Whole cannot be controlled or limited by 
 anything, either within it or without it. It must be 
 perfect : its seeming imperfection must be an illusion 
 of imperfect finite beings though, to be sure, that 
 illusion again would seem to be necessary and essential 
 to the perfection of the Whole. 
 
 It is clear that such a theory which at bottom 
 coincides with that of Eleaticism must make short work 
 of the religious attempts to understand the existence of 
 Evil. Human ' free-will ' it has long schooled itself to 
 regard as " a mere lingering chimera " ; l the resistance of 
 ' matter ' it gaily consigns to ' the devil,' who in his turn 
 is absorbed with ' God ' in the ' Higher Synthesis ' of 
 the Absolute. Evil, therefore, is not ultimately and 
 metaphysically real. It is ' mere appearance,' ' tran- 
 scended,' ' transmuted,' etc., in the Absolute along with 
 all the rest. 
 
 1 Appearance and Reality 1 , p. 435 n.
 
 xn ABSOLUTISM AND RELIGION 289 
 
 All this is very pretty and consistent and ' philo- 
 sophical.' But it is hardly a solution of the problem, 
 either practically or theoretically. Not practically, 
 because it throws no light on the question why anything 
 in particular should be as it is ; nor yet theoretically, 
 because it is avowedly a mystery how the Absolute 
 contrives to transcend its ' appearances.' 
 
 Thus the net outcome is that the religious conscious- 
 ness, so far from obtaining from ' philosophy ' any 
 alleviation of its burdens, not to speak of a solution of 
 the problem of Evil, is driven forth with contumely and 
 rebuked for having the impudence to ask such silly 
 questions ! Assuredly Mr. Bradley does well to remark 
 that (absolutist) " metaphysics has no special connexion 
 with genuine religion." l 
 
 7. How, then, can Absolutism possibly be a religion ? 
 It must appeal to psychological motives of a different 
 sort, rare enough to account for its total divergence from 
 the ordinary religious feelings, and compelling enough 
 to account for the fanaticism with which it is held and 
 the persistence with which the same old round of 
 negations has been reiterated through the ages. Of 
 such psychological motives we shall indicate the more 
 important and reputable. 
 
 (i) It is decidedly flattering to one's spiritual pride 
 to feel oneself a ' part ' or ' manifestation ' or ' vehicle ' or 
 ' reproduction ' of ' the Absolute Mind,' and to some this 
 feeling affords so much strength and comfort and such 
 exquisite delight that they refrain from inquiring what 
 these phrases mean, and whether the relation they 
 indicate would seem equally satisfactory if regarded 
 conversely from the standpoint of the Absolute Mind. 
 It is, moreover, chiefly the strength of this feeling which 
 explains the blindness of absolutists towards the logical 
 defects of their theory. It keeps them away from 
 ' Plato's Chasm,' the insuperable gap between the human 
 and the ideal ; 2 for whenever they imagine that they 
 
 1 Appearance and Reality^, p. 454. 
 2 Cp. Essays ii. and vi. 
 
 U
 
 290 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xn 
 
 have ' advanced towards a complete solution ' by ap- 
 proaching its brink, they find that the glow of feeling is 
 chilled. 
 
 (2) There is a strange delight in wide generalisation 
 merely as such, which when pursued without reference 
 to the ends which it subserves, and without regard to its 
 actual functioning, often results in a sort of logical 
 vertigo. This probably has much to do with the 
 peculiar ' craving for unity ' which is held to be the 
 distinctive affliction of philosophers. At any rate, the 
 thought of an all-embracing One or Whole seems to be 
 regarded as valuable and elevating, quite apart from any 
 definite function it performs in knowing, or service it 
 does, or light it throws on any actual problem. 
 
 (3) The thought of an Absolute Unity is cherished as 
 a guarantee of cosmic stability. In face of the restless 
 vicissitudes of phenomena it seems to secure us against 
 falling out of the universe. It assures us a priori and 
 that is its supreme value that the cosmic order cannot 
 fall to pieces, and leave us dazed and confounded among 
 the debris of a universe shattered, as it was compounded, 
 by the mere chance comings and goings of its fortuitous 
 constituents. We want to have an absolute assurance 
 of the inherent coherence of the world ; we want to have 
 an absolute assurance a priori concerning the future ; and 
 the thought of the Absolute seems designed to give it. 
 It is probably this last notion that, consciously or un- 
 consciously, weighs most in the psychology of the 
 absolutist creed. 
 
 8. Such, if we are not mistaken, are the essential 
 foundations of the absolutist's faith the things which he 
 ' believes upon instinct ' and for which he proceeds to 
 ' find bad reasons,' to quote Mr. Bradley's epigram about 
 (his own ?) metaphysics. 1 And we, of course, to whom 
 human instincts are interesting and precious and sacred, 
 should naturally incline to respect them, whether or not 
 we shared them, whether or not the reasonings prompted 
 by them struck us as logically cogent. We should 
 
 1 Appearance and Reality, p. xiv.
 
 xii ABSOLUTISM AND RELIGION 291 
 
 respect Absolutism, like any other religion, if we could, 
 and were allowed to. 
 
 Unfortunately, however, Absolutism is absolutism, and 
 will not let us. It will not tolerate freedom of thought, 
 and divergence of opinion, and difference of taste. It is 
 not content to rest on wide-spread feelings which appeal 
 to many minds : it insists on its universal cogency. All 
 intelligence as such must give its assent to its scheme ; 
 and if we will not or cannot, we must either be coerced 
 or denied intelligence. Differences of opinions and tastes 
 and ideals are not rationally comprehensible : hence it is 
 essentially intolerant, and where it can, it persecutes. 
 
 'We are compelled, therefore, to fight it in self-defence, 
 and to maintain that its contentions are not logically 
 cogent. For unless we can repulse its tyrannical pre- 
 tensions, we lose all we cared for, viz. our liberty to 
 think our experience in the manner most congenial to 
 our personal requirements. 
 
 9. But in order that we may not imitate its bad 
 example, let us not contend that because Absolutism 
 fails of being a rational system cogent for all minds, it 
 collapses into incoherent self -contradictory nonsense ; 
 but let us merely, quite mildly, explain why and where 
 it falls short of perfect rationality to our individual 
 thinking. For then, even if we succeed in making good 
 our case, we shall not have attacked the absolutist's 
 amour propre, which is the ' amor intellectualis Dei ' ; he 
 can still escape defeat by the unassailed conviction that 
 to his mind his case remains unanswerable. And so we 
 shall both be satisfied ; if only he will recognise a plurality 
 of types of mind, and consequent thereon, a possibility 
 of more than one ' rational ' and ' logically cogent ' system 
 of philosophy. 
 
 Armed, then, with the consoling assurance that our 
 ' logical ' criticism is at bottom psychological, and cannot 
 therefore, in defending our own disputed rationality, hurt 
 the religious feelings of the absolutist, let us proceed to 
 declare roundly that the grounds of Absolutism are (to 
 our minds] logically quite inadequate.
 
 292 STUDIES IN HUMANISM X n 
 
 (1) In pragmatic minds the emotional 'craving for 
 unity ' described in 7 (2) is not an all-absorbing passion. 
 It is rationally controlled by calm reflection on its functional 
 value. Merely to be able to say that the universe is (in some 
 sense) one, affords them no particular delight. Before they 
 grow enthusiastic over the unity of the universe, they want 
 to know a good deal more about it ; they want to know 
 more precisely what are the consequences of this unity, what 
 good accrues to anything merely in virtue of its inclusion 
 in a universe, how a world which is one is superior as 
 such to a congeries of things which have merely come to 
 act together. All these matters can doubtless be ex- 
 plained, only Absolutism has not yet condescended to 
 do so ; it will be time to welcome it when it has. More- 
 over, when these questions have been answered, it will be 
 asked further as to why it feels justified in ascribing its 
 ideal of unity to our experience, and how it proposes to 
 distinguish between the two cases of a real and a pseudo- 
 unity. How, in short, can it be ascertained whether a 
 world, of which unity can be predicated in some respects, 
 possesses also, and will evermore continue to manifest, all 
 the qualities which have been included in our ideal of 
 unity ? 
 
 (2) We shall further be desirous of inquiring what is 
 the value of the apparent guarantee of cosmic order by 
 the ' systematic unity,' the ' self-fulfilling ' coherence of 
 the Absolute? What precisely are (a) its benefits, and 
 (fr) the grounds of the guarantee ? 
 
 (a) From a human point of view the benefits of the 
 postulate of cosmic order, though great, are not nearly 
 enough fully to rationalise existence. And they have 
 to be paid for. On the one hand, there can be no in- 
 determination in the rigid real. Absolutism is absolute 
 determinism. And there can be no intervention of a 
 higher power in the established order of nature. That is, 
 there can be neither ' free ' choice nor ' miracle.' Both are 
 the acme of irrationality from the absolutist's point of 
 view, and would put him to intellectual confusion. On 
 the other hand, this sacred ' order ' of the Absolute does
 
 xn ABSOLUTISM AND RELIGION 293 
 
 not exclude the most stupendous vicissitudes, the most 
 appalling catastrophes, in the phenomenal world. 
 
 Let us, therefore, take a concrete case, viz. (i) the 
 total volatilisation of the earth and all that creeps upon 
 it, in consequence of the sun's collision with another star ; 
 and (2) an opportune miracle which enables those who 
 will avail themselves of it to escape, say to Mr. H. G. 
 Wells's ' Utopian double ' of our ill-starred planet. Now 
 it is clear that intellectually (i) would not be a catas- 
 trophe at all. The established laws of the ' perfect ' 
 universe provide such ' catastrophes ' in regular course. 
 They happen one or two a year. And we do not mind. 
 We think them rather pretty, if the ' new stars ' flare up 
 brilliantly enough, and are gratified to find that the 
 ' reign of law ' obtains also in ' distant parts of the 
 stellar regions ' ; (2), on the other hand, would be 
 intellectually a real disaster. An irruption of miracle, 
 however beneficent, destroys the (conception of a) system 
 of nature. A consistent absolutist, therefore, would not 
 hesitate to choose. (He has no freedom of choice any- 
 how !) He would decline to be saved by a miracle. He 
 would refuse to be put to intellectual confusion. He 
 would prefer to die a martyr's death in honour of an 
 unbroken order of nature. 
 
 A Humanist would not be so squeamish. He would 
 reflect that the conception of an ' order of nature ' was 
 originally a human device for controlling human experience, 
 and that if at any time a substitute therefor turned up, he 
 was free to use it. He would have no ingrained objection 
 even to a miraculous disorder, provided that it issued in a 
 sequence of events superior to that which ' inexorable 
 laws ' afforded. And he would marvel that the absolutist 
 should never, apparently, have thought of the possibility 
 that his whole martyrdom might be stultified by his 
 ignorance of what the cosmic order included or excluded ; 
 so that if he had known more, he might have seen that 
 the ' miracle ' he had scouted was really part of a higher 
 and more humanly ' rational ' order, while the collision he 
 had so loyally accepted was nothing of the kind, but in
 
 294 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xn 
 
 truth an ' accident.' And in either case is it not clear 
 that each man's choice would be determined, not by the 
 pure rationality of the alternatives and an irresistible logic 
 of the situation, but by the preferences of his individual 
 idiosyncrasy ? 
 
 (3) (^) We have already often hinted that our 
 ignorance, and the difficulties of identifying our actual 
 knowledge with the ideal truth, are continually under- 
 mining the value of rationalistic assumptions and defeat- 
 ing the aims it sets out to attain. So in this case. 
 When the a priori guarantee of the coherence and pre- 
 dictability of the universe by means of the Absolute comes 
 to be examined, it turns out to be of the flimsiest kind. 
 
 It rests on three assumptions (i) that the order of 
 nature which we have postulated, and which has, for the last 
 few hundreds or thousands of years, shown itself (more or 
 less) conformable to our demand, is really adequate to 
 our ' ideal ' and will fully realise it. This assumption 
 manifestly rests in part on non-intellectual considerations, 
 in part on the dubious procedure of the ontological 
 proof, 1 in part on the assumed correctness of the ' ideal.' 
 (2) It is assumed that we know (a) the Whole, (b} the 
 world, and (c] our own minds, well enough to know that 
 we shall continue to make the same demands and to 
 find that reality will continue to conform to them. Now 
 it seems to be distinctly hazardous to affirm that even 
 the human mind must continue to make even its most 
 axiomatic demands to all eternity : that even the known 
 world contains many more surprises for us, seems quite 
 probable ; while it seems fantastic to claim that we know 
 the total possibilities of existence well enough to feel 
 sure that nothing radically new can ever be evolved. 
 And yet any irruption of novelty from any of these three 
 sources would be enough to invalidate our present 
 Absolutism, and to put it to intellectual confusion.. It 
 is false, therefore, to assume (3) that what would now 
 seem to be ' irrational,' and to put us to ' intellectual 
 confusion,' may not really be part of a larger design, and 
 
 1 Cp. Essay ix. 12.
 
 xii ABSOLUTISM AND RELIGION 295 
 
 possessed of a higher rationality. Hence the rationalist's 
 protest against irrationalism must always fail, if the latter 
 chooses to claim a higher (and other) rationality. 
 
 Now all these assumptions may be more or less 
 probable, but it cannot surely be asserted that their 
 acceptance is obligatory, and that their rejection entails 
 intellectual suicide. Hence there remains, in Absolutism, 
 as in all other philosophies, an empirical element of risk 
 and uncertainty, which ' the Absolute ' only conceals, but 
 does nothing to eradicate. 
 
 (4) Lastly, and perhaps most fundamentally and 
 cogently, what sense is there in calling the universe a 
 universe at all ? How, that is, can the notion be applied 
 at all ? To call our world ' the universe ' is to imply that 
 it is somehow to be conceived as a whole. But we could 
 never actually treat it as such. For we could never know 
 it well enough. It might be of such a kind as not to be 
 a completed whole, and never to become one, either 
 because it was not rigid, but unpredictably contained 
 within itself inexhaustible possibilities of new develop- 
 ments, or because it was really a mere fragment, subject 
 to incalculable influxes and influences from without, which, 
 if reality were truly infinite, might never cease. But 
 either of these possibilities would suffice entirely to 
 invalidate reasonings based on the assumed identity of 
 our world with the universe. 1 
 
 It is somewhat remarkable 'that this difficulty should 
 not, apparently, have been perceived by absolutists, and 
 it is significant of the emotional character of their whole 
 faith, that they should habitually delight in the colloca- 
 tion of ' infinite ' with ' whole,' without suspecting the gross 
 contradiction this implies. The ' infinite ' is that which 
 cannot be got together into a whole, and the whole is 
 that which must be complete. But the truth is that, as 
 used by Absolutism, neither term is used with much 
 precision. Both are mainly labels for emotions. 
 
 It would be possible, but not very instructive, to go 
 through the whole series of absolutist catchwords, to 
 
 1 Cp. p. 333.
 
 2 9 6 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xn 
 
 expose their vagueness and ambiguity, and to show that 
 in the end they are all meaningless, because they are all 
 inapplicable to our actual experience. Inapplicable, that is, 
 without risk. But if they are once admitted to involve 
 risks, they are in the first place empirical, and in the 
 second lacking in complete intellectual cogency. Whoever 
 wills may decline to take the risks, and by so doing 
 renounce the absolutist interpretation of experience. 
 And his procedure may be for him quite as rational as 
 that of the absolutist. But is not this to have shown that 
 Absolutism can rationally be rejected ? 
 
 IO. This conclusion is all we need, and if only it 
 can be similarly accepted by the absolutist, will constitute 
 a true eirenicon. This is the last possibility we have to 
 examine. 
 
 Our arguments were satisfactory to us, because they 
 seemed rational to us. We only undertook to show that 
 we could make out a rational case for ourselves. Of 
 course, however, in calling them rational we implied a 
 claim that all similar minds would assent to them. We 
 did not dogmatise about all minds, because, for all we 
 can know a priori, there may be minds differently con- 
 stituted from our own. Only, if there are, they are not 
 ' similar ' minds (for our present purposes). The differ- 
 ences in functioning and constitution between these minds 
 and ours are worthy of examination, and may (or may 
 not) be capable of explanation. But it is at any rate 
 useless to argue with them. That is all. 
 
 But the case looks materially different from the 
 absolutist's standpoint. He was, ex hypothesi, unable to 
 combat our case with arguments which seemed rational to 
 us. But, at the same time, he does not accept the 
 arguments which seem rational to us. They seem to him 
 as little 'cogent' as his do to us. To resolve this dead- 
 lock, he is offered the suggestion that in some respects 
 there exist intrinsic differences in the logical texture of 
 human minds, and that consequently we may, and must, 
 agree to differ. Thus if he accepts this, he too is safe 
 against all attacks, and peace must ensue.
 
 xii ABSOLUTISM AND RELIGION 297 
 
 But can the absolutist content himself with this 
 solution ? If he does, will he not debar himself from his 
 original claim that his theory is absolutely cogent and 
 valid for intelligence as such ? For was it not part of 
 his theory that such complete cogency existed, and was 
 possessed by his arguments ? He cannot, therefore, com- 
 promise his claim. He must insist on proving his case 
 literally to every one of his adversaries, and similarly on 
 disproving theirs to their own complete (logical) satisfac- 
 tion, and not merely to his ! It is evident that this 
 imposes on him a stupendous burden of proof. To fail to 
 admit the logical cogency of a single step in his argument 
 is to shake the whole structure to its foundations. To 
 renounce it, is to refute it. A single dissentient, therefore, 
 will be, not merely a theoretical impeachment and a 
 practical nuisance, but actually an unanswerable argument 
 against the truth of the theory, of which it will be at all 
 costs necessary to persuade him ! Is it a wonder that 
 absolutists are irritated by the mildest of protests against 
 the least of their beliefs ? Their whole view of the 
 universe is imperilled : they are put to intellectual 
 confusion, if the objector is not ' somehow ' silenced or 
 removed. 
 
 But have they any one to thank for their dilemma but 
 themselves? Why did they devise a theory which, by 
 its very hostility to individual liberty, by its very insist- 
 ance on absolute conformity, is finally forced to sanction 
 the Liberum Veto in philosophy, and thereby to ensure its 
 own destruction ? It was not prudent. Nor is it a wise 
 theory which offers such facilities for its own refutation. 
 The situation might move to compassion the most relent- 
 less enemy. But we are helpless. The equitable com- 
 promise we offered has been rejected. Absolutism has 
 foisted upon us the Liberum Veto, and forced us to 
 exercise it. It has thrust the sword into our hands upon 
 which it proceeds to fall. And we, after all, have not 
 much reason to regret this issue. It saves much argu- 
 ment when one's opponent commits the happy dispatch.
 
 XIII 
 THE PAPYRI OF PHILONOUS 
 
 I. PROTAGORAS THE HUMANIST. II. A DIALOGUE 
 CONCERNING GODS AND PRIESTS 
 
 THE manuscripts from which the two following papers have 
 been translated were found ' in a battered leaden casket 
 among the ruins of the temple of Dionysus at Mende on 
 the Thracian coast,' and conclude with a statement that 
 they were records of conversations held with Antimorus, 
 the wisest of priests, in the month before he died, written 
 down by Philonous, the son of Antinous, and by him 
 dedicated to the god, before he set out to war with the 
 Olynthians. 
 
 To us their value is threefold. If they are authentic, 
 and their portrait of Protagoras is quite as likely to be 
 authentic as Plato's of Socrates, they may, in the first 
 place, supply an intelligible and much-needed context to 
 the bare dicta about the gods and Man the Measure, to 
 which the thought of that great thinker has practically 
 been reduced for us, and show that the true significance 
 of Protagorean theology was not agnosticism any more 
 than the true significance of Protagorean epistemology 
 was scepticism. And though they cannot undo the 
 irreparably fatal work of Athenian bigotry in collecting 
 and publicly burning the copies of Protagoras's book on 
 Truth, they may at least lead us to hesitate before con- 
 demning him on the evidence of two short sentences. 
 
 They may serve, in the second place, as a wholesome 
 
 298
 
 xin THE PAPYRI OF PHILONOUS 299 
 
 corrective of Plato's brilliant but partisan picture of Greek 
 philosophic activity at the close of the fifth century B.C. 
 And especially they may vindicate the memory of Prota- 
 goras. 
 
 The greatness of Protagoras was indeed sufficiently 
 evident to the discerning eye even before this discovery. 
 For Plato's own account of him to some extent supplied 
 its own corrective. In the Protagoras he seems as clearly 
 to excel Socrates in nobility of moral sentiment as he 
 falls short of him in dialectical quibbling. In this 
 dialogue it is Protagoras who is the moralist, and 
 Socrates who is the ' sophist.' In the Theaetetus Plato, 
 while still expressing his respect for the moral character 
 of Protagoras, makes a desperate attempt to convict his 
 Humanist theory of knowledge of scepticism and sensa- 
 tionalism. But he clearly shows that he has not under- 
 stood the doctrine he criticises, 1 and, but for the magic of 
 his writing, no one would be beguiled into supposing that 
 the charming digressions and the irrelevant by -play 
 about timid boys and Thracian handmaids which follow 
 (168-179) on the candid and powerful defence of Prota- 
 goras in 1 66- 8, contain any answer to the essential 
 points, to wit, the contention that the dialectical para- 
 doxes, which the recognition of truth - making by 
 individual men may seem to involve, vanish so soon as 
 it is observed that such ' truths ' are claims, that claims 
 to truth vary in value, and that the ' wise ' man is he whose 
 claims are valuable, and so are accepted as valid. Plato 
 manifestly evades this issue of the validation of claims ; 
 he reverts instead to the old abstraction which treats it 
 as irrelevant to truth who makes a claim (171), and is 
 content to show that a chaos of opinions must result. 
 The fallacy is the same as that of the Shah of Persia, 
 mentioned by James, 2 who refused to go to the Derby on 
 the ground that he already knew that one horse could run 
 faster than another. Similarly, if different individuals put 
 forward different valuations, and you refuse to evaluate these 
 claims, ' the ' opinion on any subject must remain a chaos, 
 
 1 See also Essays ii. 5, iii. 17, and v. i. 2 Princ. of Psych. ii. 675.
 
 300 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xm 
 
 and every ' truth ' will be judged to be both ' true ' and 
 ' false.' But not by the same people, and not so as to 
 render the right to put forward individual claims (which 
 is all that the Protagorean maxim amounts to) intrinsically 
 contradictory. It is mere ignoratio elenchi, therefore, to 
 treat Plato's argument as a refutation of Protagoras or as 
 an answer to his proposal to evaluate the conflicting 
 claims. After this Plato passes off into a magnificently 
 eloquent description of the philosophic character, which 
 ever since has served as an apologia for the futilities of 
 countless pedants. And finally (179 B.), having taken 
 his readers off the scent by these digressions, he trium- 
 phantly proves that one man is wiser than another, and 
 that therefore not every one is ' the measure,' as if ' wiser ' 
 were identical with 'truer,' instead of being an equivoca- 
 tion between it and ' better,' and as if he had not himself 
 attributed to Protagoras a distinction between the claim 
 to truth, which any one can make, and its validation, 
 which is achieved only by the ' wise.' In short, he merely 
 reiterates the objection which his own ' Protagoras ' had 
 refuted. 1 
 
 In the third place, we may gather from these MSS. 
 how men of high spirituality and great acuteness of mind, 
 but nurtured in a religious creed absurd and outworn 
 beyond anything we can easily imagine, might confront 
 the uncertainties of human fate. And it is curiously 
 instructive to note how very modern, in spite of the 
 immense progress which both science and religion have 
 made, the Protagorean attitude towards theology still 
 sounds to us. 
 
 The reason probably is that human nature has 
 changed but little. Man himself is still the greatest 
 obstacle in the way of man's knowledge of what it most 
 concerns man to know. His indolence and his fears still 
 
 1 It is not, however, by any means so certain that Protagoras regarded all 
 views as equally 'true,' as that he regarded some as 'better' than others. 
 Plato's way of extracting this admission ( Theaet. 152 c) rather suggests that it 
 may be only a bit of intellectualist misunderstanding, and it is quite possible that 
 Protagoras already distinguished between a 'claim' and a 'truth,' and only 
 attributed to individual judgments the value of ' claims.'
 
 xni THE PAPYRI OF PHILONOUS 301 
 
 prompt him to declare impious and forbidden, or impos- 
 sible, the knowledge which would transform his cosmic 
 outlook. He still prefers to conceive religion conser- 
 vatively rather than progressively. He still keeps the 
 treasures of divine revelation hidden away in his sanc- 
 tuaries, for fear lest the attempt to make use of them 
 should lead to their loss, and not to their augmentation. 
 There is a most instructive contrast between the hypocrisy 
 of science and of religion ; that of the former, while pro- 
 fessing abject obedience to nature, has stealthily mastered 
 it ; l that of the latter, while claiming to commune with 
 the supernatural, has secretly shrunk away from it ; and 
 so the faith which in the one case expands into know- 
 ledge, in the other shrivels into make-believe. 2 
 
 1 Natura non nisi parendo vincitur, Bacon could humorously write, with a 
 pen on paper and in a study, man had made by moulding reality to his pur- 
 poses. But to keep on repeating this as a reply to Humanism is not humorous, 
 but stupid. 
 
 2 Cp. Essay xvi. 9, 10.
 
 XIV 
 PROTAGORAS THE HUMANIST 
 
 ANTIMORUS ( of Mende, a small Greek city in Chalcidice, devoted 
 PHILONOUS ( to the production and consumption of wine. 
 
 PROTAGORAS, of Abdera. 
 MoROSOPHUS, an Eleatic philosopher. 
 SOPHOMORUS, his son. 
 
 Time About 370 B.C. Place Before the temple of Dionysus at Mende. 
 
 ARGUMENT 
 
 Philonous consults Antimorus about his project of studying philosophy 
 under Plato, and is warned by him that Plato's accounts of Athenian 
 philosophy cannot be trusted. For example, he had wholly mis- 
 represented Protagoras. In proof whereof Antimorus reads out his 
 notes concerning a discussion between Protagoras and two Eleatics of 
 the dictum that Man is the Measure of all things. Philonous professes 
 himself to be converted, but his enthusiasm is restrained by Antimorus. 
 
 Antimorus. Desire of what, Philonous, has driven 
 you now first to visit me ? 
 
 Philonous, I hope you will pardon my boldness, 
 Antimorus, in venturing to visit uninvited one who I 
 hardly thought would have known me. 
 
 A. It is always an honour for an old man to be visited 
 by the young and fair ; and, fortunately, I was able to 
 recognise you at once. You are like your mother, and 
 singularly like your grandmother. 
 
 P. Was not my grandmother very beautiful ? 
 
 A. So beautiful that when I was your age, Philonous, 
 I should have preferred Eudora to any other gift of the 
 gods. But her father esteemed Philcenus the better 
 match. You are welcome, therefore not only on your 
 own account. 
 
 302
 
 xw PROTAGORAS THE HUMANIST 303 
 
 P. How strange ! 
 
 A. And you are the more welcome, and by far more 
 wonderful, Philonous, in that you have come to me instead 
 of looking on at the show. For I fancy that you and I 
 alone of the Mendeans will this day be absent from the 
 theatre. Surely it is not a slight matter that has brought 
 you ? 
 
 P. It is one so great that I came with trepidation, 
 and even now hardly know how to put it. 
 
 A. Tell me. Are you in love? 
 
 P. Yes, but very strangely. 
 
 A. How ? With a Lamia ? 
 
 P. I am in love with Wisdom, and deem that you of 
 all men here can best tell me how to obtain her. 
 
 A. Unhappy boy, Wisdom is worse than any Lamia, 
 excelling them all in the perplexing shapes she takes, 
 and in the enchantments whereby she lures her victims to 
 destruction ! 
 
 P. But is it not true, Antimorus, that in your youth 
 you, too, were zealous to pursue Wisdom, and shrinking 
 from no danger, journeyed far, even to Athens, and listened 
 to the converse of the great sages of antiquity ? 
 
 A. To Athens, aye, and farther. You will not easily 
 find another, either in Hellas or among the barbarians, 
 who has asked the Sphinx her riddles and questioned also 
 the priests of the Egyptians, and Judeans, and Hyper- 
 boreans, the Magians, and the Gymnosophists. 
 
 P. How wonderful ! How much wisdom you must 
 have learnt ! 
 
 A. A bitter wisdom, to be ignorant of which you 
 might well prefer to much money ! 
 
 P. Will you not tell me what it was ? For money 
 seems to me as nothing in comparison with wisdom. 
 
 A. First, that priests are priests throughout the world, 
 however different the gods they serve. Next, that the 
 god whom sophists serve is everywhere the same. Next, 
 that wisdom is as hard to find in a barbarian land and in 
 unintelligible speech as in the familiar commonplaces of 
 our tongue and country. Next, that folly is everywhere at
 
 304 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xiv 
 
 home, and densest in the densest crowd. Next, that to 
 war with folly is the luxury of gods, and that for mortals 
 it is enough to make a living. For as the poet says 
 
 With folly even gods contend in vain. 
 
 P. A bitter wisdom, truly ! And not acceptable to 
 one who is aiming at being sent at the public expense to 
 study the wisdom of Athens. 
 
 A. Ah, you wish to do as the scholars from Rhodes ! 
 But be not discouraged, and learn rather how many times 
 the greater includes the less. When you have learnt the 
 folly of Athens you will be glad to return to Mende. 
 
 P. And is this the reason why you have returned to 
 us, and are content to live here in seclusion, instead of 
 becoming, as we hoped, the most famous of the teachers 
 of Hellas ? 
 
 A. That, and sheer weariness. But if I had not 
 returned ill and with great difficulty, from vainly searching 
 the icy Caucasus for the most glorious victim of divine 
 malignity, Prometheus, I should hardly have taken to piety 
 and drink by accepting this priesthood of Dionysus, nor 
 would you now every year admire the skill with which I 
 exhort the Mendeans at the great festival to get merry in 
 honour of the god. Not that they need the exhortation ; 
 but my speeches are considered most stimulating and 
 pleasing to gods and men ! However, there are compen- 
 sations, and the old wine in the temple cellars is really 
 excellent. 
 
 P. So I have heard. 
 
 A. You shall celebrate with me your election to a 
 studentship at Athens ! 
 
 P. I thank you. But just now I would rather hear 
 about the sages you have met. Were none of them truly 
 great and wise ? 
 
 A. One there was upon whose like the sun will not 
 shine again for ten thousand years. 
 
 P. And that, I suppose, was Socrates ? 
 
 A. What ! The boon companion of all the dissolute 
 young swells in Athens ! I knew him well, as well as I
 
 xiv PROTAGORAS THE HUMANIST 305 
 
 wanted to. At times, and for a little while, he was not 
 unamusing. It was as stupid as it was cruel to make 
 him drink the hemlock. But he had angered the 
 Athenians beyond endurance, and when fools get angry 
 they are as likely to commit a crime as a blunder. No 
 one, however, who knew him, and wished to speak the 
 truth, would speak of him as I have spoken of the wisest 
 of men from the foolishest of cities, Protagoras from 
 Abdera ! 
 
 P. It is true, then, that you were his companion ? 
 
 A. Only for a little while, alas ! For in the fifth year 
 of my intercourse with him the Athenians condemned 
 him for impiety because he had both spoken and written 
 ' the Truth ! ' 
 
 P. Yes, I have heard. He preached atheism, did he 
 not, and said " concerning the gods I have never been 
 able to discover whether they exist or not : life is too 
 short and the subject too obscure " ? 
 
 A. That is how they slandered him ! For of all the 
 men that ever lived Protagoras was the most anxious to 
 know about the gods. Whereas the many have no wish 
 to know ; it is enough for them to believe what they 
 have heard. And of the gods they will believe, anything, 
 whether it be holy or unholy, provided that it makes a 
 pleasing tale. What alone they will not endure is that 
 any one should think about divine things, or do what he 
 believes the gods desire rather than what they desire. Now 
 Protagoras wanted to know and tried to find out. But 
 he was not allowed. For in every city they told him 
 other tales about the gods, and when he compared their 
 several versions they said that he was impious ! And so, 
 taking one sentence out of many, they condemned him 
 unjustly, in word indeed because of his impiety, but in 
 fact because he had refused to give Hypocrites the 
 Sycophant a talent wherewith to celebrate the shameful 
 mysteries of Cotillon. 1 
 
 />. And did the Athenians give him poison too? 
 
 1 So the MS. , but we should no doubt read Cotytto (an unsavoury Thracian 
 goddess popular in Athens). 
 
 X
 
 306 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xiv 
 
 A. No, that they keep for their own citizens. Nor 
 did my master stay to be condemned. But they drove 
 him out, and forced him to flee for refuge to Sicily. The 
 ship was unseaworthy, and he never arrived. 
 
 P. The Athenians seem to attract wise men only to 
 destroy them ! I marvel that men call their city the 
 Lamp of Hellas ! 
 
 A. Not unreasonably. Does not the lamp attract 
 moths and destroy them ? 
 
 P. It would seem then, Antimorus, that you think 
 very differently concerning Protagoras from Plato, who has 
 mentioned him in several dialogues, and indeed you also 
 once. 1 Did you know Plato ? and have you read 
 him ? They say that no one now at Athens will listen 
 to any philosophy but his. 
 
 A, If that be true, I would counsel him to change 
 his philosophy frequently ! For the Athenians are ever 
 eager for something that sounds new. They are always 
 demanding new truth, lest they should be asked to put 
 some old truth into practice. As for Aristocles the son 
 of Ariston, whom you call by his nickname, he was but a 
 lad when we left Athens, promising indeed and full of 
 poetry, but not as yet taking part in philosophical 
 discussion. 
 
 P. But do you not think his writings wonder- 
 ful? 
 
 A. He is a poet still. But if he had not become 
 imbued with the belief that virtue is knowledge, and that 
 knowledge is concerned about the eternal and super- 
 human, he might have done more than most to render 
 virtue beautiful and knowledge profitable in the eyes of 
 men. 
 
 P. And what do you think of his portrait of Pro- 
 tagoras ? You know that he has named a dialogue after 
 him ? 
 
 A. Very little. You must not believe a word he says. 
 
 P. Is his account untrue then ? 
 
 A. Pure and malicious fiction. 
 
 1 Protagoras, 31 5 A, where our MSS. read 'Avri/jLOipos instead of ' Avri[j.upos.
 
 xiv PROTAGORAS THE HUMANIST 307 
 
 P. What ! the whole story of the encounter of Socrates 
 and Protagoras ? 
 
 A. Certainly. You can easily see for yourself that 
 there is not a word of truth in it. 
 
 P. You astonish me ! 
 
 A. You will be still more astonished to learn that the 
 Callias, at whose house the conversation is said to have 
 taken place, did not succeed to the fortune of the 
 Daduchs until his father Hipponicus had fallen in the 
 battle of Delium about the eighty-eighth Olympiad. 1 And 
 by this time Pericles the son of Xanthippus must have 
 been dead more than five years, having lost his sons by the 
 plague. And yet both his sons are said by Plato to have 
 been present ! And, moreover, the incipient beard of 
 Alcibiades, mentioned in the beginning, which Socrates 
 in his infatuation professes to admire, must have been 
 sprouting for at least ten years upon a man who had 
 already campaigned both at Delium and at Potidaea. 
 Nor would you easily gather from Plato's story that 
 Socrates was only about ten years younger than Prota- 
 goras. If, therefore, Plato blunders so grossly about 
 simple facts which he might easily have ascertained, how 
 can you trust him to report correctly the subtleties of a 
 philosophical debate ? 
 
 P. What you tell me, Antimorus, is as distressing as 
 it is astonishing. For if the writings of Plato are not to 
 be believed, what shall I be able to fancy that I know 
 either about Socrates or about Protagoras or any of the 
 old philosophers ? 
 
 A. Was it not well said by Bias that " to know we 
 know not is the beginning of knowledge " ? And are there 
 not those yet alive who can tell you the truth both 
 about the " Truth " of Protagoras and the " ignorance " of 
 Socrates ? 
 
 P. I would beseech you, Antimorus, to enlighten mine 
 before you expound that of Socrates. For at present I 
 have no longer any reason to believe anything, not even 
 that Protagoras declared that Man is the measure of all 
 
 1 424 B.C.
 
 308 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xiv 
 
 things, but shall have to suspect this too to be a wicked 
 figment of Plato's, until you have given me the true 
 measure of the man. 
 
 A. Because you have had the good fortune to be born 
 the grandson of Eudora, and the boldness to search for 
 truth in this old wine-jar, there shall be revealed to you 
 what no one yet has grasped, the meaning of Protagoras! 
 
 P. Is that a still greater mystery ? And was I 
 wrong in thinking Plato's exposition had made this clear 
 to me? 
 
 A. Which of them ? That in which he makes Prota- 
 goras mean that one man is as good a measure as 
 another, 1 or that in which he admits that Protagoras 
 might justly prefer the judgment of the wise ? 2 that in 
 which the dictum is said to mean that knowledge is 
 sensation, 3 or that in which it is too contradictory to 
 mean anything at all ? 4 
 
 P. I have always understood these accounts to mean 
 the same. 
 
 A. You are young, Philonous,and Aristocles has grown 
 into a great dialectician. But the " Truth " of Protagoras 
 he has neither understood nor tried to understand. Like 
 all these dialecticians, he has attacked that in Protagoras 
 which is in truth the merest truism ; that which is truly 
 important he has not grasped, while of that which is truly 
 daring but delightful, novel but hazardous, he has never 
 had a glimmering. Perhaps, however, you can tell me 
 how you have understood all Plato's accounts to mean the 
 same. 
 
 P. I feel more reluctance, Antimorus, and more doubt 
 in arguing with you than ever before since I have con- 
 cerned myself with philosophy. For though it all seemed 
 difficult of access to the vulgar and full of subtlety, it yet 
 seemed certain and to be grasped by pure intelligence. 
 Whereas now it seems to me that you not only question 
 all that has been received as true, but also that you are 
 able to prove it false if in any respect it is untrue. And 
 
 1 Theaetetus, 1620. 2 Ibid. 1660. 
 
 3 Ibid. 1600. 4 Ibid. 1710.
 
 xiv PROTAGORAS THE HUMANIST 309 
 
 so I begin to doubt even whether I correctly remember 
 what Plato argued, and whether I have fully understood it. 
 
 A. You are young, Philonous, else you would never 
 be ashamed to recite whatever has been received as true. 
 When you are older you will fear to do anything 
 else. Be of good cheer, therefore, and tell me the 
 tradition. 
 
 P. Is it not possible (i) to take Protagoras to mean 
 each individual man ? And (2) was not his preference for 
 a wise man as the measure the pleasing inconsistency of 
 a surrender to fact? As for the inference (3) that know- 
 ledge is sensation, must not that be drawn from the 
 assertion that what appears, is, to each ? For is not 
 sensation " what appears " ? And, lastly (4), is it not 
 clear that if what appears to each is true, and if things 
 appear differently to different men, everything both is 
 and is not at the same time ? And so is not everything in 
 contradiction with itself, and knowledge quite destroyed ? 
 And is it not the best of the joke that in destroying his 
 own argument Protagoras has escaped his own notice ? 
 For what he maintains appears true to him, but not to 
 the rest ! And so is not what they say is truth by so 
 much c truer ' than what he says it is as they are more 
 numerous than he ? 
 
 A. And so you are quite satisfied that Protagoras 
 meant what Aristocles has said he meant? 
 
 P. To speak frankly, I have sometimes wondered, and 
 the more so now that you question me, whether he really 
 meant the individual man to be the universal measure. 
 It seems so much simpler and more sensible to have 
 meant mankind by " man," and I suspect that this is how 
 you will defend Protagoras. 
 
 A. Protagoras needs not defence as yet so much as 
 you. Did you not observe that even Aristocles makes 
 Protagoras affirm that the wise man's judgment may be 
 far better than that of the rest ? 
 
 P. I now remember a distinction I did not then think 
 much of. But even so, would this make the wise man's 
 judgment truer"?
 
 310 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xiv 
 
 A. Perhaps not, if you imagine the " true " to have 
 no relation to the " good." If by " true " you mean what 
 merely is, the opinions held by the veriest fool or madman 
 may seem just as " true," just as much ".facts," as those of 
 Protagoras himself. And yet the latter will far surpass 
 them in value. But perhaps you may some day be 
 persuaded that you do not understand the " true " 
 aright until you have seen that it is embraced in the 
 " Rood," and that therefore the " better " is also the 
 " truer." 
 
 P. I do not quite understand. Will you not explain ? 
 
 A. When you have completed your defence ! Did 
 you not observe, secondly, that when Protagoras made man 
 the measure, he did not mean any part of him, his smell 
 or his sight, his palm or his foot, but the whole man, 
 with all his powers ? 
 
 P. How stupid of me not to have noticed this ! 
 
 A. You would not now say, then, that man's life was 
 wholly sensation ? 
 
 P. Of course not. We reason also, and purpose, and 
 desire. 
 
 A. Was it fair then to make Protagoras mean that 
 knowledge is sensation ? 
 
 P. I suppose not. 
 
 A. You are convicted then, Philonous, of doing an 
 injustice to Protagoras. 
 
 P. I must confess it, and ask you to pardon me, on 
 his behalf! 
 
 A. Again, why should you say that it is contradictory 
 for the same to appear different in different relations or 
 to different persons? Is it contradictory that I, for in- 
 stance, should appear large to you here, but small from 
 the top of Mount Athos, or large to a mouse and small 
 to an elephant ? And have you never in winter tried to 
 mix warm water with cold, and after putting one hand in 
 the one and the other in the other, found that the same 
 mixture appeared warm to the hand which had been in 
 the cold water, and cold to that which had been in the 
 warm ?
 
 xiv PROTAGORAS THE HUMANIST 311 
 
 P. No, I have not tried, but I have no difficulty in 
 perceiving all this. 
 
 A. Why then should it be absurd that different people 
 should think differently about the same subjects ? If it 
 is customary among the Thracians never to speak to their 
 mothers-in-law, and among the Hellenes to speak to them 
 with honied words, shall we say that the notion of mother- 
 in-law is that of something which both is and is not to be 
 spoken to, and are mothers-in-law on this account con- 
 tradictory and impossible ? 
 
 P. Perhaps not, and yet I well remember my father 
 Antinous, saying that his mother-in-law, my grandmother 
 Eudora, was both contradictory and an impossible woman. 
 
 A. Why then should Aristocles regard it as absurd 
 that each should judge in his own way concerning what 
 he perceives, and that nevertheless one man's judgment 
 should be ten thousand times as good as another's ? 
 
 P. I would no longer call it absurd. But though what 
 you say seems reasonable, can you tell me how it comes 
 about that we all perceive the same things, and live in a 
 world which is common to us all ? And how, if you 
 admit this, does it follow from the saying of Protagoras ? 
 
 A. I see, Philonous, that you have not yet thought 
 deeply enough to ask what we mean by a " common " 
 perception. If you had, you would be ripe to understand, 
 not only Protagoras, but also far better the " common " 
 world we live in. 
 
 P. We seem to have come to the brink of a great 
 thought. 
 
 A. Aye, and one which Aristocles has never reached. 
 
 The question you have asked is one which Protagoras 
 alone has raised, and to which he alone gives the answer. 
 And so, as a reward, you shall hear an argument between 
 the Master and two philosophers of Elea. I was myself 
 present, and my record is correcter by far than anything 
 Aristocles has said either about him or about Socrates. 
 Let us go within to get it, and to refresh ourselves with 
 some of my most sacred wine.
 
 312 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xiv 
 
 You have heard of Parmenides, of course, Philonous ? 
 
 P. The most wonderful of philosophers ! 
 
 A. The boldest, certainly, in wandering farthest from 
 the truth into the formless void. Then you may have 
 heard, too, of his son, Morosophus ? 
 
 P. Not until now. Was he too a philosopher ? 
 
 A. He preferred to be, rather than to be thought, 
 one. 
 
 P. That, I suppose, is why I have never heard of him. 
 
 A. Then you are probably ignorant, too, of his son 
 Sophomorus ? 
 
 P. Entirely. What prevented him from becoming 
 famous ? 
 
 A. He said it was all one, and did not care. 
 
 P. But concerning what did they discourse with 
 Protagoras ? 
 
 A. It was on the day after Protagoras had shown us 
 how Man is the maker of Truth, and how Truth is the 
 useful and good, and, in short, that whereby Man lives. 
 All this he spoke of wondrously, telling us also a sacred 
 story of the Babylonian priests concerning a garden in 
 which Man was to live gloriously and happily for ever, 
 if he would but eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge 
 which is the Tree of Life, and how by reason of the hard- 
 ships of climbing the tree, and its thorns, and the rough- 
 ness of its bark, Man would not, and was driven out by 
 God, and has lived miserably ever since, a life dull, brutish, 
 short, and utterly unlike that for which the goodness of 
 God had destined him. And all were glad to listen, 
 save only Sophomorus, who had been brought up to 
 contend with words alone, and cared not for realities. So 
 the next day, bringing with him his father Morosophus, a 
 man of sad appearance and with bushy eyebrows, they 
 attacked Protagoras with verbal puzzles they had ex- 
 cogitated overnight. 
 
 P. I should love to hear their discourse ! 
 
 A. You shall (reads] : 
 
 " Sophomorus. Behold, Protagoras, my father, Moro- 
 sophus, to whom I related last night your discourse
 
 xiv PROTAGORAS THE HUMANIST 313 
 
 concerning the usefulness of truth. He is quite as wise as 
 his father, Parmenides, though not so famous, because he is 
 too proud to contend with sophists such as you. 
 
 Protagoras. Then I am honoured indeed that he 
 should now deign to converse with me ! 
 
 S. Oh, as to that you need not be too conceited ! 
 I had great difficulty in persuading him to come. Only 
 he has thought out some arguments which are invincible, 
 and I want to see you overthrown. 
 
 P. I am glad you have come, Morosophus, for what- 
 ever reason. Shall I begin to state my case, or will you 
 begin the attack in force ? 
 
 Morosophus. I have not come, Protagoras, to argue 
 with you. It is as unworthy of the one and only true 
 philosophy to contend against upstart follies such as yours, 
 as it is of masters to contend with their revolted slaves. 
 And so, far from attacking you with an array of arguments, 
 I am minded rather, like the Scythians in the story of 
 Herodotus, to chastise you with whips, to repress you with 
 the sort of discipline my father used to inflict upon the 
 fools who thought that the Many were. 
 
 P. You promise great things, oh Morosophus ! May 
 I take it that as in the Scythians' case you mention, 
 the attack with the more usual weapons of honourable 
 warfare has been beaten off? And will it surprise you to 
 find that a free spirit which was never childish enough 
 to be enslaved to your ancestral philosophy is not likely 
 to be slavish enough to be terrified by your ' whips ' ? 
 
 S. You soon will be ! 
 
 P. Bring out your whips then and try ! 
 
 S. Go in and smash him, father ! 
 
 M. You asserted, did you not, that the true was 
 useful ? 
 
 P. Assuredly. 
 
 M. Is that assertion true ? 
 
 P. I hope so. 
 
 M. Then do you not see, most foolish one, that you 
 have failed in your endeavour to reduce truth to useful- 
 ness ? Have you not admitted that here is a truth of
 
 314 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xiv 
 
 which your doctrine does not hold ? Will you not bare 
 your back to this whip and flee ? 
 
 P. You are as kind as you are clever, Morosophus, 
 but with your leave I should prefer to face your ' whip.' 
 I do not admit that what you say impairs my argument. 
 For that the true is useful is not only true, but, as being 
 true, is also useful, and judged to be ' true ' because it is 
 useful. It confirms, therefore, instead of refuting, my first 
 assertion. 
 
 M. And yet, Protagoras, you would have to admit 
 that it was true that it was useful that it was true that 
 the true is useful. 
 
 P. And likewise you, that it was useful that it was 
 true that it was useful that it was true that the true is 
 useful. Clearly, however often you choose to predicate 
 truth, I can predicate usefulness, if the true be useful. I 
 do not see what you gain by making me repeat that any 
 ' truth ' you can name will be admitted only if it can be 
 shown to be also useful. So the magic by which you 
 turn the one into the infinite is vain. 
 
 M. What I gain is to compel you to pursue the 
 Infinite. 
 
 P. Only if my patience is infinite. But even if 
 it were, what do you gain ? 
 
 M. An argument which pursues the infinite is vain, 
 and therefore false. Or do you not know that the 
 Infinite is bad? 
 
 P. It seems to be both bad and good in your 
 opinion. At least I seem to remember your father (or 
 was it his follower Melissus ?) arguing that the Whole 
 was infinite, and also good. 
 
 M. That was the good Infinite. 
 
 P. How then do you distinguish them ? Nay, how 
 can you, if, as you say, all things are one ? For if 
 you distinguish two infinites, are they not twol But 
 whether you have one infinite, or two, or twenty, they do 
 not help you here. For all I have asserted is that of 
 every truth I will display the use. This you do not 
 refute by repeating that every truth is also ' true.' For
 
 xiv PROTAGORAS THE HUMANIST 315 
 
 this I have never denied. And yet you yourself seem to 
 think your view of truth useful for refuting me ! 
 
 5. Try another whip upon him, father ! 
 
 M. Is it possible, Protagoras, that you deny that the 
 One alone is? 
 
 P. Concerning the One I cannot say whether it is 
 or is not. It is one of many things for which life is 
 too short and philosophy too long. All I can say is 
 that I have never yet met the One, and that it is nowhere 
 visible to the naked eye of unbesotted reason. 
 
 M. It is to be seen only with the eye of Intelligence. 
 Perhaps it is in this that you are lacking. 
 
 P. Perhaps this lack is the reverse of loss. The 
 Many are enough for me, and sometimes more than 
 enough. 
 
 M. Without the One there is no Many. 
 
 P. So you have said before, and your father before 
 you. But can you never explain how ? 
 
 M. Without the One, you could not perceive the 
 world. Nor could you and I perceive the same 
 world. 
 
 P. I am not so sure that we do, quite. 
 
 M. What, will you destroy the world with the 
 * Measure ' of your folly ? 
 
 P. I hoped rather to discover how we set out to 
 build up a world. 
 
 M. That is impossible. If each man is the measure, 
 there can be no common measure, no common world, and 
 no universal truth. 
 
 P. Pardon me if I hold that there can be as much 
 (and more) of all these things as we in fact possess, and 
 that, if you listen, I can show you how. 
 
 M. It is sad that you should talk such nonsense, 
 and sadder that I should have to listen. 
 
 P. You have provoked me, but I will be merciful, 
 and, therefore, brief. And, first, let me ask you whether 
 you admit that we each perceive things in our own 
 peculiar way ? 
 
 M. How can I admit the impossible and that which
 
 316 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xiv 
 
 is contrary to reason ? I admit only that it is what you 
 ought to mean, if you wished to be consistent. 
 
 P. I am consistent, and more concerned to find out 
 what truly is, before I consider whether it is contrary 
 to reason. And it does not seem to me folly to say 
 that whatever is, is not impossible. Now that we each 
 perceive things in our own way is what I must infer from 
 all the evidence. For is this not why we differ in our 
 tastes and opinions and acts ? And so since what we 
 experience is different, we reasonably act differently. 
 
 M. How would you prove that we perceive differently? 
 And how would you discover that in some things we are 
 different, unless in others we were the same ? 
 
 P. True, Morosophus, you state the reason why 
 I always first of all assume that you agree with me 
 and perceive as I do, until I find out that you do not. 
 But this seems to me a reason, not for getting angry or 
 for inventing a One which is no explanation, but for 
 inquiring into what is really important, namely, how we 
 come to be alike in some things and to remain different in 
 others, and what therefore is meant by ' perceiving the 
 same.' For either if we all perceived all things alike, or 
 if we all perceived all things differently, there would be no 
 difficulty. In the one case we could not get sufficiently 
 apart to quarrel, in the other we could not get sufficiently 
 together, and each would dream as it were his own life- 
 dream without hindrance from any one besides. But as 
 it is, does it not seem to you a mixed world, compounded 
 wondrously, of good and evil, reason and unreason, agree- 
 ments and disagreements? As to your other question, 
 did you ever meet Xanthias, the son of Glaucus ? 
 
 M. Yes, but he seemed to me a very ordinary man 
 and quite unfit to aid in such inquiries. 
 
 P. To me he seemed most wonderful, and a great 
 proof of the truth I have maintained. For the wretch 
 was actually unable to distinguish red from green, the 
 colour of the grass from that of blood ! You may 
 imagine how he dressed, and how his taste was derided. 
 But it was his eye, and not his taste, that was in fault. I
 
 xiv PROTAGORAS THE HUMANIST 317 
 
 questioned him closely and am sure he could not help it. 
 He simply saw colours differently. How and why I was 
 not able to make out. But it was from his case and 
 others like it, but less startling, that I learnt that truth 
 and reality are to each man what appears to him. 
 For the differences, I am sure, exist, even though they 
 are not noticed unless they are very great and in- 
 convenient. 
 
 M. But surely Xanthias was diseased, and his judg- 
 ments about colour are of no more importance than those 
 of a madman. 
 
 P. You do not get rid of the difference by calling it 
 madness and disease. And how would you define the 
 essential nature of madness and disease ? 
 
 M. I am sure I do not know. You should ask 
 Asclepius. 
 
 P. Ah, he is one of those gods I have never been 
 able to meet ! Let me hazard, rather, a conjecture that 
 madness and disease are merely two ways of showing 
 inability to keep up that common world in which we both 
 are and are not, and from which we seem to drop out 
 wholly when we die. 1 
 
 M. A strange conjecture truly for a strange case ! 
 Would you apply it also to disease ? For in that case 
 the difficulty seems to be rather in conforming oneself to 
 things than to one's fellow-men. 
 
 P. To both, rather. Does not a fever drive one 
 madly out of the common world into a world of empty 
 dreams ? And is not the diseased body part of the 
 common world ? 
 
 M. Perhaps, but such conjectures do not interest 
 me. Will you not rather give an account of your own 
 disease or madness, that of thinking that the common 
 world can be compounded out of a multitude of individual 
 worlds ? 
 
 P. Willingly. Conceive then first of all a varied 
 multitude, each of whom perceived things in a fashion 
 peculiar to himself. 
 
 1 Cp. Humanism, pp. 285-7.
 
 3i8 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xiv 
 
 M. You bid me conceive a world of madmen ! 
 
 P. It does not matter what you call them, nor that 
 our world was never in so grievous a condition. I only 
 want you to see that such ' madmen ' would in nowise 
 be able to agree or act together, and that each would live 
 shut up in himself, unintelligible to the others and with 
 no comprehension of them. 
 
 M. Of course. 
 
 P. Would you admit also that such a life would be 
 one of the extremest weakness ? 
 
 M. So weak as to be impossible ! 
 
 P. Perhaps. And now suppose that by the inter- 
 position of some god, or as the saying is, 'by a divine 
 chance,' some of these strange beings were to be endowed 
 with the ability to agree and act together in some partial 
 ways, say in respect to the red and the sweet, and the 
 loud and the pleasant. Would this not be a great 
 advantage ? And would they not be enabled to join 
 together and to form a community in virtue of the 
 communion they had achieved ? And would they not 
 be stronger by far than those who did not ' perceive the 
 same ' ? And so would they not profit in proportion as 
 they could ' perceive the same ' ? and would not a world 
 of ' common ' perception and thought thus gradually grow 
 up? 
 
 M. Only if they really did perceive the same : to 
 ' agree in action ' and to ' perceive the same ' are not the 
 same, and when you have reached the former you have 
 not proved the latter. 
 
 P. As much as I need to. For by ' perceiving 
 the same' I mean only perceiving in such a way that 
 we can act together. Thus if we are told that a red light 
 means ' danger ' and a green light ' assistance,' then if we 
 both flee from the red and welcome the green, we are said 
 to ' perceive the same.' But whether what I perceive as 
 red is in any other sense ' the same ' as what you perceive 
 as red, it is foolish even to inquire. For I cannot carry 
 my ' red ' into your soul nor you yours into mine, and so 
 we cannot compare them, nor see how far they are alike or
 
 xiv PROTAGORAS THE HUMANIST 319 
 
 not. And even if I could, my comparing of my ' red ' with 
 yours would not be the same as your comparing them. 
 Moreover, if we imagined, what to me indeed is absurd 
 but to you should be possible, namely, that when I 
 perceive ' red ' I feel as you when you perceive ' green,' 
 and that your feeling when you perceive ' red ' is the same 
 as mine when I perceive ' green,' there would be no way 
 of showing that we did not perceive alike. 1 For we should 
 always agree in distinguishing ' red ' and ' green.' The 
 ' sameness,' therefore, is not the cause of the common 
 action, but its effect. Or rather it is another way, less 
 exact, but shorter, of asserting it. And so there arises 
 the opinion that we all perceive alike, and that if any one 
 does not, he is mad. And this is true as opinion, being as 
 it is convenient and salutary, and enough for ordinary life. 
 But for the purposes of science we must be more precise, 
 and regard ' perception of the same ' not as a starting- 
 point, but as a goal, which in some matters we have 
 almost, and for some purposes we have quite reached. 
 In short, we always at bottom reason from the ' common ' 
 action to the ' common ' perception, and not conversely. 
 Hence, too, when we wish to speak exactly, we must infer 
 that no two ever quite ' perceive the same,' because their 
 actions never quite agree. Moreover, this makes clear 
 why we agree about some things and judge the same, 
 and not about others, but judge differently. We agree 
 about the things it is necessary to agree about in order to 
 live at all ; we vary concerning the things which are not 
 needed for bare life, even though they may conduce to a 
 life that is beautiful and good. But it is only when we 
 do not act at all that we are able to live our own private 
 life apart, and to differ utterly from all others. 
 
 M. And what, pray, is this strange life in which we 
 do not act? 
 
 P. Do you not remember the saying of Heraclitus,. 
 " For the waking there is one common world, but of those 
 asleep each one turns aside to his own privacy " ? And 
 do you suppose that if we acted on our dreams, we could 
 
 1 Cp. Poincar, La Valeur de la Science, pp. 262-3.
 
 320 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xiv 
 
 with impunity do what we dream ? Is it not merely 
 because we lie still, and do not stir, that we can indulge 
 our fancies ? 
 
 M. All this might be true, and persuasive to one 
 less fixed in true opinion than myself, Protagoras, were 
 it not that all along you have assumed that there is 
 one common world which all are bound to imitate within 
 them. It is only if they agree about this that they can 
 live, and live together, as you say. 
 
 P. I am not astonished that you should think, 
 Morosophus, that such was my assumption. But though 
 I spoke without precision, I can extend my way of 
 conceiving the growth, or the making of a world also 
 to existences very different from men. The elements, 
 too, may have joined together in a world, because they 
 grew into the habit of taking notice of each other, 
 and prospered by so doing. And so the world may 
 be a city, and ruled by laws which are the customs 
 -of its citizens. Only you must remember that habits 
 endure and form the ' nature ' which we find. And so it 
 seems to us that we come into a world already made and 
 incapable of change. But this is not the truth. We 
 ' find ' a world made for us, because we are the heirs of 
 bygone ages, profiting by their work, and it may be suffer- 
 ing for their folly. But we can in part remake it, and 
 reform a world that has slowly formed itself. But of all 
 this how could we get an inkling if we had not begun by 
 perceiving that of all things, Man, each man, is the 
 measure ? 
 
 M. It seems to me, Protagoras, that you have now 
 made him, not only the measure, but also the maker. 
 And this shows that your first dictum was not the greatest 
 absurdity that Man has ever made. 
 
 P. Even this, that Man is a maker of his world has 
 a sense in which it is not absurd ! 
 
 M. Can you not see, man, that Reality is not made 
 by you, but pre-exists your efforts, immutable, sublime, 
 .and unconcerned, not to be fully grasped by man, even 
 when he discovers it ? Do you not feel the reverential
 
 xiv PROTAGORAS THE HUMANIST 321 
 
 awe which hedges round, as you approach it, the One, the 
 Whole, which is and was and will be ? 
 
 P. Frankly, I do not, and it is your feeling which 
 seems to me absurd. For if the Real were really in- 
 accessible to man, he could in no wise discover it. And 
 if the mystery really were sacred, it would be impious 
 even to desire its disclosure. And so I will not believe 
 that the Real is unknowable or immutable, or pre-existent 
 in the way you assume. The Real I deal with is a 
 real which I acknowledge, and I know, because my action 
 alters it. And what alone seems funny and absurd to 
 me is that whenever we have made it different, and more 
 to our liking, we should say that it was all along what we 
 have with endless difficulty persuaded it to become. But 
 surely this trick of ours does not really make it pre- 
 existent absolutely, nor independent of our action. For 
 though our actions mostly start from something which we 
 take as pre-existent, it did not pre-exist as that which it 
 was altered into. And so that which becomes real by our 
 efforts is ever said to be more real than that which we 
 started from, and altered, and thereby proved to be unreal, 
 or real only for the purpose with which it was taken. I 
 do not know whether you understand this, Morosophus, 
 as our habits of speech render it difficult to grasp. 
 
 M. I understand at least that you destroy all reality 
 by rendering it relative to human purposes. For in what 
 way can anything be said to be absolutely real, if it is 
 ever dependent upon the fleeting fancy of the moment ? 
 And without an absolute reality what is philosophy ? 
 
 P. In one way only, and that the only philosophic 
 way ! The absolutely real will be that which fulfils 
 our every purpose, and which therefore we do not seek 
 to alter, but only to maintain. It will be immutable 
 because no one will wish it otherwise, and not because 
 no one is able to improve it. But your mistake lies in 
 supposing that such a unity or harmony already exists, 
 as something we can start from. And you are still 
 more mistaken, if you suppose that because it does not 
 appear to exist, what appears to exist is not real, but the 
 
 Y
 
 322 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xiv 
 
 outcome of some strange illusion. The absolutely real 
 can be reached only through the apparently real, by re- 
 moulding it into a perfect harmony. And whether you 
 or I can achieve this, I cannot tell ; but that we should 
 attempt it is clearly fitting, and is the only thing that 
 matters." 
 
 Philonous. I cannot help stopping you, Antimorus, to 
 say how greatly your Protagoras delights me ! What I 
 had always disliked about what I was taught to believe 
 his doctrine was its preference for what is merely human, 
 and relative, and happens in experience. For this seemed 
 to leave me with nothing firm and fixed and certain. 
 And so I longed for something not dependent on ex- 
 perience, and the Ideas of Plato and even the immutable 
 One of Parmenides, though one felt they were far from 
 desirable in many other respects and hardly related to 
 most of our interests, seemed a sort of guarantee that 
 all order would not be swept away in a chaotic flux of 
 happenings. But now it seems that I was wrong, and 
 that we may look hopefully to the future for the realisa- 
 tion of all our desires, if only we will bestir ourselves to 
 bring about what seems the best ! But I interrupted you, 
 and am still eager to hear how the argument went on. 
 With such dazzling prospects it must have reached a 
 glorious conclusion. Tell me, did Protagoras persuade 
 Morosophus, as he has persuaded me ? 
 
 Antimorus. Of course not ; in real life an argument 
 does not conclude, like one of Plato's dialogues, at its 
 best. You have heard the best part of my notes, and I 
 will spare you the rest. 
 
 P. But will you not tell me how it ended ? 
 
 A. Morosophus, who to do him justice was clever 
 enough in his way, at once began to dispute the reality of 
 change, which, he said, Protagoras had assumed. You 
 know how hard it is to refute these Eleatic tricksters, who 
 will not look at the plain facts of common experience, and 
 Protagoras had not got far into his explanation before 
 that young ass, Sophomorus, interrupted and insisted
 
 xiv PROTAGORAS THE HUMANIST 323 
 
 on bringing out some more of his "whips." And so 
 Protagoras, courteous as ever, was forced to reply to 
 further futilities about the true and the useful, of the sort 
 which are now being called sophistries, but might more 
 fitly be called philosophemes, seeing that philosophers 
 have invented nearly all of them. 
 
 P. What was the question about the true and the 
 useful ? 
 
 A. The question was whether when Protagoras had 
 asserted that the true was useful he had also to admit 
 that the useful was true, and so either that any lie which 
 was convenient for a passing purpose was absolutely true, 
 or that truth was unmeaning. And so the end was that 
 Protagoras, after pointing out that if he admitted that the 
 useful was always true he would have to admit what he 
 had always denied, viz. that there was useless know- 
 ledge, had to give Sophomorus a lesson in elementary 
 logic. 
 
 P. And did you never learn from Protagoras by doing 
 what he thought we might attain the end which he divined, 
 the harmony which is absolutely real, or the absolute 
 reality which is a perfect harmony ? 
 
 A. Not with any exactness. For Protagoras did not 
 suppose that he had found more than the beginnings of 
 the way. And the whole, he said, would be long and diffi- 
 cult, and fit only for the strong and brave. But though 
 he was ever zealous that we should trust all our powers 
 to help us in our quest, yet he seemed to rely most on 
 the increase of knowledge^ and was wont to deny that any 
 knowledge was useless, because it was always a way of 
 mastering the real. 
 
 P. How splendid ! I do not understand how you 
 can speak about it all so calmly ! Why have you not 
 cried out aloud this Truth of Protagoras throughout the 
 cities of the Hellenes ? 
 
 A. And why have I become the priest of Dionysus ? 
 Did I not tell you why ? I am old, oh grandson of 
 Eudora, and you are very young ; but you would have to 
 live to be far older than ever I shall be, before you could
 
 324 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xiv 
 
 persuade the Hellenes or Barbarians to care about the 
 Truth ! Had I done as you bid me, I should soon have 
 needed the hellebore of Anticyra to escape the hemlock 
 of Athens ! Can you wonder that one who had seen 
 and suffered so much should prefer the sweet poison of 
 Mende ? 
 
 P. But in Mende at least you might have made a 
 beginning. Nay, we might still ! For in all the city 
 who is there so well-born as you, the Asclepiad, or I, the 
 Nelid, and as highly thought of? And who as clever? 
 Why should we not easily persuade the Mendeans of this 
 new " Truth," and even be honoured for teaching it ? 
 
 A. I will tell you why, Philonous. Because " truth " 
 for the Mendeans lies in wine alone, and the true is profit- 
 able only in this form. Because it was not given to the 
 Asclepiads to cure men of their folly. Because I am the 
 priest of Dionysus, to honour whom is to disgrace oneself, 
 and it beseems me least of all men to introduce new 
 worships. Because the Mendeans will elect a Nelid gladly 
 enough as their general, if you ask them, but will never 
 honour you, or any one, as their teacher. For what they 
 will want of you is not truth but victory. 
 
 P. But I care not whether they honour me or not, nor 
 value the petty prizes of their politics. I will live for 
 truth alone, whether it benefits others, or only me. 
 
 A. If you can, Philonous. But it seems to me more 
 likely that the Mendeans will not let you. They will 
 force you to die the beautiful death of a patriot, in some 
 silly skirmish with the boors of Thrace or with the stout 
 burghers of Stagira. As for me, I am too old, and should 
 be thinking of that last long journey to the house of 
 Hades, to the vile inn (iravboiceiov} that receives us all, the 
 best and the worst alike, and yet is never full. 
 
 P. Has your philosophy, then, no cure for the fear of 
 death ? 
 
 A. Because it has none for the love of ignorance ! 
 For knowledge is power, knowledge is life, while ignorance 
 is death, and leads to death, and ends in death. And 
 because the many have loved ignorance and hate the
 
 xiv PROTAGORAS THE HUMANIST 325 
 
 truth, I too must soon descend, together with the rest, 
 unknowing but not unresentful. 
 
 P. You think, then, that our Vision of Truth was but 
 a madman's dream ? ' 
 
 A. Let us dismiss both vain dreams and maddening 
 realities ! * * * And yet the dreams may be truer than 
 the realities, if the better be the truer ! Nay, this life itself 
 may be wholly, or in part, an evil dream. But who knows, 
 and why torment ourselves ? We two at least shall never 
 know. We were born too early by ten thousand years. 
 Come therefore, let us flee to the consolations of the god 
 I serve, and pledge me copious cups of this my sovereign 
 anodyne !
 
 XV 
 
 A DIALOGUE CONCERNING GODS 
 AND PRIESTS 
 
 PHILONOUS ) f M , PROTAGORAS of Abdera 
 
 ANTIMORUS j MELETUS of Athens 
 
 ARGUMENT 
 
 Philonous asks Antimorus whether he agrees with Protagoras's agnostic 
 attitude towards the gods. Antimorus will not tell him, but criticises 
 the arguments for the existence of gods propounded by Philonous. 
 (l) That from the existence of priests: can they serve the non- 
 existent ? It is objected that this would prove too much. (2) God 
 as the One. But does not this reduce all human reality to illusion 
 and separate it wholly from ' God ' ? The logical difficulties about 
 predicating unity of our world. If unity is inapplicable, is it not 
 meaningless to call the One ' God ' ? (3) The argument from human 
 desire. It is an indispensable condition of the discovery of gods, but 
 primarily proves only their psychological reality. Have then real gods 
 been discovered thus ? asks Philonous. Antimorus again excuses him- 
 self, but reads him a conversation of Protagoras with Meletus, explaining 
 his seeming agnosticism. Philonous gives up the problem, and is con- 
 soled with an Egyptian Myth. 
 
 Philonous. I can never sufficiently make out from what 
 you say, Antimorus, whether or not you believe in the 
 gods, or agree with your master Protagoras that their 
 existence lies beyond our ken. And, ever since the day 
 when I went to see you in preference to the play, you 
 have been so kind to me that I am sure you will pardon 
 me when I beg you to remove my perplexity. For the 
 matter, assuredly, is one of no slight importance, alike for 
 public and for private affairs. For if there are gods, as 
 nearly all men profess to believe, is it not most important 
 that men should win their approval by worshipping them 
 aright, it may be in ways very different from those now 
 
 326
 
 xv GODS AND PRIESTS 327 
 
 in vogue among the Hellenes and among the Barbarians ? 
 If, again, there are no gods, why should we both publicly 
 and in private spend so much money on sacrifices and 
 costly temples, and expect vainly, as gifts from the gods, 
 benefits which we might perchance secure by our own 
 exertions ? I am sure that you must have reflected on 
 these things far longer and more deeply than I have yet 
 been able to do, and so I am in hopes that you can answer 
 my question. 
 
 Antimorus. You are looking very well to-day, my 
 dear Philonous, and your question is a good one. More- 
 over, it touches a subject which is very nearly as import- 
 ant as men profess to think it, and much more important 
 than they really think it. But I am the last person, not 
 only in Mende but in the world, to answer it. You surely 
 cannot have forgotten that I am myself a priest ? 
 
 P. Of course not ; but what of that ? Nay, are not 
 priests of all men the most likely to know whether or not 
 the gods exist ? 
 
 A. How charming of you, Philonous, to say this ! 
 But even if you think priests the most likely to know, 
 do you also think them the most likely to tell ? 
 
 P. Yes : if there are gods. 
 
 A. And if not, what ? Or if they do not know ? 
 
 P. It seems to me, Antimorus, that one might, in a 
 manner, argue from the existence of priests to that of 
 gods. For if there were no gods, would there be priests 
 to serve them ? How could they serve the non-existent ? 
 
 A. Very subtle, and better than most of the argu- 
 ments of theologians ! And so you would say that 
 because I am the priest of Dionysus there must be a 
 Divine Drunkard, and because there are Atti, a Mother of 
 the Gods ? Would you argue similarly from the worships 
 of the Egyptians that there must be a Divine Crocodile 
 and a Divine Jackal and a Divine Onion ? 
 
 P. It does seem a little absurd. 
 
 A. Not a little. And are not Divine Men and 
 Women just as absurd ? 
 
 P. I suppose so. But nevertheless there are some
 
 328 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xv 
 
 of the gods whom I should be sorry to lose. Apollo, for 
 example, and the Muses. But no doubt you are right, 
 and we should worship no god but the one who moves 
 and lives in all things, taking all shapes but tied to none, 
 and exceeding far in beauty and goodness and health and 
 might all notions men can frame. 
 
 A. It is Proteus, I suppose, whom you mean? 
 
 P. Never ! The God I mean is no juggler. He 
 is the One and the All, that has made the world, and 
 made it a Cosmos. For surely there must be some reason 
 why the world is one, and all things work together for 
 good ? 
 
 A. And you think that the Cause of this should be 
 deemed the Deity? 
 
 P. Yes, and a God of all gods, who must needs 
 exist, because his existence is revealed in all things that 
 exist. This is the God too whom philosophers seem 
 to me to hint at, though obscurely. And does he not 
 seem to you the offspring of a noble thought ? 
 
 A. So noble that it seems to me oblivious of the 
 simple truth. Too noble to have a humble origin in the 
 facts of life. While as for the philosophers, so far from 
 rendering God's existence certain and necessary, they seem 
 rather to render it impossible ! 
 
 P. How so ? 
 
 A. Did you not say God was the One and the All ? 
 
 P. Yes. 
 
 A. And also that he excelled in beauty and goodness 
 and might ? 
 
 P. It is as all-good, and all-beautiful, and all-mighty 
 that I would conceive him. 
 
 A. Would you say, then, that because all things 
 are God, all things are good and beautiful ? And if 
 the Many, though one in God, yet contend against each 
 other, would you say that God was divided against him- 
 self, and distracted by intestine war? And is he such as 
 to delight in this condition ? Or is he discordant and 
 miserable, and unable to cure himself of this disease ? 
 Or is he perchance wholly unaware of the plight we see
 
 xv GODS AND PRIESTS 329 
 
 him to be in ? As for his might, how would you measure 
 it ? Can you measure it, if there is nothing to measure it 
 upon ? If all things are but manifestations of God's 
 power, and his playthings, if in all conflicts God is merely 
 sparring with himself, how can you know whether or not 
 his might is irresistible ? What, therefore, does almighty 
 power mean ? 
 
 P. These are difficulties I had never thought of, 
 and I do not feel that I can answer you sufficiently at 
 present. But I am unwilling to yield to you wholly, 
 Antimorus. And so might one not hold that God at 
 heart is good and beautiful, even though many things 
 seem otherwise to us ; that he is not really struggling 
 against himself, though we as parts, who cannot see the 
 whole, seem to see him so ; and that so the disease of the 
 world is curable, nay cured, because it is not real ? 
 
 A. One might indeed, Philonous, on one condition. 
 
 P. And what is that ? 
 
 A. You can save the perfection of the One by 
 sacrificing all on the altar of the One, and condemning 
 the Many to utter unreality. 
 
 P. How ? 
 
 A. It is true that the troubles of the Many and the 
 imperfections of appearances cannot mar the perfection 
 of the One, if they exist only for us, and not for it. 
 But then we also cannot exist for it For our troubles 
 are inherent in our nature, and to get rid of them the One 
 would have also to get rid of us. 
 
 P. But might they not be our illusion ? 
 
 A. Yet is not the illusion inevitable and existent? 
 
 P. Perhaps. 
 
 A. And if it is inevitable, is it not real ? 
 
 P. Not if the One does not suffer from it. For all 
 things truly are as they appear to it, and not to us. 
 
 A. I am glad you said this ; for it is just what I 
 was wishing you to see. If things truly are as they 
 appear to the One, then they can never appear to us 
 as they truly are. And conversely, the One can never 
 perceive things as they truly appear to us. You can
 
 330 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xv 
 
 make the One perfect, but at the cost of separating it 
 from a world which is utterly unreal, and would be 
 abhorrent to its unpolluted calm. Consider now the con- 
 sequences. 
 
 P. What ? 
 
 A. You have imagined an image of divine perfec- 
 tion. But that image floats above our world, and nowhere 
 touches it. The One cannot know our existence, and if 
 it could know it, could regard it only as a disordered 
 nightmare. It can afford us, therefore, no assistance 
 toward the betterment of life. How then have we 
 secured its divine aid ? And is not the disease of appear- 
 ance incurable, just because it is imaginary and unreal, 
 and God takes no note of it ? What then have we gained 
 by convicting ourselves and our knowledge of illusion ? 
 And worst of all, we have not even got an answer to our 
 question. 
 
 P. To what question ? 
 
 A. To the question how our argument could climb 
 from earth to heaven, and infer the existence of a god 
 from the nature of the world. 
 
 P. Yet did we not find a ladder? 
 
 A. But so queer a one that we had to cast it down 
 immediately we got to heaven. And when we got to 
 heaven no one would take notice of us we were treated 
 as unreal. And to earth we cannot redescend. Or do 
 you see a way ? 
 
 P. Not from our present position. But tell me, 
 how would it be if we gave up the notion that the 
 One is beautiful and good for it is this which seems 
 to be impracticable ? 
 
 A, By all means give it up. But how would you 
 proceed ? 
 
 P. After all, goodness and beauty are only human 
 feelings, which we might as rightly hesitate to ascribe 
 to God as human shapes and human passions. And 
 so might we not worship him as simply great ? 
 
 A. There are those, no doubt, who would be willing 
 to do this.
 
 xv GODS AND PRIESTS 331 
 
 P. And why not you? 
 
 A. I am not so ready to give up the search for 
 beauty and goodness in the cosmos. I will not worship 
 mere greatness, nor deem a whale more admirable than a 
 man simply because he is many times as large. 
 
 P. But has not the argument shown that the Divine 
 cannot be beautiful and good ? 
 
 A. Or that what is not beautiful and good cannot 
 be called divine ? 
 
 P. How do you mean ? 
 
 A. I mean that if the One is neither of these things, 
 I will not worship it, nor call it God. If it is indifferent 
 to our good, I am indifferent to its existence. 
 
 P. But have you not still ground to fear it ? Will it 
 not resent your indifference ? 
 
 A. Why should it ? I too am part of it, if I am at 
 all, fashioned by it to please itself. And if it is indifferent 
 to what seems good to man, why should it care about 
 what seems evil to man ? 
 
 P. But how if its nature was to resent all disrespect, 
 and while not rewarding the good, to inflict evil on the 
 imprudent or irreverent ? 
 
 A. Why should my irreverence offend rather than 
 amuse it ? And why should it inflict evil on itself 
 because a part of itself offended it ? Besides, if this were 
 somehow possible, you would only have turned your god 
 into an evil demon. And even so, I should not reason- 
 ably change my conduct. 
 
 P. Why not ? Would you not be made to suffer 
 for it ? 
 
 A. I might be made to suffer for my impiety, but 
 not more probably than you for your piety. For, being 
 evil, the Demon would dole out evils to all, to good and 
 bad alike. 
 
 P. I do not see that. Why ? 
 
 A. Because if he did not, but allowed himself to be 
 propitiated by rites, however strange and horrible, there 
 would be a way of making him good. For he would 
 cease to be evil to those who propitiated him, and so
 
 332 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xv 
 
 would become good, and this would be contrary to our 
 hypothesis. 
 
 P. It would seem then that the One can be neither 
 good nor evil, but must be indifferent. 
 
 A. But if it is indifferent, does it remain an object 
 of worship ? 
 
 P. It seems not. 
 
 A. If this then be truth, shall we not be really 
 atheists ? 
 
 P. Hardly that. For do you not think that it 
 will still be a great gain, not perhaps for purposes of 
 public worship, but for the private communings of the 
 soul, that we should feel that we do not live at random 
 in a random concourse of things, but in a cosmos which 
 is truly one ? 
 
 A. You are satisfied with small gains, if you think 
 this one. Still even small gains are not despicable, if 
 they are sure. But who can feel sure about this gain 
 of yours ? 
 
 P. What ? Do you think an error still lurks in my 
 argument ? 
 
 A. No, but that it flaunts itself over its whole 
 surface. 
 
 P. Do you not admit, then, that the universe is 
 one ? I do not see how any one can doubt this. 
 
 A. Not if you define the universe amiss. 
 
 P. How ? 
 
 A. As the totality of things known and unknown. 
 
 P. And is not this the right definition ? 
 
 A. Only for one desiring to beg the real question. 
 
 P. I do not understand. 
 
 A. Do you suppose that what you now perceive and 
 know is all that is and was and ever will be, the whole 
 universe in short ? 
 
 P. Of course not, nor what any man perceives and 
 knows. 
 
 A. It is possible, therefore, that additions may be 
 made to the known universe out of the multitude of 
 unknown things ?
 
 xv GODS AND PRIESTS 333 
 
 P. Yes, I suppose so. 
 
 A. How would you ascertain whether these additions 
 were really new births within the universe, or really 
 additions from without, from what had not before formed 
 part of it ? 
 
 P. I hardly know. 
 
 A. Nor I. But see what follows. 
 
 P. I am looking eagerly. 
 
 A. The world at every moment would appear 
 to you to be such that it might either give birth to 
 endless novelties within itself, or come into contact with 
 illimitable realities, which had until then existed out of 
 connexion with it. Your conception, therefore, of the 
 whole as one, could never cover all that was. There 
 would always be a Many bursting into or out, in what 
 you had taken to be one. And so in neither case could 
 its unity ever be effectively maintained, could you ever 
 get an assurance that you really knew all there was. 
 
 P. I suppose not. 
 
 A. Then what sense is there in calling our world 
 the universe ? The universe is the totality of things ; 
 but to this totality we do not attain, nor could we 
 know it, if we did. We can never make certain, therefore, 
 that we are dealing with the real universe, that we have 
 really got all things together in a universe, and that what 
 is true of it is true of the things we know. 
 
 P. But would not this uncertainty make it the more 
 interesting ? 
 
 A. Perhaps ; but it would spoil your argument from 
 the notion of a universe. 
 
 P. How ? 
 
 A. Because you could never apply your notion 
 to the world you lived in. That the universe was the 
 totality of existences no one need trouble to deny. For 
 the notion could never be applied. Nor would you, by 
 possessing it, learn anything about the world you lived in. 
 For that the world we know was the totality of things 
 could never be asserted. And what we thought about 
 the world would never justify prediction : it would always
 
 334 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xv 
 
 be at the mercy of the changes introduced by the new 
 things that entered it. 
 
 P. Would you explain this further ? 
 
 A. It is very simple. If you don't know the whole 
 of a thing and are in doubt about its character, may not 
 your opinion alter as you get to know more of it ? 
 
 P. Not unreasonably. 
 
 A. It will seem, therefore, better or worse as a whole, 
 according as the new parts of it seem better or worse ? 
 
 P. Certainly. 
 
 A. If, then, God is the whole, and the whole we 
 know is not the true whole but a part, will not our 
 reverence for an incomplete whole, of necessity be the 
 worship of a false god ? 
 
 P. Perhaps. 
 
 A. And, moreover, will not God for us grow with 
 our knowledge, growing better or worse, or better and 
 worse alternately, without ceasing ? 
 
 P. It will be very inconvenient, if he grows very 
 different ! 
 
 A. It will. And do you not think, therefore, that it 
 will be very inconvenient to worship such a thing at all ? 
 
 P. It would not be as delightful as I had hoped. 
 
 A. It would be quite as absurd as worshipping 
 the onion. And not nearly so useful. For you can 
 use the onion, and if need be eat it, ere it grows too 
 large, but what can any man do with the universe ? 
 
 P. Is it then the desire of Antimorus the Wise 
 that I should proclaim him priest of the Non-existent, 
 and must we once more call ourselves atheists ? 
 
 A. By no means. Remember that I am priest. 
 
 P. Aye, a priest who refutes all gods ! 
 
 A. No, who refutes bad arguments. When have I 
 ever said there were no gods ? 
 
 P. But have you not refuted all the arguments the 
 human mind has conceived ? 
 
 A. All, perhaps, that your mind has conceived. 
 
 P. Has yours, then, conceived others ? 
 
 A. Perhaps.
 
 xv GODS AND PRIESTS 335 
 
 P. Then lose no time in telling me. 
 
 A. They are, perhaps, not so different from yours. 
 
 P. Then why did you refute mine? 
 
 A. Perhaps they were not rightly stated, nor rightly 
 argued from. You are ever so hasty, Philonous, and 
 too eager to make an argument achieve more than its 
 strength will bear. And when it does not at once do 
 what you wish, you reject it utterly ; whereas you should 
 not make a leaping-pole out of a reed. 
 
 P. What strength is left in any of the arguments I 
 mentioned ? Have you not laid them low one by one 
 without exception ? 
 
 A. The first one, about the connexion, between the 
 existence of priests and of gods, was not a bad one. 
 
 P. You mean that there cannot be priests unless 
 there are gods ? But is it not possible that priests 
 should be instituted by deluded men of false gods, and 
 so exist, even though there are no gods at all ? 
 
 A. Not quite that : you must look at things more 
 subtly. 
 
 P. How then ? 
 
 A. Leaving aside the gods for a time, let me ask 
 you why you suppose that priests exist ? 
 
 P. That is hard to say. I have often wondered why. 
 
 A. You would not say, I suppose, that priests 
 exist because gods exist ? 
 
 P. No ; for what we are trying to prove is that 
 gods exist because priests exist. 
 
 A. Nor yet that there are priests in order that they 
 may have superior knowledge of divine things ? 
 
 P, But surely they do ! You are the first priest 
 I have known who did not profess to have ; and even 
 as to you I am not sure. 
 
 A. The knowledge I mean is not concerning sacred 
 stories, of which indeed they know a great abundance : 
 it concerns such matters as we have been conversing 
 about, the cause of being and of life and of suffering 
 and of evil, and the things after death and in Hades. 
 Have you ever anywhere met a priest who could give
 
 336 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xv 
 
 a reasonable account about such things, or answer 
 questions such as would be asked about them by a 
 reasonable man desirous of clear notions ? 
 
 P. Not unless you are the man ! 
 
 A, However much you flatter me, I fear that I shall 
 disappoint you. 
 
 P. Not unless you break off the inquiry ! 
 
 A. Then you must suggest a better reason for the 
 existence of priests. 
 
 P. Shall we say that we must have them in order 
 that the sacred rites may be performed aright? 
 
 A. Yes, that is a better answer. For assuredly 
 it is for the sake of ritual rather than of philosophy that 
 men need priests. But why do they need ritual ? 
 
 P. It seems so natural. Perhaps without it many 
 would become disorderly, and so it is beneficial to the 
 State. 
 
 A. Do you think that our Bacchanalian festivals are 
 conducive to good order ? 
 
 P. Perhaps not, but does not the fear of Zeus, the 
 guardian of the oath, stop men from swearing falsely ? 
 
 A. How strange then that perjury is still so 
 common ! Or how weak the fear of Zeus ! Or will you 
 say perhaps that it is fear of some stronger god than 
 Zeus which leads men to forswear themselves ? And do 
 you not fear that the fear of Zeus will lead men to 
 imitate him in other ways as well ? 
 
 P. A god may do without blame what it would 
 be atrocious for a man to do. 
 
 A. How then is a man to know whether it is good 
 to do as the gods, or bad ? 
 
 P. I confess, Antimorus, I cannot defend the actions 
 of the gods as they are narrated, and that the sacred 
 stories seem to me most impious. That is just why I am 
 so anxious to know what to think about the whole matter. 
 
 A. Well said. But you have not yet told me what 
 need men have for priests. 
 
 P. I can perceive none, and yet I am persuaded 
 that they need them. Perhaps it is just a desire.
 
 xv GODS AND PRIESTS 337 
 
 A. Very good indeed ! We have priests because 
 we need them, and need them to satisfy our desire. And 
 what do priests desire? 
 
 P. Gods, I should think. 
 
 A. Excellent ! And do you think that they alone 
 desire gods ? 
 
 P. No, we all do, except perhaps a few scoundrels 
 who dread their vengeance. 
 
 A. Good again ! Are we not agreed, then, that 
 gods are the embodiments of human desires, and exist 
 as surely, and as long, as the desires which they gratify ? 
 Can you wonder any longer that Bacchus is a god, and 
 Plutus, and Aphrodite, and the Onion ? For are they 
 not all objects of desire ? 
 
 P. It seems to me, Antimorus, that you go too 
 fast, and prove too much. If you could prove any god 
 thus, you would certainly prove the existence of the 
 Divine Lust and the Divine Onion. And was it not just 
 by adducing these that you laughed me out of my argu- 
 ment that the existence of priests involved that of their 
 gods ? You have substituted the worshippers for the 
 priests as the causes of the gods' existence, but otherwise 
 the argument is the same. 
 
 A. Pardon me, Philonous, it was you who dropped 
 the argument at the first touch of ridicule. You will 
 never be a great philosopher until you consent to make 
 yourself very ridiculous, and to laugh at your own ideas 
 as well as at those of others. For if the truth did not 
 seem ridiculous and paradoxical, do you suppose that 
 errors would be so common, so commonplace, so solemn, 
 and so reputable ? 
 
 P. Even so, I think there are objections to your 
 argument. 
 
 A. Then let us discuss them before we go further. 
 
 P. Well then, in the first place, if desire makes 
 gods, can it not also unmake them ? 
 
 A. No doubt, but desires are far more permanent 
 than philosophies or theologies. 
 
 P. Again, I do not admit that the desire for a thing 
 
 Z
 
 338 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xv 
 
 is a reason for thinking that that thing exists, or in 
 any way brings it into existence. The desire for food 
 does not feed me, nor make me wealthy. Nor do the 
 Helmet of Hades and the Elixir of Life exist because 
 I should greatly desire them. And in this case of the 
 gods this magic of desire is the less likely to have 
 creative power, seeing that a god is a more difficult and 
 precious thing for a desire to make than even an elixir 
 of life. 
 
 A. You argue well against a doctrine I have not 
 affirmed. For the gods I spoke of as creations of desire, 
 I supp'osed to exist in the opinions of men, and not on 
 the heights of Olympus. 
 
 P. Then they do not really exist ? 
 
 A. Yes, they do really exist in the souls of men. 
 And it is there that they are most potent, and far excel 
 the dwellers of far-away Olympus, seeing that they are 
 so much nearer. 
 
 P. But that is not what I meant, nor what men 
 commonly mean when they ask about the existence of 
 the gods. They inquire about gods who hold the shining 
 mansions of the skies, and not about those who hold the 
 hearts of men. 
 
 A, You admit, then, the existence of these latter ? 
 
 P. Yes, but they do not answer my question, and 
 have no connexion with the real gods. 
 
 A. That remains to be seen. For we must advance 
 step by step, and before we try to climb the heights of 
 Olympus, we must try to fathom the depths of human 
 nature. For I should not wonder if the latter showed us 
 the way to the former. 
 
 P. I do not oppose your considering them if you 
 please. 
 
 A. That is right, my dear Philonous ; for you have 
 escaped your own notice saying some very wrong things 
 about the gods who are born of desire and dwell in the 
 souls of men. 
 
 P. What, pray, are these ? 
 
 A. Did you not say that your desire for food had no
 
 xv GODS AND PRIESTS 339 
 
 power to make you believe that food existed, or to satisfy 
 your hunger ? 
 
 P. How can it have ? The desire has no arms and 
 legs! 
 
 A. No ; but you have. Have you not observed 
 four things ? First, that men do not usually get de- 
 sirable things unless they actually desire them : next, 
 that if they desire them, they usually find a way of 
 getting them : thirdly, that when a thing is desired, there 
 is apt to arise a belief that it is existent and attainable : 
 and lastly, that when it is attained, it is often supposed to 
 have existed all along. 
 
 P. But it does not become existent because it is 
 desired. Nor is it attained because it is desired, but 
 because it exists. 
 
 A. Quite right ! But you would admit, I suppose, 
 that it might remain unknown to all eternity, for lack 
 of a desire to know it ? 
 
 P. Certainly. 
 
 A. And so, as no one looked for it, no one found it, 
 and it remained non-existent for us ? 
 
 P. Certainly. 
 
 A. Desire then is the cause of our discovery of that 
 which exists beyond our former knowledge ? 
 
 P. It may often be this. But only if we are willing 
 to bestir ourselves to get what we desire. 
 
 A. Doubtless. But does it seem to you reason- 
 able that the man who will not act nor trouble himself 
 to look, should be thought deserving of truth or know- 
 ledge any more than of any other good thing ? 
 
 P. Perhaps not. 
 
 A. Is he not as silly as the sophist's ass, who was 
 so consumed with desire that he could himself consume 
 neither of the two bundles of hay before his nose, and 
 wasted away ? 
 
 P. I do not believe that any real ass would be as 
 stupid as Buridan's. 
 
 A. Nor any real philosopher. Even Thales was 
 practical enough when put to it. He made a fortune
 
 340 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xv 
 
 by cornering the oil presses. They show " the philo- 
 sopher's corner" still in the market at Miletus. 
 
 P. So I have heard, and I am sure the others, much 
 as they profess to scorn wealth, are secretly consumed 
 with envy, and really proud of Thales. 
 
 A. And rightly too ! But I must not forget that just 
 now I made a mistake to gratify you. 
 
 P. What was that ? 
 
 A. I admitted that a desire could not make its object. 
 
 P. Why ought you not to have admitted this ? 
 
 A. Because it sometimes can. 
 
 P. How ? 
 
 A. Have you not observed how many desires bring 
 about their own satisfaction and make real their own 
 objects ? 
 
 P. For example ? 
 
 A. I will take one with which you doubtless are 
 familiar. Is it not true that the lover desires his be- 
 loved to return his love, and if he loves wisely and fortu- 
 nately, does not his desire awaken a responsive passion in 
 the beloved ? And so has not the desire for love impelled 
 love, to make love real ? 
 
 P. Yes, but the desire makes real what was not 
 real before. It does not prove that what was desired 
 existed before it was desired. It lied, therefore, in assum- 
 ing this. 
 
 A. Say rather, it hoped for the best ! Or if it lied, 
 was it not the noblest lie ? 
 
 P. What is that ? 
 
 A. That which is prophetic of the truth, and engenders 
 it. But I am not sure that it lied. For I never said that 
 the object desired must exist before the desire which creates 
 it. It is enough that it should have been created by the 
 desire for it. And this assuredly is what the desire for 
 gods should have done for us. Perhaps it will also some 
 day make them good and kind and responsive to our 
 wishes. 
 
 P. I begin to understand your gods that live in the 
 hearts of men. They are real as the ideal responses to
 
 XV 
 
 GODS AND PRIESTS 341 
 
 real human needs, which really move us. But I do not 
 yet perceive their connexion with the gods that live above, 
 the real gods as I called them. 
 
 A. That surely is not difficult. If we must seek, 
 to find, desire, to know, it is clear that the inner gods 
 alone control the roads that lead to the gods above, and 
 render them propitious to our wishes. They are our 
 intermediaries. They hold the gates through which all 
 our prayers and petitions must ascend. And by them too 
 all the messages from above are re-worded and translated 
 from the language of the gods into a speech our souls can 
 comprehend. Nor is there any other way by which the 
 real gods can be reached. 
 
 P. It seems a long way, and we may not yet have 
 reached them. 
 
 A. Aye, and we may not have wanted to ! Or, 
 having set out, we may have turned back in dismay. 
 
 P. At last we are getting to the point ! Do you 
 think that we have now reached the point where the 
 gods above us and without us can communicate with 
 those within, and transmit their will to us ? 
 
 A. I have long feared that we might reach a point 
 at which it would no longer be holy for me to answer 
 you. For by the body of my Lord Bacchus, I dare not 
 say no \ And how can you ask one who has studied the 
 rites of many gods among the Hellenes and the barbarians 
 to say frankly yest 
 
 P. Then you will disappoint me at the end ? 
 
 A. I told you that I should. But I will treat 
 you to something better than my own opinions, to the 
 thoughts of my great master Protagoras, whose mouth was 
 not sealed and whose office was to teach the truth freely. 
 
 P. I shall be delighted to hear more of Protagoras. 
 
 A. You know that he was gravely suspected of 
 impiety and atheism ? 
 
 P. Yes. 
 
 A. Unjustly indeed, but not without plausibility. 
 For how much satisfaction could the established rites 
 offer to one like Protagoras who, being deeply con-
 
 342 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xv 
 
 cerned about divine things and the wonders of existence, 
 really wanted to know, and would not content himself 
 with ' sacred stories ' ? 
 
 P. To me also they often seem to be stories told to 
 children, and not good even for them. 
 
 A. Well, you shall hear how Protagoras dealt with 
 Meletus, the tragic poet, who was as a tragic poet comic, 
 and as a theologian tragic. 
 
 P. The same who accused Socrates ? 
 
 A. Yes, but that was later. He had been reading 
 Protagoras's new book on Truth, and like most men 
 had not really understood a word. For truth was but 
 a word to him, and he had never asked himself what 
 it was in very deed. But of course he had been stirred 
 up by the saying about the gods. And so he naturally 
 taxed Protagoras with atheism. You shall hear how 
 skilfully the master answered him. 
 
 {Gets out a roll and reads.} 
 
 " Protagoras. You are mistaken surely, Meletus, if you 
 think that I have denied that there are gods. I only said 
 that I had neither met them, nor been able to find out 
 anything for certain about them. And so I am to be 
 pitied rather than blamed : for surely no one is ignorant 
 of his own will ; the fault therefore is not mine, but that 
 of others, whether of the gods or of men, I cannot say. 
 
 Meletus. But it is your fault, if you have been un- 
 willing either to inquire diligently into the stories men 
 tell about the gods or to believe them when they were 
 told you. 
 
 P. Once more you are mistaken, Meletus. For I 
 have, as you know, travelled far and long throughout 
 Hellas, and from my youth I have always asked the 
 wisest men concerning what they knew about the gods, 
 wherever I went. And they were always glad to tell me 
 their sacred stories, which I noted down. I now have a 
 large collection of them, which some might think most 
 entertaining. But as for believing them, why not even 
 Herodotus could compass that ! In Thessaly, for example,
 
 xv GODS AND PRIESTS 343 
 
 they will tell you that Zeus lives on a mountain named 
 Olympus, but in Asia they tell you, no, the mountain is 
 in Mysia, and with them Homer also seems to hold. In 
 Crete, again, they affirm stoutly that Zeus no longer lives 
 at all, in token whereof they even show his sepulchre. 
 In Arcadia, Artemis is the Huntress-Maid, in Ephesus she 
 is a mother with more breasts than any sow. And so 
 forth, that I may mention nothing more unseemly. 
 Which, then, of these stories do you wish me to believe, 
 seeing that they cannot all be true ? 
 
 M. With the gods all things are possible, and it 
 is impious to question sacred stories. 
 
 P. That is just what I cannot think. For it seems 
 to me that the sacred stories malign the gods, if there 
 are gods, and were the inventions of wicked men. Or 
 else they have become wicked by the lapse of time, 
 because they were thought too sacred to be retold in 
 ways befitting the greater insight of a later age. 
 
 M. No. The sacred stories are told by holy men, 
 priests, and if you would reverently listen to them, you 
 would know what to think. You should honour the 
 priests, therefore, and believe what they tell you. 
 
 P. But do the priests themselves know ? 
 
 M. They, if any men. For they have preserved the 
 revelations made by the gods of old. 
 
 P. It seems to me that if so, they have preserved 
 them very badly. And who knows whether the stories 
 are now told as they happened ? 
 
 M. You will find that they tell the sacred stories 
 precisely as they received them from their ancestors, many 
 of whom were themselves children of the gods and must 
 surely have known their parents. And so it is reasonable 
 to believe that the sacred tradition is exact, and that we 
 know quite as much about the gods as those did to whom 
 they revealed themselves. 
 
 P. That is just what I complain of, and what leads 
 me to fear that the priests know no more than I ! 
 
 M. How so? 
 
 P. You said, did you not, that the priests know
 
 344 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xv 
 
 the revelations made by the gods of old, both con- 
 cerning themselves and all things which it is good for 
 man to know ? 
 
 M. I did. 
 
 P. And you said also that they have preserved this 
 knowledge exactly? 
 
 M. Certainly. 
 
 P. Then we know no less than the men of old ? 
 
 M. So I contend. 
 
 P. Nor any more ? 
 
 M. How could we, unless there had been fresh 
 theophanies ! 
 
 P. And such there have not been ? 
 
 M. Don't you believe it ! 
 
 P. And yet I have met many who affirmed this 
 stoutly. They seemed indeed to be somewhat ecstatic 
 persons, but not liars. 
 
 M. They were deceived then. 
 
 P. This I am willing to believe. But is it not 
 possible that your friends also were deceived, and have 
 handed down stories similar to those now told ? 
 
 M. Possible, but not likely. 
 
 P. Not unlikely, I should say. And in other 
 ways also it would seem either that the priests have 
 been bad guardians of sacred truths, or good guardians 
 of unholy falsehoods. For consider : is not the true, 
 good ? 
 
 M. Certainly. 
 
 P. Then to attain truth should make us better ? 
 
 M. Is not this what sacred truths do ? 
 
 P. And also better able to attain more truth ? 
 
 M. Perhaps. 
 
 P. Why then have we not attained better knowledge 
 of holy things by the aid of the theophanies of former 
 days ? 
 
 M. I cannot say. 
 
 P. Again, is it the nature of benefactors to abandon 
 those to whom they have shown kindness, and of the 
 benefited to keep away from their benefactors ?
 
 xv GODS AND PRIESTS 345 
 
 M. It ought not to be. 
 
 P. And yet does not something of this sort seem to 
 happen when gods benefit men ? 
 
 M. In what way ? 
 
 P. Why, do you not think that the gods, after 
 bestowing on us beneficial revelations of themselves, 
 have withdrawn themselves from our ken ? And men 
 similarly, after acquiring some little knowledge of the 
 gods, show plainly that they desire to know no more 
 about them. 
 
 M, Never have I heard this said by any one, 
 Protagoras. But many have lamented over their, ignor- 
 ance of the gods. 
 
 P. In words, no doubt. But do not their deeds 
 cry out louder than their words ? And of those who 
 claimed to believe in gods, have you ever found any one 
 to act as if this belief opened out to him a way to 
 real knowledge and more knowledge, and knowledge not 
 to be attained by those who are not willing to believe in 
 the gods ? 
 
 M. It is not holy to desire more knowledge than 
 the gods have granted, or to seek to pry into their secrets. 
 
 P. What god has revealed this to you, Meletus ? 
 And how else do you know that the gods do not desire 
 you to desire more knowledge concerning themselves 
 before they will, or can, reveal more ? How again do 
 you know that men should not pry into the secrets of 
 the gods ? Do you perchance suspect the gods of having 
 evil secrets ? 
 
 M. No, but I suspect you of undermining all 
 established worship, and of wishing to improve on the 
 gods of the city. For no religion could exist with new 
 knowledge and new gods and new worships ever coming 
 in to upset the old. 
 
 P. I wonder. And I deem it strange that in other 
 matters which men try and suppose themselves to know, it 
 is not so, but the more they know, the more eager they 
 grow and the more able to learn, and the greater and 
 stronger and more precious and more intelligible their
 
 346 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xv 
 
 knowledge seems to them. Either, therefore, knowledge 
 about the gods is not really knowledge, or men are not 
 willing to treat it as really knowledge. In either case I 
 am prevented from knowing, as I said. Why then should 
 I be blamed ? How can I help it ? Either there is 
 nothing for me to know, or I am not allowed to know it. 
 
 M. Still less, Protagoras, are you allowed to in- 
 quire. Let me speak to you as a friend. I liked your 
 rhetoric, and thought your lectures the best I ever listened 
 to. But if you are wise, you will in the first place erase 
 from your book that terrible sentence about the gods, and 
 in the next place retire from Athens till the storm blows 
 over. 
 
 P. I am sure your advice is kindly meant. But 
 I do not at all agree with you. I would rather that 
 my whole book on Truth should perish excepting of 
 course what I said about man being the measure, for that 
 I feel assured cannot die and that that one sentence be 
 preserved, than that it should perish and all the rest be 
 preserved. For I greatly fear that the major part of my 
 Truth is too subtle for the dull sight of men such as now 
 are. And as for leaving Athens, let the Athenians drive 
 me out if they think fit. I am a stranger and accustomed 
 to wander over the face of the earth. And so I will wait 
 to see whether it will be accounted a crime in me to have 
 spoken and written the ' Truth.' 
 
 M. Then may the gods you doubt help you ! But 
 your days are numbered. 
 
 P. Are they not that in any case, to one who has 
 passed his three-score years and ten ? " 
 
 Antimorus. Well, Philonous, how do you like that ? 
 
 Philonous. Wondrously, and yet it always makes me 
 uncomfortable, too, to listen to Protagoras or you. You 
 are so different from the other philosophers, and so 
 disturbing. You never seem to fear either the gods or 
 even men, and least of all, what is most terrible to the 
 prudent, to wit, what it has been customary to say. And 
 you always throw out hints of something new and un-
 
 xv GODS AND PRIESTS 347 
 
 heard of to come, that might at any time break in upon 
 our life and transform it beyond all recognition. And 
 yet you will never tell us what you think it is. 
 
 A. So long as the unknown God is undesired, 
 he is unknowable. Moreover, all you ever want to 
 hear is a pleasing tale. You Greeks are children, 
 like the others. You have need of priests, because 
 you will not trust the gods within you ; and yet 
 you will not truly believe even your priests. You only 
 want them to sing you lullabies about the gods ; and 
 whatever saves you thought and trouble you are willing 
 to believe after a fashion. And whether what we 
 chant is true and certain, you care not, provided it is 
 comforting, nor what our comforting is worth. And to 
 please you, we humour you, and tell you what you wish 
 to hear, even though we know that you had much better 
 test the hidden oracle, and seek the lonely way that leads 
 to the unknown God each soul that dares and perseveres. 
 
 P. I do believe you are right, Antimorus. And so 
 too are the others. For these things are too high for 
 mortals. I too am afraid ! I would rather trust priests 
 and rites and sacrifices and expiations and sacred stories, 
 nay chants and charms and amulets, than my naked self. 
 Philosophy becomes too terrible when it bids us do such 
 things. 
 
 A. You have not yet learnt that the most efficacious 
 of all expiations is to sacrifice your fears, and you fear 
 philosophy so soon as it ceases to be idle babble, and 
 requires you to think things out and act on your con- 
 victions ! But never mind, my poor boy, I will comfort 
 you with a most sacred story, which was told me by 
 the oldest of the priests of Ra at Thebes in Egypt, 
 a man so old and holy that he had forgotten even his 
 own name, and become one with his god, and answered 
 to the name of Ra. 
 
 P. I should dearly love to hear it. 
 
 A. You have heard, perhaps, that in truth, not 
 Uranus, but Eros was the oldest of the gods ?
 
 348 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xv 
 
 P. I have heard it as a secret doctrine. 
 
 A. Consider it then to be true, if you are willing to 
 believe the divine genealogies of my Egyptian priest. 
 
 P. I will. But what of the rest of the genealogy ? 
 
 A. Many things he said which are contrary to received 
 opinions, especially holding it to be false that older 
 things are better, and the gods happier than mortals. 
 For, he said, the divinest of all things is to endure suffering 
 without dying. And the gods in the beginning suffered 
 ineffably in their endeavours to make a cosmos. And 
 most of all Eros, seeing that he was very eager, and yet 
 blind, and encompassed about with darkness. And in 
 darkness he would have remained, had he not encountered 
 Pistis, 1 whose nature it is to bring light and brightness 
 wherever she is. And she enlightened Eros, so that he 
 was enabled to see, and consorting with him, she bare 
 Praxis, 2 who again, when she was of age, mingled with 
 Chaos. And there were born to Praxis and Chaos two 
 sons, Pragma and Prometheus, whereof the former was 
 very large, being a giant of a violent and intractable 
 disposition. And he often threatened to swallow up 
 both his mother and the other gods. Wherefore 
 Prometheus, who was crafty, slew him by stealth, and 
 his mother cut him up into many things, 3 and thus made 
 the world we now inhabit. But Eros was wroth with 
 Prometheus, and chained him for ever to the collar-bone 
 of the brother he had slain which is Mount Caucasus. 
 
 P. I suppose it is this story which Agathon means 
 when he says : 
 
 "Action of old discriminated all things." 4 
 
 A. Doubtless : but the time has come for my even- 
 ing sacrifice to Dionysus. So run away, Philonous, and 
 get yourself elected a general by the Mendeans. There 
 may not be a war after all, and even if there is, it is 
 easier to face the risk of death than of eternal life. 
 
 1 Faith. 2 Action. :i T 
 
 * n/>ats jrdXcu StetXe -K&.VTO. Trpdy/j.a.Ta.
 
 XVI 
 FAITH, REASON, AND RELIGION 1 
 
 ARGUMENT 
 
 I. The problem of religious philosophy that of the relations of 'faith' and 
 ' reason. ' The rationalistic criticism of religion, and the pragmatic 
 criticism of rationalism. 2. Faith as a specifically religious principle. 
 Its revival as a philosophic principle, and a presupposition of reason. 
 3. The Will-to-believe and to disbelieve. Humanism as a recognition 
 of actual mental process. 4. The analysis of 'reason.' 5. Thought 
 dependent on postulation, i.e. 'faith.' 6. The definition of 'faith.' 
 7. The pragmatic testing of faith and knowledge. 8. The incom- 
 pleteness of this process. 9. The analogy of scientific and religious 
 faith. 10. Their differences. II. Five spurious conceptions of 
 faith. 12. The possibility of verifying religious postulates. 13. 
 Humanist conclusions as to the philosophy of religion. The pragmatic 
 character of Christianity obscured by an intellectualist theology. 
 
 I. THE nature of religion, and the extent to which 
 what is vaguely and ambiguously called ' faith,' and what 
 is (quite as vaguely and ambiguously) called ' reason ' 
 enter into it, rank high among the problems of perennial 
 human interest in part, perhaps, because it seems im- 
 possible to arrive at any settlement which will appear 
 equally cogent and satisfactory to all human minds. Of 
 late, however, the old controversies have been rekindled 
 into the liveliest incandescence, in consequence of two 
 purely philosophic developments. 
 
 On the one hand, Absolutism, despite its long coquet- 
 tings with theology, has revealed itself as fundamentally 
 hostile to popular religion (see Essay xii.). In works like 
 
 1 This essay appeared in substance in the Hibbert Journal for January 1906. 
 It has been retouched in a few places to fit it more effectively for its place in 
 this volume. 
 
 349
 
 350 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvi 
 
 Mr. Bradley's Appearance and Reality, and still more 
 formidably, because more lucidly and simply, in Dr. 
 McTaggart's Some Dogmas of Religion, it has reduced 
 Christian Theism to what seems a position of grotesque 
 absurdity by an incisive criticism from which there is no 
 escape so long as its victim accepts the rationalistic tests 
 and conceptions of truth and proof with which it operates. 
 
 On the other hand, it has simultaneously happened 
 that just these tests and conceptions have been impugned, 
 and to a large extent condemned, by the pragmatic 
 movement in philosophy. It threatens to deprive Ration- 
 alism * of its favourite weapons just as it is about to drive 
 them home. It promises to lead to a far juster and more 
 sympathetic, because more psychological, appreciation of 
 the postulates of the religious consciousness, and to 
 render possible an unprejudiced consideration of the 
 non-' rational ' and non-rationalistic evidence on which 
 religion has all along relied. And so rationalistic 
 philosophers have at once taken alarm. 
 
 Hence, though this movement appears to affect immedi- 
 ately nothing but technicalities of the theory of knowledge, 
 it has been extensively taken as an attempt at a revolution- 
 ary reversal of the relations of Faith and Reason. The new 
 philosophy was promptly accused of aiming at the oppres- 
 sion, nay, at the subversion, of Reason, of paving the way 
 to the vilest obscurantism and the grossest superstition with 
 the ruins of the edifice of truth which its scepticism had 
 exploded ; in short, of attempting to base Religion on 
 the quicksands of irrationality. But, it was urged, the 
 dangerous expedients which are used recoil upon their 
 authors: the appeal to the will -to -believe ends by 
 sanctioning the arbitrary adoption of any belief any one 
 may chance to fancy, and thus destroys all objectivity 
 in religious systems ; religious sentiment is freed from the 
 repressive regime of a rigid rationalism only to be ignobly 
 dissipated in excesses of subjective licence. 
 
 1 I am using the term strictly as = ' a belief in the all-sufficiency of reason,' 
 and not in its popular sense as = ' criticism of religion. ' A rationalist in the 
 strict sense may, of course, be religious, and per contra a voluntarist, or a 
 sensationalist, may be a rationalist in the popular sense.
 
 xvi FAITH, REASON, AND RELIGION 351 
 
 Now, the first thing that strikes one about such 
 denunciations is their premature violence. The opponents 
 of the new Humanism should have met it on the logical, 
 and still more on the psychological, ground whence its 
 challenge proceeded, before they hastened to extract from 
 it religious applications which had certainly not been 
 made, and possibly were not even intended, by its authors, 
 and which there is, as yet, hardly a sign, in this country 
 at least, that the spokesmen of the religious organisations 
 are willing to welcome. And until the leaders of the 
 churches show more distinct symptoms of interest, both 
 in the disputes of philosophers in general and in this 
 dispute in particular, it seems premature to anticipate 
 from this source the revolution which is decried in ad- 
 vance. Theologians, in general, have heard ' Wolf ! ' 
 cried too often by philosophers anxious to invoke against 
 their opponents more forcible arguments than those of 
 mere reason, they have found too often how treacherous 
 were the specious promises of philosophic support, they 
 are too much absorbed in historical and critical researches 
 and perplexities of their own to heed lightly outcries of 
 this sort. 
 
 The controversy, then, has not yet descended from the 
 study into the market-place, and it seems still time to 
 attempt to estimate philosophically the real bearing of 
 Humanism on the religious problem, and to define the 
 functions which it actually assigns to reason and to faith. 
 It may reasonably be anticipated that the results of the 
 inquiry will be found to justify neither the hopes of those 
 who expect an explicit endorsement of any sectarian 
 form of religion (if such there are), nor the fears of those 
 who dread a systematic demolition of the reason. 
 
 2. Perhaps a brief historic retrospect will form the 
 best approach to the points at issue. Thoughtful 
 theologians have always perceived, what their rationalistic 
 critics have blindly ignored, viz. that religious truths are 
 not, like mathematical, such as directly and universally to 
 impose themselves on all minds. They have seen, that 
 is, that the religious attitude essentially implies the
 
 352 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvi 
 
 addition of what was called ' faith ' for its proper apprecia- 
 tion. This ' faith,' moreover, was conceived as an in- 
 tensely personal act, as an emotional reaction of a man's 
 whole nature upon a vital issue. It followed that it 
 was unreasonable, on the part of rationalists, to ignore 
 this specific character of religious truth or to treat it as 
 irrational. And it was this perception which prompted 
 a Pascal to array the ' reasons of the heart ' against 
 the (abstract) reasons of ' the head,' a Newman to compile 
 his Grammar of Assent, and a Ritschl to spurn the 
 pseudo-demonstrations of (a Hegelian) philosophy, and 
 to construct an impregnable citadel for the religious 
 sentiment in the exalted sphere of ' judgments of value.' 
 
 Accordingly, when that great student of the human 
 soul, William James, proclaimed the right of inclining 
 the nicely-weighted equipoise of intellectual argumentation 
 by throwing into the scales a will-to-believe whichever 
 of the alternatives seemed most consonant with our 
 emotional nature, it might well have seemed that he was 
 merely reviving and re-wording a familiar theological 
 expedient which philosophy had long ago discredited as 
 the last desperate resource of an expiring religious 
 instinct. 
 
 It turned out, however, that there was an important 
 novelty in the doctrine as revived. It reappeared as a 
 philosophic doctrine, firmly resting on psychological and 
 epistemological considerations which were, intrinsically, 
 quite independent of its religious applications, and took 
 the field quite prepared to conduct, on purely philosophic 
 grounds, a vigorous campaign against the intellectualist 
 prejudices of the current rationalism. In other words, by 
 conceiving the function of ' faith ' as an example of 
 a general principle, the religious applications, through 
 which the principle had first been noticed and tested, 
 were rendered derivative illustrations of a far-reaching 
 philosophic view. It ceased, therefore, to be necessary to 
 oppose the reasons of the heart to those of the head ; it 
 could be maintained that no ' reasons ' could be ex- 
 cogitated by an anaemic brain to which no heart supplied
 
 xvi FAITH, REASON, AND RELIGION 353 
 
 the life-blood ; it could be denied that the operations of 
 the ' illative sense ' and the sphere of value-judgments 
 were restricted to religious truths. The new philosophy, 
 moreover, as we have seen, 1 has been taught by the 
 sceptical results to which the old abstractions led, that 
 knowledge cannot be depersonalised, and that the full 
 concreteness of personal interest is indispensable for the 
 attainment of truth. Hence the theologians' insistence on 
 the personal character of ' faith,' which on the old assump- 
 tions had seemed a logical absurdity, was completely vindi- 
 cated. And so the indications of emotional influence, and 
 the proofs of the ineradicability of personality, multiplied 
 throughout the realm of truth, until the apparently dispas- 
 sionate procedure of mathematics ceased to seem typical 
 and became a paradox. 2 Thus, throughout the ordinary 
 range of what mankind esteems as ' truth,' the function 
 of volition and selection, and the influence of values in 
 all recognition of validity and reality, have become too 
 clear to be ignored, and there has resulted the curious 
 consequence that, by the very process of working out the 
 claims of faith fairly to their logical conclusion, ' faith ' 
 has ceased to be an adversary of and a substitute for 
 'reason,' and become an essential ingredient in its 
 constitution. Reason, therefore, is incapacitated from 
 systematically contesting the validity of faith, because 
 faith is proved to be essential to its own validity. 
 
 3. The sweeping nature of this change was at first 
 obscured by the accident that the new philosophy was 
 first applied in a paper written for a theological audience, 
 and promulgated as a ' Will-to-believe,' without sufficient 
 emphasis on the corresponding attitudes of a Will-to- 
 disbelieve or to play with beliefs, or to suspend belief, or 
 to allow belief to be imposed by what had already been 
 
 1 Cp. Essays ii. , iii. , and vi. 
 
 2 Of course, the discrepant character of mathematical truth as ' self-evident ' 
 and ' independent ' of our arbitrament, is only apparent. It arises mainly from 
 the ease with which its fundamental postulates are made and rendered familiar, 
 from the general agreement about their sphere of application, from the complete 
 success of their practical working, and from the obvious coherence of truths 
 which are tested in whole systems rather than individually. Cp. Humanism, 
 pp. 91, 92; and Personal Idealism, pp. 111-17, and 70 . 
 
 2 A
 
 354 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvi 
 
 accepted as external ' fact.' Thus it was the special 
 character of the first application that led the less dis- 
 cerning to overlook the general character of the principle 
 and the universal scope of the method. But in itself the 
 new doctrine is perfectly general and impartial in its 
 application to all cognitive states. It proceeds essentially 
 from simple observations that, on the one hand, pure 
 cognition is not an actual process in any human mind, 
 but at best a fiction for theoretic purposes (of the most 
 dubious character) ; while, on the other, all actual mental 
 procedure is thoroughly personal and permeated through 
 and through with purposes and aims and feelings and 
 emotions and decisions and selections, even in such cases 
 where these features are ostensibly abstracted from. 
 
 Fundamentally, therefore, the new Humanism is 
 nothing but an attempt to dismiss from psychology 
 fictions which have been allowed to engender a brood of 
 logical monsters, which in their turn have tyrannised 
 over human life, and driven back the healthy human 
 instinct to experiment, and thereby to know, from what 
 they perniciously proclaimed forbidden ground. And as 
 this fundamental position has never directly been im- 
 pugned, does it not become an easy and inevitable 
 inference, that the attitude of the denier, the doubter, and 
 the believer cannot be discriminated by the ' pureness ' of 
 the thought, by the test of the presence or absence of 
 emotion ? If no thought is ever ' pure,' if it is neither 
 4 self-evident ' nor true in point of fact that the more 
 nearly ' pure ' it is the better it is for all purposes, if 
 emotion, volition, interest, and bias impartially accompany 
 all cognitive procedures, is it not preposterous to treat 
 the concrete nature of the mind, the personal interests 
 which give an impulse to knowledge and a zest to life, 
 merely as impediments in the search for truth ? What 
 emotions, etc., must be repressed, to what extent, for 
 what purposes, depends entirely on the character of the 
 particular inquiry and of the particular inquirer. Thus, 
 the anger which leaves one man speechless will add 
 eloquence and effect to the speeches of another ; and the
 
 xvi FAITH, REASON, AND RELIGION 355 
 
 desire to prove a conclusion, which impairs the judgment 
 of one, will stimulate another to the most ingenious 
 experiments and the most laborious efforts. It is useless, 
 therefore, to generalise at random about the cognitive 
 effect of these psychological influences. They must be 
 admitted in principle, and evaluated in detail. It must 
 surely be futile to protest against the normal functioning 
 of the mind ; it must be rational to recognise influences 
 which affect us, whether we approve of them or not. 
 For how can they be estimated and treated rationally, 
 unless we consent to recognise their potency ? Has it 
 not then become necessary to examine, patiently and in 
 detail, how precisely these forces act ; how, when, and to 
 what extent their influence may be helpful or adverse, 
 how they may be strengthened and guided and guarded 
 or controlled and disciplined ? And is it not a strange 
 irony that impels a purblind rationalism to denounce as 
 irrational so reasonable an undertaking ? 
 
 4. Let us therefore set aside such protests, and pro- 
 ceed with our inquiry. Like most terms when scrutinised, 
 neither reason nor faith are conceived with sufficient 
 precision for our scientific purpose, and it would be hard 
 to say which of them had been misused in a more flagrant 
 or question-begging way. Reason to the rationalist has 
 become a sort of verbal fetish, hedged round with 
 emotional taboos, which exempt it from all rational 
 criticism. It is credited with supra-mundane powers of 
 cognition a priori ; it is sacrosanct itself ; and when its 
 protecting aegis is cast over any errors or absurdities, it 
 becomes blasphemy and ' scepticism ' to ask for their 
 credentials. Hence it is only with the utmost trepidation 
 that we can dare to ask What, after all, does reason 
 mean in actual life? When, however, we ask this 
 question, and ponder on the answer, we shall not be 
 slow to discover that, in the first place, reason is not 
 reasoning. Reasoning may, of course, enter into the 
 ' rational ' act, but it is by no means indispensable, and 
 even when it does occur, it only forms a small part of 
 the total process. Ordinarily instinct, impulse, and habit
 
 356 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvi 
 
 account for by far the greater number of our ' rational ' 
 acts. On the other hand, it is not rational to ' reason ' 
 three hours a day about the clothes one is going to put 
 on ; the reasoning of the victims of such ' abulia,' so far 
 from being taken as a mark of superior rationality, is 
 taken as a symptom of a loss of reason. 
 
 In the next place, 'reason ' is not a faculty. It stands 
 for a group of habits which men (and to some extent 
 some animals) have acquired, and which we find extremely 
 useful, nay necessary, for the successful carrying on of 
 life. Among these habits may be mentioned that of 
 inhibiting reaction upon stimulation, i.e. of checking our 
 natural and instinctive tendencies to act, until we have 
 reflected what precisely it is we are dealing with. To 
 determine this latter point, we have developed the habit 
 of analysis, i.e. of breaking up the confused complex of 
 presentations into ' things ' and their ' attributes,' which 
 are referred to and ' identified ' with former similar ex- 
 periences, and expressed in judgments as to what the 
 situation ' really is.' This enables us to rearrange the 
 presented connexions of attributions, and the whole 
 reasoning process finds its natural issue and test in an 
 action which modifies and beneficially innovates upon the 
 original habit of reaction. 
 
 5- In other words, thinking or judging is one of the 
 habits that make up man's ' reason,' and thinking or 
 judging is a highly artificial and arbitrary manipulation 
 of experience. The ' rational ' connexion of events and 
 the ' rational ' interpretation of experiences are very far 
 removed from our immediate data, and are arrived at only 
 by complicated processes of thought. Now, thinking 
 involves essentially the use of concepts, and depends 
 ultimately upon a number of principles (identity, contra- 
 diction, etc.), which have long been regarded as funda- 
 mental ' axioms,' but which reveal themselves as postu- 
 lates to a voluntarist theory of knowledge which tries to 
 understand them. 
 
 Now, a postulate is not a self-evident ' necessary ' truth 
 it ceases to be necessary so soon as the purpose which
 
 xv! FAITH, REASON, AND RELIGION 357 
 
 called it into being is renounced. Neither is it a passively 
 received imprint of experience. It is an assumption, 
 which no doubt experience has suggested to an actively 
 inquiring mind, but which is not, and cannot be, proved 
 until after it has been assumed, and is often assumed 
 because we desire it, in the teeth of nearly all the apparent 
 ' facts.' It is therefore a product of our volitional activity, 
 and initially its validity is uncertain. It is established 
 ex post facto by the experience of its practical success. In 
 other words, it is validated in just the same way as are 
 the other habits that make up our ' reason.' In so far as, 
 therefore, reasoning rests on postulates, and postulates are 
 unproved and open to doubt at the outset, our attitude in 
 adhering to them implies ' faith,' i.e. a belief in a ' verifica- 
 tion ' yet to come. Must we not say, then, that at the 
 very roots of ' reason ' we must recognise an element of 
 ' faith ' ? And similarly it would seem that as the funda- 
 mental truths of the sciences are attained in the same 
 way, they all must presuppose faith, in a twofold manner 
 (i) as making use of reasoning, and (2) as resting upon 
 the specific postulates of each science. 
 
 6. That the principle of faith is commonly conceived 
 very variably and with great vagueness has already been 
 admitted, though its critics seem unfairly to incline 
 towards the schoolboy's definition that it is ' believing a 
 thing when you know it's not true.' Even this definition 
 would not be wholly indefensible, if it were only written 
 ' believing when you know it's not true,' and if thereby 
 proper attention were drawn to the fact that a belief 
 sustained by faith still stands in need of verification to 
 become fully ' true.' On the whole, however, it would 
 seem preferable to define it as the mental attitude which, 
 for purposes of action, is willing to take upon trust 
 valuable and desirable beliefs, before they have been proved 
 ' true,' but in the hope that this attitude may promote 
 their verification. About this definition it is to be noted 
 (i) that it renders faith pre-eminently an attitude of will, 
 an affair of the whole personality and not of the (abstract) 
 intellect ; (2) that it is expressly concerned with values,
 
 358 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvi 
 
 and that the worthless and unimportant is not fitted to 
 evoke our faith ; (3) that it involves risk, real stakes, and 
 serious dangers, and is emphatically not a game that can 
 be played in a casual and half-hearted way ; (4) that a 
 reference to verification is essential to it, and that there- 
 fore it is as little to be identified with, as to be divorced 
 from, knowledge. Now, verification must come about by 
 the results of its practical working, by presuming the 
 ' truth ' of our faith and by acting on its postulates ; 
 whence it would appear that those theologians were right 
 who contended that real faith must justify itself by works. 
 On the other hand, we might anticipate that spurious 
 forms of faith would fall short in one or more of these 
 respects, and so account for the confusion into which the 
 subject has drifted. 
 
 7. Such, then, being the nature of the faith which is 
 said to envelop and sustain reason, and to engender 
 knowledge, can it be fairly charged with forming a 
 principle of unbridled individualism which abrogates all 
 distinctions between subjective fancy and objective reality ? 
 Nothing surely could be further from the truth. At first, 
 no doubt, it looks as though to recognise the psychological 
 necessity and logical value of the will to believe opened 
 the door to a limitless host of individual postulates. But 
 the freedom to believe what we will is so checked by the 
 consciousness of the responsibility and risk attaching to 
 our choice, that this part of the doctrine becomes little 
 more than a device for securing an open field and a fair 
 trial to every relevant possibility. Furthermore, all such 
 subjective preferences have to submit to a severe sifting 
 in consequence of the requirement that our postulates 
 must stand the test of practical working, before their 
 claim to truth can be admitted. Whatever our faith, it 
 must be confirmed by works, and so prove itself to be 
 objectively valid. 
 
 Alike, therefore, whether it is applied to knowledge or 
 to faith, the pragmatic test is a severe one. It allows, 
 indeed, the widest liberty to experiment : but it inexorably 
 judges such experiments by the value of their actual
 
 xvi FAITH, REASON, AND RELIGION 359 
 
 achievements, and sternly withholds its sanction from 
 insincere phrasemongering, from ineffectual aspiration, 
 from unworkable conceptions, from verbal quibblings and 
 dead formulas. Throughout the intellectual world the 
 pedantry of the past has heaped up so much rubbish 
 which the application of this pragmatic test would clear 
 away, that it is not always easy to repress a suspicion 
 that much of the philosophic alarm at the consequences 
 of applying our test may have been inspired, more or 
 less unconsciously, by an unavowed dread lest it should 
 insist on pensioning off some of the more effete veterans 
 among philosophic traditions. 
 
 For really the pragmatic value of much that passes for 
 philosophy is by no means easy to discern. Metaphysical 
 systems, for instance, hardly ever seem to possess more 
 than individual value. They satisfy their inventors, and 
 afford congenial occupation to their critics. But they 
 have hitherto shown no capacity to achieve a more general 
 validity or to intervene effectively in the conduct of life. 
 Again, it is inevitable that the pragmatic inquiry as to 
 what difference their truth or falsehood can be supposed 
 to make should be raised concerning many metaphysical 
 propositions, such as that the universe is ' one ' or ' perfect,' 
 or that truth is ' eternal,' or that ' substance ' is immutable, 
 which, in so far as they are not taken as merely verbal 
 (and this is all they usually profess to be when criticised), 
 seem only very distantly and doubtfully connected with 
 life. Their prestige, therefore, is seriously imperilled. 
 
 Now, similar dogmas abound in religion, and are not 
 wholly absent even from the sciences. But their occur- 
 rence is outbalanced by that of assertions which carry 
 practical consequences in the most direct and vital way. 
 Hence the pragmatic importance and value of science and 
 religion can hardly be contested. And as tested by their 
 material results in the one case and by their spiritual 
 results in the other, they both indisputably ' work.' It is 
 inevitable, therefore, that we should regard them as resting 
 on conceptions which are broadly ' true,' or ' true ' at all 
 events until superseded by something truer. They have
 
 360 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvi 
 
 nothing, consequently, to fear from our method of criticism: 
 if anything, its application may be expected to invigorate 
 their pursuit, and to relieve them of the burden of non- 
 functional superfluities with which an officious formalism 
 has encumbered them. 
 
 Selection, then, of the valuable among a plurality of 
 alternatives is essential to the life and progress of religious, 
 as of secular, truth. Truth is not merely ' what each man 
 troweth,' but (in its fulness) also what has stood its tests 
 and justified our trust. 
 
 8. But experience would seem to show that (at least 
 while the winnowing process is still going on) the results 
 of this testing are not so decisive as to eliminate all the 
 competitors but one. Over an extensive range of subjects 
 the most various opinions appear tenable, and are success- 
 fully maintained. But why should this astonish us ? 
 For (i) what right have we to expect filial results from 
 an incomplete process ? (2) What right have we to assume 
 that even ultimate ' truth ' must be one and the same 
 for all ? The assumption is no doubt convenient, and in 
 a rough and ready way it works ; but does it do full 
 justice to the variety of men and things ? Is the ' same- 
 ness ' we assume ever really more than agreement for 
 practical purposes, and do we ever really crave for more 
 than this ? And provided we achieve this, why should 
 not the ' truth,' too, prove more subtly flexible, and 
 adjust itself to the differences of individual experience, 
 and result in an agreement to differ and to respect our 
 various idiosyncrasies? (3) It is difficult to see why a 
 phenomenon, which is common in the sciences and normal 
 in philosophy, without exciting indignation, should be 
 regarded as inadmissible in the religious sphere. It is a 
 normal feature in the progress of a science that its ' facts ' 
 should be established by engendering a multitude of 
 interpretations, none of which are capable, usually, of 
 covering them completely, and none so clearly ' false ' as 
 to be dismissible without a qualm. Why, then, should 
 we be alarmed to find that the growth of religious truth 
 proceeds with an analogous exuberance ? (4) Anyhow,
 
 xvi FAITH, REASON, AND RELIGION 361 
 
 whether we like or dislike the human habit of entertain- 
 ing divergent beliefs, the plurality of the opinions which 
 are held to be ' true ' is an important fact, and forms one 
 of the data which no adequate theory of knowledge can 
 afford to overlook. 
 
 9. It is useless, therefore, to close our eyes to the 
 fact that faith is essentially a personal affair, an adventure, 
 if you please, which originates in individual options, in 
 choices on which men set their hearts and stake their 
 lives. If these assumptions prosper, and if so by faith we 
 live, then it may come about that by faith we may also 
 know. For it is the essential basis of the cognitive 
 procedure in science no less than in religion that we must 
 start from assumptions which we have not proved, which 
 we cannot prove, and which can only be ' verified ' after 
 we have trusted them and pledged ourselves to look upon 
 the facts with eyes which our beliefs have fortunately 
 biased. Of this procedure the belief in a causal con- 
 nexion of events, the belief which all natural science pre- 
 supposes and works on, is perhaps the simplest example. 
 For no evidence will go to prove it in the least degree 
 until the belief has boldly been assumed. Moreover, as 
 we have argued (in Essays ii., iii., and vi.), to abstract from 
 the personal side of knowing is really impossible. Science 
 also, properly understood, does not depersonalise herself. 
 She too takes risks and ventures herself on postulates, 
 hypotheses, and analogies, which seem wild, until they 
 are tamed to our service and confirmed in their allegiance. 
 She too must end by saying Credo ut intelligam. And 
 she does this because she must. For, as Prof. Dewey 
 has admirably shown, 1 all values and meanings rest upon 
 beliefs, and " we cannot preserve significance and decline 
 the personal attitude in which it is inscribed and operative." 
 And the failure of intellectualist philosophy to justify 
 science and to understand ' how knowledge is possible,' we 
 have seen to be merely the involuntary consequence of its 
 mistaken refusal to admit the reality and necessity of faith. 
 
 1 In his important paper on ' Beliefs and Realities ' in the Phil. Rev. xv. p. 
 113, foil.
 
 362 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvi 
 
 I find it hard, therefore, to understand why a religious 
 assumption, such as, e.g. the existence of a ' God,' should 
 require a different and austerer mode of proof, or why the 
 theologian should be debarred from a procedure which is 
 always reputable, and sometimes heroic, in a man of 
 science. 
 
 We start, then, always from the postulates of faith, 
 and transmute them, slowly, into the axioms of reason. 
 The presuppositions of scientific knowledge and religious 
 faith are the same. So, too, is the mode of verification 
 by experience. The assumptions which work, i.e. which 
 approve themselves by ministering to human interests, 
 purposes, and objects of desire, are ' verified ' and accepted 
 as ' true.' So far there is no difference. But we now 
 come to the most difficult part of our inquiry, viz., that of 
 applying our general doctrine to the religious sphere, and 
 of accounting for the different complexion of science and 
 religion. For that there exists a marked difference here 
 will hardly be denied, nor that it (if anything) will account 
 for the current antithesis of faith and reason. It must be, 
 in other words, a difference in the treatment of the same 
 principles which produces the difference in the results. 
 
 10. Now, it is fairly easy to see that certain differ- 
 ences in treatment are necessarily conditioned by differ- 
 ences in the subjects in which the verification of our 
 postulates takes place. In ordinary life we deal directly 
 with an ' external world ' perceived through the senses ; in 
 science with the same a little less directly : in either case 
 our hypotheses appeal to some overt, visible, and palpable 
 fact, by the observation of which they are adequately 
 verified. But the data of the religious consciousness are 
 mainly experiences of a more inward, spiritual, personal 
 sort, and it is obvious that they can hardly receive the same 
 sort of verification. The religious postulates can hardly 
 be verified by a direct appeal to sense, we think ; and 
 even if theophanies occurred, they would not nowadays 
 be regarded as adequate proofs of the existence of 
 God. 
 
 But this difference at once gives rise to a difficulty.
 
 xvi FAITH, REASON, AND RELIGION 363 
 
 The opinion of the great majority of mankind is still so 
 instinctively averse from introspection, that it is not yet 
 willing to treat the psychical facts of inward experience 
 as facts .just as rightfully and in as real a way as the 
 observations of the senses. It does not recognise the 
 reality and power of beliefs. It does not see that " beliefs 
 are themselves real without discount," " as metaphysically 
 real as anything else can ever be," and that " belief, sheer, 
 direct, unmitigated, personal belief," can act on reality 
 " by modifying and shaping the reality of other real 
 things." 1 And because it has not understood the reality 
 of beliefs as integral constituents of the world of human 
 experience, and their potency as the motive forces which 
 transform it, it has disabled itself from really understand- 
 ing our world. 
 
 But it has disabled itself more seriously from under- 
 standing the dynamics of the religious consciousness. 
 It rules out as irrelevant a large and essential part of the 
 evidence on which the religious consciousness has every- 
 where instinctively relied. It hesitates to admit the his- 
 toric testimony to the ' truth ' of a religious synthesis which 
 comes from the experience of its working through the 
 ages, even though it may not, like the old rationalism, 
 dismiss it outright as unworthy of consideration. It 
 suspects or disallows many of the verifications to 
 which the religious consciousness appeals. And this is 
 manifestly quite unfair. The psychological evidence is 
 relevant, because in the end there is a psychological side 
 to all evidence, which has been overlooked. The historical 
 appeal is relevant, because in the end all evidence is 
 historical, and the truth of science also rests on the record 
 of its services. The controversy, therefore, about the 
 logical value of religious experience will have henceforth 
 to be conducted with considerably expanded notions of 
 what evidence is relevant. Nor must we be more severe 
 on religion than on science. But it is plain that we are. 
 We ought not to be more suspicious of the religious than of 
 the many scientific theories which are not capable of direct 
 
 1 Prof. Dewey in I.e. pp. 127, 124.
 
 364 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvi 
 
 verification by sense -perception. But even though the 
 ether, e.g., is an assumption which no perception can ever 
 verify, it is yet, in scientific theory, rendered so continuous 
 with what is capable of perceptual verification that the 
 discrepancy is hardly noticed. The system of religious 
 truths is much less closely knit ; the connexion of the 
 postulates with our spiritual needs and their fulfilling 
 experiences is much less obvious ; the methods and 
 possibilities of spiritual experiment are much less clearly 
 ascertained. 
 
 And the reason, no doubt, partly is that in the religious 
 sphere the conceptions for which the support of faith is 
 invoked are much more vaguely outlined. It would be a 
 matter of no slight difficulty to define the conception of 
 religion itself, so as to include everything that was 
 essential, and to exclude everything that was not. And 
 it would not be hard to show that at the very core of the 
 religious sentiment there linger survivals of the fears and 
 terrors with which primitive man was inspired by the 
 spectacle of an uncomprehended universe. 
 
 Again, consider so central a conception of religion as, 
 e.g. ' God.' It is so vaguely and ambiguously conceived 
 that within the same religion, nay, within the same Church, 
 the word may stand for anything, from the cosmic 
 principle of the most vaporous pantheism to a near 
 neighbour of the most anthropomorphic polytheism. 
 And it is obvious that while this is so, no completely 
 coherent or ' rational ' account can be given of a term 
 whose meanings extend over almost the whole gamut of 
 philosophic possibilities. But it is also obvious that there 
 is no intrinsic reason for this state of things, and that 
 theologians could, if they wished, assign one sufficiently 
 definite meaning to the word, and then devise other terms 
 as vehicles for the other meanings. It may be noted, as 
 a happy foretaste of such a more reasonable procedure, 
 that already philosophers of various schools are beginning 
 to distinguish between the conceptions of ' God ' and of 
 ' the Absolute,' though it is clear to me that the latter 
 ' conception ' is still too vague and will in its turn have
 
 xvi FAITH, REASON, AND RELIGION 365 
 
 to be either abolished or relegated to a merely honorary 
 position. 
 
 11. It must be admitted, thirdly, that a widespread 
 distrust of faith has been, not unnaturally, provoked by 
 the extensive misuse of the principle in its religious 
 signification. Faith has become the generic term for 
 whatever religious phenomena co-existed with an absence 
 of knowledge. Under this heading we may notice 
 the following spurious forms of faith : ( I ) Faith may 
 become a euphemism for unwillingness to think, or, at 
 any rate, for absence of thought. In this sense faith is 
 the favourite offspring of intellectual indolence. It is 
 chiefly cherished as the source of a comfortable feeling 
 that everything is all right, and that we need not trouble 
 our heads about it further. If we 'have faith' of this 
 kind, no further exertion is needed to sustain our spiritual 
 life ; it is the easiest and cheapest way of limiting and 
 shutting off the spiritual perspective. (2) It is not un- 
 common to prefer faith to knowledge because of its 
 uncertainty. The certainty about matters of knowledge 
 is cold and cramping : the possibilities of faith are 
 gloriously elastic. (3) Our fears for the future, our 
 cowardly shrinkings from the responsibilities and labours 
 of too great a destiny, nay, our very despair of knowledge 
 itself, may all assume the garb of faith, and masquerade 
 as such. (4) ' Faith ' may mean merely a disingenuous 
 disavowal of a failure to know, enabling us to retain 
 dishonestly what we have not known (or sought) to gain 
 by valid means. To all these spurious forms of faith, of 
 course, our Humanism can furnish no support, though it 
 is alert to note the important part they play (and 
 especially the first) throughout our mental life. 
 
 The fifth form of faith is not so much fraudulent as 
 incomplete ; its fallacy consists in allowing itself to be 
 stopped short of works, and to renounce the search 
 for verification. This is the special temptation of the 
 robuster forms of faith : if our faith is very strong it 
 produces an assurance to which, psychologically, no more 
 could be added. Why, then, demand knowledge as
 
 366 STUDIES IN HUMANISM X vi 
 
 well ? Does not this evince an unworthy distrust of faith 
 at the very time when faith has shown its power? To 
 which it may be replied that we also can and must 
 distinguish psychological assurance from logical proof, 
 even though the latter must induce the former, and the 
 former must lay claim to logical value as it grows more 
 nearly universal. The difference lies in the greater psycho- 
 logical communicability of the ' logical ' assurances and their 
 wider range of influence. At first sight emotional exhor- 
 tations (sermons, etc.) may seem to produce far intenser and 
 more assured beliefs than calmer reasonings. But they do 
 not appeal so widely nor last so well, and even though it 
 is hazardous to assume that ' logical ' cogency is universal, 1 
 it is certainly, on the whole, of greater pragmatic value. 
 
 Moreover, the motives of an unreasoning faith are 
 easily misread ; the faith which is strong enough to feel 
 no need of further proof is interpreted as too weak to 
 dare to aspire to it. And so a properly enlightened faith 
 should yield the strongest impetus to knowledge : the 
 stronger it feels itself to be, the more boldly and eagerly 
 should it seek, the more confidently should it anticipate, 
 the more probably should it attain, the verificatory 
 experiences that recompense its efforts. 
 
 12. It must be admitted for these reasons that the 
 mistaken uses of the principle of faith have retarded the 
 intellectual development of the religious view of life. It 
 has lagged so far behind the scientific in its formal 
 development that theologians might often with advantage 
 take lessons from the scientists in the proper use of faith. 
 But intrinsically the religious postulates are not in- 
 susceptible of verification, nor are religious ' evidences ' 
 incapable of standing the pragmatic test of truth. And 
 some verification in some respects many of these postulates 
 and much of this evidence may, of course, be fairly said 
 to have received. The question how far such verification 
 has gone is, in strict logic, the question as to the sphere 
 of religious ' truth.' The question as to how much further 
 verification should be carried, and with what prospects, is, 
 
 1 Cp. Essay xii. 8.
 
 xvi FAITH, REASON, AND RELIGION 367 
 
 strictly, the question of the sphere of the claims to truth 
 which rest as yet only upon faith. 
 
 1 3. To attempt to determine with scientific precision 
 what amount of established truth must be conceded to 
 religion as it stands, and what claims to truth should be 
 regarded as reasonable and valuable, and what not, is 
 a task which probably exceeds the powers, as it certainly 
 transcends the functions, of the mere philosopher. It would 
 in any case be fantastic, and probably illusory, to expect 
 any philosophy to deduce a priori and in so many words the 
 special doctrines of any religion which bases its claims 
 on historic revelation, and may, by its working, be able 
 to establish them. For what would be the need and the 
 use of revelation if it added nothing to what we 
 might have discovered for ourselves ? Moreover, in the 
 present condition of the religious evidence, any attempt 
 to evaluate it could only claim subjective and personal 
 interest. No two philosophers probably would evaluate 
 it just in the same way and with the same results. 
 
 It seems better, therefore, to make only very general 
 observations, and to draw only general conclusions. As 
 regards the general psychology of religion, it is clear 
 ( i ) that all our human methods of grasping and remould- 
 ing our experience are fundamentally one. (2) It is 
 clear that the religious attitude towards the facts, or 
 seeming facts, of life is in general valid. (3) It is clear 
 that this attitude has imperishable foundations in the 
 psychological nature of the human soul. (4) It is clear 
 that the pragmatic method is able to discriminate rigorously 
 between valid and invalid uses of faith, and offers sufficient 
 guarantees, on the one hand, against the wanderings of in- 
 dividual caprice, and, on the other, against the narrownesses 
 of a doctrinairism which would confine our postulates to a 
 single type those of the order falsely called ' mechanical.' * 
 
 . 1 Strictly interpreted, the word confirms the Humanist position which it is 
 so often used to exclude, For a ' mechanism ' is, properly, a device a means 
 to effect a purpose. And, in point of fact, it is as a means to ordering our 
 experience that ' mechanical ' conceptions are in use. To abstract from this 
 ideological function of all ' mechanism,' therefore, is to falsify the metaphor : a 
 device of nobody's, for no purpose, is a means that has no meaning.
 
 368 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvi 
 
 It can show that it is not ' faith ' to despise the work of 
 ' reason,' nor ' reason ' to decline the aid of ' faith ' ; and 
 that the field of experience is so wide and rough that 
 we need never be ashamed to import religion into its 
 cultivation in order to perfect the fruits of human life. 
 
 As regards the concrete religions themselves, it is clear 
 (i) that all religions may profit by the more sympathetic 
 attitude of Humanism towards the religious endowment 
 of human nature, and so towards their evidences and 
 methods. And this for them is a gain not to be despised. 
 For it invalidates the current rationalistic attacks, and 
 secures religions against the ordinary ' dialectical ' refuta- 
 tions. It gives them, moreover, a chance of proving their 
 truth in their own appropriate way. It is clear (2) that 
 all religions work pragmatically to a greater or less 
 extent. And this in spite of what seem, theoretically, 
 the greatest difficulties. The obvious explanation is that 
 these ' theoretical ' difficulties are really unimportant, 
 because they are either non-functional or pragmatically 
 equivalents, and that the really functional parts of all 
 religions will be found to be practically identical. It 
 follows (3) that all religions will be greatly benefited and 
 strengthened by getting rid of their non - functional 
 accretions and appendages. These constitute what may, 
 perhaps, without grave injustice be called the theological 
 side of religion ; and it nearly always does more harm 
 than good. For even where ' theological ' systems are 
 not merely products of professional pedantry, and their 
 ' rationality ' is not illusory, they absorb too much energy 
 better devoted to the more truly religious functions. The 
 most striking and familiar illustration of this is afforded 
 by our own Christianity, an essentially human and 
 thoroughly pragmatic religion, hampered throughout its 
 history, and at times almost strangled, by an alien 
 theology, based on the intellectualistic speculations of 
 Greek philosophers. Fortunately the Greek metaphysic 
 embodied (mainly) in the ' Athanasian ' creed is too 
 obscure to have ever been really functional ; its chief 
 mischief has always been to give theological support to
 
 xvi FAITH, REASON, AND RELIGION 369, 
 
 ' philosophic ' criticisms, which, by identifying God with 
 ' the One,' have aimed at eliminating the human element 
 from the Christian religion. 1 As against all such attempts, 
 however, we must hold fast to the principle that the 
 truest religion is that which issues in and fosters the 
 best life. 
 
 1 Cp. Prof. Dewey. I.e. , pp. 118-9. 
 
 2 B
 
 XVII 
 THE PROGRESS OF PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 1 
 
 ARGUMENT 
 
 I . The impotence of ' facts ' to resist interpretations prompted by bias. 
 The attempts to interpret ' psychical phenomena ' systematically. 2. 
 The work of Frederic Myers. 3. The conception of the Subliminal. 
 4. Myers's usej of it to transcend terrestrial existence. 5- The 
 argument of his Human Personality. 6. Current criticisms of it. 
 7. Replies to these. 8. The 'proof of immortality. 9. The 
 need for organised and endowed inquiry. 
 
 i. IT is a popular superstition that the advancement of 
 truth depends wholly on the discovery of facts, and that 
 the sciences have an insatiable appetite for facts and 
 consume them raw, like oysters ; whereas, really, the 
 actual procedure of the sciences is almost the exact 
 opposite of this. For the facts to be ' discovered ' there 
 is needed the eye to see them, and inasmuch as the most 
 important facts do not at first obtrude themselves, it has 
 usually to be a trained eye, and animated by a persevering 
 desire to know. Thus radium, for instance, with the 
 revolution in our whole conception of material nature 
 which it imports, after vainly bombarding an inattentive 
 universe for aeons, has only just succeeded in getting itself 
 discovered, and its wonderful activity appreciated and 
 ranked as ' fact.' 
 
 Again, the sciences are anything but heaps of crude 
 facts. They are coherent systems of the interpretation of 
 what they have taken as ' fact,' and they, very largely, make 
 their own facts as they proceed. Nor are ' facts ' facts for 
 
 1 This essay appeared in the Fortnightly Review for January 1905. It is 
 reprinted by the courtesy of the editor, with a few additions towards the end. 
 
 370
 
 xvn PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 371 
 
 a science until it has prepared them for assimilation, and can 
 swallow them without unduly straining its structure. In 
 other words, the sciences always select and ' cook ' their 
 facts. ' Fact ' is always ' faked ' to some extent. Hence 
 what is fact for one science, and from one point of view, is 
 not so for and from another, and may be irrelevant or a 
 fiction. If, therefore, rival theorists are determined to 
 occupy different points of view, and to stay there without 
 seeking common ground, they can controvert each other's 
 ' facts ' for ever. For their assertions concern what are 
 really different facts. So there is no way of settling the dis- 
 pute save by the good old method of letting both continue 
 until harvest-time, and finding which contributes more to 
 human welfare. Facts, in short, are far from being rigid, 
 irresistible, triumphant forces of nature ; rather they are 
 artificial products of our selection, of our interests, of our 
 hopes, of our fears. The shape they assume depends on 
 our point of view, their meaning on our purpose, their 
 value on the use we put them to ; nay, perhaps, their 
 very reality on our willingness to accept them. For if 
 there lurks within them some backbone of rigidity which 
 we cannot hope to alter, it is at least something to which 
 we have not yet penetrated, and which it would be fatal 
 rashly to assume, so long as the facts that face us are still 
 such that we want to alter them. 
 
 Now most of this has long been known to the 
 logicians, though for various reasons they have not yet 
 thought fit to make it clear to the uninitiated public. Nor 
 should I now dare to divulge these mysteries of the higher 
 logic were it possible to discuss the history of Psychical 
 Research without reference to the striking way in which 
 it illustrates this, our human, treatment of fact. This 
 history has been a tragedy (or tragi-comedy) with three 
 main actors, Fact, Prejudice or Bias, and Interpretation ; 
 and the greatest of these is Prejudice. For it has deter- 
 mined the interpretation, which in turn has selected the 
 facts. And thus the impotence of Fact has been most 
 clearly shown. For of facts bearing on the subject there 
 has always been abundance : mankind has always had
 
 372 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvn 
 
 experience of ghosts, trances, inspirations, dreams, fancies, 
 illusions, hallucinations, and the like. Some men have 
 always been ill-balanced, as others stolid, some responsive 
 to the unusual, as others indifferent. And divergent 
 prejudices have always been strong to emphasise what- 
 ever told in their favour, and to suppress whatever did 
 not. And so ' what the facts really were ' has manifestly 
 depended on the interpretations put upon them. 
 
 Of such interpretations the two extremes have always 
 been conspicuous. The one is often called the super- 
 stitious and the other the scientific. The names indeed 
 are bad, and beg the question : for any interpretation has 
 a right to be called scientific if it is coherent and works, 
 while any is superstitious which rests on mere prejudice 
 and can give no coherent account of itself. But still, the 
 interpretation which treats all psychic phenomena as 
 essentially pathological has hitherto been preferred by the 
 more scientific people, and has therefore been worked out 
 and applied more scientifically, while hardly anything has 
 been done to elicit the latent scientific value of its rival. 
 
 Since the formation of the Society for Psychical 
 Research, however, this situation has been changed, and 
 its work has begun to tell both on the facts and on their 
 interpretation. Not that as yet much progress has been 
 made in altering the mode in which the facts appear, i.e. 
 in obtaining control of them, in making them experi- 
 mental, or in eliciting new ones. But the quality of the 
 old facts has been greatly improved ; they are beginning 
 to be received with a more discriminating hospitality, to 
 be scrutinised with a more intelligent curiosity, to be 
 recorded with something like precision. And what, in 
 the light of their past history, is probably quite as im- 
 portant for what is the use of collecting facts which no 
 one understands ? much has been done to render their 
 interpretation more scientific, and it is upon this aspect 
 of the progress of Psychical Research that this essay is 
 intended to enlarge. 
 
 The better understanding of the traditional phenomena 
 has been greatly advanced by a series of notable books
 
 xvn PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 373 
 
 proceeding from the inner circles of the Society for 
 Psychical Research. First to be mentioned is Prof. 
 William James's profound and delightful Varieties of 
 Religious Experience, which has so signally shown the 
 psychological significance of much that from the patho- 
 logical point of view would seem sheer excesses of 
 spiritual morbidity. Secondly, Mr. Podmore's History of 
 Modern Spiritualism has shown how the ' facts ' look to 
 an intelligent, competent, but intensely sceptical, criticism. 
 And, lastly, the late Frederic Myers's Human Personality 
 has made a brilliant and suggestive effort to look at the 
 same material with a constructive purpose, and to put 
 upon it a coherent interpretation which will convert the 
 whilom playground of the will-o'-the-wisps of superstition 
 into a stable habitation of science. This enterprise seems 
 interesting and important enough to warrant an attempt 
 to estimate its outcome, now that the first rush of readers 
 and the first clash of critics has rolled by. 
 
 Myers's conception of the function of the Society 
 for Psychical Research differs widely from that of Mr. 
 Podmore : it is for him not an organisation for the harrying 
 of spiritual impostors, but a possible training school for 
 the future Columbus of an ultra-terrestrial world. And 
 so he is inspired by the spirit of research, nay, of 
 adventure, which is the prelude to discovery. 
 
 2. Perhaps, however, the first reflection he provokes is 
 one on the waywardness of genius, on its annoying habit 
 of not sticking to its last, and not allowing quiet folk to 
 drowse on in their old ancestral ways, but of making un- 
 expected incursions into fresh territories and dragging an 
 unwilling humanity in its train. For there can be little 
 doubt that Mr. Myers was a genius, though not at all of 
 the kind that would (antecedently) have been suspected 
 of attempting epoch-making contributions to science and 
 philosophy. His gifts were clearly of a literary and 
 poetic character, such as seemed to promise him a dis- 
 tinguished place and an agreeable career among the 
 English men of letters, but might, in the first instance, 
 well be thought to have unfitted him for the close
 
 374 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvn 
 
 reasoning and laborious experimenting that are needed by 
 the man of science. But a strong passion of his 
 emotional nature turned his powers in quite a different 
 direction. A wicked fairy (I suppose) afflicted him with 
 a well-nigh unique and unequalled longing to know, before 
 he trod it, the path all souls must travel ; and this desire 
 formed the tragedy and glory of his life. It is usual to 
 suppose that a passionate desire is a mere hindrance in 
 the search for truth ; but a more observant psychology 
 must acknowledge what strength, what perseverance, and 
 what daring it may bestow upon the searcher. Of this 
 power, Myers's case affords a signal example ; for by dint 
 of his desire to know he transformed himself. He turned 
 himself into a man of science, keenly watchful and 
 thoroughly cognisant of every scientific fact that seemed 
 to bear, however remotely, on his central interest, and 
 though, I think, he never quite secured his footing on the 
 tight-ropes of technical philosophy, he made himself 
 sufficiently acquainted with the abstruser mysteries of 
 metaphysics. And so he actually trained his Pegasus, as 
 it were, to pull the ark of the covenanted immortality out 
 of the slough of naturalism. 
 
 And then it appeared to the marvel of most beholders 
 that there is work for the imagination to accomplish in 
 science no less than in poetry. It was the poetry in 
 Myers that enabled him to grasp at great conceptions, 
 whose light could not have dawned on duller souls, and 
 to build up out of the rubbish heaps of uncomprehended 
 and unutilised experience the impressive structure which, 
 if it be not the temple of ultimate truth, yet for the 
 present marks the ' furthest north ' of scientific striving 
 towards one of the great poles of human interest. And, 
 similarly, it was his desire that gave him driving-power. 
 For twenty years he laboured unremittingly himself, and 
 enlisted by his enthusiasm the co-operation of others. 
 Like other pioneers, those of psychical research will never, 
 probably, obtain the recognition due to their courage, 
 endurance, and faith in an undertaking which not only 
 their social surroundings, but their own misgivings, pro-
 
 xvn PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 375 
 
 nounced futile and absurd. It was mainly due to Myers's 
 tact and enthusiasm that the Society was nerved to 
 persist in the tedious task of observing and collecting the 
 erratic bits of evidence, the perplexing phantasmagoria of 
 experiences, which he has now so brilliantly fitted together 
 into his fascinating picture of the subliminal extent and 
 transcendent destiny of the human spirit. True, the 
 picture is impressionist : in some parts it is sketchy ; in 
 others its completion was cut short by death ; nowhere 
 perhaps will it bear a pedantically microscopic scrutiny. 
 But it is the picture of a master none the less, and 
 takes the place of a mere smear of meaningless detail 
 and shadowy outline. Wherefore it is an achievement, 
 and its scientific value is incontestable, whether or not we 
 are willing to accept it as a real image of the truth. 
 
 3. Accordingly, it is no wonder that, whereas those 
 who applied strictly technical standards, and looked for 
 what it is vain to expect, and difficult to use, in an inchoate 
 science, viz. a formal precision of spick and span con- 
 ceptions, have been somewhat disconcerted by the heuristic 
 and tentative plasticity of Myers's terms, the greatest of 
 living psychologists, Prof. William James, himself no 
 mean adept in psychical researches, should thus testify to 
 his suggestiveness. " I cannot but think," he says, 1 " that 
 the most important step forward that has occurred in 
 psychology since I have been a student of the science, is 
 the discovery, first made in 1886, that in certain subjects 
 at least there is not only the consciousness of the ordinary 
 field, with its usual centre and margin, but an addition 
 thereto in the shape of a set of memories, thoughts, and 
 feelings, which are extra -marginal and outside of the 
 primary consciousness altogether, but yet must be classed 
 as conscious facts of some sort, able to reveal their 
 presence by unmistakable signs." This then is ' the 
 problem of Myers,' the great question as to the nature 
 of the subconscious or subliminal extension of what we 
 may, perhaps, still call the self. 
 
 1 Varieties of Religion Experience, p. 233. Cp. also his fuller appreciation 
 of Myers's work in the Proceedings of the S. P. R., Part 42, pp. 13-23.
 
 376 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvn 
 
 To Myers this conception of the Subliminal Self is the 
 great clue that guides him through the labyrinth of 
 abnormal and supernormal fact, and holds together phe- 
 nomena so various as sleep, dream, memory, hypnotism, 
 hysteria, genius, insanity (largely), automatisms, chromatic 
 hearing, hallucinations, ghosts, telepathy and telergy, 
 clairvoyance and the like, and even ' ectoplasy.' It is 
 evident therefore that it is essential for an appreciation 
 of Human Personality to grasp this great conception of 
 the Subliminal Self, and the considerations which conduct 
 to it. 
 
 Psychological experiment has confirmed what the best 
 philosophic speculation had previously suspected, viz. that 
 the world of sense is limited. That is, there exist limits 
 beyond which any particular sense-perception either ceases 
 or is transformed. It is only within a limited range that 
 disturbances in the air are perceived as sounds, and in the 
 'ether' as sights. There are ultra-violet 'rays,' and 
 infra-red ' rays,' which are both invisible, and there are 
 * tones ' too high and too low to be heard. There are 
 limits of intensity also to sensation. A very slight 
 stimulation is not felt ; e.g. a small fly crawling across 
 the hand arouses no sensation. And yet we cannot say 
 that this crawling passes quite unnoticed. For, if there 
 are half-a-dozen such flies, we feel them collectively. But 
 does not this imply that each separately must have con- 
 tributed something ? For six ciphers would add up to 
 nothing. In this way, then, we form the notion of a 
 limen or ' threshold ' over which a ' sensation ' must 
 pass to enter consciousness. This threshold is not, how- 
 ever, a fixed point : it may be shifted up and down, raised 
 so as to contract, or lowered, so as to enlarge the range of 
 consciousness, to an unknown extent, according to the 
 variations of attention, mental condition, etc. At present 
 the range of variation in the limen is almost unexplored ; 
 but it is undeniable that both the hyper-aesthesia which 
 results from a lowering, and the abnormal concentration, 
 or ' abstraction,' which results from a raising, and still 
 more from a combination of the two (as in some hypnotic
 
 xvn PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 377 
 
 states), may easily lead to abnormalities that would hitherto 
 have been accounted miracles. 
 
 It should be noted, furthermore, that we cannot evade 
 the paradox of unfelt 'sensations' by interpreting the 
 limen in terms of physiology. At first sight it seems easy 
 enough to assume that there is nothing mental out of 
 consciousness, and to explain that the bodily disturbances 
 (due to the crawling flies) have to attain a certain magni- 
 tude before the mind reacts upon them. We may suppose, 
 that is, that it is not worthy of the mind to take note of 
 the nervous excitation due to the crawling of a single fly. 
 But this only transfers the difficulty from the sense organs 
 to the central brain : it still remains a fact that a mind 
 which responds to a sum of slight disturbances in the brain 
 must, in summing them, have apprehended them sublimi- 
 nally in their separation. Nay, in the end must not this 
 weird power of unnoticed noticing be ascribed to ' matter ' 
 generally? For how could anything ever respond to a 
 sum of stimulations if the constituents of the sum had 
 not been somehow noticed ? It would seem, then, that 
 from this notion of the subliminal there is no escape. 
 
 4. But instead of being a nuisance and a paradox, it 
 may be made into a principle of far-reaching explanation. 
 This is what Myers has done. He has extended this 
 scientific notion of subliminal ( perception ' from the 
 parts to the whole, and instead of recognising it grudg- 
 ingly and piecemeal, he gladly generalises it into a 
 principle of almost universal application. When this is 
 done, the supraliminal and the subliminal seem to change 
 places in our estimation, and our normal supraliminal 
 consciousness shrinks into a mere selection of the total 
 self, which the necessities of mortal life have stirred us to 
 condense into actual consciousness, while behind it, em- 
 bracing and sustaining all, there stretches a vast domain 
 of the subliminal whose unexplored possibilities may be 
 fraught with weal or woe ineffable. Who after this will 
 question the potency of the poetic seer to evolve romance 
 out of the disjointed data of academic science? And 
 yet, like all great feats, it is like the egg of Columbus
 
 378 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvn 
 
 and very simple. At bottom it is only a shifting of 
 standpoint, a throwing of our spirit's centre of gravity 
 over into the subliminal. Let us for a moment cease to 
 regard as the true centres of our being the conscious 
 persons of a definite kind, hedged in by social restrictions 
 and psychical and physical incapacities of all sorts, which 
 we appear to be, and whom, in spite of philosophic warn- 
 ings, we assume ourselves to know so well : let us regard 
 them as mere efficient, though imperfect, concentrations 
 of our being upon the practical purposes of normal life. 
 And then, hey presto ! the thing is done ! We return 
 transfigured to the surface from our dive into the sub- 
 liminal. We are greater, perhaps more glorious, than our 
 wildest dreams suspected. We have transcended the 
 limits of terrestrial being, and flung aside the menace of 
 materialism. Or, in more technical philosophic language, 
 which it is a pity Myers did not in this instance use, we 
 find ourselves contemplating the correlation of physical 
 and psychical from the point of view of the transmission, 
 not of the production, theory of the latter. 1 Psychic life, 
 that is, is not engendered by the phantom dance of 
 ' atoms,' but conversely, its veritable nature pierces in 
 varying degrees the distorting veil of ' matter ' that seems 
 so solid, and yet, under scientific scrutiny, so soon dis- 
 solves into the fantastic fictions of ' vortex -rings ' or 
 ethereal ' voids ' and ' stresses,' or ' energy ' equations. 
 And the beauty of this change of attitude is that whereas 
 no facts can be discovered which will invalidate this rein- 
 terpretation, it is quite possible that new discoveries may 
 make its materialistic rival simply unworkable. 
 
 Myers has two great similes for illustrating what he 
 conceives to be the relation of the conscious to the sub- 
 conscious personality. It is like unto the visible portion 
 of an iceberg of whose total mass eight - ninths float 
 beneath the surface. Or it is like the visible spectrum 
 beyond which there extend at either end infra-red and 
 ultra-violet rays, to say nothing of yet more mysterious 
 modes of radiation, as potent, or more potent, than those 
 
 1 Cp. James's Human Immortality,
 
 xvii PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 379 
 
 our eyes enable us to see. The latter image has indeed 
 this further advantage, that close inspection will reveal 
 dark lines and discontinuities even within the narrow 
 band of visible light Just so there are abundant breaks 
 of continuity in our conscious life, which may be made 
 to spell out messages to the psychologist from the 
 hidden depths of the soul, much as the dark lines in a 
 stellar spectrum reveal to the astronomer the composition 
 of far distant stars. And he believes that in the super- 
 normal phenomena of which his book supplies a pro- 
 visional codification, we have something corresponding to 
 the ' enhanced ' lines of spectroscopy. 
 
 5. Hence it is natural enough that Myers should begin 
 his survey by tracing the subliminal support in the normal 
 operations of our consciousness. Morbid disintegrations 
 of personality prove that at least we are not rounded-off 
 and self-complete souls, which must be in their integrity, 
 or not be at all. And yet not all the features of such 
 cases look like mere decay ; they are interspersed with 
 signs of a complete memory and of supernormal faculty, 
 and of connexions deep below the surface. The analysis 
 of genius is next attempted, in perhaps the least con- 
 vincing chapter in the book, which derives genius from 
 ' subliminal uprushes.' In the fourth chapter sleep is 
 dealt with, and considered as a differentiation of psychic 
 life parallel with waking life, preserving a more antique 
 complexion, and showing (in dreams) symptoms of a 
 closer connexion with and access to the subliminal. 
 Chapter V. deals with the extension of normal into 
 hypnotic sleep, and the enhanced control of the organism 
 which it often carries with it. In these first chapters the 
 facts to which Myers so copiously appeals throughout 
 are, on the whole, beyond dispute, though there still is 
 abundant difference of opinion about their interpretation. 
 But in the sixth chapter he approaches a region in which 
 the ordinary man and ordinary science evince a stubborn 
 unwillingness to admit, and even to ascertain, the facts. 
 Starting with an ingenious suggestion that syncesthesia, 
 like ' coloured hearing,' are vestiges of a primitive sensi-
 
 380 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvn 
 
 tivity not yet definitely attached to special organs of 
 sense, he proceeds to other forms of sensory automatism, 
 which convey messages from the subliminal to the con- 
 scious self. These may take the form of spontaneous 
 hallucinations, or be experimentally induced by ' crystal- 
 gazing/ and often reveal telepathic influence. 
 
 Of telepathy, Mr. Myers is not long content to retain 
 the provisional description, officially prescribed by the 
 Psychical Society, as ' a mode of communication not 
 requiring any of the recognised channels of sense.' He 
 soon takes it more positively as a law of the direct inter- 
 course of spirit with spirit, as fundamental as gravitation 
 in the physical world. And so it becomes, not an alter- 
 native to the spiritistic interpretation, as with Mr. 
 Podmore, but rather its presupposition, and a way of 
 rendering it feasible and intelligible. Granting, therefore, 
 that spirits as such are in immediate telepathic interaction 
 in a subliminal ' metetherial ' (i.e. spiritual) world, it be- 
 comes arbitrary to deprive them of this power on account 
 of the mere fact of death. Telepathy from the dead 
 becomes credible, and the seventh chapter, on ' phantasms 
 of the dead,' revels in ghost stories. The eighth chapter, 
 on motor automatism, expounds and interprets the 
 phenomena of planchette writing, table tilting, etc., and 
 the evidence of discarnate intelligence they often seem to 
 involve, which seems sometimes to amount to a ' psychical 
 invasion,' or ' possession ' of the automatist. Hence 
 there is an easy transition in the ninth chapter to the 
 subjects of trance, possession, and ecstasy, in which the 
 organism may be operated entirely by alien ' spirits,' 
 while the normal owner may be enjoying a subliminal 
 excursion into a spiritual world. As finally the action of 
 spirit on matter is a mystery anyhow, and as the actual 
 limitation of our power to produce movements to bodies 
 directly touched by our organism is wholly empirical, and 
 may result only from the unimaginative habits of the 
 supraliminal self, and as, moreover, discarnate spirits may 
 possess a greater and more conscious power to manipulate 
 the molecular arrangements of matter, there is no a priori
 
 xvii PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 381 
 
 reason even for discrediting the stories of telekinesis and 
 ectoplasy, which form the so-called ' physical phenomena ' 
 of spiritism. 
 
 6. Such, in barest outline, and without attempt to re- 
 produce his multitudinous references to cases, and the felici- 
 ties of his phrasing, is Myers's argument for the extension 
 of human personality beyond its habitual limits. It will 
 be thought by many to pander to the human love of well- 
 told fairy-tales, and to recall within the bounds of scientific 
 possibility every aberration of savage superstition. And 
 certainly Myers has cast his net very wide and deep, and 
 brought into it not only a fine collection of fish, of which 
 some are very rare and queer specimens, but also not a 
 few of the abhorrent monsters of the abyss which common 
 sense can hardly bear to look upon. 
 
 Moreover, in a sense criticism is easy ; in token whereof 
 we may instance some of its more valid forms. It has been 
 objected then : (l) That Myers deals largely in suggestions 
 which, after all, are merely possibilities ; (2) that he never 
 defines the nature of the personality for which he claims 
 survival of death, and never proves that what seems to 
 survive is truly personal ; (3) that such of his facts as 
 would be generally admitted are capable of alternative 
 interpretations ; while (4) for the disputed phenomena, 
 even the copious evidence adduced is inadequate and 
 dubious ; (5) that telepathy among the living is, as yet, 
 assumption enough to explain everything ; (6) that his 
 theory is a jumble of physiological materialism with the 
 wildest spiritualism ; (7) that he is absurdly optimistic in 
 his anticipations both as to the benefits to be derived 
 from the study of our ' metetherial ' environment ; and also 
 (8) as to the reasonableness of incarnate and discarnate 
 spirits in forwarding his aim. 
 
 7. To these objections it might fairly be replied : as to 
 (i), that Myers himself claims no more, and more cannot 
 fairly be expected of him. As to (2), that while he 
 certainly takes personality for granted, our immediate 
 experience fully entitles us to do so. The people who 
 decline to admit the existence of personality until it has
 
 382 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvn 
 
 been abstractly defined to their liking, are beyond the pale 
 of ordinary scientific argument. On the other hand, it 
 must be granted that the proof of personality in the 
 subliminal, and of the persistence of a human person after 
 death is, as yet, on Myers's own showing, somewhat 
 incomplete. But the indications point that way, and it 
 was a merit in Myers to refrain from the usual philo- 
 sophers' leap to the absolute world-ground as soon as 
 they are driven off the field of ordinary experience. 
 
 (3) It is quite true that for most of the admitted facts 
 of secondary personality, hypnotism, automatism, sleep, 
 dream, etc., there exist alternative interpretations. That 
 is, there are descriptions of them in technical formulas. 
 But these in no case amount to real explanations. More- 
 over, they are various and complicated, and Myers's 
 conception of a single subliminal self would effect a great 
 simplification. Further, it is precisely some of these 
 comparatively normal facts that seem to need his theory 
 most clearly. As this point will bear some further 
 emphasis, it may be pointed out that the orthodox psycho- 
 logical treatment of dreams, e.g., is plainly insufficient. 
 The conscious self is in no proper sense the creator of its 
 dreams. Even if we grant that the stuff that dreams are 
 made of is taken from the experiences of waking life 
 (though dreams of ' flying,' e.g., show that this is not. 
 strictly true), this does not explain the selection. Nor 
 does it avail to point to probabilities of peripheral stimula- 
 tions as the physiological foundation of dreams. The 
 extraordinary transmutation of the stimuli thus supplied 
 needs explanation. Why should a mosquito bite during 
 sleep set up a thrilling tale of battle, murder, and sudden 
 death ? Who is the maker of these vivid plots to which the 
 dreamer falls a victim ? It is certainly not the conscious 
 self of the dream which may be (more or less) identified 
 with that of waking life. Must we not assume some sort 
 of subliminal self? 1 
 
 1 Dr. Morton Prince's fascinating study of the tribulations of the ' Beauchamp ' 
 family (The Dissociation of a Personality) warrants, perhaps, the suggestion that 
 one of its heroines, ' Sally, ' was such a subliminal self.
 
 xvii PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 383 
 
 Or should we venture further yet, and argue that since 
 dreams (while we dream them) have all the marks of an 
 independent reality, are immersed in a space and a time 
 of their own, and contain personages just as external to 
 us, and as uncontrollable in their actions as those of 
 waking life, these dream-worlds really exist, and are 
 actually visited by us ? Philosophically something might 
 be said for this, and still more for the converse of this 
 view, viz. that our waking life is but an incoherent dream, 
 whose full explanation would lie in an awakening yet to 
 come. 
 
 This, indeed, was the view taken by one of Myers's 
 best ' spirits,' Mrs. Piper's ' G. P.,' whose communication 
 may be cited in answer to complaints that ' spirits ' have 
 never yet revealed anything novel or worth knowing. 1 
 "You to us," he says (ii. 254), " are sleeping in the material 
 world ; you look shut up as one in prison, and in order 
 for us to get into communication with you, we have to 
 enter into your sphere, as one like yourself, asleep. This 
 is just why we make mistakes, as you call them, or get 
 confused and muddled." 
 
 The truth is that psychologists have hitherto accepted 
 the rough criteria of practical life, and disregarded the 
 theoretic study of dreams, because they seemed to yield 
 so little fit to use for the purposes of practice. And yet, 
 what is it but an empirical observation that dream-worlds 
 are worlds of inferior reality ? 2 Is it not conceivable, 
 therefore, that we should discover some of superior reality 
 and value ? At present, therefore, while psychology seems 
 confronted with the choice between the Scylla of the 
 Subliminal and the Charybdis of real dream-worlds, can 
 one wonder that it should try to put off the evil day as 
 long as possible ? 
 
 1 Cp. , too, Dr. Wiltse's dream (ii. 315) for a striking account of what ' death ' 
 feels like. A genuine experience like this will always bear comparison with 
 literary imitations even by so consummate an artist as Plato, e.g. in his ' vision 
 of Er,' and will be felt to be, psychologically, more convincing. The best re- 
 production of the psychological quality of such genuine experiences with which I 
 am acquainted in literature, is to be found, to my thinking, in the ' dream ' 
 finale of Mr. G. L. Dickinson's Meaning of Good. 
 
 2 Cp. Essay xx. 22.
 
 384 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvn 
 
 (4) It must be admitted that all over the field covered 
 by Mr. Myers very much more evidence is required, and 
 that a critic with the knowledge and temper of, e.g., Mr. 
 Podmore, could pick endless holes in nearly all of it. 
 The possibilities of fraud and error seem inexhaustible, 
 especially if semi-conscious cheating in abnormal mental 
 states be common. It is true also that in default of 
 better material Myers will sometimes use half-baked 
 bricks, just to complete his structure. But he himself 
 was quite aware of this, and when a man knows that he 
 has only months before him to complete his life's work, 
 and feels that if he does not succeed in putting together 
 the scattered material into a synthesis (however provisional) 
 no one else will do so, he may well be pardoned if he 
 makes what use he can of the material that lies handy. 
 It should be recognised also that a synthesis which 
 embraces such a multitude of facts does not rest solely 
 on any one set of them, and in a sense grows independent 
 of them all. That is, the mere coherence of the interpreta- 
 tion becomes a great point in its favour as against a 
 variety of unconnected alternatives. Again, the collection 
 and correction of the evidence is the proper function of 
 the Psychical Society, for which Myers's system provides 
 the aid of a working theory, a provisional classification, 
 and a technical terminology. 
 
 (5) It is possible that telepathy (in its original sense) 
 might be stretched over all the facts which it seems too 
 harsh to dismiss. But, then, telepathy is itself a mere 
 description, and in no way an explanation. It has to be 
 interpreted, either in definitely physical or in definitely 
 spiritual terms ; it can hardly stand by itself as a fact 
 which transcends the physical order without opening out 
 upon another. Hence the attempt to conceive it as the 
 adit to a spirit-world must be pronounced legitimate. 
 
 (6) Myers no doubt might have considerably improved 
 his statement by greater reliance on the contentions of 
 an idealist philosophy, but the charge of confusing the 
 physical and the spiritual seems in the main to fail. 
 For, as we saw (p. 378), Myers has silently adopted the
 
 xvn PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 385 
 
 ' transmission ' view of soul, and this entitles him to 
 the free use of all the facts that are presented on the 
 materialistic side. 
 
 (7) Omne ignotum pro magnifico may be a generous 
 delusion, but at least it makes a good stimulus to research. 
 Lastly, as to (8), he is well aware that his gospel 
 will impinge on rooted prejudice and meet the bitterest 
 hostility. He knows how " immemorial ignorance has 
 stiffened into an unreasoning incredulity " (i. 157). He 
 tell us (ii. 77) "that the novelties of this book are intended 
 to work upon preconceptions which are ethical quite as 
 much as intellectual." l 
 
 But still he underrates the resistance which human 
 minds and tempers are sure to offer to his doctrine. 
 Concerning any considerable novelty of thought the 
 prediction may be made that hardly any one above thirty 
 will be psychologically capable of adopting it, unless he had 
 previously been looking for just such a solution. Myers, 
 therefore, will no more persuade the existing generation 
 of psychologists than Darwin persuaded the biologists of 
 his age. It is vain to expect it. Novelty as such must 
 always make its appeal to the more plastic minds of the 
 young who have not yet aged into great authorities. 
 
 Again, it is obvious that Myers's whole trend of thought 
 must be utterly distasteful to the numerous people who 
 do not believe that they have more than an illusory 
 personality now, and (rightly or wrongly) have no desire 
 to have it perpetuated after death. Then, again, there 
 are many whose a priori sense of spiritual dignity is 
 outraged by what they think the indecorum in which 
 ' ghosts ' have been observed to indulge, and who, as 
 Myers observes, are the spiritual descendants of the people 
 who would not listen to a heliocentric astronomy, on the 
 ground that it was unworthy of heavenly bodies to move 
 in elliptical, and not in circular, orbits. Many others will 
 not care to look beyond the fact that the new ' psychical 
 science ' seems superficially to revive old superstitions of 
 savage thought though why it should enhance their 
 
 1 Cp. also i. 185, and ii. 2, ii. 79-80. 
 
 2 C
 
 386 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvn 
 
 confidence in human knowledge to find that immemorial 
 traditions had been wholly wrong, or destroy it to find 
 that from the first men had possessed some inkling of the 
 truth, is perhaps a feeling it were hard to refine into a 
 logical lucidity. In short, no one who has learnt from 
 Mr. Balfour that the causes of belief are hardly ever 
 rational, will expect an immediate revolution in habitual 
 modes of thinking from the work of Myers. 
 
 8. " However this may be, do you in point of fact 
 believe that immortality is proved ? " If I were point 
 blank asked this question, I should probably reply that 
 most people are still unaware of the nature of proof. 
 They imagine that ' proofs ' can be provided which appeal 
 to ' plain facts,' and rest upon indisputable principles. 
 Whereas we saw that really no science deals with plain 
 facts or rests on absolutely certain principles. Its ' facts ' 
 are always relative to its principles, and the principles 
 always really rest on their ability to provide a coherent 
 interpretation of the facts. All proof, therefore, is a 
 matter of degree and accumulation, and no science is 
 more than a coherent system of interpretations, which, 
 when applied, will work. In every science, therefore, 
 there is a finite number of facts which would have to be 
 rejected or reinterpreted, and a small number of principles 
 which would have to be modified or withdrawn, in order 
 to qualify as ' false ' the system of that science. In a 
 science, however, of a high degree of certainty, the 
 principles are well tested and very useful, and the facts 
 are capable of being added to at pleasure. Also, the 
 subject is sufficiently explored to minimise the danger of 
 discovering an anomaly. That a new fact like radium 
 should prima facie threaten to derange so fundamental a 
 principle as the Conservation of Energy, and should have 
 to be bought off by giving up the old sense of the 
 Indestructibility of Matter, is an incident which occurs 
 but rarely in a respectable science like Chemistry, and it 
 speaks well for the open-mindedness of chemists and their 
 confidence in the stability of their system that they should 
 have admitted its existence as soon as M. Curie had
 
 xvn PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 387 
 
 announced it. But Psychology is not so firmly rooted, 
 and at present shows the inhospitable temper that comes 
 from a secret lack of self-assurance. And so psychologists 
 dare not be as open-minded ; they do not credit them- 
 selves or others with sanity of soul enough to encounter 
 abnormal facts without loss of mental balance. In 
 Psychical Research all is still quite inchoate, and there- 
 fore plastic, and the final interpretation of its data must 
 depend on inquiries yet to make. 
 
 One can only say, therefore, that Myers's interpretation 
 has for the first time rendered a future life scientifically 
 conceivable, and rendered much more probable the other 
 considerations in its favour. And, above all, it has rendered 
 it definitely provable. The scientific status of a hypothesis 
 depends chiefly on the facilities for experimental verifica- 
 tion it affords. No matter how probable it may seem at 
 first sight (i.e. how concordant with our prejudices), it is 
 naught, if naught can verify it ; no matter how wild it 
 seems, it is useful, and tends to be accepted, if it can 
 suggest experiments whereby to test it, and to grapple 
 with the facts. Now it is one of the greatest merits of 
 Myers's book that he throughout conceives his hypothesis 
 in this scientific spirit. His cry is ever for further observa- 
 tion, more thought, and keener experimentation. And his 
 conception is capable at every point of definite investiga- 
 tion, and at many actually appeals to definite experiment. 
 And whoever has a vestige of the scientific spirit must 
 regard this as the atonement for his initial daring. 
 
 It may well be that in this way there will gradually 
 grow up a consistent body of interpretations, embodying 
 our most convenient way of regarding the facts, which 
 can be adopted as a whole, even though no single member 
 of the system taken in isolation will be sufficient to compel 
 assent. And then human immortality will be scientifically 
 ' proved.' Until then it will remain a matter of belief, 
 however ' probable ' it grows. 
 
 9. How long the 'proof will be in coming who can 
 say? If we sit down and wait, we may wait for ever. 
 Something will depend on the activity of the Society
 
 388 STUDIES IN HUMANISM X vn 
 
 for Psychical Research and kindred bodies, more on 
 the attitude of the general world. To work out fully 
 all the rich suggestions of Myers's grandiose scheme 
 might well absorb all the available psychological 
 energies of hundreds, nay, at the former rate of pro- 
 gress, of thousands of years. But short of this, if we 
 tried to verify only the main ideas, it would be a 
 question of whether, say, half-a-dozen first-rate minds 
 could be induced to take up the subject, not (as now) in 
 the scanty leisure of professional preoccupations, but as 
 their life's work. If they will, comparatively slight 
 discoveries might raise the subject from the observational 
 to the experimental plane, and so indefinitely quicken the 
 pulse of progress. In psychical, as in all other, science 
 we must get staid professionals to consolidate the work 
 of the enthusiastic amateurs who opened out the way. 
 
 But it is obvious that to secure them funds are needed, 
 and that on a generous scale. To some small extent, 
 perhaps, these may come from a growth in the numbers 
 of the Society, which has also started an Endowment Fund. 
 It modestly asks for at least Sooo in order to subsidise 
 a young psychologist for special work. But this trifling 
 sum has not yet been raised. And for anything like a 
 thorough investigation money will be needed on a far more 
 liberal scale. A vigilant literary committee to record and 
 probe the spontaneous evidence, and an expensive labora- 
 tory for experimental tests are obvious necessaries, and 
 instead of one, a dozen specialists. For all this ; 100,000 
 would scarcely be enough. There is nothing unreasonable 
 in the view of the Hon. Sec. of the Society, who assures 
 me that he would undertake to find permanent and profit- 
 able employment for the income of half a million. 
 
 The situation, however, is so discreditable as to warrant 
 a bolder suggestion. In every civilised community many 
 millions are annually spent by and on organisations which 
 profess to be the depositaries of invaluable truths concern- 
 ing spiritual things, and to regard it as their most sacred 
 duty to teach and to sustain elaborate systems of spiritual 
 knowledge. It is, however, a serious drawback to their
 
 xvii PSYCHICAL RESEARCH 389 
 
 efficacy that considerable and growing doubt exists about 
 the authenticity of this knowledge. The position of every 
 church could be indefinitely strengthened, if it could obtain 
 further verification of the evidence on which its claims are 
 based. These claims, moreover, rest largely on allega- 
 tions susceptible of verification. The spiritual truths pro- 
 fessed, that is, are not wholly matters of direct personal 
 experience (though these perhaps are the most distinctive 
 features of the religious experience) ; they concern also 
 what were not originally or in intention ' matters of faith ' 
 at all, but matters of observation and experiment, and are 
 therefore capable of continuous verification by analogy. 1 
 
 The notion of an initially perfect revelation is, like that 
 of an initially absolute truth, a prejudice. Even if we had 
 it, the mere lapse of time would fatally impair its value. 
 Even initially dubious revelations, on the other hand, 
 would authenticate themselves by becoming progressive 
 and increasingly valuable. Yet, strange to say, no church 
 anywhere bestows any of its energy and its income upon 
 substantiating in this way its claim to truth. The apolo- 
 getics of all churches are merely arguments, and wholly 
 overlook the simplest, most scientific, and effective means 
 of establishing their case. The ideas that the proper 
 function of a -church is to be a channel of communication 
 between the human and the superhuman, that its know- 
 ledge should be progressive like that of secular science, 
 that its ' talents ' should not be stowed away for safe 
 custody, that its revelations should be employed so as to 
 earn more, that its present apathy is slowly but inevitably 
 sapping the confidence of mankind in the genuineness of 
 religious truths, in short, that theology could and should 
 be made into an experimental science, seems never to 
 have occurred to any one of them. 
 
 And yet if the churches should awaken to the fact that 
 religious truths need verification like any others, and that 
 they offer to intelligent and persevering research rewards as 
 great and probable as those of science, they could not but 
 recognise that they should not merely tolerate psychical 
 
 1 Cp. Humanism, p. 237.
 
 390 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvn 
 
 research, but even actively participate in it. For such 
 research might make important contributions to the veri- 
 fication needed. The churches, therefore, would have to 
 organise themselves, in part at least, for the purpose of 
 psychical research, primarily, no doubt, along the lines 
 indicated by their several creeds ; and thus the difficulty 
 about finding the means and the workers of a systematic 
 inquiry would to a large extent be overcome. 
 
 However this may be, the money will no doubt 
 eventually be raised in one way or another. For the 
 human reason may surely be trusted finally to realise how 
 monstrous it is that for our last, our longest, and most 
 momentous journey alone we make no preparation, nor 
 seek to know the dangers or the routes, but set out 
 blindly and stolidly like brutes, or at best like children, 
 equipped only with the vaguely-apprehended consolations 
 of a ' faith ' we have never dared to verify.
 
 XVIII 
 FREEDOM 
 
 ARGUMENT 
 
 I. Humanism must establish the reality of Freedom. 2. Real freedom 
 involves indetermination. 3. The difficulty of the question due to a 
 clash of Postulates. 4. Determination a postulate of science. Its 
 methodological grounds. 5. The moral postulate of Freedom ; it 
 implies an alternative to wrong but not to right action. 6. The 
 empirical consciousness of freedom shows that moral choices are neither 
 common nor unrestricted nor unconnected with character. 7. The 
 reconciliation of the scientific and the moral postulates. The methodo- 
 logical validity of determinism compatible with real, but limited, 
 indetermination. 8. Why the alternative theories make no practical 
 difference. 9. The positive nature of freedom and its connexion 
 with the plasticity of habits and the incompleteness of the real. 10. 
 Human freedom introduces indetermination into the universe. 1 1 . 
 Is human the sole freedom in the universe ? It need not be supposed. 
 The possibility of ascribing a measure of indetermination to all things. 
 The incompleteness of the proof of mechanism. 12. The metaphysical 
 disadvantages and advantages of Freedom. Is predestinate perfection 
 thinkable, or an incomplete reality unthinkable ? 
 
 I. IT is one of the most striking features of a new philo- 
 sophy that it not only breaks fresh ground but also brings 
 up old issues in a new form, and exhibits them in a new 
 light. Accordingly, it is natural enough that Humanism 
 should have something distinctive to say about the old 
 puzzle concerning freedom and determination. It is in 
 fact under obligation to treat this subject, because it has 
 implicitly committed itself, as its chief exponents have of 
 course been perfectly aware. 1 It has assumed that human 
 
 1 See James's ' Dilemma of Determinism ' in The Will to Believe, which is 
 the only profitable thing written on the whole subject in English for the last 
 thirty years. My aim in this essay is merely to carry a little further and to render 
 a little more explicit the consequences of Prof. James's principles. Mr. R. 
 
 391
 
 392 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvm 
 
 action is endowed with real agency and really makes a 
 difference alike to the system of truth and to the world 
 of reality. Without this assumption all the talk about 
 the ' making ' of truth and reality would be meaningless 
 absurdity. And the assumption itself would be equally 
 absurd, if all human actions were the completely deter- 
 mined products of a rigidly necessary order of events. 
 
 It is obvious, therefore, that unless the selections and 
 choices which are shown to pervade our whole cognitive 
 function are real, the system of our science will collapse 
 as surely as our conception of moral agency, and that there 
 can be no real making of either truth or reality. And 
 conversely, if a philosophy finds it necessary to recognise 
 choices and selections anywhere, it must provide for their 
 ultimate reality and collide with a theory which 
 declares them to be ultimately illusory. Our trust in an 
 immediate experience which presents us at least with an 
 appearance of alternatives and choices stands in need of 
 vindication, and if we distrusted this appearance, we should 
 engender a scepticism about our cognitive procedure to 
 which it would be hard to set limits. Thus our imme- 
 diate experience plainly suggests the reality of an indeter- 
 mination which seems irreconcilable with the assumption 
 of determinism ; and immediate experience our Humanism 
 dare not disavow. 
 
 Humanism, therefore, has to defend and establish the 
 reality of this indetermination, and so to conceive it that 
 it ceases to conflict with the postulates of science, and 
 fits harmoniously into its own conception of existence. 
 It has, in other words, to make good its conception of a 
 determinable indetermination and to show that it is 
 involved in the assertion of a really evolving, and there- 
 fore as yet incomplete, reality. This it can do by showing 
 that the indetermination, though real, is not dangerous, 
 because it is not unlimited, and because it is determinable, 
 as the growth of habit fixes and renders determinate 
 
 F. A. Hoernle has detected the vital importance of this criticism of determinism, 
 and gives an excellent account of the Humanist attitude towards it in Mind, N.S. 
 56, pp. 462-67.
 
 FREEDOM 393 
 
 reactions which were once indeterminate. But no one 
 who is at all acquainted with the complexities of human 
 thought will suppose that this goal of Humanist endeavour 
 will be easily attained. 
 
 2. What we must mean by ' freedom ' should be 
 clear from what has been said, and it will be unnecessary 
 to delay the discussion by examining attempts to conceive 
 ' freedom ' in any less radical fashion. There have been 
 of course a variety of attempts to conceive freedom as a 
 sort of determinism, and these have been admirably classi- 
 fied by William James as ' soft ' determinisms. But under 
 sufficient pressure they always harden into the most 
 adamantine fatalism, and a ' soft ' determinism usually 
 indicates only the amiable weakness of an intelligence 
 seeking for a compromise. 
 
 Thus the notion of ' self-determination,' for example, 
 when thought out, will be found to involve that of self- 
 creation, and it may be doubted whether any being, 
 actual or imagined, could completely satisfy its require- 
 ments, if we except the jocose paradoxes of a few Indian 
 creation-myths in which the Creator first lays the World- 
 Egg, and then hatches himself out of it. In all the 
 ordinary exemplifications of the notion, the being which 
 is supposed to determine itself is ultimately the necessary 
 product of other beings with which it can no longer 
 identify itself. We are made by a long series of ancestors, 
 and these in their turn were inevitably generated by non- 
 human forces of a purely physical kind, if science is to 
 be trusted. Nor do we escape this derivation of the ' self- 
 determining ' agent from a not-self by postulating a non- 
 natural cosmic consciousness, and trusting to it to break 
 through the chains of natural necessity. For such a being 
 must be conceived either as itself the imponent of the 
 natural necessity to which we are enslaved, or, if it escapes 
 therefrom itself, as abrogating it so thoroughly as to 
 invalidate our whole faith in a stable order of nature. 
 Moreover, in neither case would such a being be our 
 'self any more than is the stellar nebula, among the last 
 and least of whose differentiations we are bidden to enrol
 
 394 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvm 
 
 ourselves. Any ' universal consciousness ' must be common 
 to us all, and cannot therefore be that which is peculiar 
 to each, and the source of our unique individuality. It is 
 better, therefore, to accept the doctrine of our ' self-deter- 
 mination ' by identification with the Absolute as sheer 
 dogma than to try to think it out. 
 
 We shall dismiss, therefore, from consideration any use 
 of ' freedom ' which does not primarily involve the pos- 
 sibility of real alternatives, between which real choices 
 have to be made, which are not merely illusory. 
 
 3. Now the difficulty of the question of freedom 
 arises from the fact that it lies in the focus where two of 
 the great postulates that guide our actions meet and 
 collide. But herein also lies its interest and its instructive- 
 ness for the theory of knowledge. For nothing is better 
 calculated to reveal the nature of our postulation than the 
 way in which we treat such cases. 
 
 The two postulates in question are the Scientific 
 Postulate of Determinism and the Ethical Postulate of 
 Freedom. The first demands that all events shall be 
 conceived as fully determined by their antecedents, in 
 order that they may be certainly calculable once these 
 are known ; the second demands that our actions shall 
 be so conceived that the fulfilment of duty is possible in 
 spite of all temptations, in order that man shall be 
 responsible and an agent in the full sense of the term. 
 
 It is clear, however, that these postulates conflict. If 
 the course of events really conforms to the determinist 
 postulate, no alternatives are possible. No man, there- 
 fore, can act otherwise than he does act. Nor is there 
 any sense in bidding him do otherwise than he does or 
 be other than he is ; for good or for evil his predestined 
 course seems to be inevitably marked out for him, down 
 to the minutest detail, by forces that precede and trans- 
 cend his individual personality. To speak of respon- 
 sibility or agency in respect to such a being seems a 
 mockery ; man is but a transitory term in an infinite 
 series of necessitated events which recedes into the past, 
 and portends its extension into the future, without end ;
 
 xvni FREEDOM 395 
 
 so that at no point can any independence or initiative be 
 ascribed to him. 
 
 We are confronted, then, by this dilemma, that if the 
 course of events is wholly determined, the whole of the 
 ideas and beliefs and phraseology which imply the con- 
 trary must rest upon illusion. There are not really in 
 the world any alternatives, disjunctions, contingencies, 
 possibilities ; hypotheses, doubts, conditions, choices, selec- 
 tions are delusions of our ignorance, which could not be 
 harboured by a mind which saw existence as it really is, 
 steadily and as a whole. If per contra the course of 
 events is not determined, we seem to reject the sole 
 assumption on which it can be known and calculated, and 
 to reduce nature to a chaos. We must sacrifice either our 
 knowledge or ourselves. For what alternative can be 
 found to these imperious postulates ? If all things are 
 determined, all are irredeemably swept along in one vast 
 inhuman flow of Fate ; if anything is undetermined, we 
 have sold ourselves to a demon of caprice who can every- 
 where disrupt the cosmic order. 
 
 It speaks well for the levelheadedness of humanity 
 that it has not allowed itself to be scared to death by 
 the appalling pretensions of these philosophic bogies ; and 
 that on the whole mankind has exhibited an equanimity 
 almost equal to the sangfroid of Descartes when he set 
 himself to doubt methodically everything that existed, 
 but resolved meanwhile not to change his dinner hour. 
 
 In point of fact determinists and indeterminists for all 
 practical purposes get on quite well with each other and 
 with uncritical common sense. They profess to think the 
 universe a very different thing, but they all behave in very 
 much the same way towards it. 
 
 Still it is worth while to try to account for so strange 
 a situation. And if we have the patience to analyse 
 precisely the nature of the conflicting postulates, and of 
 the immediate consciousness of freedom, we shall perhaps 
 perceive how the puzzle is constructed. 
 
 4. Determinism is an indispensable Postulate of Science 
 as such. Its sway extends, not merely over the natural
 
 396 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvm 
 
 sciences, in which it is nowadays often thought to 
 originate because its somewhat discreditable ethical origin 
 has been forgotten, 1 but quite as cogently over theology 
 and ethics. Unpredictable miracles and incalculable 
 choices are just as disconcerting and subversive as inter- 
 ruptions of the mechanical sequence of happenings. 
 
 The reason is that, always and everywhere, we are 
 interested in predicting the future behaviour of things, 
 because we wish to adjust our conduct accordingly. We 
 welcome, therefore, an assumption which will constitute 
 a general justification of our habitual procedure, and 
 encourages us to try to predict the future of all things 
 from their known antecedents. 
 
 The assumption of Determinism, therefore, has primarily 
 a moral significance ; it is an encouragement and not a 
 revelation. It does not in itself enable us to predict how 
 anything will behave ; to discover this we have to 
 formulate the special ' laws ' of its behaviour. But it 
 gives us a general assurance to counteract the primary 
 impression of confusion with which the universe might 
 otherwise afflict us. It justifies us in looking for special 
 laws and rejecting a priori the attribution of events to 
 lawless and incalculable chance. Whenever experience 
 confronts us with ' facts ' which exhibit such a character, 
 we feel emboldened to declare them to be mere ' appear- 
 ances.' The facts, we affirm, are really law-abiding, only 
 we do not yet know their laws. And to a perfect know- 
 ledge all events would be completely calculable. In short, 
 by making the determinist assumption we nerve human 
 science to carry on from age to age its heroic struggle 
 against the brute opacity, the bewildering variety, of the 
 presented sequence of events. 
 
 But there is nothing in all this to carry the assumption 
 
 1 This very prettily exemplifies the divergence between the origin of a belief 
 and its validity. For as a matter of history determinism was devised as an 
 excuse for the bad man, and arose out of the Socratic intellectualism. We see 
 from Aristotle's Ethics (Eth. Nic. iii. ch. 5) that in his time the moralist had 
 to contend against the view that vice is involuntary while virtue is voluntary. 
 Aristotle meets it by showing that the argument proves virtue to be as involun- 
 tary as vice. This inference has merely to be accepted to lead to full-blown deter- 
 minism. Accordingly we find that in the next generation this was done, and 
 the ' freewill ' controversy was started between the Stoics and the Epicureans.
 
 xvin FREEDOM 397 
 
 out of the realm of methodology into that of metaphysics. 
 By conceiving Determinism as a postulate we go a very 
 little way towards showing that determination is actual 
 and complete and an ultimate fact. For it is quite easy 
 to accept it as a methodological assumption without claim- 
 ing for it any ontological validity. So long as we restrict 
 ourselves to the methodological standpoint any postulate 
 is good while it is serviceable ; its ultimate validity is not 
 required nor inquired into : nay, it may continue to be 
 serviceable even after it has been discovered to be false. 
 
 This point may be illustrated by an instructive 
 example suggested by the late Prof. Henry Sidgwick. 1 
 He supposes that " we were somehow convinced that the 
 planets were endowed with Free Will," and raises the 
 question how far this would reasonably impair our con- 
 fidence in the stability and future of the Solar System. 
 Now, according to the ordinary account of the matter as 
 given by a dogmatic and metaphysical rendering of 
 Determinism, the consequences should be terrible. The 
 fatal admission of indetermination should carry with it 
 the death-knell of astronomy, and ultimately of all science. 
 For of course we should always have to face the con- 
 tingency that the planets might depart incalculably from 
 their orbits, and so our most careful calculations, our 
 most cogent inferences, could always be refuted by the 
 event. ' What use, therefore, is it any longer,' a convinced 
 determinist might exclaim, ' to try to know anything 
 when the very basis of all knowing is rendered funda- 
 mentally unknowable ? ' 
 
 But a practical man of science would decline to concur 
 in so alarmist an estimate of the situation. He would 
 wait to see whether anything alarming happened. He 
 would reflect that after all the planets might not exercise 
 their freedom to depart from their courses, and might 
 abstain from whirling the Solar System headlong to 
 perdition, at least in his time. And even if they did 
 vary their orbits, their vagaries might prove to be so 
 limited in extent that they would not be of practical 
 
 1 Methods of Ethics, bk. i. ch. v. 3.
 
 398 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvm 
 
 importance. In fact, the divergences might be so small 
 as to be cloaked by the discrepancies between the 
 calculated and the observed orbits, which until then had 
 been ascribed to the imperfection of our knowledge. It 
 would only be if de facto he found himself a horrified 
 spectator of heavenly bodies careering wildly across the 
 sky that he would renounce the attempt to predict their 
 behaviour. Until then he would continue to make his 
 calculations and to compile his nautical almanachs, hoping 
 and praying the while that the Sun's influence would 
 prevent Mars and Venus from going wrong. For however 
 much his inward confidence in the practical value of his 
 labours might be abated, his methods would be affected not 
 one jot. So long as it was worth while to calculate the 
 planets' orbits, he would have to assume methodologically 
 that they were determined according to the law of 
 gravitation, just as before. He would realise, that is, 
 that the methodological use of his deterministic principle 
 could survive the discovery of its metaphysical falsity. 
 For since the ' free ' act was ex hypothesi incalculable, the 
 truth of freedom as a metaphysical fact could yield no 
 method by which calculations could be made and 
 behaviour predicted, and hence science would unavoid- 
 ably ignore it. 
 
 We see, then, (i) that in whatever way the meta- 
 physical question is decided, the methodological use of 
 the determinist principle is not interfered with, and 
 that science in consequence is safe, whatever metaphysics 
 may decree. And (2) the principle, and with it science, 
 in so far as it depends on the principle and not on 
 actual experience, is practically safe whatever the actual 
 course of events. For however irregularly and intricately 
 things might behave, they could not thereby force us 
 to renounce our postulate. We should always prefer to 
 ascribe to our ignorance of the law what might really be 
 due to inherent lawlessness. The postulate would only 
 be abandoned in the last resort, when it had ceased to 
 be of the slightest practical use to any one, even as a 
 merely theoretic encouragement in attempting the control
 
 xviii FREEDOM 399 
 
 of events. (3) It should follow from this that the 
 scientific objection to a doctrine of Freedom was strictly 
 limited to its introduction of an unmanageable contingency 
 into scientific calculations. It would hold against an 
 indeterminism which rendered events incalculable, but 
 not against a belief in Freedom as such. A conception 
 of Freedom, therefore, which allowed us to calculate the 
 ' free ' event, would be scientifically quite permissible. 
 And a conception of Freedom which issued in a plurality 
 of calculable alternatives would be scientifically un- 
 objectionable, even though it would smother meta- 
 physical Determinism with kindness and surfeit it 
 with an embarras de richesses. We should prepare 
 ourselves, therefore, to look out for such a conception of 
 Freedom. 
 
 5. In considering the moral Postulate of Freedom 
 we should begin by noting that the moralist has no 
 direct objection to the calculableness of moral acts and 
 no unreasoning prejudice in favour of indeterminism. 
 He seems to need it merely in order to make real the 
 apparent alternatives with which the moral life confronts 
 him. But he would have as much reason as the 
 determinist to deplore the irruption into moral conduct 
 of acts of Freedom, if they had to be conceived as 
 destructive of the continuity of moral character : he 
 would agree that if such acts occurred, they could only 
 be regarded as the irresponsible freaks of insanity. But 
 he might question whether his dissatisfaction with 
 determinism necessarily committed him to so subversive 
 a conception of moral freedom. He would deny, in 
 short, that rigid determination or moral chaos were the 
 only alternatives. 
 
 The moralist, moreover, if he were prescient, would 
 admit that he could perfectly conceive a moral life 
 without indetermination. Nay, he might regard a moral 
 agent as possessed of the loftiest freedom whose conduct 
 was wholly calculable and fully determined, and there- 
 fore absolutely to be trusted. For whether or not he 
 regarded a course of conduct as objectionable would
 
 400 STUDIES IN HUMANISM X vm 
 
 naturally depend on its moral character, and a good 
 life is all the better for resting on a staunch basis of 
 fixed habits. 
 
 As compared with such a life, it would of course 
 have to be admitted that an indetermination in moral 
 action which implied a possibility of wrong-doing was 
 a stain upon the agent's character, and indicative of a 
 defect or incomplete development of the intelligence 
 or moral nature. The moralist, therefore, would agree 
 with Aristotle that the divine ideal would be that of a 
 ' necessary ' being, fully determined in its actions by its 
 own nature, and therefore ' free ' to follow its promptings, 
 and to realise without impediment its own perfections. 
 Why then, and where, does the moralist come into con- 
 flict with determinism ? It is only when we have to 
 deal practically with the bad man that it becomes morally 
 necessary to insist that an alternative to his bad life 
 must be really possible. The bad man's life may be 
 habitually bad, but his case is not hopeless, unless he is 
 necessitated to go on in the way he is going. If 
 alternatives are possible, his redemption is possible. But 
 his redemption is hopeless, if there never was but one 
 way for him and all the world. The moralist, therefore, 
 demands an alternative to the bad man's foredoomed 
 badness, in order to rationalise the moral universe. 
 
 He wants to be able to say to the bad man : ' You 
 need not have become the leper you are. You might 
 have moulded yourself otherwise. Your villainous 
 instincts and unhappy circumstances do not exculpate 
 you. You might have resisted your temptations. Even 
 now your case is not quite hopeless. Your nature is not 
 wholly rigid. In God's universe no moral lapses are 
 wholly irretrievable. Occasions therefore will present 
 themselves in which, even for you, there will be real 
 alternatives to evil-doing, and if you choose to do right, 
 you may yet redeem yourself.' But he does not need 
 or desire to say analogously to the good man : ' In spite 
 of the deeply ingrained goodness of your habits, you are 
 still free to do evil. May I live to see the day when
 
 xvin FREEDOM 401 
 
 you commit a crime and vindicate thereby your moral 
 freedom ! ' 
 
 The moralist, in short, insists on the reality of the 
 alternative in the one case only ; he has no objection to a 
 freedom which transcends itself and is consolidated into 
 impeccable virtue. In other words, he does not wish to 
 conceive all moral acts as indeterminate, but only some ; 
 and he has no need whatever to conceive them as inde- 
 terminable. This alone suffices to constitute an essential 
 difference between the real demand for moral freedom 
 and the bogey of indeterminism which determinists seek 
 to put in its place. 
 
 It should further be observed that there is no moral 
 need to insist on an unlimited indetermination even in 
 order to impress the bad man. A very slight degree of 
 plasticity will suffice for all ethical demands. And in 
 point of fact no moralist or indeterminist has ever denied 
 the reality of habits. Any notable alteration of habit 
 or sudden conversion is always regarded as more or less 
 miraculous, if it tends in the right direction, or as morbid, 
 if it does not. We see, therefore, that the moral postulate 
 of Freedom is by no means in itself an absurd or extreme 
 one, even though it is not yet apparent how it can 
 scientifically be satisfied. 
 
 6. We may, however, obtain light on this subject by 
 next considering the empirical consciousness of Freedom. 
 Consciousness certainly appears to affirm the existence of 
 real alternatives, and of real choices between them. But 
 it can hardly be said to testify to a freedom which is 
 either unceasing or unrestricted. 
 
 ( i ) What we feel to be ' free ' choices are compara- 
 tively rare events in a moral life of which the greater part 
 seems to be determined by habits and circumstances leaving 
 us neither a real, nor even an apparent, choice. Empirically 
 our free choices occur as disturbances in the placid flow 
 of experiences, as distinctly upsetting to the equilibrium 
 of our lives as the crises in which we feel ' unfree ' and 
 constrained to do what we would rather not. Both felt 
 freedom and felt necessity, in short, are symptoms of a 
 
 2 D
 
 402 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvm 
 
 crisis, and mark the turning-points of a life. They are 
 in a sense correlative and indicative of a certain (specific- 
 ally human) stage in moral development. 1 
 
 (2) The alternatives which we empirically encounter 
 never seem to be unlimited. We never feel ' free ' to do 
 anything and everything. Intellectually our choice seems 
 always to be one between alternative ways of achieving 
 an end, of realising a good. Morally it seems always to 
 be a choice between ' duty ' and ' inclination/ ' right ' and 
 ' wrong.' We feel ' free ' to choose, but not at random ; 
 the alternatives are definitely labelled ' wrong but pleasant ' 
 and ' right but repugnant.' 
 
 (3) These alternatives do not seem unconnected with 
 our character. So far from appearing to be so, it is of 
 the essence of our ' choice ' that both alternatives should 
 appeal to us. Alike if our sense of duty had grown 
 strong enough, and we had no inclination to do anything 
 but what is right ; and if evil indulgences had utterly 
 destroyed our sense of duty, and we retained no inkling 
 of what was right, our choice would disappear, and with 
 it the feeling that we were ' free.' 
 
 Our moral ' freedom,' therefore, seems to indicate a 
 moral condition intermediate between that of the angel 
 and that of the devil. It seems to lie in the indeterminate- 
 ness of a character which is not yet fixed in its habits for 
 good or evil, but still sensitive to the appeals of both. 
 Similarly, the intellectual alternatives would disappear for 
 intelligences either vastly more perfect or vastly less 
 perfect than our own. A mind that could unerringly pick 
 out the best means for the realisation of its ends would 
 not be perplexed by alternatives, any more than a mind 
 that was too stupid to perceive any but the one most 
 obvious course. In either case, therefore, the reality of 
 the alternatives and the feeling of ' freedom ' which accom- 
 panies our choice seem to be relative to definite moral 
 and intellectual states which occur at a definite stage of 
 habituation. A mind to which the truths of arithmetic 
 are still contingent, which sometimes judges 12 x 12 to 
 
 1 As I pointed out long ago in Riddles of the Sphinx, pp. 464-5.
 
 xviii FREEDOM 403 
 
 be 1 44 and sometimes not, is not yet decided in its habits 
 of arithmetical calculation. A will to which moral alter- 
 natives are contingent, which when entrusted with a bottle 
 of whisky doubts whether to get drunk or to stay sober, 
 is not yet established in its virtue. 
 
 In both cases, no doubt, the contingency of our reaction 
 betokens a defect. To a perfect knowledge the best 
 course would allow no inferior alternative to be enter- 
 tained ; a perfect will would not be tempted by an alter- 
 native to the right course. To a combination, therefore, 
 of perfect will with perfect knowledge no alternatives of 
 any sort could exist, and no act could ever be ' contingent.' 
 
 But why should this prevent us from recognising the 
 alternatives that seem to exist for us ? It only renders 
 them relative to the specific nature of man. It does not 
 render them unintelligible. They are not irruptions from 
 nowhere. They spring from a character in which they are 
 naturally rooted, because that character is still contingent. 
 
 When, therefore, the determinist attempts to represent 
 our freedom as incalculably upsetting the continuity of 
 character, he is stooping to sheer calumny. If I am 
 perplexed to choose between a number of possible means 
 to my end, it is because just my intelligence presents just 
 those alternatives to me under just those circumstances. 
 A mind whose make-up, knowledge, and training were 
 even slightly different might have quite different alterna- 
 tives, or none at all, or be puzzled in cases when I should 
 not feel the slightest hesitation. So too our moral choices 
 are personal ; they presuppose just the characters and 
 circumstances they arise from. 
 
 7. It is extremely important to observe the precise 
 character of these empirical appearances, because if this 
 is done, it is easy to perceive in them the real solution of 
 the whole crux. They directly suggest a way of recon- 
 ciling the scientific and the ethical postulate ; a way so 
 simple that it would seem incredible that no one should 
 have perceived it before, had we not learnt from long and 
 sad experience that the simplest solutions are usually the 
 last which the philosophic mind is able to hit upon or
 
 404 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvm 
 
 willing to accept, especially if such solutions happen also 
 to be empirically obvious. And yet what could be simpler 
 than the inferences from the facts we have described ? If 
 it is true that empirically the ' free ' acts always seem to 
 spring from the given situation, if the alternatives always 
 seem to exist for a particular mind under particular 
 circumstances, does it not follow at once that whichever 
 of the alternatives is chosen, it will appear to be rationally 
 connected with the antecedent circumstances ? There will 
 be no break, and no difficulty of transition from the act 
 to its antecedents and back again. 
 
 If, therefore, the actual course of events is contem- 
 plated ex post facto, it will always be possible to argue 
 that it is intelligible because it sprang from character and 
 circumstances. And if our purpose is deterministic, it 
 can always be maintained that no other course could 
 have been adopted ; that because it was intelligible, no 
 other course would have been. But this is manifestly 
 false ; the alternative, had it been adopted, would have 
 seemed equally intelligible, just because it was such as to 
 be really entertained by the agent under the circum- 
 stances, and as naturally rooted in them. After the event, 
 therefore, the determinist is in the position to argue 
 ' heads I win, tails you lose ' ; whatever the issue, he can 
 claim it as a confirmation of his view. Before the event, 
 on the other hand, he was always impotent ; he could 
 always modestly disclaim prediction (and therewith avoid 
 refutation) on the ground of insufficient knowledge. His 
 position, therefore, seems inexpugnable. 
 
 And yet what has happened has really utterly upset 
 him ; for we have come upon a sort of third alternative 
 to Determinism and Indeterminism. The determinists 
 had argued that if the course of events was not rigidly 
 determined it must be wholly indeterminable ; that if it 
 was not uniquely calculable, it could not be calculated at 
 all. But here we appear to have a case in which alternative 
 courses are equally calculable, and to be confronted with 
 a nature which is really indeterminate and really deter- 
 minable in alternative ways, which seem equally natural
 
 xvm FREEDOM 405 
 
 and intelligible. The determinist, therefore, is really 
 baffled. It no longer follows from the rejection of his 
 theory that we must give up calculating and understand- 
 ing the course of things. If their nature is such that at 
 various points they engender real alternatives, they will 
 engender a plurality of intelligible possibilities, and the 
 choice between them will constitute a real ' freedom,' with- 
 out entailing any of the dreadful consequences with which 
 determinism and indeterminism both seemed to menace 
 us. Thus we need neither overturn the altar of science 
 nor sacrifice ourselves upon it : the freedom, which seemed 
 lost so long as only one course of nature seemed rational, 
 intelligible, and calculable, is restored when we recognise 
 that two or more may seem intelligible, because equally 
 natural and calculable. We can satisfy, therefore, the 
 scientific postulate of calculability without denying the 
 reality of the alternatives which our moral nature seems 
 both to require and to attest. For we can confidently 
 lay it down that no event will ever occur which will not 
 seem intelligibly connected with its antecedents after it 
 has happened. It will, therefore, be judged to have been 
 calculable, even though this inference will contain a 
 certain modicum of illusion. For though, no doubt, if 
 we had known enough, we might have calculated it out 
 as a real possibility, we could not have made sure that 
 just this possibility and not any of its alternatives would 
 actually be realised. But practically this is more than 
 enough for science, and would admit of far greater success 
 in calculation than the deficiencies of our knowledge now 
 actually concede to us. 
 
 It must not be thought, however, that the conception 
 of Freedom we have thus arrived at constitutes a refuta- 
 tion of Determinism. Methodological postulates as such 
 cannot be refuted ; they can only be disused. And meta- 
 physical dogmas also, that is, ultimate attitudes of 
 thought, cannot be refuted ; they can only be chosen or 
 rejected ; for they form the foundations on which our 
 demonstrations rest. Determinism, then, as a scientific 
 postulate, has not been endangered ; as a metaphysical
 
 406 STUDIES IN HUMANISM X vm 
 
 creed it reduces itself, like all such ultimate assumptions, 
 to a matter of free choice. And herein, in this case, lies 
 a paradox, perhaps ; for as we cannot vindicate our free- 
 dom unless we are determined to be free, so we cannot 
 compel those to be free who are free to be determined, 
 and prefer to think it so. 1 
 
 8. But though this paradox may be left to the care- 
 ful consideration of determinists, we can now resolve 
 another that which was noted in 5 as to the charming 
 agreement which obtains between determinists, libertarians, 
 and ordinary folk, in their practical behaviour. For if the 
 postulates are really methodological necessities, every one 
 in his practice will have to use them, however he may 
 think about them metaphysically, and whether or not he 
 thinks about them at all. The theoretic divergences, 
 therefore, in our views will make no practical difference ; 
 both parties will use both postulates, and will have a 
 right to do so. 
 
 (i) Every one has to take it for granted that the 
 course of events is calculable in so far as he is interested 
 in forecasting it. This, indeed, is merely a periphrasis of 
 the statement that determinism is a methodological postu- 
 late. The libertarian, therefore, has the same right as 
 any one else to treat events as calculable, to try to calcu- 
 late all he can and knows. He may be conscious that 
 this aim can never be fully realised, that things are not 
 wholly calculable ; but while he calculates he must hope 
 that they will behave as if they were determined, and will 
 not frustrate his efforts by exhibiting their freedom. 
 Even if he fails, it will be his interest to attribute his 
 lack of success, not to the real contingency he has 
 admitted into nature, but rather to the defects of his 
 knowledge. He will wholly agree, therefore, with the 
 determinist that if he had known more, his calculation 
 would have succeeded. And he would defend himself by 
 urging that anyhow the contingency introduced into our 
 
 1 As William James well says, freedom " ought to be freely espoused by men 
 who can equally well turn their backs upon it. In other words, our first act of 
 freedom, if we are free, ought in all inward propriety be to affirm that we are 
 free " ( Will to Believe, p. 146).
 
 xvin FREEDOM 407 
 
 world by our ignorance must vastly exceed that due to 
 any real indetermination in the nature of things. 
 
 In dealing, on the other hand, with cases which evoke 
 the moral postulate of freedom, the libertarian will, of 
 course, recognise the reality of the freedom he has 
 assumed. But this will not debar him from calculating. 
 He will assume the indetermination in the nature he is 
 studying to be real, and calculate the alternative courses 
 to which it can be supposed to lead. And if he has a 
 pretty clear conception of the nature of his ' free ' fellow- 
 men, his success in forecasting their behaviour will not 
 fall sensibly short of his success in calculating that of 
 more remote natures which he takes to be fully 
 determined. 
 
 (2) The determinist regards the scientific postulate as 
 the expression of an ultimate truth about reality. But 
 in practice it reduces itself to the expression of a pious 
 hope. ' If I knew all the antecedents, I could calculate 
 all the consequences,' is an aspiration and a wish rather 
 than a positive achievement. This was why we treated 
 it in 4 as essentially a moral encouragement to 
 endeavour. Even the determinist, moreover, must be 
 dimly conscious that his wish will never be granted him, 
 that the whole course of events never will be calculated 
 by him. Why, then, should he repine at learning that 
 the impossibility of his ideal rests ultimately on the 
 inherent nature of reality rather than on the ineradicable 
 weakness of his mind ? Practically it makes no difference. 
 He finds de facto that he cannot calculate all events. He 
 tries them all, just like the libertarian. But he is baffled 
 in just the same way. Both, therefore, must agree that 
 contingencies exist in their common world which they 
 cannot calculate. To deny their ultimate reality is no 
 practical assistance ; it only adds the annoyance that we 
 must conceive ourselves to be subject to illusion and 
 incapable of perceiving things as they really are. 
 
 On the other hand, in dealing with moral contingencies 
 the determinist has to treat them as just as real as the 
 libertarian. However firmly he may be convinced that
 
 408 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvm 
 
 his neighbour's acts are rigidly determined, he does not 
 always feel certain that he knows his nature sufficiently 
 to predict them. He is fortunate if he can feel sure 
 what alternatives are most likely to appeal to him, and 
 calculate the consequences and adjust his own course 
 accordingly. In practice, therefore, he will do just as the 
 libertarian did : he will have to recognise, that is, real 
 but calculable, alternatives which exist, at all events 
 for him. 
 
 In other words, the pragmatic difference between the 
 rival theories tends to be evanescent ; in practice both 
 parties have to pocket their metaphysics and to act 
 sensibly ; in theory the differences are such that their 
 influence on practice is very remote, and mainly emotional. 
 For common sense, again, there are no practical alter- 
 natives ; the whole metaphysical controversy, therefore, 
 seems nugatory, and is regarded with the utmost 
 equanimity. And is not this all as it should be in a 
 universe in which thought is secondary to action ? 
 
 9. We have, however, pushed forward our doctrine 
 of Freedom somewhat rapidly, and shall do well to 
 analyse its nature in order to secure our ground. 
 
 We should realise, in the first place, that we took a 
 risk in declaring the immediate consciousness of Freedom 
 to contain the solution of the puzzle. There is always a 
 risk in taking appearances to contain ultimate truth. 
 But it is not so serious as to take them as containing no 
 truth at all. And to our Humanism it will naturally 
 seem a better risk to take to trust appearances than to 
 invalidate them for no sufficient reason. Let us there- 
 fore bravely accept the risk and pose our critics by 
 asking, Why, after all, should the alternatives which 
 seem to be real not be really real ? Because to regard 
 them as real renders science impossible and life chaotic ? 
 That allegation we have shown to be untrue. Science is 
 in no danger from our doctrine, and for the purposes of 
 life we all assume the reality of contingencies. Because 
 we do not yet understand the positive nature of Freedom, 
 beyond this that it involves indetermination ? And because
 
 xvm FREEDOM 409 
 
 a real indetermination ultimately leads to a metaphysically 
 unthinkable view of the universe ? 
 
 These latter suggestions are more deserving of con- 
 sideration. And so let us first explore the positive 
 nature of the sort of Freedom we have seemed to find, 
 considering it empirically and psychologically, before 
 attempting to evaluate its metaphysical significance. 
 
 There does not seem to be any reason why we should 
 not accept the empirical reality of psychological indeter- 
 mination, once we have really disabused our minds of 
 the prejudice engendered by a misconception of the 
 scientific postulate. Such indetermination, indeed, appears 
 to be a natural incident in the growth of a habit, and the 
 capacity for retaining a certain plasticity and growing new 
 habits seems to be essential to existence in a universe 
 which has, on the one hand, acquired a certain stability 
 and order, and yet, on the other, is still evolving new 
 conditions, to which novel adjustments are from time to 
 time required. A nature, therefore, which was entirely 
 indeterminate in its reactions, and one which was entirely 
 rigid and determinate, would alike be inefficacious and 
 unsuited to our world. To live in it we need a certain 
 degree of plasticity and the intelligence to perceive when 
 better adjustments can be effected by varying our habits 
 of reaction. This power, indeed, seems to be the essence 
 of our ' reason.' l Why then should philosophy insist on 
 regarding this plasticity as quite illusory ? 
 
 It appears, further, to be a misapprehension when this 
 plasticity of habit is regarded as conflicting with the con- 
 ception of ' law.' Law, subjectively regarded from the 
 standpoint of a knower trying economically to conceive 
 the universe, means regularity, and therefore calculable- 
 ness and trustworthiness. Phrasing it intellectualistically, 
 this constitutes the ' intelligibility ' of the natural order. 
 Regarded objectively, however, ' law ' means nothing but 
 habit. The ' laws of nature/ however they may be 
 thought to originate, are de facto the established habits of 
 things, and their constancy is an empirical fact of 
 
 1 Cp. Essay xvi. 4.
 
 410 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvm 
 
 observation. It is from experience alone that we learn 
 that nature in general conforms itself to our postulate of 
 regularity and renders it so applicable that we can take 
 it to be ' true.' 
 
 But experience never fully warrants the assertion that 
 the habits of nature are absolutely fixed and constant. 
 For all we can prove to the contrary, even the most 
 fundamental laws may be changing let us hope 
 ' evolving ' into something better. Over large tracts of 
 nature wherever we can trace the working of intelligence 
 the laws do not even appear to have an absolute 
 constancy. All this, however, will not interfere with our 
 methodological assumption of constancy unless the changes 
 in habits are very rapid ; as rapid, say, as the changes in 
 the fashions. Nor will it necessarily render the course of 
 things unintelligible. On the contrary, we have seen that 
 adaptive innovations in habits, intelligent divergences from 
 law, are the very essence of ' reason,' and if the changes 
 of fashions are irrational in their frequency, they are at 
 the same time rational, as satisfying the desire to display 
 one's credit with one's dressmaker or tailor. 
 
 There is then no real psychological difficulty about the 
 idea that the plasticity of habit carries with it a certain 
 indetermination, which, however, is intelligible and calcul- 
 able and salutary. The only difficulty really involved 
 lies in conceiving a nature which is, as it were, divided 
 against itself and advancing at different rates in different 
 parts, in such a way that the ' desires ' may engender 
 internal friction by persistently hankering after ingrained 
 habits of behaviour long after the ' reason ' has condemned 
 their inappropriateness under the now altered circum- 
 stances. And this difficulty no doubt deserves more 
 attention than psychologists and moralists have yet 
 bestowed upon it. But in whatever way it may be 
 explicable, it can hardly be denied that something of the 
 sort really exists ; and for our present purpose this 
 suffices. 
 
 Metaphysically, on the other hand, the difficulty which 
 the existence of indetermination involves is a very big
 
 XVIH FREEDOM 411 
 
 one. If, that is, it is admitted to exist at all, it touches 
 the last problems of ontology. For it resolves itself 
 into the question of the possibility of thinking a really 
 incomplete reality, a world which is really plastic and 
 growing and changing. And the a priori sort of meta- 
 physics has always found the reality of change an in- 
 superable stumbling-block. 1 We, on the other hand, may 
 think the reality of change too evident to argue over, we 
 may deem the objections raised against it silly quibbles, 
 we may see that to deny it only leads to phantom 
 universes having no relation to our own ; but we must 
 recognise the reality of a formidable prejudice. It will 
 be more prudent, therefore, to postpone the final tussle 
 with this prejudice till we have considered (i) how far the 
 consequences of the human Freedom we have conceived 
 may be traced throughout the world ; (2) how far some- 
 thing analogous can be attributed to the other existences 
 in the world ; and (3) how we should value a world whose 
 nature is ultimately ' free.' 
 
 10. If human freedom is real, the world is really 
 indeterminate. This is easily demonstrable. For if we 
 really have the power to choose between alternatives, the 
 course of things will necessarily differ according as we do 
 one thing or an other. This follows alike whether we 
 conceive the rest of the world to be fully determined, or 
 to have itself some power of spontaneous choice. If a 
 single variable factor is introduced among a mass of 
 invariable antecedents, the consequents will needs be 
 different. If it is introduced amid a mass of antecedents 
 which themselves are variable, the final outcome may 
 indeed remain the same, but only if these other factors 
 set themselves intelligently to counteract and thwart the 
 first. Thus the intermediate course of events will yet 
 be different, seeing that it will have been altered to 
 encounter the first variable. In either case, therefore, 
 there will be alternative courses of history, and a real 
 indetermination in a universe which harbours a free agent. 
 
 Humanly speaking, the first case seems clearly to be 
 
 1 Cp. Essay ix. i.
 
 412 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvm 
 
 congruous with the facts. Human purposes have not all 
 been thwarted ; they have left their mark upon the earth 
 and made it a very different place from what it would 
 otherwise have been. Of course, however, we may hold 
 that their realisation has occurred only in so far as it has 
 not thwarted an ulterior and diviner purpose which has 
 a countermove to^every human sin and error. 1 
 
 This consequence, then, of human freedom is too clear 
 to be denied. It can only be minimised. After all, it 
 may be said, what does human freedom come to ? It can 
 only effect infinitesimal changes on the surface of the 
 earth. It cannot divert the stars in their courses, it 
 cannot even regulate the motions of the earth, it cannot 
 ward off the ultimate collapse of the Solar System. 
 
 To which it may be replied (i) that our agency is 
 not necessarily negligible because it cannot control the 
 cosmic masses ; (2) that our interests are chiefly confined 
 to the earth's surface, and that it matters not a little 
 whether or not we can manipulate that; (3) that the extent 
 to which we can alter the course of things depends on 
 the extent to which we can render things plastic to our 
 purposes ; (4) that with audacity and study we may find 
 the world far more plastic than as yet we dare to think. 
 Science is as yet only beginning, and mankind is only 
 beginning to trust itself to science, which as yet hardly 
 dares to speculate about all that it might possibly attempt. 
 Lastly (5), even differences of choices which at first 
 seem infinitesimal may lead to growing divergences, and 
 ultimately constitute all the difference between a world in 
 which we are saved and one in which we are damned. 
 
 On the whole, therefore, we shall do well not to think 
 too meanly of our powers, but to reflect rather on the 
 responsibilities involved even in our most trivial choices. 
 If we can really make our ' fate ' and remake our world, 
 it behoves us to make sure that they shall not be made 
 amiss. 
 
 1 1. It will next be politic to face an objection which 
 has probably long been simmering in our readers' minds. 
 
 1 Cp. James, Will to Believe, pp. 181-2.
 
 xvin FREEDOM 413 
 
 ' Is it credible,' they will incline to ask, ' that man alone 
 should be free and form an exception to the rest of the 
 universe ? And if the rest of the universe is determined, 
 is it not probable that man will be likewise ? ' 
 
 Now it cannot be admitted that our view of man 
 should necessarily be falsified in order to accommodate it 
 to our beliefs about the rest of the universe. But at the 
 same time the human mind finds exceptions irksome, and 
 is disposed to question them. We can, however, get rid 
 of this ' exception ' in another way. Instead of sacrificing 
 our freedom to cosmic analogies, let us try to trace some- 
 thing analogous to our freedom throughout the universe. 
 
 It is evident, in the first place, that a higher and more 
 perfect being than man, if the intelligent operations of 
 such a one are traceable in the world, would be both 
 1 freer ' than man, that is more able to achieve his ends 
 and less often thwarted, and also more determinate in 
 his action, and more uniform and calculable in the 
 execution of his purposes. It is clear, therefore, that a 
 God ' would work by ' law ' rather than by ' miracle,' in 
 proportion as he really controlled the world, and that 
 consequently it would be very easy to misinterpret his 
 agency, and to ascribe it to a mechanical necessity ; 
 which of course is what has usually been done. 
 
 Turning next to beings lower in the scale than our- 
 selves, we have of course good reason to attribute to the 
 higher animals a mental constitution very like our own. 
 And that should carry with it something very like our 
 sense of freedom. A dog, for example, appears to be 
 subject to conflicting impulses, to doubt and hesitate, 
 to attend selectively and choose, and sometimes to exhibit 
 a spontaneity which baffles calculation almost as com- 
 pletely as that of his master. We can indeed imagine 
 the great motives that broadly determine his conduct, but 
 in some respects his motives are harder to appreciate, 
 because his mind is remoter from our own. 
 
 As we descend the scale of life these difficulties grow 
 more marked ; our spiritual sympathy with, and inward 
 understanding of, the conduct we observe grow less and
 
 414 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvm 
 
 less. The feelings which prompt, and the motives which 
 impel, to the spontaneous acts we notice grow ever more 
 mysterious. But externally we can still predict the lower 
 animal's behaviour. We do not understand the why of 
 its spontaneous, random motions. But we observe that 
 these variations lie between certain narrow limits, which 
 are narrowed down as intelligence is lowered. An amoeba 
 never does anything startling to shock the biologist. 
 Hence as intelligence diminishes or grows alienated from 
 our own, conduct becomes more uniform, and therefore in 
 a way more calculable. Only it is in another way. We 
 have become external spectators of acts to which we have 
 lost the inner clue. 
 
 Nevertheless when we descend to the inanimate, and 
 meet apparently perfect regularity, we feel that we have 
 reached the true home of mechanical ' law ' which knows 
 no breaking, disturbed by no intelligence, and varied by 
 no vestige of spontaneous choice. But we have no 
 inward comprehension whatever of the processes we watch. 
 Why should material masses gravitate inversely as the 
 square of the distance ? What satisfactions can they 
 derive from this ratio in particular ? Why should atoms 
 dance just in the mazy rhythms they severally choose ? 
 Why should electrons carry just the ' charges ' they 
 empirically bear ? All this is sheer, brute, uncompre- 
 hended fact, of which no philosophy since Hegel has had 
 the folly to essay an a priori explanation. But little we 
 care, or scientifically need care, so long as it all happens 
 with a ' mechanical ' regularity which can be accurately 
 calculated. 
 
 It is convenient, therefore, to assume that the inorganic 
 is the realm of rigid mechanism and devoid of every trace 
 of spontaneous spirit. But this is an assumption which 
 is strictly indemonstrable. The regularity to which we 
 trust is no adequate proof. For, taken in large masses, 
 human actions show a similar constancy. Averages 
 remain regular and calculable, even though their indi- 
 vidual components may vary widely and incalculably from 
 the mean. Under stable and normal conditions of society
 
 XVHI FREEDOM 415 
 
 the statistics of births, marriages, and deaths do not vary 
 appreciably from year to year. Yet some of these events 
 are usually set down to individual choices. 
 
 Now in observing the inorganic we are dealing with 
 the world's constituents in very large numbers. Physical 
 and chemical experiments operate with many thousands 
 and millions of millions at a time. The least speck 
 visible under the microscope is composed of atoms by the 
 million. Consequently the regularity we observe may 
 very well be that of an average. If, then, a single atom 
 here or there displayed its extraordinary intelligence or 
 original perverseness by refusing to do as the rest, how 
 pray should it ever be detected by us ? How should we 
 ever suspect that the process rested upon choice and was 
 not utterly mechanical ? 
 
 Thirdly, it must be borne in mind that we may fail to 
 observe the differences in the behaviour of individual 
 atoms or electrons merely because our experiments are 
 too ignorant and clumsy to discriminate between them, 
 so as to tempt some, without alluring others. Their 
 complete qualitative identity is inferred from experiments 
 which are as crude and barbarous as would be experiments 
 which concluded to the non-existence of human indi- 
 viduality from the fact that when men were hurled over a 
 precipice in large quantities they were all equally dashed 
 to pieces. 
 
 How coarse our methods are we usually discover only 
 when they are improved. Thus it long seemed inexplicable 
 how a grain of musk could retain its fragrance for years 
 without sensibly losing weight, if this quality really rested 
 on the emission of particles ; but this mystery is now to 
 a large extent solved by the discovery of radio-activity. 
 It has turned out that the electroscope is a far more 
 delicate instrument than the most sensitive balance, which 
 remains unaffected by the violent propulsion of electrons 
 which accompanies the disruption of atomic matter. And 
 so the whole doctrine of the indestructibility of matter 
 may be radically wrong, and its apparent proofs due 
 merely to the roughness of our former measurements. In
 
 4i6 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvm 
 
 experimenting with radium we have managed to select 
 those ' atoms ' which are nearing their explosive end, and 
 to concentrate them until their death agonies grow visible 
 to us ; but concerning the generation of atoms we are still 
 in the dark, though we suspect a good deal, enough at 
 any rate to entertain the idea that the constancy of matter 
 may be merely the stability of an average. Similarly it 
 is possible that long -continued fractionations might sift 
 out the chief individual differences in all the chemical 
 ' elements.' It is therefore quite fallacious to infer that 
 things have a rigid and unalterable nature, because they 
 show their indifference to us by reacting alike to modes 
 of treatment which to our eyes seem different. In view 
 of our ignorance of their inner nature this may only show 
 that differences which seem important to us do not seem 
 important to them. 1 
 
 Deficient as our observations are in delicacy, they are 
 still more deficient in endurance. The evidence that the 
 ' laws ' of nature remain really constant is hardly complete 
 even for the last few centuries. The discrepancies, for 
 example, between the historically recorded and the retro- 
 spectively calculated eclipses of the sun and the moon are 
 too great to be compatible with existence of our present 
 planetary orbits even a few centuries ago. 2 To explain 
 them we have to choose between the assumptions that our 
 records are false, that the moon is slowly escaping us, that 
 the earth's diurnal rotation is slowing down, that the sun's 
 motion or attraction is altering, or that the law of gravita- 
 tion is changing, or whatever combination of these and 
 other hypotheses we can devise to fit the facts more 
 nearly. To guide that choice we have only the vague 
 methodological maxim that it is well to try first such 
 hypotheses as involve the least disturbance of the accepted 
 system of science. But even the greatest readjustments 
 may be needed. If now we supposed the primary laws 
 of nature to be changing slowly and continuously, most of 
 
 1 Cp. Humanism, p. n, note. 
 
 2 See an article on "Ancient Eclipses" by Prof. P. H. Cowell in Nature, 
 No. 1905.
 
 xvni FREEDOM 417 
 
 the evidence which is now held to imply their rigid 
 constancy would be seen to be inconclusive. Thus even 
 in the inorganic world habits might be plastic and ' laws ' 
 might be gradually evolving. 
 
 If this be so, it is, moreover, clear that we ourselves 
 might take a part in determining this evolution. Our 
 operations might induce things to develop their habits in 
 one way rather than another, and so we should literally 
 be altering the laws of nature. It is even permissible to 
 surmise that we may already sometimes have accom- 
 plished this. The chemist, for example, seems often so 
 to play upon the acquired habits of his substances as 
 to bring into existence compounds which but for him 
 would never have existed, and never could have existed 
 in a state of nature. And so he may induce new 
 habits ; for once these combinations have been formed, 
 they may leave permanent traces on the natures that 
 take part in them, and so alter their ' affinities ' for the 
 future. 
 
 The speculations whereby we have illustrated the 
 possibility that individuality, plasticity, and freedom may 
 pervade also the inorganic world will seem wild and 
 unfamiliar. But they are such that science may some day 
 verify them, if they are looked for. At present we blind 
 ourselves to their possibility by making the methodo- 
 logical assumptions of determinism and mechanism. But 
 it should be clearly confessed that it is entirely possible 
 that the world may now be, and may always have been, 
 such as to contain a certain indetermination throughout 
 its structure, which we have only failed to discover because 
 we have closed our eyes to it, in order to have a more 
 easily calculable universe. If, however, that postulate is 
 modified so that ' free ' acts also are conceived as calculable, 
 our eyes may be opened, as it were by magic, and the 
 evidences of ' freedom ' may everywhere pop up and stare 
 us in the face. 
 
 12. We come at last to the ultimate metaphysical 
 advantages and disadvantages of the belief in Freedom 
 which we have developed. That it has its drawbacks is 
 
 2 E
 
 418 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvm 
 
 fairly obvious. Indeterminism, even when it has been 
 tamed, i.e. limited, and rendered calculable and determin- 
 able, still means chance ; and chance means risk ; and 
 risk a possibility of failure. Our craven instincts, there- 
 fore, our indolence, our diffidence, will always demand an 
 assurance of salvation, a universe which cannot go astray, 
 but is predestined to be perfect. 
 
 The prejudices thus engendered are probably among 
 the strongest of the secret motives which inspire the 
 absolutist's aversion from Pragmatism. As Prof. Muir- 
 head opportunely confesses, the admission of contingency 
 seems to turn the universe into " a joint-stock enterprise 
 under God and Co., Limited, without insurance against 
 accident" l and this would be very much of a pis alter 
 to predestinate perfection. 
 
 But is predestinate perfection possible or really think- 
 able ? And what is the ' insurance against accident ' 
 offered us by the agents of the Absolute really and truly- 
 worth ? 
 
 If the universe as we know it is predestined to any- 
 thing, it is predestined to go on as it is upon its fatal 
 course. For the universe, we are assured, contains no 
 free agents, human or divine, to work out beneficial trans- 
 formations in its nature. It is predestined, therefore, to 
 be an unmeaning dance of cosmic matter, diversified at 
 intervals by catastrophes, as blind blundering suns go 
 crashing into each other's systems and make holocausts 
 of the values and polities which some powerless race 
 of planetary pygmies has painfully evolved. It is 
 predestined to a fate which nothing can avert, which 
 no one can mitigate or improve. 
 
 And to make our ' insurance ' doubly sure, we are 
 furthermore assured that this universe, which extorts its 
 tribute of tears from every feeling breast, is already perfect, 
 if only we could see it which being necessarily ' finite ' we 
 cannot ! There is not, therefore, the slightest reason 
 why, for finite minds, the universe should ever seem, or 
 become, more satisfactory than now it is. The absolutist 
 
 1 Hib&ert Journal, vol. iv. p. 460. Italics mine.
 
 xvin FREEDOM 419 
 
 in his determinism at bottom entirely agrees with 
 Mephistopheles 
 
 Glaub' unser einem dieses Ganze 
 1st nur fur einen Gott gemacht. 
 
 The only boon which his view ' insures ' us is that a 
 world which with all its faults had seemed plastic and 
 improvable, becomes a hopeless hell for the wanton and 
 superfluous torture of helpless ' finite ' beings, whose doom 
 was predestined from all eternity ! 
 
 For my part, I should prefer a universe marred by 
 chance to such a certainty. For the ' chance ' in this 
 case means a chance of improvement. Of course a world 
 that was really perfect in a simple and human way, and 
 was incapable of declining from that perfection because 
 it contained no indetermination, would be better still. 
 But such a world ours plainly is not, though it has a 
 chance of developing such perfection by becoming wholly 
 harmonious and determinate. And is it not ' assurance ' 
 enough for all reasonable requirements that in a world 
 wholly harmonised no one could upset its harmony nor 
 have any motive for changing his habits and the way of 
 the world ? 
 
 There remains to be discussed the metaphysical 
 objection to the conception of indetermination which was 
 postponed in 9. It is at bottom an objection to the 
 reality of change in ultimate reality, to the notion of its 
 incompleteness and development. It is, however, merely a 
 survival of Eleatic prejudice, and the simplest way to dispose 
 of it is by a demand for its credentials. For why should 
 it be taken as certain a priori that the real cannot change ? 
 All we knozu about reality negatives this notion. And if 
 our immediate experience cannot convince us of the 
 reality of change, of what can anything convince us ? Or 
 if it is claimed that the impossibility of change can be 
 made dialectically evident by a priori reasoning from 
 ideas, our reply will be that, if so, the ideas in question 
 must be faulty. For our ideas should be formed to 
 understand experience, not to confute it. Ideas which
 
 420 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xvm 
 
 are inapplicable are invalid. Ideas which contradict 
 experience are either false, or in need of verification by 
 the altering of the reality which contradicts them. In 
 short, it is vain to threaten libertarians with the meta- 
 physical terrors of what James calls ' the block-universe.' 
 That conception is usually mystical, when it is not a 
 materialistic corollary from an obsolescent physics ; it 
 can never be really thought out in metaphysics except 
 into sheer, unmitigated Eleaticism. And, as in Zeno's time, 
 the puzzle ' solvitur ambulando ' by those who really wish 
 to know : we leave it aside and pass on. 
 
 To sum up ; our Freedom is really such as it appears ; 
 it consists in the determinable indetermination of a nature 
 which is plastic, incomplete, and still evolving. These 
 features pervade the universe ; but they do not make it 
 unintelligible. Nay, they are the basis of its perfecti- 
 bility.
 
 XIX 
 THE MAKING OF REALITY 
 
 ARGUMENT 
 
 i. Hegel's great idea of a thought process which was to be also the cosmic 
 process spoilt by his dehumanising of the former. The false abstractions 
 of the ' Dialectic ' from time and personality lead to its impotence to 
 explain either process. 2. Humanism renews Hegel's enterprise by 
 conceiving the ' making of truth ' to be also a ' making of reality. ' Its 
 epistemological validity. 3. The problem of a metaphysical ' making 
 of reality.' 4. Its difficulties, (i) Can reality be wholly engendered 
 by our operations ? (2) Can the Pragmatic method yield a metaphysic ? 
 5. Even epistemologically we must (r) distinguish between 'discover- 
 ing ' and ' making ' reality. The distinction may mark the division 
 between Pragmatism and Humanism. But it is itself pragmatic, and in 
 some cases the difference between ' making ' and ' finding ' becomes 
 arbitrary. 6. (2) The great difference between original and final 
 ' truth ' and ' fact ' in the process which validates ' claims ' and makes 
 ' realities.' The Pragmatic unimportance of starting-points. Initial 
 truth as ' sheer claim ' and initial fact as mere potentiality. Their 
 methodological worthlessness. 7. (3) The methodological nullity and 
 metaphysical absurdity of the notion of an ' original fact. ' Ultimate 
 reality something to be looked forward, and not back, to. 8. The 
 transition to metaphysics. Humanism and metaphysics. 9. The four 
 admitted ways in which the ' making of truth ' involves a ' making of 
 reality.' The fifth knowing makes reality by altering the knowers, 
 who are real. IO. But is the object known also altered, and so 
 ' made ' ? Where the object known is not aware it is known, it is 
 treated as 'independent,' because knowing seems to make no difference. 
 The fallaciousness of the notion of mere knowing. Knowing as a pre- 
 lude to doing. 1 1. The apparent absence of response to our cognitive 
 operations on the part of ' things,' due to their lack of spiritual com- 
 munion with us. But really they do respond to us as physical bodies, 
 and are affected by us as such. 12. Hylozoism or panpsychism as 
 a form of Humanism. ' Catalytic action ' and its human analogues. 
 13. Hence there is real making of reality by us out of plastic facts. 
 14. The extent of the plasticity of fact, practically and methodologically. 
 15. The non-human making of reality. 16. Our two indispensable 
 assumptions : (i) the reality of freedom or determinable indetermination, 
 and (2) 17, the incompleteness of reality, as contrasted with the 
 Absolutist notion of an eternally complete whole, which renders our 
 whole world illusory. 
 
 421
 
 422 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xix 
 
 i . IT was a great thought of Hegel's l that truth and 
 reality, logic and metaphysics, belonged together and 
 must not be separated, and that, to make the world truly 
 intelligible, the making of truth and the making of 
 reality must be made to coincide. He tried, therefore, to 
 conceive the cosmic process as one with the thought 
 process, and to represent all the events which happened 
 in the real evolution of the world in time as incidents in 
 the self-development of a ' dialectical process ' in which 
 the Absolute Idea arrived at a full logical comprehension 
 of its own eternal meaning. 
 
 But, unfortunately, he spoilt this great idea (with which 
 Dr. McTaggart alone of his English followers seems to con- 
 cern himself) in the execution. He tried to conceive thought 
 as out of time, and its ' eternity ' as higher than the time- 
 process of reality, and as containing the ' truth ' and 
 meaning of the latter. But this equation of the eternal 
 ' logic-process ' with the temporal ' cosmic process ' did not 
 work out to a real solution. The one was eternally 
 complete, the other manifestly incomplete ; and no real 
 correspondence could be established between their re- 
 spective terms. 2 Moreover, the real events of the cosmic 
 process stubbornly refused to be reduced to mere illus- 
 trations of a dialectical relation of ' categories,' and the 
 desperate attempt of the ' Dialectic ' to declare the surplus 
 of meaning, which the real possessed over the logical, to 
 be really a defect, to be mere meaningless ' contingency ' 
 which reason could not, and need not, account for, was 
 really a covert confession of its fundamental failure. 
 
 This failure, moreover, was really an inevitable con- 
 sequence of its own fundamental assumptions. It 
 had begun by misconceiving the ' thought - process,' 
 which was to be its clue to reality. It had begun 
 by abstracting from its concrete nature, from the 
 actual thinking of human beings. It had begun, that is, 
 by misconceiving the function of abstraction. It had 
 begun, in short, by dehumanising thought in order to 
 
 1 Or rather of Fichte's ; but Hegel appropriated it. 
 ' 2 Cp. Humanism, pp. 95-109.
 
 xix THE MAKING OF REALITY 423 
 
 make it more adequate to ultimate reality. But the 
 result was that it destroyed the real link between reality 
 and thought. For it is only as concrete human thinking 
 that we know thought to be a real process at all. Once 
 this link is severed, once the human side of thought is 
 flung aside as meaningless and worthless, thought per se, 
 however ' absolute ' and ' ideal ' and ' eternal ' we may 
 call it, is wafted away from earth into the immense 
 inanity of abstractions which have lost touch with a 
 reality to which they can never again be applied. 
 
 This fate has overtaken the ' Dialectic.' The self- 
 development of its ' categories ' is not the real develop- 
 ment of any actual thought. It is not, consequently, 
 the real explanation of any actual process. It still 
 bears a sort of ghostly resemblance to our concrete 
 thinking, to the body of incarnate truth from which it 
 was abstracted ; and, therefore, it can still claim a 
 shadowy relevance to the real events of life. But it is 
 too abstract ever to grasp either of them in their full 
 concreteness. Thus its claim to predict events is very 
 like the weather prophecies in Zadkiets Almanack so 
 vaguely worded that almost anything may be said to con- 
 firm it. But it can never suggest any definite reason 
 why definite persons at any definite time should think 
 just those thoughts which they think, or use just the 
 categories which they use, rather than any other. It 
 can never allege any reason why events should exemplify 
 the logical relation^ of the categories in the precise way 
 they are said to do, rather than in a dozen other ways 
 which would do equally well, or why, conversely, the 
 categories should achieve exemplification by just the 
 events which occur, rather than by a myriad others 
 which would perform this function no less well. All 
 such definite questions it waves aside as concerned 
 merely with the impenetrable ' contingency ' of the 
 phenomenal. Even, therefore, if we take the most 
 favourable view of its claims, and admit it to be an 
 explanation of everything in general, it still fails to 
 satisfy the demands, either of science or of practice, by
 
 424 STUDIES IN HUMANISM X i X 
 
 being too vague and too ambiguous to be the ex- 
 planation of anything in particular. It is truly the 
 " unearthly ballet of bloodless categories," Mr. Bradley 
 has called it, a mere Witches' Sabbath of disembodied 
 abstractions, from which the true seeker after the mean- 
 ing of reality will no more distil spiritual satisfaction 
 than Dr. Faustus did from the Walpurgisnacht on the 
 Brocken. And even as an intellectual debauch, as a 
 sowing of spiritual wild oats, it is better to avoid what 
 may so seriously confuse and debilitate the mind. 
 
 It remains, however, to show that the points at which 
 the Hegelian Dialectic's failure becomes patent are in 
 direct connexion. It fails, practically on its own show- 
 ing, to account for the whole of the time process, because 
 it fails to account for the whole of the thought process. 
 For it has in both cases made the same fatal abstraction. 
 It has assumed that because for the practical purposes of 
 human knowing it is convenient and possible and 
 sufficient to abstract from the full concreteness (' par- 
 ticularity ') of the Real, what we neglect, and often have 
 Jtp neglect, is really meaningless. But this is not the case. 
 There is nothing ' accidental ' and void of significance 
 about the Real, nothing which a complete theory of events 
 can afford to ignore. The minutest ' incident ' has its 
 meaning, every least shade of personality its importance, 
 even though our limitations may practically force us 
 to neglect them. Such concessions may be accorded to 
 the humility of a pragmatic theory of knowledge : they 
 cannot be rendered compatible with the all - embracing 
 claims of a theory of absolute knowledge. Hence the 
 pretensions of the Dialectic to absolute completeness do 
 not entitle it to the arrogance of such abstractions. If 
 it cannot or will not explain everything, it forfeits its 
 claim to be ' concrete ' and to be valid. It has mis- 
 understood, moreover, the nature ' of abstraction. The 
 abstraction which occurs in actual thinking is human, 
 and not absolute ; it is relative to a restricted purpose, 
 and can be rectified by altering the purpose whenever 
 this is requisite or desirable. Abstraction, in other
 
 xix THE MAKING OF REALITY 425 
 
 words, is an instrument of thought, and not a good per se. 
 It should not be dehumanised any more than any other 
 feature of our thinking. And if we refrain from de- 
 humanising our thought, we shall not be forced to 
 ' de-realise ' reality in order to make it ' intelligible.' 
 
 2. Let us try, therefore, to renew Hegel's enterprise 
 of the identification of the making of truth and the 
 making of reality, under the better auspices of a logic 
 which has not disembowelled itself in its zeal to become 
 true. That the pragmatic theory of knowledge does 
 not start with any antithesis of ' truth ' and ' fact,' but 
 conceives ' reality ' as something which, for our knowledge 
 at least, grows up in the making of truth, and conse- 
 quently recognises nothing but continuous and fluid tran- 
 sitions from hypothesis to fact and from truth to truth, 
 we have already seen in Essays vii. and viii. It follows 
 that the ' making of truth ' is also in a very real sense a 
 ' making of reality.' In validating our claims to ' truth ' 
 we really ' discover ' realities. And we really transform 
 them by our cognitive efforts, thereby proving our 
 desires and ideas to be real forces in the shaping of 
 our world. 
 
 Now this is a result of immense philosophic import- 
 ance. For it systematically bars the way to the 
 persistent but delusive notion that ' truth ' and ' reality ' 
 somehow exist apart, and apart from us, and have to be 
 coaxed or coerced into a union, in the fruits of which we 
 can somehow participate. The making of truth, it is 
 plain, is anything but a passive mirroring of ready-made 
 fact. It is an active endeavour in which our whole 
 nature is engaged, and in which our desires, interests, 
 and aims take a leading part. Nevermore, therefore, 
 can the subjective making of reality be denied or ignored, 
 whether it be in the interests of rationalism, and in 
 order to reserve the making of reality for an ' absolute 
 thought,' or whether it be in the interests of realism, and in 
 order to maintain the absoluteness of an ' independent ' 
 fact. Taken strictly for what it professes to be, the 
 notion of ' truth ' as a ' correspondence ' between our
 
 426 STUDIES IN HUMANISM X ix 
 
 minds and something intrinsically foreign to them, as a 
 mirroring of alien fact, has completely broken down. 
 The reality to which truth was said to ' correspond,' i.e. 
 which it has to know, is not a ' fact ' in its own right, 
 which pre-exists the cognitive functioning. It is itself a 
 fact within knowing, immanently deposited or ' precipi- 
 tated ' by the functioning of our thought. The problem 
 of knowledge, therefore, is not ' how can thought 
 engender truth about reality ? ' It is rather ' how can 
 we best describe the continuous cognitive process which 
 engenders our systems of ' truth ' and our acceptance of 
 ' reality,' and gradually refines them into more and 
 more adequate means for the control of our experience ? ' 
 It is in this cognitive elaboration of experience that both 
 reality and truth grow up pari passu. 'Reality' is reality 
 for us, and known by us, just as ' truth ' is truth for us. 
 What we judge to be ' true,' we take to be ' real,' and 
 accept as ' fact.' And so what was once the most 
 vaporous hypothesis is consolidated into the hardest 
 and most indubitable ' fact.' Epistemologically speaking, 
 therefore, so far as our knowledge goes or can go, the 
 making of truth and the making of reality seem to be 
 fundamentally one. 
 
 3. But how about metaphysics ? Does this ' mak- 
 ing of truth ' supply a final answer to all the 
 questions we can ask ? This is by no means obvious. 
 Even on the epistemological plane the making of truth 
 seemed to recognise certain limitations, the exact nature 
 of which, being unable to pursue the subject into the 
 depths of metaphysics, we were not able to determine. 
 We had to leave it doubtful, therefore, how far a coin- 
 cidence of our cognitive making of truth with the real 
 making of reality could be traced, and whether ulti- 
 mately both processes could be combined in the same 
 conception. It seemed possible that our so-called mak- 
 ing of reality would not in the end amount to a revela- 
 tion of the ultimate essence of the cosmic process, and 
 that the analogies between the two would finally prove 
 fallacious or insufficient.
 
 xix THE MAKING OF REALITY 427 
 
 We postponed, therefore, the further consideration of 
 these questions, and have been rewarded since then by 
 lighting upon a number of truths which may be distinctly 
 helpful in a renewed attack upon our problem of the 
 ' making of reality.' 
 
 (1) We have seen in Essay ix. I that an evolu- 
 tionist philosophy ought not prematurely to commit itself 
 to a static view of Reality, and that it is not an ineluctable 
 necessity of thought, but a metaphysical prejudice, to 
 believe that Reality is complete and rigid and unimprov- 
 able, and that real change is therefore impossible. We 
 have thus gained the notion of a plastic, growing, in- 
 complete reality, and this will permit us to conceive a 
 ' making of reality ' as really cosmic. 
 
 (2) The examination of Freedom in the last essay 
 ( 9-12) brought us once more into contact with this 
 idea of a really incomplete reality. For it seemed that 
 there might after all be a vein of indetermination running 
 through the universe, and that the behaviour and the 
 habits of things could still be altered. This idea 
 cropped up as a logical consequence of the reality of 
 human freedom, which we found it possible to maintain 
 on other grounds. This freedom and plasticity, moreover, 
 would explain and justify our treatment of our ideas as 
 real forces, and our claim that the ' making of truth ' was 
 necessarily also a making of reality. For the plasticity 
 of the real would explain how it was that our subjective 
 choices could realise alternative developments of reality. 
 
 And (3) it appeared to be possible that this plasticity 
 of things might involve not merely a passive acquiescence 
 in our manipulations, but a modicum of initiative, and 
 that thus ' freedom ' might not be confined to human 
 nature, but might in some degree pervade the universe. 
 If so, not only would the possibilities of ' making reality ' 
 be vastly enlarged, but we should have established the 
 existence of a very real and far-reaching identity in nature 
 between human and non- human reality, which would 
 justify the expectation of very considerable likeness in the 
 processes by which they severally adjust themselves to
 
 428 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xix 
 
 their environment. Accordingly, we might feel entitled 
 to look for analogues also to the human making of truth 
 and reality, and these might help to render intelligible 
 the vast masses of reality, which it seemed at the end of 
 Essay vii. we could not humanly claim to have ' made.' 
 
 4. Still it will not do to underrate the difficulties of 
 the situation. The Pragmatic Method, we have always 
 admitted, has definitely postulated an initial basis of fact 
 as the condition of its getting to work at all. And 
 although any particular ' fact ' can always be conceived as 
 having been ' made ' by a previous cognitive operation, 
 this latter in its turn will always presuppose a prior basis 
 of fact. Hence, however rightly we may emphasise the 
 fact that what we call reality is bound up with our knowing 
 and dependent on our manipulations, there will always 
 seem to be an insuperable paradox in the notion that 
 reality can, as suck and wholly ', be engendered by the con- 
 sequences of our dealings with it. 
 
 Our Pragmatic Method, moreover, has so far fought 
 shy of metaphysics. It has pleaded that originally it 
 had professed to be merely epistemological in its scope, 
 and has gravely doubted whether metaphysics were not 
 for it ultra vires} It may be well, therefore, to indulge 
 the foibles of our method, to the extent at least of con- 
 sidering what more can be said about the making of reality 
 on strictly epistemological ground, before we transform it, 
 by claiming for it universal application and expanding it 
 to cosmic dimensions, and thereby soar to metaphysics. 
 
 5. In point of fact there is a good deal more to be 
 said. For example, (i) the difficulty about conceiving 
 the acceptance of fact as the basis of the pragmatically 
 developed situation should be treated, not as an objection 
 to the Pragmatic Method, but as a means of bringing out 
 
 1 I do not think that the text of Axioms as Postulates anywhere, even in 
 isolated paragraphs, entitles critics to read it in a metaphysical sense. And 
 certainly the whole method and purpose of that essay should have made it un- 
 mistakable that it was nowhere intended to be taken in any but an epistemological 
 sense. If so, it is beside the point to object to pp. 54-63 of Personal Idealism 
 as not giving a satisfactory account of the creation of the universe. Really that 
 would have been too much to expect even from the untamed vigour of a new 
 philosophy ! That the question under discussion referred only to our cognitive 
 making of reality was quite plainly stated on p. 61.
 
 xix THE MAKING OF REALITY 429 
 
 its full significance. For it can be made to bring out the 
 important distinction between the reality which is ' made ' 
 only for us, i.e. subjectively, or as we say ' discovered,' and 
 that which we suppose to be really ' made,' made objec- 
 tively and in itself. That we make this distinction is 
 obvious ; but why do we make it ? If both the subjective 
 and the objective ' making of reality ' are products of the 
 same cognitive process, of the same ' making of truth ' 
 by our subjective efforts, how can this distinction arise, 
 or, ultimately, be maintained ? 
 
 Now it is clear, in the first place, that acceptance of 
 the Pragmatic Method in no wise compels us to ignore 
 this distinction. Nor does it as such compel us to assert 
 the ' making of reality ' in the objective sense. It seems 
 quite feasible to conceive the making as merely subjective, 
 as referring only to our knowledge of reality, without 
 affecting its actual existence. 1 Nay, the existence of the 
 distinction may itself legitimately be appealed to show 
 that common sense draws a clear line at this point. And 
 so it may be denied that we ' make ' reality metaphysically, 
 though not that we ' make ' it epistemologically. 
 
 The validity of this position may provisionally be 
 admitted. Let it merely be observed that it is com- 
 patible with a full acceptance of Pragmatism as a method, 
 and even with a very extensive ' making of reality ' by 
 our efforts. For these efforts are still indispensable in 
 order that reality may be ' discovered.' It is still true 
 that our desires and interests must anticipate our ' dis- 
 coveries,' and point the way to them, and that so our 
 conception of the world will still depend on our subjective 
 selection of what it interested us to discover in the 
 totality of existence. And of course the ' making of 
 reality,' in so far as we mould things to suit us, and in 
 so far as social institutions are real forces to be reckoned 
 with and potent in the moulding of men, is also unaffected 
 by the refusal to conceive the ultimate making of reality 
 as proceeding identically, or analogously, with our ' making 
 
 1 Hence it seems possible to be, e.g. , a pragmatist in epistemology, and a realist 
 in metaphysics, like Prof. Santayana.
 
 430 STUDIES INJUJMANISM xix 
 
 of truth.' So that it is quite possible to be a good prag- 
 matist without attempting to turn one's method into a 
 metaphysic. 
 
 Secondly, it is clear that if the Pragmatic Method is 
 true, the distinction between ' discovering ' and ' making ' 
 reality must itself have a pragmatic ground. It must be 
 evolved out of the cognitive process, and be validated by 
 its practical value. And this we find to be the case. 
 The distinction is a practical one, and rests on the various 
 behaviours of things. A reality is said to be discovered, 
 and not made, when its behaviour is such that it is 
 practically inconvenient or impossible to ascribe its reality 
 for us entirely to our subjective activity. And as a rule 
 the criteria of this distinction are plain and unmistakable. 
 To wish for a chair and find one, and to wish for a chair 
 and make one, are experiences which it is not easy to 
 confuse, and which involve very different operations and 
 attitudes on our part. In the one case, we have merely 
 to look around, and our trusty senses present to us the 
 object of our desire in effortless completion : in the other 
 a prolonged process of construction is required. 
 
 More verbally confusing cases arise when we have 
 made a claim to reality which we cannot sustain, or denied 
 a reality which we subsequently recognise. These cases 
 seem to lend themselves to the belief in an ' independent ' 
 reality, because in our dealings with them we do not 
 seem to alter ' reality,' but only our beliefs about it. The 
 confusion, however, is at bottom one between a reality (or 
 truth) which is claimed, and one which is verified. If a 
 claim is falsified, the new truth (or reality) which takes its 
 place may always be antedated, and conceived as having 
 existed independently of the claim which it refutes. But 
 it cannot be said to be similarly independent of the 
 process which has established it. The truth is that what 
 in such a case we have made is not a reality, but a 
 mistake. ^ And a mistake is a claim to reality (or truth) 
 which will not work, and has to be withdrawn. But the 
 failure of a cognitive experiment is no proof that experi- 
 mentation is a mistake. Nor does the fact that a reality
 
 xix THE MAKING OF REALITY 431 
 
 existed, which we mistakenly denied, prove that it was 
 not ' made,' even by ourselves. 
 
 In other cases the line is not so clear, and the ' finding ' 
 seems to involve a good deal of ' making.' Our language 
 itself often testifies to this. Thus we often ' find ' that 
 when we have ' made ' mistakes, the precise amount 
 of wilfulness involved in the ' making ' is difficult to 
 estimate. Or consider our dealings with other beings 
 spiritually responsive to our action. Our behaviour to 
 them may really determine their behaviour to us, and 
 make them what we believed or wanted them to be. 1 
 Thus ' making love ' and ' finding love ' are not in general 
 the same. But you may make love, because you find 
 yourself in love, and making love may really produce love 
 in both parties to the suit. Few people, moreover, would 
 really ' find ' themselves in love, if the object of their 
 affections had done absolutely nothing to ' make ' them 
 fall in love. And every married couple has probably 
 discovered by experience that the reality and continuance 
 of their affection depends on the behaviour of both parties. 
 
 It is clear then ( I ) that, roughly and in the main, there 
 is a real pragmatic distinction between ' discovering ' and 
 'making' reality. But (2) we also get some suggestive 
 hints that this distinction may not be absolute, and that 
 in our dealings with the more kindred and responsive 
 beings in the world our attitude towards them may be an 
 essential factor in their behaviour towards us. If so, we 
 shall have sufficient ground for the belief that our manipu- 
 lations may really ' make,' and not merely ' find ' reality, 
 and sufficient encouragement to pursue the subject farther. 
 
 6. (2) In admitting that the pragmatic making of 
 truth always presupposed a prior basis of fact an important 
 point was omitted. We neglected to notice also the 
 great and essential difference between the nature of the 
 truth and the reality as it enters the process at the begin- 
 ning and as it emerges from it at the end. Both the truth 
 and the reality have been transformed. Their originally 
 tentative character has disappeared. The ' truth/ which 
 
 1 Cp. Humanism, p. 12, n.
 
 432 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xix 
 
 entered the process as a mere claim, has now been validated. 
 The ' reality,' which at first was a suspicion, a hope, a 
 desire, or a postulate, is now fully substantiated, and an 
 established fact. The difference wrought by the pragmatic 
 verification, therefore, is as great in the case of the ' reality ' 
 as in that of the truth, and it was surely worth the whole 
 labour of rethinking the traditional formulas in pragmatic 
 terms to have had our attention drawn to its existence. 
 
 For the pragmatic theory of knowledge initial principles 
 are literally ap^al, mere starting-points, variously, ar- 
 bitrarily, casually selected, from which we hope and try 
 to advance to something better. Little we care what their 
 credentials may be, provided that they are able to conduct 
 us to firmer ground than that from which we were fain to 
 start. We need principles that work, not principles that 
 possess testimonials from the highest a priori quarters. 
 Even though, therefore, their value was prospective and 
 problematical, they were accepted for the services they 
 proffered. For we knew better than to attach undue 
 importance to beginnings, than to seek for principles self- 
 evident, and realities undeniable to start with. 1 We 
 divined from the first that truth and reality in the fullest 
 sense are not fixed foundations, but ends to be achieved. 
 
 Consequently, the question about the nature of initial 
 truth and reality cannot be allowed to weigh upon our 
 spirits. We have not got to postpone knowing until we 
 have discovered them. For actual knowing always starts 
 from the existing situation. 2 Even, therefore, if we fail to 
 penetrate to such absolute beginnings our theory can 
 work. And it is not disposed to regard initial facts or 
 truths as specially important, even if they could be 
 ascertained. Indeed our method must treat them as 
 conceptual limits to which actual cognition points, but 
 which it never rests on. Initial truth it will regard as 
 sheer claim, unconfirmed as yet by any sort of experience, 
 and undiscriminatingly inclusive of truth and falsehood. 
 A really a priori truth, i.e. a claim which really preceded 
 all experience, would be as likely to be false as true when 
 
 1 Cp. Essay ix. 9. 2 Cp. Essay vii. 3.
 
 xix THE MAKING OF REALITY 435 
 
 it was applied. It has no value, therefore, for a theory of 
 knowledge which is wishful to discriminate between true 
 and false. Initial reality, similarly, would be sheer 
 potentiality, the mere v\tj of what was destined to develop 
 into true reality. And whatever value metaphysics may 
 attach to them, the theory of knowledge can make 
 nothing of sheer claims and mere potentialities. Methodo- 
 logically we may and must assume that every truth and 
 every reality now recognised is to be conceived as evolved 
 from the cognitive process in which we now observe it, 
 and as destined to have a further history. 
 
 For if we declined to treat it so, we should lose much 
 and gain nothing. We should gratuitously deprive our- 
 selves of the right of improving on the imperfect and 
 unsatisfactory realities and truths which we now have. 
 By conceiving them as rigid, i.e. as fixed and unalterable 
 from the beginning, we should merely debar ourselves 
 from discovering that after all they were plastic, if such 
 chanced to be their nature. If, on the other hand, they 
 chanced to be rigid, we should not be put to shame ; we 
 should merely suppose that we had not yet found the 
 way to bend them to our will. The sole methodological 
 principle, therefore, which will serve our purpose and 
 minister to a desire for progressive knowledge is that 
 which conceives no reality as so rigid and no truth as so 
 valid as to be constitutionally incapable of being improved 
 on, when and where our purposes require it. We may be 
 de facto quite unable to effect such an improvement. But 
 why should that compel us to forbid effort and to close 
 the door to hope for all eternity ? 
 
 To sum up then : even though the Pragmatic Method 
 implies a truth and a reality which it does not make, yet it 
 does not conceive them as valuable. It conceives them only 
 as indicating limits to our explanations, and not as reveal- 
 ing the solid foundations whereon they rest. All effective 
 explanation, however, starts from the actual process of 
 knowing, which is pragmatic, and not from hypothetical 
 foundations, which are dubious. And all effective truth 
 and reality result from the same pragmatic process. 
 
 2 F
 
 434 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xix 
 
 7 (3). It is clear, then, that we have, on methodo- 
 logical grounds, a certain right to demur to the demand for 
 an explanation of the initial basis of fact. It is quite true 
 that our method logically implies a previous fact as its 
 datum. But it is also true that since any determinate char- 
 acter in a ' fact ' may be conceived, and must be assumed, 
 to have been derived, this original datum is reduced for us 
 in principle to a mere potentiality, an indeterminate 
 possibility of what is subsequently made of it. And so 
 methodologically, as we saw in the last section, it need not 
 trouble us, because we are concerned, not with presupposi- 
 tions, but with ends. 
 
 It is only, however, when this notion of an original 
 fact is translated into the language of metaphysics that 
 its methodological nullity is fully revealed. When the 
 doctrine of the making of reality out of a relatively 
 indeterminate material is construed metaphysically, and 
 pushed back to the ' beginning,' it seems to assert the 
 formation of the Real out of a completely indeterminate 
 Chaos, of which nothing can be said save that it was 
 capable of developing the determinations it has developed 
 under the operations which were performed upon it. 
 
 But how, it is asked, with a fine show of indignation, by 
 philosophers, who have forgotten Plato's Segapevr) and the 
 creation stories of all the religious mythologies from the 
 book of Genesis downwards, can such a notion be 
 put forward as a serious explanation ? How can a 
 wholly indeterminate ' matter ' be determined by experi- 
 ment ? What would any experiment have to go upon ? 
 By what means could it operate ? And why should the 
 * matter ' react in one way rather than in any other ? 
 And then, without awaiting a reply or crediting us with 
 any awareness of some of the oldest and least venerable 
 of metaphysical puzzles, they hastily jump to the con- 
 clusion that Pragmatism has no real light to throw on the 
 making of reality, and that they may just as well revert to 
 the cover of their ancient formulas. 
 
 It is, however, from their conclusion only that we 
 .should dissent. We may heartily agree that these
 
 xix THE MAKING OF REALITY 435 
 
 questions should be put in a metaphysical sense, if only 
 in order that it may be seen what their answers would 
 involve. We may agree also to some of their terms. It 
 is obvious, for example, that to derive reality from chaos 
 is not seriously to explain it. But then we never said or 
 supposed it was. On the other hand we should not admit, 
 at least not without cause alleged, that because a thing is 
 indeterminate it is necessarily indeterminable, or that if it 
 is indeterminate, it must be conceived as infinitely so, 
 merely because we are not able before the event to predict 
 in what ways it will show itself determinable. We shall 
 plead, in short, the doctrine that the accomplished fact has 
 logical rights over the ' original ' fact. 
 
 Still Chaos is no explanation. This is just our reason 
 for the methodological scruple about the whole notion of 
 expecting a complete metaphysical explanation of the 
 universe from the pragmatic analysis of knowledge. It 
 may reasonably be contended that the whole question is 
 invalid because it asks too much. It demands to know 
 nothing less than how Reality comes to be at all, how 
 fact is made absolutely. And this is more than any 
 philosophy can accomplish or need attempt. In 
 theological language, it is to want to know how God 
 made the world out of nothing. Nay it includes a 
 demand to know how God made himself out of nothing ! 
 But this is not only a question to which we are never 
 likely to get an answer, but also one which, as Lotze 
 wisely remarked, is logically inadmissible. For it ignores 
 the facts that something must be taken for granted in all 
 explanation, and that the world, just as we have it now, 
 is the presupposition de facto of every question we ask 
 about it, including those as to its past and its ' origin.' 
 Thus in a methodological sense the existing world, with 
 its pragmatic situation, is the necessary presupposition of 
 the original datum from which it is held to be derived. 
 
 Moreover, even if per impossibile the demand could 
 somehow be satisfied, and we could learn how the first 
 fact was made, there is no reason to think that the pro- 
 cedure would strike us as particularly ' rational ' or
 
 436 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xix 
 
 enlightening, or that this ' knowledge ' would leave us any 
 the wiser. It would certainly appear to have been a 
 making of something out of nothing. And the first 
 ' something ' would probably seem something despicable 
 or disgusting. It would very likely look to us like the 
 primordial irruption into the world we now have of that 
 taint of corruption, evil, or imperfection, which phil- 
 osophers have tried so often to think, and so rarely to do, 
 away. 
 
 The fact is that the conception of ultimate reality 
 looks forward, and not back, and must do so (like 
 Orpheus) if it is to rescue our life from the house of 
 Hades. It cannot be separated from that of ultimate 
 satisfaction. 1 We can conceive ourselves, therefore, as 
 getting an answer to the question about the beginning of 
 the world-process only at the end. And it will be no 
 wonder if by that time we should have grown too wise 
 and too well satisfied to want to raise the question. And 
 to us, at least, it is no paradox that a psychological inability 
 or unwillingness to raise a problem may also be its only 
 logical solution. When Perfection has been attained, the 
 universe, having at last become harmonious and truly one, 
 will perforce forget its past in order to forget its sufferings. 
 For us, meanwhile, it should suffice to think that Perfec- 
 tion may be attained. 2 
 
 To reject this would be to allow the validity of 
 von Hartmann's objection to the existence of a God on 
 the ground that, if he were conscious, he would go mad 
 over trying to understand the mystery of his own exist- 
 ence. Von Hartmann infers that the Absolute must 
 be unconscious ; but even that does not apparently 
 prevent it from going mad, as we saw in Essay xi. 
 
 The objection, therefore, which has troubled us so 
 long may now finally be put aside. Methodologically an 
 original fact is unimportant, because it is unknowable, 
 and because no actual fact need be treated as original. 
 
 -, 1 Cp. Humanism, pp. 200-3.1 
 
 2 Cp. Essay vii. 12 s.f. Humanism, pp. 202-3, 212-9, 226-7 ! Personal 
 Idealism, p. 109 ; Kiddles of the Sphinx, ch. xii.
 
 xix THE MAKING OF REALITY 437 
 
 The demand to know it, moreover, is invalid, and cannot 
 be satisfied by any philosophy in any real way. 'Original 
 fact ' is a metaphysical impostor. For it could be the 
 explanation of nothing, not even of itself. And, lastly, 
 we now perceive that the way to satisfy what is legitimate 
 in the demand is, not by conceiving an original fact, but 
 by conceiving a final satisfaction. 
 
 8. The only obstacle, therefore, which can still 
 impede our progress on our projected excursion into meta- 
 physics, is that which arises from the native reluctance of 
 the Pragmatic Method itself to sanction such adventures. 
 But at this point we may bethink ourselves that this 
 method itself is not final. We have conceived it from 
 the first as included in, and derivative from, a larger 
 method, which may show itself more obliging. Our 
 Pragmatism, after all, was but an aspect of our Human- 
 ism. 1 And Humanism, though itself only a method, 
 must surely be more genial. It cannot but look 
 favourably on an attempt thoroughly to humanise the 
 world and to unify the behaviour of its elements, by 
 tracing the occurrence of something essentially analogous 
 to the human making of reality throughout the universe. 
 It will not, moreover, severely repress us, when we try to 
 answer any question of real human interest, on the ground 
 of its metaphysical character. 
 
 For ' metaphysics,' it will say, ' though adventures, 
 and so hazardous, are not unbecoming or unmanly. There 
 is not really much harm in them, provided that they are 
 not made compulsory, that no one is compelled to 
 advance into them farther than he likes, and that every 
 one perceives their real character and does not allow 
 them to delude him. The worst that can happen to you 
 is that you should find yourself unable to advance, or to 
 reach the summit of your hopes. If so, you can always 
 retire with safety, and be no worse off than if you had 
 never attempted an enterprise too great for your powers. 
 So, too, if you grow tired. What alone renders meta- 
 physics offensive and dangerous are the preposterous 
 
 1 Cp. Humanism, pp. xv.-xxi.
 
 438 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xix 
 
 pretensions sometimes made on their behalf. For, so far 
 from being the most certain of the sciences (as is their 
 proud aspiration), they are de facto the most tentative, just 
 because they ought to be the most inclusive. Every new 
 fact and advance in knowledge, and every new variation 
 of personality, may upset a system of metaphysics. You 
 must not, therefore, grow fanatical about your metaphysi- 
 cal affirmations, but hold them with a candid and constant 
 willingness to revise them, and to evacuate your positions 
 when they become untenable. And after all, you have 
 always a safe fortress to retire upon if the worst should 
 come to the worst. If the objective " making of reality " 
 should prove illusory, you can take refuge with the 
 subjective making of reality which the Pragmatic Method 
 has quite clearly established.' 
 
 Thus encouraged, let us see how far a real making of 
 reality can be predicated of our world. 
 
 9. Dare we affirm, then, that our making of truth 
 really alters reality, that mere knowing makes a differ- 
 ence, that things are changed by the mere fact of being 
 known ? Or rather, to elicit more precise responses, let 
 us ask in what cases these things may be affirmed ? 
 
 For we have seen l that in some cases these assertions 
 are plainly true, and refer only to facts which should have 
 been noticed long ago, and which the Pragmatic Method 
 has now firmly established. Thus (i) our making of truth 
 really alters ' subjective ' reality. It first ' makes ' real 
 objects of interest and inquiry, and then ' finds ' realities 
 to satisfy them. (2) Our knowledge, when applied, alters 
 'real reality,' and (3) is not real knowledge, if it cannot 
 be applied. Moreover, (4), in some cases, e.g. in human 
 intercourse, a subjective making is at the same time a 
 real making of reality. Human beings, that is, are really 
 affected by the opinion of others. They behave 
 differently, according as their behaviour is observed or 
 not, as e.g. in ' stage fright,' or in ' showing off.' Even 
 the mere thought that their behaviour may be known 
 alters it. And as we saw in 5, the difference between 
 
 1 Essay vii. 13.
 
 xix THE MAKING OF REALITY 439 
 
 ' making ' and ' discovering ' reality tends in their case to 
 get somewhat shadowy. 
 
 Still none of this has amounted to what we must now 
 proceed to point out, viz. (5) that mere knowing always 
 alters reality, so far at least as one party to the transaction 
 is concerned. Knowing always really alters the knovver ; 
 and as the knower is real and a part of reality, reality is 
 really altered. Even, therefore, what we call a mere 
 ' discovery ' of reality involves a real change in us, and a 
 real enlightenment of our ignorance. And inasmuch as 
 this will probably induce a real difference in our sub- 
 sequent behaviour, it entails a real alteration in the 
 course of cosmic events, the extent of which may be 
 considerable, while its importance may be enormous. 
 
 10. But what about the other party to the cognitive 
 transaction, the ' object ' known ? Can that be conceived 
 as altered by being known and so as ' made ' by the 
 process ? 
 
 Common sense, plainly, would seriously demur to 
 asserting this, at least in the ordinary sense of ' knowing.' 
 In many cases the objects known do not seem to be visibly 
 altered by our mere knowing, and in such cases we prefer 
 to speak of them as ' independent ' facts, which our 
 knowing merely ' discovers.' This is the simple source of 
 the notion of the ' independent reality ' which the meta- 
 physics of absolutism and realism agree in misinterpreting 
 as an absence of dependence upon human experience. 
 But we have already seen (in 5) that the distinction 
 between ' making ' and ' discovering ' is essentially prag- 
 matic, and cannot be made absolute : we must now 
 examine further, when and under what conditions it may 
 be alleged. 
 
 Whether a reality is called ' independent ' of our 
 knowing, and said to be merely ' discovered ' when it is 
 known, or not, seems to depend essentially on whether it 
 is aware of being known ; or rather on how far, and in 
 what ways, it is aware of being known. 
 
 In the case of beings who are in close spiritual 
 communion with us, and thoroughly aware of the meaning
 
 440 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xix 
 
 of our operations, there is great sensitiveness to our 
 becoming aware of them. When we cognise them, and 
 recognise their reality, they react suitably and with a 
 more or less complete comprehension of our action. Such 
 awareness is shown, e.g. by our fellow-men and by such 
 animals as are developed enough to take note of us, and 
 to have their actions disturbed and altered by our 
 knowing, or even by the thought that we may know 
 them and are observing them. It is amusing to note, 
 for example, how a marmot will show his perturbation 
 and whistle his shrill warning, long before the casual 
 intruder on his Alpine solitudes has suspected his exist- 
 ence. 
 
 But how does this apply to the lowest animals and to 
 inanimate things? They surely are quite indifferent to 
 our knowledge of them ? To them mere knowing makes 
 no difference. 
 
 This case looks, plainly, different, and language is 
 quite right to distinguish them. But before we deal with 
 it we must elucidate the notion of ' mere knowing.' 
 Mere knowing does not seem capable of altering reality, 
 merely because it is an intellectualistic abstraction, which, 
 strictly speaking, does not exist. In the pragmatic con- 
 ception, however, knowing is a prelude to doing. What 
 is called ' mere knowing,' is conceived as a fragment of 
 a total process, which in its unmutilated integrity always 
 ends in an action which tests its truth. Hence to 
 establish the bearing on reality of the making of truth, 
 we must not confine ourselves to this fragmentary ' mere 
 knowing,' but must consider the whole process as com- 
 pleted, z>. as issuing in action, and as sooner or later 
 altering reality. 
 
 Now that this pragmatic conception of knowing is the 
 one really operative, the one which really underlies our 
 behaviour, is shown by the actions of beings who display 
 sensitiveness to our observation. The actor who exhibits 
 stage fright is not afraid of mere observation. He is 
 afraid of being hissed, and perhaps of being pelted. 
 And the marmot who whistles in alarm is not afraid
 
 xix THE MAKING OF REALITY 441 
 
 of merely having his procedures noted down by a 
 scientific observer : he is afraid of being killed. Neither 
 the one nor the other would care about a mere 
 spectator who really did nothing but observe. If such 
 a being really existed, and Plato's intellectualistic ideal 
 were realised, he would be the most negligible thing in 
 the universe. But knowing is pragmatic, and ' mere ' 
 knowing is a fable. And, tlierefore, it is terrible, and 
 potent to make and unmake reality. It was not for 
 nothing that the gods kept Prometheus chained : it is not 
 for nothing, though it is in vain, that Intellectualism tries 
 to muzzle Pragmatism. 
 
 11. For one being to take note of another and to 
 show itself sensitive to that other's operations, it must be 
 aware of that other as capable of affecting its activities 
 (whether for good or for evil), and so, as potentially 
 intrusive into its sphere of existence. Man is sensitive 
 to man because man can affect the life of man in so 
 many ways. Hence the variety of our social reactions 
 and the wealth of our social relations. But consider the 
 relations of man and the domestic animals. The range 
 of mutual response is very much contracted. Newton's 
 dog Diamond, though no doubt he loved his master, had 
 no reverence for the discoverer of gravitation. He in 
 return had no appreciation of the rapture of a rabbit 
 hunt. The marmot, similarly, conceives man only as a 
 source of danger. Hence the simplicity of his reaction, 
 just a whistle and a scurry. Why then should we search 
 for anything more recondite in order to account for the 
 apparent absence of response to our operations when we 
 come to deal with beings who are no longer capable of 
 apprehending us as agents ? This would merely mean 
 that they were too alien to us and our interests to concern 
 themselves about us. Their indifference would only 
 prove that we could not interfere with anything they 
 cared about, and so that they treated us as non-existent. 
 We, too, treat their feelings, if they have any, as non- 
 existent, because we cannot get at them, and they seem 
 to make no difference in their behaviour.
 
 442 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xix 
 
 But is this absence of response absolutely real ? A 
 stone, no doubt, does not apprehend us as spiritual 
 beings, and to preach to it would be as fruitless (though 
 not as dangerous) as preaching to deaf ears. But does 
 this amount to saying that it does not apprehend us 
 at all, and takes no note whatever of our existence ? 
 Not at all ; it is aware of us and affected ' by us on the 
 plane on which its own existence is passed, and quite 
 capable of making us effectively aware of its existence 
 in our transactions with it. The ' common world ' shared 
 in by us and the stone is not, perhaps, on the level of 
 ultimate reality. It is only a physical world of ' bodies,' 
 and ' awareness ' in it can apparently be shown only by 
 being hard and heavy and coloured and space-filling, 
 and so forth. And all these things the stone is, and 
 recognises in other ' bodies.' It faithfully exercises all 
 the physical functions, and influences us by so doing. 
 It gravitates and resists pressure, and obstructs ether 
 vibrations, etc., and makes itself respected as such a body. 
 And it treats us as if of a like nature with itself, on the 
 level of its understanding, i.e. as bodies, to which it is 
 attracted inversely as the square of the distance, moder- 
 ately hard and capable of being hit. That we may also 
 be hurt it does not know or care. But in the kind of 
 cognitive operation which interests it, viz. that which 
 issues in a physical manipulation of the stone, e.g. its use 
 in house-building, it plays its part and responds according 
 to the measure of its capacity. Similarly, if ' atoms ' 
 and ' electrons ' are more than counters of physical 
 calculation, they too know us, after their fashion. Not 
 as human beings, of course, but as whirling mazes of 
 atoms and electrons like themselves, which somehow 
 preserve the same general pattern of their dance, influ- 
 encing them and reciprocally influenced. And let it not 
 be said that to operate upon a stone is not to know it. 
 True, to throw a stone is not usually described as a 
 cognitive operation. But it presupposes one. For to 
 throw it, we must know that it is a stone we throw, and 
 to some extent what sort of a stone it is. Throwing a
 
 xix THE MAKING OF REALITY 443 
 
 pumice-stone, e.g. requires a different muscular adjust- 
 ment from throwing a lump of lead. Thus, to use and 
 to be used includes to know and to be known. That it 
 should seem a paradox to insist on the knowledge 
 involved even in the simplest manipulations of objects, 
 merely shows how narrow is the intellectualistic notion 
 of knowledge into which we have fallen. 
 
 12. 'But is not this sheer hylozoism ? ' somebody 
 will cry. What if it is, so long as it really brings out a 
 genuine analogy ? The notion that ' matter ' must be 
 denounced as ' dead ' in order that ' spirit ' may live, no 
 longer commends itself to modern science. And it ought 
 to commend itself as little to philosophy. For the 
 analogy is helpful so long as it really renders the 
 operations of things more comprehensible to us, and 
 interprets facts which had seemed mysterious. We need 
 not shrink from words like ' hylozoism,' or (better) 
 ' panpsychism,' provided that they stand for interpretations 
 of the lower in terms of the higher. For at bottom they 
 are merely forms of Humanism, attempts, that is, to make 
 the human and the cosmic more akin, and to bring them 
 closer to us, that we may act upon them more successfully. 
 
 And there is something in such attempts. They can 
 translate into the humanly intelligible facts which have 
 long been known. For example, we have seen ( 1 1 ) 
 that in a very real sense a stone may be said to know us 
 and to respond to our manipulation, nay, that this sense 
 is truer than that which represents knowing as unrelated 
 to doing. Again, there is a common phenomenon in 
 chemistry called ' catalytic action.' It has seemed mysteri- 
 ous and hard to understand that although two bodies, A 
 and B, may have a strong affinity for each other, they 
 should yet refuse to combine until a mere trace of an 
 ' impurity,' C, is introduced, and sets up an interaction 
 between A and B, which yet leaves C unaltered. But 
 is not this strangely suggestive of the idea that A and 
 B did not know each other until they were introduced 
 by C, and then liked each other so well that poor C was 
 left out in the cold ? More such analogies and possi-
 
 444 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xix 
 
 bilities will probably be found if they are looked for, and 
 in any case we should remember that all our physical 
 conceptions rest ultimately on human analogies suggested 
 by our immediate experience. 
 
 It is hardly true, then, that inanimate ' things ' take no 
 notice of our ' knowing,' and are unaltered by it. They 
 respond to our cognitive operations on the level on 
 which they apprehend them. That they do not respond 
 more intelligently, and so are condemned by us as 
 ' inanimate,' is due to their immense spiritual remoteness 
 from us, or perhaps to our inability to understand them, 
 and the clumsiness and lack of insight of our manipula- 
 tions, which afford them no opportunity to display their 
 spiritual nature. 
 
 1 3. Even, however, on the purely physical plane on 
 which our transactions with other bodies are conducted, 
 there is response to our cognitive manipulation which 
 varies with our operation, and therefore there is real 
 making of reality by us. 
 
 Even physically, therefore, ' facts ' are not rigid and 
 immutable. Indeed, they are never quite the same for 
 any two experiments. The facts we accept and act on 
 are continually transformed by our very action, and so 
 the results of our efforts can slowly be embodied in the 
 world we mould. The key to the puzzle is found in 
 principle, once we abandon intellectualism and grasp the 
 true function of knowledge. For the alien world, which 
 seemed so remote and so rigid to an inert contemplation, 
 the reality which seemed so intractable to an aimless and 
 fruitless speculation, grows plastic in this way to our 
 intelligent manipulations. 
 
 14. The extent of this plasticity it is, of course, 
 most important for us to appreciate. Practically, for 
 most people at most times, it falls far short of our wishes. 
 Nay, we often feel that if reality is to be remade, it 
 must first be unmade, that if we could only grasp the sorry 
 scheme of things we should shatter it to bits before remould- 
 ing it nearer to the heart's desire. Still, this is not the 
 normal attitude of man. There is usually an enormous
 
 xix THE MAKING OF REALITY 445 
 
 mass of accepted fact which we do not desire to have 
 remade, and which so has the sanction of our will. Other 
 facts it has never occurred to us to desire to remake. In 
 other cases, we do, indeed regard an alteration as desirable 
 in the abstract, but for some reason or other, perhaps 
 merely because we are too lazy, or too faintly interested, 
 or too much engrossed by more pressing needs, we do 
 not actually attempt to effect an alteration. The amount 
 of ' fact,' therefore, which it is ordinarily felt to be im- 
 peratively necessary to alter is comparatively small, and 
 this is why most people find (or ' make ' ?) life tolerable. 
 
 But whatever our actual desire and power to alter 
 our experience, it is an obvious methodological principle 
 that we must regard the plasticity of fact as adequate for 
 every purpose, t\e. as sufficient for the attainment of the 
 harmonious experience to which we should ascribe 
 ultimate reality. For (a) if we do not assume it, we 
 may by that very act, and by that act alone, as William 
 James has so eloquently shown, shut ourselves out from 
 countless goods which faith in their possibility might 
 realise, (b] Some facts, at least, are plastic, and others look 
 plastic, at least to common sense. And even though some 
 4 facts ' do not look as if they would speedily yield to human 
 treatment, there is (<:) no reason in this for abandoning 
 our methodological principle of complete plasticity. For 
 a partial plasticity would be nugatory and unworkable. 
 If we had assumed it, it might always be declared to be 
 inapplicable to the case to which it was applied. And 
 conversely, even if we could somehow know, non- 
 empirically and a priori, that on some points the world 
 was quite inflexible, we could not use this knowledge 
 because we should not know what these points were. 
 Nor should we be entitled to infer that we had found 
 them out, even from our failures. For a failure, if it 
 does not discourage us, warrants nothing but the 
 inference that we cannot get what we want in just the 
 way we tried. Hence for the purposes of any particular 
 experiment it would still be necessary to assume that the 
 world was plastic. Whatever ' theoretic ' views, there-
 
 446 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xix 
 
 fore, we may privately cherish as to the unalterable 
 rigidity of facts, we must act as if ' fact ' were as flexible 
 as ever is needed, if we would act effectively. And as 
 the principle is methodological, it would not affect or 
 undermine the stability of fact, wherever that was needed 
 for our action. 
 
 15. Our position, then, as genuine makers of reality 
 seems to be pretty well established. We do not make 
 reality out of nothing, of course, i.e. we are not ' creators/ 
 and our powers are limited. But as yet we are only 
 beginning to realise them, and hardly know their full 
 extent ; we are only beginning cautiously to try to remake 
 reality, and so far (with the exception of some improvement 
 in domesticated plants and animals) our activities have 
 been mainly destructive : in every direction, however, there 
 seems to extend a wide field of experiments which 
 might be tried with a fair prospect of success. Nor do 
 we yet know the full extent of the co-operation which our 
 aims might find, or obtain, from other agents in the 
 universe. 
 
 For it seems clear that we are not the sole agents in 
 the world, and that herein lies the true explanation of 
 those aspects of the world, which we, the present agents, i.e. 
 our empirical selves, cannot claim to have made. There is 
 no reason to conceive these features as original and rigid. 
 Why should we not conceive them as having been made by 
 processes analogous to those whereby we ourselves make 
 reality and watch its making ? For, as we have seen, all 
 the agents in the universe are in continuous interaction, 
 adjusting and readjusting themselves according to the 
 influences brought to bear upon them. The precise 
 nature of these influences varies according to the character 
 and capacity which the various agents have acquired. 
 There is no need to assume any character to be original. 
 All the ' laws of nature,' in so far as they are really 
 objective and not merely conveniences of calculation, 
 may be regarded as the habits of things, and these 
 habits as behaviours which have grown determinate, and 
 more or less stable, by persistent action, but as still
 
 xix THE MAKING OF REALITY 447 
 
 capable of further determinations under the proper 
 manipulation. 1 
 
 And lest we should be thought to limit our outlook 
 too narrowly to the agents which our science at present 
 consents to recognise, it ought also definitely to be 
 realised that among the agencies which we have not yet 
 found, because we have not yet looked, or looked only in 
 a half-hearted and distrustful manner, there may be a being 
 (or perhaps more than one) so vastly more potent than 
 ourselves that his part in the shaping of reality may have 
 been so preponderant as almost to warrant our hailing 
 him as a ' creator.' And again, it is possible that our own 
 careers, and so our own agency, may extend much farther 
 back into the past than now we are aware. 
 
 But these suggestions will seem wild to many, and 
 need not be emphasised or enlarged on. They do not 
 affect the conceivability of the making of reality, nor the 
 conceptual unity of a cosmic process in which there may 
 always be distinguished a certain aspect of what may be 
 called ' cognition,' and another of ' action,' but in which 
 the former is always subsidiary to, tested and completed 
 by, the latter. 
 
 1 6. What may, however, more plausibly be thought 
 to affect the conception of the making of reality are two 
 closely connected metaphysical assumptions which we 
 have implied throughout. They may be called (i) the 
 reality of freedom or the determinable indetermination of 
 reality, and (2) the incompleteness of reality. Both of 
 these conceptions we discovered, and to some extent 
 justified, towards the end of the last essay ( 10-12). 
 But it may not be amiss to add a few words in justifica- 
 tion and confirmation of our choice. 
 
 It is evident, in the first place, that if we have no 
 freedom, and cannot choose between alternative manipula- 
 tions and reactions, we are not agents, and, therefore, 
 cannot ' make reality.' Freedom, therefore, is a postulate 
 of the Humanist making of reality. Strictly speaking, 
 however, human freedom would suffice to validate the 
 
 1 Essay xviii. n.
 
 448 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xix 
 
 notion. For if we can operate alternatively, we can 
 initiate alternative courses of reality. 
 
 But there are no stringent reasons for confining 
 freedom, and the plastic indetermination of habit on 
 which it rests, to man alone. 1 It may well be a feature 
 which really pervades the universe. All beings in the 
 world may be essentially determinable, but still partly 
 indeterminate, in their habits and actions. That such is 
 the nature of the universe may indeed be argued from 
 the fact that it responds variously to various modes of 
 handling. And once it is admitted to be partly un- 
 determined, it is not a question of principle how far the 
 indetermination goes. Many or all of the other agents 
 beside ourselves may be capable of more or less varying 
 their responses to stimulation, of acquiring and modifying 
 their habits. Thus the whole universe will appear to us 
 as literally the creature of habit, but not its slave. And 
 the more of this ' freedom ' we can attribute to the 
 universe, the more plastic to good purposes we may 
 expect to find it. For we shall expect to find habit more 
 rigid where intelligence is lacking to suggest readjustment 
 and amendment, more plastic where there is more striving 
 towards a better state ; and yet, on the other hand, more 
 stable where there is less impediment to perfect function- 
 ing ; but everywhere, let us hope, latently plastic enough 
 to render the notion of a perfect, and therefore universal, 
 harmony that of an attainable ideal. 2 
 
 17. If there is freedom in the world, and reality is 
 really being made, it is clear that reality is not fixed and 
 finished, but that the world-process is real and is still 
 proceeding. And so we come once more upon the 
 metaphysical objection to the growing, incomplete, reality 
 which seems to be demanded by a philosophy of Evolution. 
 We have already twice challenged or defied this prejudice,* 
 and may this time try to vanquish it by explaining how 
 it comes about. 
 
 This objection springs, we may frankly admit, from 
 
 1 Cp. Essay xviii. 9. 2 Cp. Humanism, p. 181. 
 
 3 Cp. Essays ix. i, xviii. 12.
 
 xix THE MAKING OF REALITY 449 
 
 a sound methodological principle which has great prag- 
 matic value. When we can allege no reason why a 
 thing should change, we may assume that it remains the 
 same. Applying this maxim to the quantum of existence, 
 we conclude that the amount of being is constant. Apply- 
 ing it to the totality of existence, we conclude that the 
 universe as a whole cannot change in any real way, but 
 must be complete and rigid. 
 
 These two applications, however, are neither on the 
 same footing nor of equal value. The first yields the 
 sound working assumptions of the indestructibility of 
 ' matter ' and the conservation of ' energy,' which are of 
 the utmost pragmatic value in physics. They are, in the 
 first place, the easiest assumptions to work with. For it 
 is far easier to make calculations with constant factors 
 than with variable. They are, in the second place, 
 applicable ; for although these principles, like all pos- 
 tulates, are not susceptible of complete experimental 
 proof, experience does not confute them by discrepancies 
 so great or so inexplicable as seriously to impair their 
 usefulness. 1 In the third place, they are applied only to 
 those abstract aspects of physics which have shown them- 
 selves amenable to quantitative treatment, and in regard 
 to which, therefore, such treatment seems valid. The 
 scientific use, therefore, of the principle of constancy is 
 pragmatically justified by the peculiar nature of the 
 subject-matter to which it is applied. 
 
 But can as much be claimed for its metaphysical 
 double? It is not self-evident that the quantitative 
 aspect of reality is of paramount authority. It is not 
 easy to apply the quantitative notion to the spiritual 
 aspects of existence. It is very difficult to conceive a 
 ' conservation ' of spiritual values. It is still more difficult 
 to obtain empirical confirmation of this notion. It is 
 
 1 Of course, however, it should be remembered that the leakage of energy, 
 which takes place de facto in its transformations, is only theoretically stopped by 
 the notion of its ' degradation ' or ' dissipation. ' Moreover, to conceive the 
 universe as ' infinite ' is really to render the postulate of conservation inap- 
 plicable to it. For by what test can it be known whether an infinite quantity 
 of matter or energy is, or is not, ' conserved ' ? 
 
 2 G
 
 450 STUDIES IN HUMANISM X ix 
 
 almost absurd to deny the reality of our continual 
 experience of change, out of deference to a metaphysical 
 postulate. And, lastly, every human motive urges us to 
 deny the completeness of Reality. 
 
 For, humanly speaking, this atrocious dogma reduces 
 us and our whole experience to illusion. If we think 
 out its demands, we must concede that nothing is really 
 happening ; there is no world-process, no history, no time ; 
 motion and change are impossible ; all our struggles and 
 strivings are vain. They can accomplish nothing, because 
 everything that truly is is already accomplished. The 
 sum total of Reality has been reckoned up, and there is 
 lacking not a single cipher. So all our hopes and our 
 fears, our aspirations and our desperations, do not count. 
 For we ourselves are illusions, we, and all our acts and 
 thoughts and troubles all, save only, I suppose, the 
 thought of the rigid, timeless, motionless, changeless One, 
 which we have weakly postulated to redeem our experi- 
 ence, and which rewards us and resolves our problems by 
 annihilating us ! It is a pity only that it does not make a 
 clean job of its deadly work, that it does not wholly absorb 
 us in its all-embracing unity. For after all ought it not 
 to annihilate the illusion as well as its claim to reality ? 
 If we, and the time-process, and the making of reality, 
 are all fundamentally unreal, we ought not to be able to 
 seem real even to ourselves. And still less should we be 
 able to devise such blasphemous objections against the 
 One ! Somehow, not even the One knows how, the 
 ' Illusion ' falls outside the ' Reality ' ! 
 
 And for us, at all events, it is reality. For us Reality 
 is really incomplete ; and that it is so is our fondest hope. 
 For what this means is that Reality can still be remade, 
 and made perfect ! 
 
 It is this genuine possibility, no assured promise, it is 
 true, nor a prophecy of smooth things, but still less a 
 proffer of false coin, which our Humanist metaphysic 
 secures to us. It does not profess to know how the 
 Making of Reality will end. For in a world which 
 contains real efforts, real choices, real conflicts, and real
 
 xix THE MAKING OF REALITY 451 
 
 evils, to the extent our world appears to do, there must be 
 ground for a real doubt about the issue. We hardly 
 know as yet how the battle of the Giants and the Gods 
 is going ; we hardly know under what leader, and with 
 what strategy, we are contending ; we do not even know 
 that we shall not be sacrificed to win the day. But is 
 this a reason for refusing to carry on the fight, or for 
 denying that Truth is great and must prevail, because it 
 has the making of Reality ?
 
 XX 
 
 DREAMS AND IDEALISM 1 
 
 ARGUMENT 
 
 i. The popularity and ambiguity of Idealism. Can Humanism be the 
 higher synthesis of it and realism ? 2. A degenerate ' idealism ' which 
 pragmatically = a monistic realism. 3. The drift in 'absolute ideal- 
 ism ' towards realism. The common objection to absolutism and 
 realism, and the coincidence of their standpoints humanistically. Realism 
 as a shelter for absolutism. 4. Realistic velleities in absolutism 
 in order to meet the alleged subjectivism of Humanism. Their futility. 
 5. The cry 'back to Plato.' Platonism as either realism or idealism. 
 But realism is pluralistic, and if the Absolute also is sacrificed, only the 
 intellectualism remains in 'absolute idealism.' 6. Common -sense 
 realism is pragmatic ; but its working has limits. ( I ) Religiously ; 
 ' Heaven' is a second 'real world.' (2) Philosophically ; the real world 
 is a construction, individual and social. (3) Pragmatic realism does 
 not transcend the experience-process. 7. Philosophic realism has 
 overlooked the Humanist alternative. 8. Other idealisms, personal, 
 subjective, absolute. 9. An attempt to prove absolute idealism. 10. 
 The inadequacies and fallacies of this proof, (i) The ambiguity of 
 'reality is experience.' (2) The 'subject' depends on the 'object' as 
 much as vice versa. (3) The Absolute does not explain human experi- 
 ences, and vainly complicates the problem of a common world. II. 
 (4) Kant's argument from the 'making of reality' criticised. 12. (5) 
 The psychological subjectivity of experiences presupposes a ' real ' 
 world. 13. Can Idealism be proved pragmatically? 14. Its 
 fundamental dictum is reality is 'my' experience. Why this is not 
 necessarily solipsistic. Why it is idealistic. 15. The extrusion of the 
 'objective' world, and its volitional character. 16. The case for 
 solipsism. 17. The solipsistic interpretation of dreams has a 
 pragmatic motive, but 1 8 so has the realistic interpretation of waking 
 life, which remains immanent in experience, and cannot be more real 
 than that. 19. Dreams prove that this reality need not be absolute. 
 20. The philosophic import of dreams. 21. A simple argument for 
 idealism. 22. Seven objections to it and their refutation. 23. Is 
 Idealism, then, proved ? A paradoxical form of Realism. 24. The 
 final confutation of Realism. 25. The final confutation of Idealism. 
 26. The Humanist solution, which combines the objective and sub- 
 jective factors harmoniously. The Humanist Ideal. 
 
 1 This essay appeared in the Hibbert Journal for October 1904. It has been 
 extensively recast and added to, in order to make more explicit its connexion with 
 the general line of thought of these Studies, and to clinch their argument. 
 
 452
 
 xx DREAMS AND IDEALISM 453 
 
 i. FOR some reason, which it is not difficult to guess 
 at, and which is probably not unconnected with the con- 
 venient ambiguities of the word, it has become more 
 reputable for philosophers to call themselves ' idealists ' 
 than ' realists.' But it is merely a popular misapprehension, 
 which no serious student of philosophy should countenance, 
 to suppose on this account that any doctrine called 
 ' idealism ' must specially concern itself with the vindica- 
 tion of ideals. In point of fact the term ' idealism ' is 
 very variously and vaguely used, the line between it and 
 ' realism ' is by no means an easy one to draw in practice, 
 and the classification of many doctrines is somewhat 
 arbitrary. Moreover, it seems hard to say whether the 
 new pragmatic doctrines are more akin to ' realism ' or to 
 ' idealism.' 
 
 It seems, therefore, that we can most fitly conclude 
 these Studies by devoting ourselves to an examination of 
 the present condition of the controversy between ' realism ' 
 and ' idealism,' with a view to determining to which of 
 them Humanism has more affinity, and how completely 
 it can assimilate the truths they severally contain. For 
 it is probable that here too, in dealing with what is 
 perhaps the ultimate antithesis of intellectualist meta- 
 physics, Humanism is enabled to play the part of a 
 mediator who transcends their strife, and incorporates 
 in a higher synthesis all that is really valuable in 
 both. 
 
 2. We begin, then, with Idealism, which, as we 
 noted, has attained a certain primacy over Realism, and 
 developed into a perplexing multitude of forms. The 
 more degenerate of these come to very little, and are 
 significant only as illustrating the tendency of more 
 highly differentiated philosophic thought to revert to the 
 simpler and more convenient theories of ordinary life. 
 To many ' idealists ' their ' idealism ' hardly seems to 
 mean more than this, that they conceive themselves to be 
 entitled to speak of the universe as somehow and in some 
 sense ' spiritual ' ; as for the rest they think and act 
 exactly like nal've realists. But how and in what sense
 
 454 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xx 
 
 the world is 'spiritual' it is impossible to extract from 
 their ambiguous dicta ; often one suspects that all they 
 can really mean is that the spiritual is included in the 
 universe. At any rate they are careful to leave undefined 
 the meaning of ' spiritual,' and unelucidated the problem 
 of the exact relation and analogy between the spiritual 
 character ascribed to the universe and our human 
 spirits. It is useless, again, to ask them for a proof, or 
 derivation, of their standpoint : they are too prudent to 
 attempt it. 
 
 It is clear that such flabby ' idealism ' cannot commend 
 itself to pragmatic thinkers, who will want to know why 
 that should be called idealism which, both in its practical 
 consequences and in the efficacious part of its theory, 
 coincides with realism. It is, accordingly, no wonder 
 that when the slightest logical pressure is put upon it, 
 this sort of idealism tends to disappear, or rather to 
 transform itself into a monistic realism, or realistic 
 absolutism. 
 
 3. All forms of absolutist ' idealism,' moreover, have 
 recently been subjected to very severe pressure in con- 
 sequence of pragmatist attacks. They have not only 
 been asked a number of awkward questions which they 
 have never been able to answer, but the functional value 
 and logical validity of their answers to the questions 
 which they always thought they could answer, and on which 
 they most prided themselves, have been systematically 
 impugned. For this transformation of the logical situation 
 Prof. Dewey's Studies in Logical Theory have been largely 
 responsible, and the effect upon many idealisms has been 
 highly paradoxical. For it has apparently driven them 
 in the direction of realism ! 
 
 And yet at bottom nothing was more natural. There 
 is nothing like community in misfortune to awaken 
 philosophic sympathy. And Prof. Dewey had put 
 absolute idealism in the same box, or rather in the same 
 hole, with realism. He had shown, that is, quite clearly, 
 and in a manner which has not yet been disputed, that 
 the favourite weapon of idealists in their debates with
 
 xx DREAMS AND IDEALISM 455 
 
 realism might be turned against them. They had for 
 years been accustomed to condemn the fatuity of realism 
 in assuming that knowledge could be accounted for by a 
 ' transcendent ' real which could not be known. And then 
 suddenly it turned out that their own theory involved this 
 same fatuity in an aggravated form ! For it appeared 
 that absolute knowledge, as they had conceived it, failed 
 at every point to account for human knowledge, and that 
 between the two there lay what we have named in 
 honour of its first discoverer (or maker ?) ' Plato's Chasm,' 
 to the brink of which their theories could approach, but 
 which they could never cross. 
 
 Fundamentally, therefore, as regards the theory of 
 knowledge, the position of absolute idealism coincides, in 
 all the epistemologically important points, with that of 
 realism. Both have tried to conceive ultimate reality as 
 essentially ' independent ' of our knowing, as intrinsically 
 unrelated to our life. In order to satisfy this postulate 
 both have postulated that our knowing must somehow 
 transcend itself, and be able to bring us tidings of some- 
 thing which is unaffected by our process of cognition. 
 Both involve the fundamental self-contradiction that this 
 something is conceived both as related to us, and as not 
 related, in and by the same process. Both have failed to 
 perceive that there is a much simpler solution of the 
 problem which involves no such difficulties, that they 
 have misinterpreted the postulates on which they try to 
 build the self-contradictory structures of their theories of 
 knowledge, and that the ' transcendent ' and the ' inde- 
 pendent ' and the ' absolute ' can far better be conceived 
 as staying comfortably within the experience process. 
 Both, in short, have failed to reckon with a Humanist 
 epistemology. 
 
 In comparison with these fundamental points of agree- 
 ment, the differences between ' realism ' and ' absolute 
 idealism ' are really negligible. What does it matter 
 whether the reality to which our knowing has to ' corre- 
 spond ' is called an absolute ' fact ' or an absolute ' thought ' ? 
 In neither case can it be reached from the human stand-
 
 456 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xx 
 
 point : in either case it would abolish our thought or 
 render it nugatory, if it could be reached. Still, as we 
 saw in Essays iv. 7 and vii. I , though these difficulties 
 are all insuperable, yet realism really involves a few less 
 of them. Absolute idealism has involved itself in some 
 additional complications, owing to the way in which 
 absolute thought reduces our thought to an unreal ' appear- 
 ance,' which can yet somehow persist in asserting its 
 reality. There is, therefore, a sort of gain for it in 
 becoming realistic ; and this, together with the perception 
 of their common entanglement, would amply suffice to 
 account for the recent drift of ' idealists ' towards realism, 
 if one could credit them with a full perception of the 
 difficulties of their theory. But as yet this is hardly the 
 case. They still conceive them as ' difficulties ' incidental 
 to a fundamentally sound theory : they have not yet 
 realised its utter rottenness. 
 
 4. They have, moreover, further motives for their 
 aspirations towards ' a more objective ' view of reality. 
 They have, in the first place, committed themselves to an 
 interpretation of the pragmatic theory of knowledge 
 which renders it controversially desirable to give a more 
 realistic turn or tone to absolutism. This interpretation 
 is one which their preconceptions, no doubt, rendered 
 natural, and perhaps inevitable, but which is nevertheless 
 wholly mistaken. They have interpreted Pragmatism as 
 sheer subjectivism, identified it with Protagoreanism, 
 adopted Plato's identification of the latter with scepticism, 
 admitted his claim to have refuted it, and added that this 
 has been done for all time, and that there is nothing new 
 under the sun. 
 
 But all these assertions happen to be false, as we 
 have fully shown. What is true about them is merely 
 that Pragmatism has tried to recall philosophy to the con- 
 sideration of actual human thinking, and that this is 
 always personal and individual. Hence the absolutist 
 misinterpretation of this undertaking only proves how the 
 continued contemplation of ' ideal ' abstractions can vitiate 
 a human mind. The absolutists who argue as above
 
 xx DREAMS AND IDEALISM 457 
 
 have evidently so disaccustomed themselves to observe 
 the concrete facts of human existence that all actual 
 thinking seems to them to be of necessity ' merely sub- 
 jective.' That actual thinking should necessarily start 
 with the ' subjective,' and naturally reach the ' objective ' 
 by an immanent development which engenders all dis- 
 tinctions, ' transcends ' them because it includes them, 
 and reconciles them because it never misconceives them 
 as absolute, sounds to their ears incredible. They will 
 not believe it even when they see it set down plainly in 
 cold print. Yet such is nevertheless the case, and probably 
 was the case from the first, and implied in the first sketch 
 of a Humanist theory of knowledge by Protagoras. 1 
 
 Hence the attempt to refute Humanism and to baffle 
 its attack by growing more ' realistic ' seems unlikely to 
 succeed. For the Humanist account of the cognitive 
 process really transcends both ' realism ' and ' idealism ' as 
 hitherto maintained. It explains both, by tracing their 
 genesis and pointing out exactly where they have severally 
 drawn unwarrantable inferences. It can afford, therefore, 
 to remain on excellent terms with Realism, more particu- 
 larly with what is really the most practically important 
 and efficient form of it, viz. the common-sense theory of 
 ordinary life, of the pragmatic value of which it is keenly 
 appreciative. It does not profess to despise it, to ' criticise ' 
 or ' overcome ' it ; it simply includes it. It simply points 
 out that, good as it is so far as it goes, it does not go the 
 whole way, and must be supplemented. 2 
 
 It hardly seems worth while, therefore, for ' absolute 
 idealism ' to take the trouble of becoming realistic, in 
 order to differ from and to confute a ' subjectivism ' its 
 critics are not committed to. 
 
 5. Still, once the cry ' back to Plato ' has been raised, 
 it cannot readily be hushed. We have ourselves joined 
 in it heartily, and insisted that the lesson which Platonism 
 has for all attempts to separate the ideal from the human 
 should never be forgotten. But this cry must render 
 an idealism which adopts it in a manner realistic. For (in 
 1 Cp. Essay ii. 5. 2 Cp. 6.
 
 458 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xx 
 
 a sense) the Platonic philosophy seems capable of forming 
 a common meeting -ground for realistic and idealistic 
 intellectualisms, so much so that it may alternatively be 
 called a realism or an idealism. Hitherto ' idealists ' have 
 preferred to call Plato ' the great idealist ' ; in future they 
 may, as justly or unjustly, call him the great realist. It 
 really does not matter. For, on the one hand, his Theory 
 of Ideas is surely ' idealism,' and on the other, the Ideas 
 are objective entities, and independent and free from all 
 subjective taint. And it seems to be little more than 
 an accident that the champion ' realists ' of the day, 
 Messrs. G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, have entitled 
 their ultra-Platonic hypostasisation of predicates ' realism ' 
 rather than idealism.' If, then, these tendencies are 
 worked out to their logical conclusions, it may well be 
 confessed before long that ' absolute idealism ' is really 
 obsolete idealism, at least so far as its substantive part is 
 concerned. 
 
 A promising career might thus be predicted for an 
 absolutism calling itself a realistic idealism or an idealistic 
 realism, which Janus-like could always smile triumphantly 
 with one face, however much the other was smitten, were 
 it not for two sad circumstances. The first of these is 
 the existence of Plato's Chasm, across which neither 
 Platonism nor Realism can help it. The second is Prof. 
 Dewey's proof that in the end all forms, both of meta- 
 physical realism and of metaphysical absolutism, must fall 
 into this chasm, and that neither can exonerate the other 
 from objections which press equally on both. It seems 
 more likely, therefore, that upon further reflection, and 
 when the nature of the situation is clearly perceived, this 
 attempt of absolutism to array itself in the serviceable 
 sheepskin of an honest realism will be seen to be cankered 
 in the bud, and will be nipped off quietly. 
 
 After all, the enterprise was always paradoxical and 
 never really safe, and it may mitigate regrets to point out 
 that in any case ' absolute idealism ' could hardly have 
 really paid the price of an alliance with Realism. In all 
 but its materialistic forms, Realism seems profoundly
 
 xx DREAMS AND IDEALISM 459 
 
 pluralistic; in its most modern philosophic form it is un- 
 mitigated pluralism. Platonism itself would be pluralistic, 
 but for the Idea of the Good ; * and even this unifying 
 principle de facto remains an aspiration, which avowedly 
 cannot be applied to the actual systems of the sciences. 
 To purchase, therefore, the support of Realism, ' absolute 
 idealism ' would have to surrender its adjective as well as 
 its substantive, and to evaporate into mere general intel- 
 lectualism. But this, perhaps, is what ' absolute idealists ' 
 have at bottom cared for most. 
 
 6. As the ' idealisms ' we have considered have 
 brought up the subject of Realism, we may now improve 
 the occasion to have a preliminary explanation with this 
 doctrine. And to begin with, we must draw a sharp 
 distinction between ( I ) the common-sense or naive realism 
 of ordinary life, and (2) philosophic realism. 
 
 With the first of these our Humanism will be loth to 
 quarrel or part company. For it manifestly is a theory 
 of very great pragmatic value. In ordinary life we all 
 assume that we live in an ' external ' world, which is 
 ' independent ' of us, and peopled by other persons as real 
 and as good, or better, than ourselves. And it would be 
 a great calamity if any philosophy should feel it its duty 
 to upset this assumption. For it works splendidly, and 
 the philosophy which attacked it would only hurt itself. 
 
 Common -sense, or, as we may now also call it, 
 pragmatic realism, works for almost every purpose. It is 
 only when he tries to satisfy therewith his religious 
 cravings that the ordinary man discovers that it has its 
 limitations. For the real world he lives in is not an ideal 
 world, and he can find no room in it for his ideals. 
 ' Heaven ' cannot be found in the heavens. He is driven, 
 accordingly, to the thought of ' another world,' which is 
 not wholly continuous with the real world. Yet it must 
 be real too, nay, more truly real than our world. He gets, 
 therefore, two worlds, the ' reality ' of each of which has 
 somehow to be accommodated to that of the other. The 
 puzzles involved in this relation the ordinary man, very 
 
 1 Essay ii. 13.
 
 460 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xx 
 
 naturally, declines to think out. But he must admit 
 that they form a legitimate starting-point for a philosophic 
 elaboration of his working assumption. 
 
 The philosopher, for his part, may discover further 
 limits to the pragmatic sufficiency of ordinary realism. 
 A few odds and ends of experience, which are usually put 
 aside as ' unreal,' come under his notice. By investigating 
 them he slowly comes to realise that the pragmatically 
 real world is not an original datum of experience at all, 
 but an elaborate construction, made by us, individually 
 and socially, by a purposive selection of the more 
 efficacious, and a rejection of the less efficacious portions 
 of a ' primary reality ' which seems chaotic to begin with, 
 but contains a great deal more than the ' external world ' 
 extracted from it. 1 The exact nature of the process by 
 which the ' real world ' is constructed by us, remains, 
 indeed, in some respects obscure. It is clear, however, 
 that the child, from the first day of its individual life, sets 
 to work to organise the chaos of its primary experience 
 in ways which are certainly as far as possible removed 
 from a ' disinterested ' interest in pure knowing, and are 
 almost certainly volitional. But the baby is not much of 
 a psychologist, and by the time it has organised its 
 experience enough to be able to watch its own procedures 
 and to tell us about them, it has long ago forgotten the 
 details of its world-ordering achievements. The nearest 
 approximation we can get to an account of the process 
 from inside, is probably to be found in the fascinating and 
 unique account by the Rev. ' Mr. Hanna ' of how he 
 recovered from total amnesia produced by a fall from a 
 cart. 2 But even here ' Mr. Hanna ' had, all unwittingly, 
 a previous existence to fall back upon, which helped him 
 greatly in giving him cues and suggesting the interpreta- 
 tions of his ' chaos.' And this suggests that even if the 
 baby has not similarly got dim memories of previous 
 existences to aid it in getting a world to know and know- 
 
 1 Cp. Essay vii. 5, 14 ; Essay xix. 7. 
 
 2 The narrative forms Part ii. in Drs. Sidis and Goodhart's Multiple 
 Personality.
 
 xx DREAMS AND IDEALISM 461 
 
 ing it (a view which Plato of yore and many hundreds of 
 millions of men at present have professed to hold), it is 
 equipped with a bodily structure which instigates it to a 
 multitude of traditional modes of selective functioning. 
 Thus the individual's procedure points back (for us at 
 least) to a human past, and this again to a non-human 
 past, until our thought is cast back to the apparently 
 invalid notion of a beginning in absolute chaos. 1 
 
 It is clear, then, that, taken metaphysically, ordinary 
 realism develops difficulties which preclude our conceiving 
 it as ultimately and completely true, even on pragmatic 
 grounds. It evidently contains much truth, but that truth 
 will have to be re-interpreted. 
 
 The root error of the philosophic treatment of 
 ' pragmatic realism ' is perhaps to take pragmatic asser- 
 tions as metaphysical dogmas, which they cannot be, 
 and which they were never really meant to be. The 
 pragmatic realism which works is not concerned with 
 ultimate realities. It is relative to life and to the facts of 
 life. When, therefore, it speaks of ' absolute facts ' and 
 ' independent realities,' it must not be understood too 
 literally. It does not mean anything that exists out of 
 relation to us. For such things would have no pragmatic 
 interest or value. These terms, too, must be interpreted 
 pragmatically. " There is none but a pragmatic tran- 
 scendency even about the more absolute of the realities 
 thus conjectured or believed in " as William James 
 declares. 2 And we have ourselves seen that the ' independ- 
 ence ' ascribed to certain realities does not really transcend 
 the cognitive process. 3 It only means that in our 
 experience there are certain features which it is con- 
 venient to describe as ' independent ' facts, powers, 
 persons, etc., by reason of the peculiarities of their 
 behaviour. In the sense, therefore, in which the term is 
 intended it is quite legitimate. But the whole is "an 
 intra-experiential affair." 4 It becomes false only when it 
 is misinterpreted into a metaphysical dogma, and credited 
 
 1 Essay xix. 7. 2 Journal of Philosophy, ii. 5, p. 117. 
 
 8 Essays vii. 14, and xix. 10. 4 James, I.e. p. 118.
 
 462 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xx 
 
 with a miraculous capacity to jump out of the universe of 
 experience and back again as it pleases, without anybody's 
 being a bit the better (or the worse) for it. Such 
 acrobatic feats, of course, are pragmatically quite uncalled 
 for. They are also humanly quite unnecessary. In short, 
 they are a mistake, and with them vanishes all ground for 
 a conflict between Humanism and the common-sense 
 realism which is pragmatically valid, and which the former 
 merely cleanses of an unessential admixture of erroneous 
 metaphysics. 
 
 7. Towards the philosophic realism, which attempts 
 to construct a metaphysical theory of a strictly independent 
 reality which can nevertheless be known, Humanism can- 
 not assume an equally indulgent attitude. We have 
 already more than once rehearsed the insoluble puzzles 
 which this theory involves, 1 and need therefore dwell on 
 them no further. But it must still be pointed out that 
 even if this sort of realism involved itself in no intrinsic 
 difficulties, it would yet be lacking in conclusiveness, 
 because it has overlooked an alternative to the idealism 
 which it combats. Humanism forms a third alternative 
 to Realism and Idealism, and can give alternative inter- 
 pretations of the conceptions on which they severally rely. 
 As regards Realism, for example, it is possible to conceive 
 of a ' truth ' and a ' reality ' which are valid, not because 
 they are ' independent ' of us, but because we have ' made ' 
 them, and they are so completely dependent on us that we 
 can depend on them to stay ' true ' and ' real ' independently 
 of us. It is possible, in other words, to conceive all the 
 terms of the realist epistemology humanistically, as values 
 selectively attached by us to phenomena within the 
 knowledge -process, which is both 'objective' and 'sub- 
 jective,' and ' makes,' as incidents in its development, all 
 the terms used by the other theories of knowledge. 
 
 It would seem, therefore, that the relations of Humanism 
 to Realism are comparatively simple. Pragmatic realism 
 it incorporates ; philosophic realism it convicts of a mis- 
 conception of its own epistemological terminology. 
 
 1 3, Essays iv. 7, and vii. i.
 
 xx DREAMS AND IDEALISM 463 
 
 8. Humanism, however, is as yet far from having 
 concluded its discussion of Idealism, and here the situation 
 is far more complicated. For there exist, in the first 
 place, a number of idealisms which more or less obviously 
 escape from the objection we have urged against the 
 realisms and absolutisms we have mentioned. ' Personal 
 idealism,' for example, in all its forms, clearly abstains from 
 making the fatal abstraction from personality which is so 
 ruinous to knowledge ; and it is, at least, a moot point 
 whether Berkeleianism also may not claim exemption from 
 condemnation on account of the personalistic element which 
 it contains alongside of its sensationalist epistemology. 
 Subjective idealisms, again, which culminate in outright 
 solipsism, cannot be accused of ignoring the subjective 
 aspects of cognition. All these idealisms, therefore, if 
 they fail at all, fail at other points and for other reasons 
 than those which have been mentioned. 
 
 And we have not yet done even with ' absolute 
 idealism.' For we have not yet examined the most 
 stalwart form of it, which is a genuine idealism and 
 unwilling to compromise itself with realism. It makes, 
 moreover, a real attempt to prove its standpoint, and 
 instead of merely abusing Berkeley's ' subjectivism,' with- 
 out supplying any other basis for idealism, it builds on 
 him, and tries to exploit his argument for its own purposes. 
 Lastly, it really tries to mediate between the human and 
 the ' divine.' Its undertaking, therefore, is instructive and 
 deserving of detailed examination, though undoubtedly 
 beset with perils. For it aims at steering a safe and 
 rational course between the Scylla of subjective idealism 
 and the Charybdis of realism. Actually, however, it 
 would seem rather to sacrifice part of its crew to Scylla 
 and the rest to Charybdis, and finally to founder in an 
 abyss of fallacy. 
 
 9. (i) It sets out from what may stand as the 
 fundamental tenet of all genuine idealism, to which, in its 
 own sense, Humanism willingly assents, viz. the assertion 
 that reality is experience. But, as thus baldly stated, this 
 proposition needs expansion if it is to account for the
 
 464 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xx 
 
 facts, and idealistic absolutism also has to develop it. It 
 proceeds, therefore, to add, on the one hand, that the 
 experience which is co-extensive with reality is not to be 
 identified with our experience as the subjective idealists 
 falsely suppose while yet, on the other, the assertion that 
 reality is independent of our experience is not to involve 
 a lapse into realism. 
 
 It protests, therefore, (2) that subjective idealism is 
 absurd. The subjectivist cannot really suppose that 
 things cease to exist when he is not perceiving them, 
 nor that his fellow-men are but phantoms of his own 
 creation. But this very sensible contention at once 
 raises a difficulty. For does not this concession block 
 the original road to Idealism, and bring us back to 
 Realism? (3) The absolutist, therefore, tries to save his 
 idealism by adding to the assertion that reality is ex- 
 perience 'yes, but the Absolute 's, not ours' The Absolute 
 is an infinite experience which includes all our finite 
 experiences, and eternally perceives the system of the 
 universe, thus providing a habitation for realities (ideas) 
 which have lapsed from the minds of individual thinkers. 
 (4) The finite subject's self-elation is thus put down, but 
 the qualities of the absolute experience remain to be 
 determined. And this might be difficult if the finite 
 spirit, of which alone we seem to have direct knowledge, 
 were wholly worthless. But it can be declared an im- 
 perfect reflexion of the Absolute, and then observations 
 of finite experience may once more be appealed to to 
 give a content to the notion of ' experience.' By their 
 propitious aid the void and formless Absolute gets itself 
 determined as individual, purposive, and spiritual, some- 
 times even as conscious and personal, while any doubts as 
 to whether these human qualities will stand the transfer to 
 the Absolute are silently evaded. 
 
 It is, I think, apparent that, when thus reduced to its 
 bare essentials, this absolutist proof of Idealism seems by 
 no means satisfactory. Nor would so many philosophers 
 have felt bound to accept it faute de mieux had they not 
 come upon it with two settled convictions the one, derived
 
 xx DREAMS AND IDEALISM 465 
 
 from their studies, that Realism is impossible, and the 
 other from their natural instincts, that subjective idealism 
 is practically absurd. 
 
 A little reflection, however, will show that if the 
 above argument be the best Idealism can do, then no form 
 of Idealism is tenable. But this as yet it would be 
 premature to assert. A strictly logical idealism must 
 certainly steer nearer to subjectivism than to absolutism, 
 and avoid the assumption of an absolute experience 
 as self-defeating and as accounting for the ' independent ' 
 existence of the ' real ' world as little as the wildest 
 solipsism. But, even so, it would be exposed to grave 
 objections. 
 
 i o. For it must at length be noted that all the stock 
 arguments for Idealism are fallacious or inadequate. Thus 
 (i) the mere experiencing of a world cannot be taken as 
 an adequate proof of Idealism, because it would occur 
 equally if Realism were right. For, however ' independent ' 
 the reality might be in itself, it would be real for us only 
 as experienced. Still less could it validly be urged 
 against a view which conceives the reality and the 
 experiencing as evolving pari passu. 
 
 (2) It seems vain merely to show that without an 
 experiencing subject there can be no object, and that, 
 therefore, reality is spiritual. For this fails to show that 
 reality is wholly spiritual, if spiritual means subjective. 
 For the ' subject ' in this argument is just as much con- 
 ditioned by the ' object ' as vice versa. Each is implied in 
 the other, and neither can claim the priority. Experience 
 is a process which plays between two poles, both of which 
 are necessary to its reality. The idealistic interpretation, 
 therefore, is, at most, a half truth. 
 
 (3) The argument that as the world is plainly not 
 dependent on ' my ' experience, it must be on the Ab- 
 solute's, succumbs to the slightest criticism. It is traceable, 
 of course, to the old Berkeleian doctrine that the esse 
 of things is their percipi, whence it infers that as there is 
 a permanent world-order there must also be a continuous 
 divine percipient. In this, however, some serious sub- 
 
 2 H
 
 466 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xx 
 
 reptions have already been committed. Thus it has been 
 taken for granted (i) that there already is what as yet 
 we are only struggling towards, viz. a world-order strictly 
 ' common' to a plurality of percipients ; l and (2) that the 
 alleged permanence of the world as it appears to the 
 postulated non-human mind is available as an explanation 
 of ' my ' intermittent experience, and yields a common 
 ground for individual experiences to meet on. The 
 Absolute, in short, is used as an asylum ignorantice, which 
 hides from view the real difficulties, both of the practical 
 and of the metaphysical problem of a ' common ' world. 
 
 The absolutist form of this argument, moreover, is 
 greatly inferior to the Berkeleian. For Berkeley had at 
 least claimed the right to conceive the divine mind in 
 a sufficiently human fashion to render plausible, if not 
 unexceptionable, the analogy between it and the human 
 mind. But all such analogies utterly break down when 
 an impersonal, inhuman Absolute is substituted for God. 
 For then the world is not ' in ' my consciousness in the 
 same way as it is in .the Absolute's, nor does it exist 'for' 
 my mind in the same way as it is supposed to do for the 
 Absolute's. Indeed, it is only in a different and quite 
 improper sense that mind and consciousness can be 
 attributed to the totality of things the Absolute. 
 Moreover, its experience ' includes ' other experiences in 
 a way ' mine ' does not. Nor does their inclusion in an 
 absolute ' mind ' render things any the less extra-mental 
 to me, or alleviate the pressure of an alien reality. From 
 our human point of view, therefore, this absolute idealism 
 is the crassest realism : it has wholly lost also the chief 
 emotional advantage of idealism, the power, to wit, ot 
 fostering a feeling of kinship with the universe. 2 
 
 And, finally, it is merely an illusion that the existence 
 of an Absolute at all accounts for the common world of 
 individual percipients. For (i) it is practically useless ; 
 it does nothing to alleviate our practical difficulties of 
 understanding one another of communicating ideas and 
 experiences. (2) It leaves the individual variations just 
 
 1 Cp. pp. 4 . , no, 315-20. 2 Cp. Humanism, pp. 197-8.
 
 xx DREAMS AND IDEALISM 467 
 
 the same. But (3) it renders their existence theoretically 
 incomprehensible. For even when we have hastily taken 
 it to solve the question of the possibility of a common 
 world (by begging it), we find ourselves involved instead 
 in a still more puzzling problem, viz. that of accounting 
 for an indefinite plurality of fragmentary distortions of 
 the absolute world-image. To dismiss these cavalierly as 
 ' appearances ' is to exhibit temper, not to solve the 
 problem. For, after all, it was these human experiences 
 which the Absolute was invoked to explain. Not only 
 does it refuse to do this, but it leaves us (4) with our 
 difficulty doubled. We had to explain how the many 
 individual perceptions could correspond with one another 
 and coalesce into a common world. We have now to 
 explain, in addition, how each of them can correspond 
 with an absolute perception as well ! 
 
 Is it too much, therefore, to conclude that the argument 
 from the human to the ' absolute ' mind does not hold 
 because there is no analogy between them ? An Ab- 
 solute, of course, may still be conceived to ' include ' us 
 and all things, but there is no reason whatsoever to 
 regard it as ' spiritual ' or as spiritually valuable. The 
 Absolute will help us neither to regard Reality as spiritual, 
 nor to escape from the difficulties of Idealism. 
 
 II. (4) We may consider next the idealistic argu- 
 ment which goes back to Kant, and forms the core of 
 his ' transcendental idealism,' namely, the important and 
 indispensable part played by human activity in the con- 
 stitution of ' reality.' To accept from Kant the details 
 of the operations of thought in building up reality is a 
 feat which none of his disciples have so far achieved, and 
 which is no doubt impossible. But his main principle is 
 sound ; reality for us is largely of our making. Indeed, 
 so far from disputing this, our Humanist theory of 
 knowledge has only made it clearer. It has become 
 manifest that selective attention and purposive manipula- 
 tion are essential and all -pervasive influences in the 
 construction of the ' real ' world, and even the funda- 
 mental axioms, which (like Causation) long seemed
 
 468 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xx 
 
 objective and ' independent ' facts, and by Kant were 
 still regarded as facts of mental structure, are now shown 
 to originate in subjective demands. 1 A Humanist philo- 
 sopher, therefore, is not likely to undervalue whatever 
 testimony to Idealism may be derivable from the mould- 
 ing of our experience of reality by our activity. But 
 candour compels him to avow that no proof of complete 
 Idealism seems attainable in this fashion. For it cannot 
 be proved that reality is wholly of subjective manufacture. 
 Kant himself found that the ' forms of thought ' must 
 be supplied with ' matter ' from ' sensation,' to render 
 possible the construction of an ' objective ' nature : nor is 
 a disavowal of his antithesis a solution of his problem. 
 A second factor, therefore, not of our making, must be 
 admitted into our ' reality.' This we may (and must) 
 attenuate into a mere indeterminate potentiality, 2 or 
 disparage by protesting that the true reality of things is 
 never to be sought in what they originally were, but 
 rather in what they have been enabled to become : 3 but 
 such pragmatic ways of dealing with the difficulty are 
 not open to the Kantian idealist. He is still intellectualist 
 enough to shrink from the assertion that what is methodo- 
 logically null and practically valueless may be ignored by 
 a theory of knowledge. And so for him there still 
 remains a given material for his constructive manipulation 
 an objective condition of his activity. However much, 
 therefore, he emphasises the function of constructive activity 
 in the cognition of reality, he still falls short of a proof 
 that reality is wholly psychical. 
 
 12. (5) Psychology has supplied an interesting argu- 
 ment to the subjectivity of all experiences from the 
 variations of individual perceptions. But it too is in- 
 sufficient to prove Idealism. For it has already pre- 
 supposed a ' real ' world in the very experiments which 
 establish the existence of these subjective differences in 
 perception. Hence, though their significance has been 
 unduly overlooked by philosophers, and their proper 
 
 1 Cp. Personal Idealism, pp. 47-133. 
 2 Essay xix. 6. 3 Essay xix. 7.
 
 xx DREAMS AND IDEALISM 469 
 
 observation may be scientifically most important, and 
 throws much light on the de facto ways in which the 
 ' common ' world of social intercourse is established and 
 extended, the proof that reality is psychical is ultra vires 
 also for this argument. It can be appealed to only after 
 it has been shown that the ' real ' world which it pre- 
 supposes is already ' ideal.' 
 
 1 3. Shall it be admitted, then, that the ' proofs ' of 
 Idealism one and all break down ? Certainly, if what we 
 required was an a priori proof independent of experience. 
 Our ultimate assumptions cannot be proved a priori ; 
 they can only be assumed and tried. And Idealism also 
 may claim to be too fundamental to be derivable from 
 anything more ultimate. It too may appeal to the 
 pragmatic test, and thereby win our sympathies. Let it 
 be assumed, then, tentatively, and to see how it works. 
 If it is content to be proved in this way, it may claim, 
 and perhaps substantiate its claim, to yield a successful 
 and adequate interpretation of experience. And, more- 
 over, by conceiving and assuming it thus, we may come 
 upon one real, though empirical, argument in its favour, 
 which seems to go a long way towards confirming its 
 contention. 
 
 14. In attempting such a proof we must be bold as well 
 as sympathetic. We must not fear to follow our assump- 
 tions into their most incisive and instructive consequences. 
 It will be futile, therefore, to shrink from the proposition 
 that the fundamental dictum of Idealism must be formu- 
 lated as being that Reality is ' my ' experience. This 
 dictum has a subjective tinge, which has terrified most of 
 the soi-disant ' idealists,' and driven them blindly into the 
 nearest refuge for the intellectually destitute. But there 
 is no great harm in it, if we do not allow it to harden 
 into solipsism, and are careful to conceive a sufficiently 
 intimate and plastic correlation between the world or 
 reality and the self or experient. And we must avoid 
 the fatal blunder of imagining that when we have pro- 
 nounced our dictum, we know all about the self and the 
 world, and have nothing more to learn from experience.
 
 470 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xx 
 
 We still have almost everything to learn. For we have 
 really still to learn both what we are and what the world 
 is, and what precisely we mean by calling it ours. We 
 may not, therefore, so far treat our knowledge of the self 
 as primary and our knowledge of the world as secondary, 
 as solipsism tries to do. It is truer to treat the knowledge 
 of each as defining the other, and to say that the world 
 cannot be known without knowing the self, nor the self 
 without knowing the world. 
 
 This relation of mutual implication of self and world, 
 therefore, might just as well be denominated realism as 
 idealism. What alone gives superior plausibility to its 
 idealistic interpretation is the empirical fact that the 
 interpenetration of the self and the world is not complete. 
 The self is not exclusively implicated in our ' real ' world. 
 It has experience also of the ' primary reality ' * out of 
 which the real world is constructed, and it extends also, as 
 we shall see ( 23, 26), into ' unreal ' worlds of experience. 
 It is not, therefore, tied to the one pragmatically real 
 world, and this enables it to conceive itself as transcend- 
 ing it, and gives it a certain primacy. 
 
 15. Still the proposition that reality is ' my ' experience 
 is not pragmatically workable. The initial statement, 
 therefore, of Idealism must at once be expanded, and 
 subjected to a modification which amounts to a correction. 
 I have to realise that, though the reality may be really 
 mine, it has yet been largely ' ejected ' or extruded from 
 my consciousness, and endowed with an ' independent ' 
 existence or ' transcendent ' reality. And the motives for 
 this procedure need analysis. 
 
 Looking into this question, we soon perceive that our 
 motives were volitional. We were not constrained by 
 any logical compulsion, but impelled by our emotions and 
 desires. We refused to accept as ours the whole of our 
 experience ; and that on grounds as emotional as they 
 are empirical. This is once more illustrated by the strange 
 case of ' Mr. Hanna,' who, in consequence of being 
 pitched out of a carriage on to his head, became as 
 
 1 6.
 
 xx DREAMS AND IDEALISM 471 
 
 a new-born babe with an adult intelligence. He sub- 
 sequently described how he surrendered his natural 
 solipsism on being restrained by the doctors, who 
 thought him delirious. " The first that I was really sure 
 that there was something beside me was when Dr. O. 
 jumped on me. Then I was sure there was something 
 against me." "But before you thought it was yourself?" 
 " Yes, but I thought I didn't know it all." " Did you 
 know why he jumped on you ? " " No ; I knew I was 
 trying to reach out, and he was trying to push me back, 
 and I saw that Dr. O. was the only one, and I could not 
 really make out that there were many of them in the 
 room. It seemed to me that, after all, it was all one 
 thing that was against me, and that they were all like 
 a part of me" ' Our experience, it is clear, happens to 
 be of such a sort that we will not accept the entire 
 responsibility for it. And so we postulate an external 
 extra-mental reality, to which we can attribute most of its 
 offensive features. 2 
 
 It is, however, quite conceivable that experience might 
 be, or become, such that our objection to owning it would 
 disappear. If, e.g. events invariably took the course we 
 desired, should we not succumb to the temptation of 
 fancying ourselves the omnipotent creators of the cosmic 
 history ? Or, again, if pleasure and pain (or even pain 
 alone) were eliminated from our experience, should we 
 retain self-consciousness enough to frame the antithesis of 
 'self and 'world'? And what motive would remain for 
 ascribing any feature in the course of events to an 
 ' independent ' world ? 
 
 1 6. That there was no logical necessity about the 
 conception of an external world follows also from the 
 possibility of solipsism. It is unfortunate that the mere 
 mention of this theory annoys philosophers, especially 
 those who plume themselves on being ' idealists,' to 
 the very verge of aphasia, and that in consequence they 
 
 1 Sidis and Goodhart, Multiple Personality, p. 109, cp. p. 205. 
 
 2 The primitive instinct is to assign to an external cause even the most clearly 
 subjective disorders. Hence diseases of body and mind are ascribed to possession 
 by demons.
 
 472 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xx 
 
 rarely produce an articulate refutation of it. For solipsism 
 is intellectually quite an entertaining doctrine, and not 
 logically untenable ; it is only practically uncomfortable. 
 We might, had we willed it, have taken a solipsist 
 view of the situation, if we were willing to take the 
 consequences. Any one madly logical enough might always 
 insist that he was the sole and omnipotent creator of 
 his whole experience. When he fell into a ditch he 
 might applaud his subtle sense of humour in hoaxing 
 himself. When, touching fire, he was burned, he might 
 still proudly claim the authorship of the fire. And when, 
 annoyed at his fatuity, you went up and boxed his ears, 
 he might still ascribe the indignity to the bad regulation 
 of his creative fancy ! In short, no logic could refute 
 him so long as he himself did not refuse to own whatever 
 incidents befell him, and was willing to accept them as 
 characteristic of his nature. It might be demonstrated, 
 of course, that such a nature must be inherently absurd 
 and perverse, self-contradictory and self-tormenting, and 
 even self-destroying, as, e.g. if he declined to manipulate 
 that idea of his which he calls his legs in such a way as 
 to avoid a contact between it and that idea of his which 
 he calls an angry bull. But if he were blandly willing 
 to admit all this, what then ? However you maltreated 
 him, you could not force him to admit your ' independent ' 
 reality. 
 
 But, you will say, the solipsist is mad, and no sane 
 person can entertain such fancies. Even about this it is 
 not safe to dogmatise. The point whether a being, to 
 which there must be attributed an inherently discordant 
 and conflicting nature, is mad, would have been settled 
 with the philosophers of the Absolute. For must not 
 their idol, which ' includes,' ' is', and ' owns ' the weltering 
 mass of suffering, struggling, and conflicting experiences 
 that make up our world, have very much the constitution 
 of our imaginary solipsist ? And is it not a queer con- 
 clusion for any philosophy to come to that solipsism is 
 absolutely true and yet for us unthinkable ? * 
 
 1 Cp. Essay x.
 
 xx DREAMS AND IDEALISM 473 
 
 1 7. And, further, before we condemn the solipsist as an 
 outrageous fool, should we not reflect whether we do not 
 ourselves agree with him ? Are we not in the habit of 
 claiming as of our own fabrication large portions of our 
 experience which are just as absurd and incoherent as 
 those of the poor solipsist ? Do we not, that is, regard 
 ourselves as the authors and inventors of our own night- 
 mares ? And so is it not a flagrant inconsistency to 
 adopt a solipsistic interpretation for our ' dreams ' and 
 a realist interpretation for our ' waking ' experiences ? 
 
 What makes this worse is that it is quite hard at 
 times to know to which portion of life an experience 
 ought to be assigned, and that no fundamental differences in 
 character between the two can be established. For a 
 dream-world, like that of waking life, runs its course in 
 time and extends itself in space, and contains persons 
 and things that seem ' independent,' and sometimes are 
 pleasing, and sometimes the reverse. There is therefore 
 no theoretic reason for the difference in our attitude. 
 The reason is purely practical, and excellent so far as 
 it goes. Dream-worlds are of inferior value for our 
 purposes, and are therefore judged ' unreal! What pre- 
 cisely is their philosophic value remains to be elucidated ; 
 but at any rate they show that the solipsistic interpreta- 
 tion of experience is neither impossible nor theoretically 
 wrong. 
 
 1 8. The realistic interpretation, therefore, of our 
 waking life and the ' independent reality ' of the world 
 we experience is not an inevitable, but a pragmatic 
 inference, and involves no real inconsistency. It is the 
 result of an extrusion by which we resent the intrusion 
 of unwelcome incidents. It need not, therefore, ever 
 have suggested itself; we might all have lived and died 
 as chaotic solipsists to all eternity. But once the happy 
 thought occurred to any one, that he might postulate an 
 independent reality to account for the incoherencies in 
 his experience, the foundations of realism were laid. The 
 procedure was a great and instant success. 1 The notion 
 
 1 Cp. 6, and Personal Idealism, pp. 114-5.
 
 474 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xx 
 
 of an independent external world and independent other 
 persons has indisputably worked, and philosophic argu- 
 ments are impotent against it. If philosophy disputes 
 it, it will only earn contempt. For common sense is 
 always ready to suppose that whatever works is true, 
 and, fortunately, philosophy is now tending to admit that 
 common sense is, mainly, right. 
 
 But though the Realism of ordinary life and science is 
 right so far as it goes, it is not a complete proof of 
 absolute Realism. The ' independent reality ' which has 
 been postulated is not after all independent of experience, 
 but relative to the experience which it serves to harmonise. 
 It is nothing absolute ; it means ' real ' in and for that 
 experience. It may be, therefore, as real as that experi- 
 ence, but can never be more real. The external world and 
 my fellow-creatures therein are real ' independently ' of 
 me, because this assumption is essential to my action, 
 and therefore as real as the experience I am thereby 
 trying to control, provided always that the situation 
 which evoked the postulate continues. Thus the c independ- 
 ence ' of the real world is limited by the very postulate 
 which constructed it ; it is an independence subject to 
 the one condition that its postulation should not cease. 
 If, therefore, anything should happen in my experience 
 leading me to doubt its ultimateness, the reality of the 
 ' independent ' external world would be at once affected. 
 
 19. Now, curiously enough, it is a fact that our ex- 
 perience as a whole is such as to suggest doubts of its own 
 finality. It is not wholly real ; we predicate unreality and 
 illusion of large tracts of it : ' real reality ' is only a species, 
 with ' unreality,' in the larger genus of primary reality. 
 Thus it "is these discontinuities in our experience which 
 familiarise us with the notion of different orders of 
 reality. We experience abrupt transitions from one 
 plane to another of reality, and in consequence we often 
 find ourselves revising our belief in the independent 
 reality of much that at first was accepted without qualms. 
 Our dream-experiences, of course, are a signal illustration 
 of all this. They are facts which incontestably show
 
 xx DREAMS AND IDEALISM 475 
 
 that a claim to reality is no proof of it, and that our 
 pragmatic realities need not be ultimate. 
 
 This only shows, it may be said, that philosophers are 
 dreamers, and that you are no better than the rest. I 
 can swallow the insult if I am allowed to exculpate the 
 other philosophers. For really there are few subjects 
 which philosophers have more persistently forborne to 
 work out, not to say neglected, than the philosophic 
 import of dreams. And yet reflection on their existence 
 might have led to corollaries of the greatest value for the 
 proper understanding of experience. 
 
 20. (i) The fact of dream-experience, in principle, 
 involves an immense extension of the possibilities of 
 existence. It supplies a concrete, easy, and indisputable 
 illustration of how to understand the notion of other 
 worlds that are really ' other,' and the manner of a 
 transition from one world to another. It shows us that 
 Paradise cannot be found by travelling north, south, east, 
 or west, however far that it is vain to search the satellites 
 of more resplendent suns for more harmonious conditions 
 of existence. We must pass out of our ' real ' space 
 altogether, even as we pass out of a dream-space on 
 awaking. In short, we may confidently claim that to 
 pass from a world of lower into one of higher reality 
 would be like waking from an evil dream ; to pass from a 
 higher into a lower world would be like lapsing into 
 nightmare. 1 
 
 (2) More than this, dream -experience suggests a 
 definite doubt of the ultimateness of our present waking 
 life, and a definite possibility of worlds of higher reality 
 ('heavens') related to: our present waking life just as 
 the latter is to dream-life. Thus a thought which 
 Religion long ago divined, dimly and with incrusta- 
 tions of mythopceic fancy, Philosophy expounds as a 
 reasoned and reasonable possibility, and urges Science 
 to verify in actual fact. 2 And already this unverified 
 conception may sanction the consoling hope that of the 
 evil and irrationality that oppress us not a little may be 
 
 1 Cp. Humanism, p. 282. 2 Cp. ibid. p. 283.
 
 476 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xx 
 
 due to our not yet having found a way to dissipate the 
 spell of a cosmic nightmare which besets us. 
 
 21. (3) Do not dreams yield the simplest and most 
 cogent of all pleas for Idealism ? Do they not afford a 
 brilliant vindication to the idealist's contention that whole 
 worlds of vast complexity may be subjective in their 
 origin, and that their seeming reality is no sufficient 
 warrant for their extra-mental nature ? Do they not 
 triumphantly enforce our warning that the ascription of 
 reality to the contents of experience must not be made 
 more absolute than is necessary? For while we dream 
 them, our dream-experiences may seem as ' independent ' 
 of our wishes and expectations as any incident in our 
 waking life ; but that this independence was deceptive, 
 and conditional upon the dream's continuance, we mostly 
 realise on waking up. 
 
 We seem to derive, therefore, from the empirical, but 
 incontestable, fact of dreaming a striking confirmation 
 of the original idealist assertion, viz. that as reality is 
 experience, the psychic factor in it is essential to its 
 existence, and also a proof that apparent need not be real 
 ' reality! And this is proved, not of ' dreams ' alone, but of 
 ' waking ' life no less. For the existence of the former 
 enables us to grasp the thought of a fuller reality tran- 
 scending waking life, as the latter transcends dreams. 1 
 
 Just how far these propositions go to prove Idealism 
 and to disprove Realism of any kind, may fitly be con- 
 sidered when the doctrine has encountered a few of the 
 objections which are easily suggested, and as easily 
 refuted. 
 
 22. (i) Thus it is clear that our view provides for 
 the fullest recognition of empirical reality. Such recog- 
 nition is usually just as full in dreams as in waking 
 life. I run away from a dream-crocodile on a dream- 
 river with the same unhesitating alacrity as I should 
 display if I met a real crocodile on the banks of the 
 Nile. 
 
 (2) 'But,' it may be objected, 'do you not in your 
 
 1 Cp. Riddles of the Sphinx, pp. 284-7.
 
 xx DREAMS AND IDEALISM 477 
 
 dreams see through the illusion and detect the unreality ? 
 Do you not know that you are dreaming ? ' Sometimes, 
 I reply ; but then I sometimes also suspect the reality 
 of my waking life. In fact, that is what I am disputing 
 just now. And in support of my suspicions I am able 
 to quote a whole host of religious, scientific, and philo- 
 sophic doctrines concerning the ' true reality ' of worlds 
 other than that of sense-appearance. 
 
 (3) 'But is not dream-life merely a parody of real life, 
 a grotesque rehash of past experiences containing nothing 
 novel or original ? Why question the conventional 
 explanation of science, which assumes the primary reality 
 of waking life and treats all other modes of experiencing 
 as aberrations from it?' 
 
 We are, of course, aware that the philosophic claim 
 we are making for dreams is from the standpoint of 
 common science, a giant paradox. Nor should we 
 dispute that for the ordinary purposes of practice that 
 standpoint will suffice. But with the wider outlook of 
 philosophy one must remember (i) that the exclusive 
 reality of ' waking ' experience is not a primary fact, but 
 the outcome of a long process of differentiation and 
 selection ( 6) which is not yet quite complete, as is 
 shown by the survival of the belief in the prophetic signifi- 
 cance of dreams. The process can be traced and practically 
 justified, but it can never subvert the immediate reality 
 of ' unreal ' experience. (2) It is not quite true that 
 there is no originality in dreams. There do occur in 
 them, though rarely, experiences which cannot as such 
 be directly paralleled from waking life. Do we not fly 
 in dreams, and glide, and fall down precipices without 
 hurt? Yet these are achievements we have never 
 accomplished while awake. Nor can I imagine what 
 justified me once in dreaming that I was a beautiful 
 woman well over eight feet high ! I remember that it 
 felt most uncomfortable. (3) Whatever may be the ex- 
 tent and meaning of this originality in dreams, it is not 
 essential to our answer. For the ' scientific ' objection to 
 dreams is in any case unable to rebut the suggestion
 
 478 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xx 
 
 that, instead of imitating ' waking ' life, it and dream-life 
 may both be imitating a higher and more real experience 
 of which for the moment we have grown oblivious, that 
 this is the real source of the similarity between them, and 
 that on awaking from our ' waking ' life we should dis- 
 cover this, and then only really understand both our earth- 
 life and our dream-life. 
 
 (4) ' But is it not an essential difference that 
 " dreams " are short and fleeting, while waking reality 
 abides ? ' No, I reply, the difference in duration does not 
 matter. Our subjective time-estimation is enormously 
 elastic ; some dreams, as experienced, may teem with the 
 events of a lifetime. That, on awakening, they should 
 shrivel ex post facto into a few moments of ' waking' time 
 is irrelevant. In the time of a more real world might not 
 a similar condensation and condemnation overtake our 
 waking life ? It is as possible to have a time within a 
 time, and a dream within a dream, as to have a play 
 within a play, and the fact that we criticise a dream-time 
 and a dream-reality within another of the same kind no 
 more proves the latter's absolute reality than the fact 
 that Hamlet can discourse about the players' play to 
 Ophelia proves that Shakespeare did not write both the 
 plays. 
 
 (5) ' But is it not an important difference that whereas 
 the breaks in waking life are yet bridged so that it can 
 continue coherently from day to day, each dream-ex- 
 perience forms a unique and isolated world to which we 
 never can return ? ' There is a difference here, but too 
 much must not be made of it. For it seems to be merely 
 an empirical accident that we do not usually resume our 
 dreams as we do our waking life. And that the fact has 
 not imposed on our writers is attested, e.g., by the tales of 
 Peter Ibbetson, the Brush-wood Boy, and The Pilgrims of 
 the Rhine. Moreover, cases of dreams continued from 
 night to night are on record. 1 The trance - person- 
 alities, too, of many mediums are often best interpreted 
 as continuous dreams ; as, for instance, the strange 
 
 1 Cp. Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, i. pp. 353-77.
 
 xx DREAMS AND IDEALISM 479 
 
 trance lives of Mile. ' Helene Smith,' studied by Prof. 
 Flournoy. 1 
 
 Again, there are on this point assertions implied in all 
 the great religions which should be most embarrassing to 
 the common-sense confidence in the unreality of dreams. 
 ' Visions ' and ' revelations ' of more real worlds, and 
 experiences of spiritual ecstasies, are not merely the 
 central reality of all mysticism, but permeate the Scriptures 
 and the lives of the founders of religions which count 
 their adherents by the million. Is not every good 
 Mohammedan bound to believe that his Prophet was 
 carried up to ' heaven ' on the celestial camel Borak, and 
 there copied the sacred text of the eternal Koran ? Must 
 not good Jews and good Christians similarly concede the 
 authenticity of the theophanies to Moses and St. Paul ? 
 And yet from the standpoint of waking life all these 
 experiences were indubitably of the ' unreal ' order. No 
 doctor, e.g. would hesitate for an instant to ascribe the 
 experiences of Jesus at the Temptation to hallucinations 
 engendered by the forty days' fast on which they followed. 
 We have learnt, indeed, from Prof. James that this 'medical 
 materialism ' does not dispose of the spiritual value of 
 such ' abnormal ' experiences. 2 But the fact remains that 
 if the religions are to stand, they must contend that 
 plienomena which would ordinarily be classified as unreal 
 may, properly, belong to a world of higher reality. The 
 ordinary man, therefore, must choose between abandoning 
 his religion, and admitting that experiences on a 
 different level from that of waking life are in some way 
 real, and that it is not their discrepancy from ordinary 
 life, but their own contents, which decide in what way. 
 They are not necessarily discontinuous, incoherent, and 
 unimportant because they diverge from the ordinary level : 
 they may claim, and possess, greater spiritual value and 
 a superior reality. 
 
 And so, lastly, it may be pointed out that the unreality 
 we allege against ordinary dreams rests really on their 
 
 1 Des Indes a la planete Mars. 
 - The Varieties of Religious Experience, ch. i.
 
 480 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xx 
 
 intrinsic shortcomings. ' Real ' and ' unreal ' are really 
 distinctions of value within experience ; the ' unreal ' is 
 what may safely be ignored, the ' real ' what it is better to 
 recognise. If in our sleep we habitually 'dreamt' a 
 coherent experience from night to night, such a dream-life 
 would soon become a ' real ' life, of which account would 
 be taken, and to which, as in Bulwer Lytton's story, 
 waking life might even be sacrificed. We should have 
 to regard ourselves as living in two worlds, and which of 
 them was more ' real ' would depend largely on the interest 
 we took in our several careers. 
 
 (6) Leaving such psychological complexities, our 
 objector might take simpler and more practical ground. 
 ' Dwelling on dreams,' he might say, ' is pernicious. It 
 undermines our faith in the reality of waking life ; it 
 impairs the vigour of the action which presupposes such 
 reality.' And, of course, if this were true, if our doctrine 
 were practically paralysing and calculated to unnerve us, 
 no more serious objection could be brought against it in 
 pragmatic eyes. But there is no reason to anticipate any 
 such debilitating consequences. Logically there is nothing 
 in the thought of a higher reality that should lead us to 
 neglect the highest reality with which we are in contact, 
 or that should lead us to suppose that the right principles 
 of action in our world would be wholly abrogated in a 
 higher. Once more we might appeal to the religious 
 conceptions of ' higher ' worlds for confirmation. The 
 ' other ' worlds they postulate are not intended as reduc- 
 tions of the earthly life to unimportance, but as enhance- 
 ments of its significance. 
 
 And psychologically, also, it does not seem true that we 
 do not take our dream-worlds seriously while they last, 
 or are more careless about our actions in them ; the 
 terrors of a nightmare are surely often among the most 
 real and intense feelings of a lifetime, and a man who 
 could discover a way of controlling the dreams of others 
 would speedily master the ' real ' world. 
 
 (7) Lastly, a still more personal objection may be 
 taken. If waking life may be as unreal as a ' dream,'
 
 xx DREAMS AND IDEALISM 481 
 
 may not those for whom we have cared in it turn out to 
 be as unreal as the personages of our dreams ? And will 
 not this atrocious, but inevitable, inference rob life of most 
 of its personal interest ? 
 
 This argument, in the first place, cuts both ways. Not 
 all persons are pleasant, and it might be quite a relief to 
 find that some of the bad characters in our experience 
 were but the monsters of a dream. Secondly, it does not 
 follow that because persons (and things) belong to a 
 dream-life they do not belong also to a world of higher 
 reality. Our dreams, that is, may be veridical and 
 reminiscent of past terrors ; and they may refer to, or 
 foreshadow true reality, 1 even as already we may dream 
 of the persons and events of our ' waking ' lives. 
 
 23. All these objections, then, are capable of being 
 met, and the doctrine that dreams emancipate us from 
 too absolute a subservience to the realities of waking life 
 cannot be shown to deprive our life of any element of 
 value, while it opens out possibilities of an indefinite 
 enhancement of that value. But we have still to ask how 
 far we may take this as meaning that Idealism has been 
 established, and Realism confuted, beyond doubt. 
 
 Taking the latter question first, it would seem that, so 
 far as this argument goes, uncompromising Realism, viz. 
 the assertion that existence is quite independent of ex- 
 perience, is still tenable. If, that is, it is ever really true 
 that the real world is independent of us, then the existence 
 of dream-worlds does not render the belief untenable. 
 But it remains tenable only at the cost of a paradox 
 which most realists, perhaps, would shrink from. For 
 inasmuch as it has been shown that a complete parallelism 
 exists between ' dream ' worlds and ' real ' worlds, the 
 resolute realist must take the bull by the horns, and 
 boldly allege that all experiences are cognitions of real 
 worlds, and the dream-worlds are real too ! He might 
 explain further that the coexistence of an indefinite 
 plurality of real worlds, of infinitely various kinds and 
 degrees of completeness, complexity, extent, coherence, 
 
 1 Cp. Humanism, p. 284. 
 
 2 I
 
 482 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xx 
 
 pleasantness, rationality, etc., was quite conceivable. 
 Habitually, no doubt, we were confined to one of these, 
 but occasionally, as in dreams, we (or our ' souls ') were 
 enabled, we knew not by what magic, to make fleeting 
 incursions into these other, equally real, worlds, and there 
 to make new acquaintances or to meet old ones, to act 
 and suffer, and finally to return and say (falsely) that ' it 
 was all a dream.' Such is the sole interpretation of the 
 facts a consistent Realism could come to, and though it 
 has not yet been advocated with full philosophic con- 
 sciousness, it is not very far removed from some early 
 speculations about dreams which are still entertained by 
 savages. 
 
 And, like most consistent views in metaphysics, it 
 would not be quite easy to refute. It would seem like an 
 appeal to taste rather than to principle, e.g. to urge that 
 to assume such a plurality of worlds was needlessly to 
 complicate existence, or that more idealistic interpreta- 
 tions of dream - worlds were to us personally more 
 attractive. 
 
 24. So it is better, perhaps, to fall back upon our 
 general objections to metaphysical Realism, which we 
 have meanwhile held in abeyance, and to improve them 
 into a final confutation of this theory. 
 
 Let us then, once more, emphatically affirm that the 
 entire independence of experience which it attributes to 
 the real is in every way impossible and incredible. It is, 
 moreover, an unwarranted misinterpretation. For (i) the 
 fact we start from, and must continue to start from, is not 
 a ' reality ' which is ' independent,' but one which is 
 experienced. The mutual implication of ' experience ' and 
 'reality,' in other words, forbids their divorce ( 14). 
 And (2) the ' independent reality ' attributed to some of 
 the objects of our experience does not mean what the 
 metaphysical realist supposes. It does not assert an 
 absolute independence, but is relative to, and rightly 
 understood, means to be relative to the experiencing mind 
 which asserts it. The reality we predicate, therefore, is 
 never 'extra-mental'; it has at its heart a reference to
 
 xx DREAMS AND IDEALISM 483 
 
 the experience which it serves to explain. If, therefore, 
 Realism is taken to mean a denial that experience and 
 reality belong together, it becomes a metaphysic for which 
 there neither is, nor can be, any positive evidence. 
 
 25. But the same considerations will confute also 
 any idealism which asserts existence to be merely mental, 
 and a fortiori if mental is taken solipsistically, If, as we 
 have seen, ' reality ' and ' experience ' are correlated terms, 
 it is false in principle to reduce the former to the latter. 
 The mind can no more be real without a ' real world ' of 
 some sort to recognise and know, than the real world 
 known can be real without a mind to know it. There is 
 nothing, either in the logical situation or in our actual 
 experience, which warrants either the ' idealist ' or the 
 ' realist ' assertion. This was why we were so cautious 
 never to admit that reality was only ' my ' experience, or 
 wholly psychic. In so far, therefore, as this claim is 
 implied in the fundamental position of Idealism, Idealism 
 is finally false, and as false as Realism. But is it ? One 
 can hardly answer, because so much depends upon usage. 
 Moreover, though it matters a great deal whether or not 
 we grasp a doctrine clearly, it matters far less whether we 
 label it in one way or another. The old labels, however, 
 have grown so worn and dirty, and have had so many 
 conflicting directions inscribed upon them, they have 
 suffered so many erasures and corrections, that even the 
 most optimistic philosopher may well doubt whether they 
 can convey the treasures of our truth safely to our destina- 
 tion, and the most conservative, whether we had not 
 better start afresh with new ones. Humanists, at all 
 events, will have a special motive for discarding both the 
 old labels. For some of them hitherto had been ac- 
 customed to describe their doctrines as realistic, others as 
 idealistic ; others have varied their descriptions as the 
 exigencies of exposition seemed to require. For them, 
 at all events, it will be simpler to regard the doctrine we 
 have developed as neither realistic nor idealistic, but as 
 humanistic. 
 
 26. They will be confirmed in this view by observing
 
 484 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xx 
 
 that the illustration from dreams, though it seemed to 
 arise from a defence of Idealism, did not fail to bring out 
 this most important point, that a recognition of reality 
 was always involved. For the appeal to dreams showed 
 the ideal character of the real only by referring to a 
 higher reality in which the unreality of the ' dream ' could 
 be revealed. The notion of reality, therefore, was not 
 abolished, but reaffirmed. We merely abandoned a less 
 for a more satisfactory form of reality. For we were led 
 to the thought of a higher reality which, so far from being 
 merely subjective appearance, was needed for its detection. 
 Thus a recognition of reality was the condition of the 
 condemnation of appearance, nor could anything be 
 condemned as a ' dream ' until we had already awakened 
 to something more truly ' real.' 
 
 Thus an 'objective' factor and a recognition of 
 ' reality ' were always essential. But so was their rela- 
 tion to our experience, nay to ' my ' experience. For 
 ultimately to every ' me ' the recognition of reality 
 depends on its pragmatic efficacy in harmonising and 
 organising ' my ' experience. If and when it comes 
 about that ' my ' experience changes, ' my ' reality must 
 change accordingly. 
 
 Thus full justice is done also to the ' subjective ' factor, 
 and both are harmoniously combined in the Humanist 
 theory. If, nevertheless, it may seem that the balance 
 finally inclines somewhat to the ' subjective ' side, because, 
 after all, it is still held to be possible that every individual 
 soul may some day ' awake ' to find the reality of its 
 world with all its works abolished for it overnight, the 
 fault lies, not in our theory, but in the actual facts. For, 
 as we saw at the end of 14, the real world is not yet 
 coextensive with the totality of existence, with the 
 whole of the self's experience. It is a selection, the 
 arbitrariness and inadequacy of which engender doubts 
 which mere ' faith ' cannot fully cure. But those doubts 
 would vanish with an alteration in the character of 
 our experience. As the ' reality ' we ' recognised ' became 
 more harmonious and more adequately assimilative of
 
 xx DREAMS AND IDEALISM 485 
 
 our whole experience, we should trust it more. And, 
 even as it is, we can draw a certain comfort from these 
 doubts. So long as ' the real world,' for so many and so 
 often, is so like a hideous nightmare, it is consoling to 
 think that it can wholly be transfigured, that it can 
 wholly be escaped from. And so, though as pragmatists 
 we must insist that it is our primary duty to alter and 
 improve our present world, and to remake it into greater 
 conformity with our ideals, we cannot humanly blame 
 those who have at all times sighed religiously for 
 ' heavens,' in which all wrongs should be righted and all 
 evils overcome. We should teach them merely that the 
 celestial and the earthly aspirations are not incompatible, 
 that the kingdom of heaven does not come by observa- 
 tion, that to remake earth is to build up heaven, that 
 there is continuity enough in the world to warrant the 
 belief that the same forces and efforts are needed and 
 operative and efficacious in both spheres, and that what- 
 ever is to be perfected in heaven must have been begun 
 on earth. 
 
 But at this point apprehension may be felt by some 
 lest this series of realities embracing and annulling dreams 
 should be infinite, so that nothing we could ever experience 
 could ever be real enough to be final and to assure us that 
 it could never turn out to have been a dream. This fear, 
 however, would rest upon a misconception. Our pro- 
 cedure has throughout assumed that the reality of every 
 experience is accepted until grounds for doubting it 
 arise. This, indeed, is why ' dreams ' at first deceive 
 us. The grounds for doubt, moreover, we have seen, 
 are in the last resort intrinsic ; they consist either in 
 some breach with the continuity of the rest of ex- 
 perience, or in some disharmony which shocks us 
 into a denial of its ultimate reality. Perhaps, indeed, 
 the first case is really resolvable into the second ; for a 
 breach of continuity as such involves an unpleasant jar. 
 And if our experience were always wholly pleasant, and 
 its smooth flow never jarred with our ideals, should we 
 not pay scant heed to any incoherencies it might involve ?
 
 486 STUDIES IN HUMANISM xx 
 
 If life were one great glorious pageant, should we dream 
 of questioning its incidents ? Should we not accept them 
 all in the spirit of little children watching the gorgeous 
 transformations of a pantomime? Perhaps such a child- 
 like attitude is feasible in heaven, but on earth it is out 
 of place. For we as yet experience discordant planes of 
 reality, and so can and must conceive ideals of a more 
 harmonious universe. We can and must doubt, too, 
 the ultimateness of our present order ; but we could not 
 and should not doubt the absolute reality of an experi- 
 ence which had become intellectually transparent and 
 emotionally harmonious. For then we should not need 
 to postulate anything beyond our experience to account 
 for it. Our immediate experience would cease to hint 
 that it was the symbol of an unmanifest reality. 
 
 Can such a situation be described in terms of Idealism 
 or of Realism ? Assuredly it can be described in either 
 way. For in such an experience everything would be 
 absolutely real ; and yet ' I ' should disown no part of it. 
 It is merely a verbal question whether ' heaven ' is better 
 defined idealistically as a condition in which whatever is 
 desired is realised, or realistically as one in which what- 
 ever is real is approved of. But why not simply say that 
 Humanism is alike the true Idealism and the true Realism, 
 and has conceived the true Ideal, in which experience has 
 become divine without ceasing to be human, because it 
 has wholly harmonised itself, and achieved a perfect and 
 eternal union with a perfected Reality?
 
 INDEX 
 
 Absolute, the, 224-5? passim, viii, 
 14, 27, 116, 131, 134, 137, 139, 
 158, 166 n., 190, 217, 239, 288, 
 292, 294, 295, 394, 418 ; its disso- 
 ciation, 267, 271, 273 ; as mad, 
 273, 472 ; as not = ' God,' 286-8, 
 364 ; as a postulate, 252-7 ; as re- 
 lated to experience, 464-7 ; as a 
 solipsist, 257, 261-5, 47 2 ! as un " 
 conscious, 265, 436 
 
 Absolute Mind, 10, 233, 289, 467 
 
 Absolutism, ix, 119, 121-2, 137, 181, 
 203, 229, 255, 439 ; and Dissocia- 
 tion of Personality, 266-73 > anc ^ 
 Religion, 27^-97 ; its end in 
 scepticism, xiii, 285 ; its incom- 
 patibility with Humanism, 238 ; its 
 realistic trend, 454-9 
 
 Abstraction, of Logic, 87, 103 ; of the 
 universal, 173-4, from human think- 
 ing, 422-4 
 
 Action, answers questions, 91, involves 
 selection, 233, makes common 
 world, 318, its primacy, 408, 447, 
 tests truth, 440 
 
 Activity, 130, 131, 230, 232, 357, 
 468 
 
 Agency, 230, 392 
 
 Alternatives, implied in selection, 125, 
 in Humanism, 392-417 
 
 Anaxagoras , 35, 54 
 
 Anaximander, 29 
 
 Appearance, 220, 225, 227, 233, 239- 
 40, 247, 249-50, 254, 273, 288-9, 
 456, 467 
 
 Application, a test of truth, 8, 9, 40, 
 82, in, 146, 149, 296 
 
 A priori, in relation to experience, 
 245-6, to mathematics, 55, to 
 postulates, 197, 236-7, to truth, 
 42, 251-5, 432-3 
 
 Apriorism, 42, 237 
 
 Aristophanes, 32, 40 
 
 Aristotelian Society, 71 n. 
 
 Aristotle, 9, 23, 29, 32, 35, 41, 42, 
 
 45, 46, 49, 50, 60, 62, 63, 127, 152, 
 
 186, 396 n. , 400 
 
 Arithmetic, 9, 55, 94, 236 n. , 402 
 Attention, selective, 231-5, 467 
 Axioms, xii, 120, 236-7, 241-5, 356, 
 
 467 
 
 Bacon, 301 n. 
 
 Bain, A., 133 
 
 Balfour, A. /., 386 
 
 ' Beauchamp, ' Miss, 269, 270, 272 
 
 Becoming, of Ideas, 66 
 
 Belief, 353, 363 
 
 Bergson, x 
 
 Berkeley, xiv, 228 n. , 231-2, 463, 466 
 
 Bosanquet, B., 71 n. , 77, 81, 90, 97, 
 100, 103, 105, 284 
 
 Bradley, F. H., xii, xiii, 4 ., 77, 81, 
 85, 96, 97, 99, 101, ii 4-140 passim, 
 146, 147, 177, 220 n. , 225 n., 231, 
 237, 239 ., 241, 260, 261-2, 267, 
 273, 275, 276, 283, 284, 286, 287, 
 289, 290, 360, 424 
 
 Buridan, 339 
 
 Bussell, F. W., 136, 139 
 
 Caird, E. , 35 
 
 Case, T., 73 
 
 Causation, 236 n., 242, 361, 467 
 
 Certainty, 83-4 
 
 Chance, 245, 318, 396, 418-9 
 
 Change, 39, 220 ; as illusion, 225, 
 2 55' 45 I as rea l' 22 7> 3 22 - 4 11 - 
 4 J 9, 45 
 
 Choice, 127, 129, 219, 292-4, 358, 392, 
 394-5, 400-3. 406, 415. 427 
 
 Colour-blindness, 316-7 
 
 Common World, the, 4 . , no, 182, 
 311, 315-20, 442, 466-7, 469 
 
 Concept, function of, 356 ; immutable, 
 64-5 ; instrumental, 56, 64 ; Plato's 
 theory of, 25, 50/1 See also ' Uni- 
 versal ' 
 
 Consistency, as criterion of truth, 65, 
 zoo, in, 150, 243 
 
 487
 
 488 
 
 STUDIES IN HUMANISM 
 
 Contingency, 403, 406, 407, 418, 422. 
 
 See also ' Chance ' 
 Contradiction, law of, 146, 150 ; no 
 
 criterion, 239-41 ; of the senses, 39, 
 
 no, 220, 309-10; of insufficient 
 
 concepts, 65, 239 
 Cowell, P. H., 416 
 Creation, 196, 261, 271, 434-5, 446, 
 
 447 
 
 Criterion, as consistency, 65, 149-50 ; 
 as control, 222 ; as non-contradic- 
 tion, 239-41 
 
 Curie, P. 89, 386 
 
 Darwin, 279, 385 
 
 Darwinism, 29 
 
 Definition, 1-2 
 
 Dehumanising, xiv, 64, 69, 106, 171, 
 
 422, 425 
 Depersonalising, 98, 100 . , 106, 112, 
 
 1 7L 353. 3.6 1 
 Derealising, xiv, 425 
 Descartes, 395 
 Desire, in relation to truth, 91-3, 339- 
 
 40 ; to postulates, 256, 337-41 ; to 
 
 reality, 338-40, 425 
 Determinism, 125, 248, 284, 292, 
 
 392-420 
 Dewey, /. , ix, 19 n., 96, 121, 122, 
 
 199, 361, 363, 369, 454, 458 
 Dialectic, 46, 171, 172-4, 279,280,422-4 
 Dialectical, spirit, 39, 211, 220; dia- 
 logues, 45, 47 
 Dickinson, G. L., 383 n. 
 Dreams, 202, 261, 316, 317, 319, 325, 
 
 382-3, 473-85 
 Dualism, of fact vs. truth and value, 
 
 121 ; of Plato, 57, 61-2 
 
 Education, 23-5 
 
 Eleaticism, 48, 51, 53, 226, 288, 420 
 
 Emotion, 82, 99, 162, 354 
 
 Empiricism, 224-57, 2 59> 2 77 
 
 Error, problem of, 3, 78, 105 - 6, 
 147 n. , 170, 177, 180, 183; as 
 failure, 111-2; as psychological, 94 ; 
 as related to knowledge, 7, 123, 
 149 ; to truth-making, 65, 205, 212 ; 
 as valuation, 38 
 
 Ethics, postulate freedom, 399-401 
 
 Eucken, R., xii 
 
 Evaluation, of claims to truth, 4, 76, 
 157 n. ; of meanings, 87 
 
 Evil, 82, 188, 227, 247, 253, 256-7, 
 287-9. SSL 436 
 
 Evolutionism, 224-7, 2 7%> 448 
 
 Experience, direct, 222 ; immediate, 
 392 ; religious, 363 ; relation to 
 experiment, 191 ; to reality, 202, 
 463-5, 469-70, 473-4. 482-6; to 
 
 understanding, 247 ; to solipsism, 
 
 259-60 ; fear of, 255 
 Experiment, 191, 193, 364 
 External world, 13, 201-2, 234, 362, 
 
 459, 471, 474 
 
 Fact, as accepted, 120, 185, 186, 198, 
 200, 354, 426, 428 ; as independent, 
 
 124, 181, 425 ; initial, 428-31, 
 434-7 I objective, 188, 190 ; plastic, 
 
 125, 371, 445-6 ; primary, 186 ; and 
 truth, 121, 123-4, 370-2, 431; as 
 unpleasant, 93, 188-90 ; unreal, 188. 
 See also ' Reality ' 
 
 Faith, 276, 290, 301, 389 ; relation 
 to reason and religion, 34^-6^ 
 
 False, as valuation, 6, 143-4, 151, 
 154-5, 192-3, 212 
 
 Fatalism, 393 
 
 Feeling, 128-9, 2 4^ 
 
 Fichte, 422 n. 
 
 Fiske, J. , 29 
 
 Flournoy, T. , 479 
 
 Flux, 40, 48, 51-3, 233, 255 
 
 God, ambiguousness of, 134, 285, 364 ; 
 definition of, 136, 285 ; infinity of, 
 138 ; omnipotence of, 137, 287-8, 
 329, 418 ; proofs of, 305, 327, 335, 
 336-41, 344, 362 ; as creator, 435-6, 
 447 ; as postulate, 362 ; source of 
 values, 219, 244-5 ; relation to the all, 
 26, 276, 285, 328-34, 364, 369, 436 
 
 Gomperz, T., 28-33, 35 n -> 4^> 47 
 
 Good, and bad, 6, 37, 152, 154; denned, 
 152 ; kinds of, 191 ; and true, 6, 
 152, 154, 310 ; Idea of, 54-5, 459 ; 
 The, 153, and the One, 55 
 
 Goodhart, Dr., 460, 471 
 
 Goodness, moral, 153, 246 ; of gods, 
 331-2 
 
 Gorgias, 86 
 
 Greek, philosophy, 23 f. , 43, 368 ; 
 science, 25 
 
 Green, T. H. , 278, 279, 282, 284. , 286 
 
 Grote, 31 
 
 Habit, and freedom, 400-3, 409 ; plas- 
 ticity of, 409-10, 417, 448 
 
 Haeckel, 279 
 
 ' Hanna,' Rev. Mr., 460, 471 
 
 Hartmann, E. von, 265, 436 
 
 Hegel, xiv, 134, 172, 278, 280, 414, 
 422, 425 
 
 Heine, viii 
 
 Heraclitus, 39, 51, 319 
 
 Herodotus, 313 
 
 Hoffding, H., xi 
 
 Hoernle, R. F. A., 71 n., 77, 115, 146, 
 174 n., 392 n.
 
 INDEX 
 
 489 
 
 Horn, F., 47 
 
 Humanism, definition, 5 n. , 10-16 ; a 
 method, 16, 19 ; of Protagoras, 34, 
 68, 113 ; relation to Absolutism, 
 238 ; to faith, 365 ; to freedom, 
 391-2, 408 ; to idealism, 453, 457, 
 463, 486 ; to metaphysics, 16, 19, 
 226, 229, 443, 450 ; to psychology, 
 72, 354 ; to realism, 453, 457, 459- 
 62, 486; to religion, 135-6, 351, 
 368 ; to scepticism, 69 ; to sub- 
 jectivism, 69, 457, 463 ; to truth, 121 
 
 Humanism, vii-viii, ix, 129, 132 ; and 
 notes 16, 70, 120, 128, 178, 187, 
 190, 241, 242, 246, 275, 317, 353, 
 416, 422, 431, 436, 437, 448, 466, 
 
 475- 48i 
 
 Hume, 221, 230-1 
 Huxley, T. H., 279 
 
 Idea, communion of, 48, 54 ; de- 
 pendent on experience, 252, 420 ; 
 as psychical fact, 77 ; of Good, 54-5, 
 
 459 
 
 Ideal, its formation, 4, 163-6, 223 ; 
 reality, 199 ; relation to application, 
 40, 164 ; to idealism, 453 ; to man, 
 xiv, 70, 107-9, I2 3> 164-6, 187, 
 213, 222 ; to truth, i66/., 180-1 
 
 Ideal Theory, of Plato, 43/"., 109-10, 
 322, 457-9 
 
 Idealism, 453-86 ; ambiguity of, 228 n. , 
 453 ; difficulty of, 48 ; relation to 
 solipsism, 258-65. See also ' Ab- 
 solutism,' ' Personal Idealism,' and 
 ' Subjectivism ' 
 
 Identity, 85, 237, 319 
 
 Imagery, 94 
 
 Immortality, proof of, 386-7 ; and 
 Platonism, 57 
 
 Independence, of dream-worlds, 473, 
 475-6; of external world, 13, 201, 
 474 ; of ideals, 165 ; of Logic, 95, 
 97-9, 103-5 ; of Plato's Ideas, 
 57-8, 60, 175 ; of reality, 65, 122, 
 177, i8o/, 321, 430, 439, 455, 
 474 ; of theory, 126-8, 131 ; of 
 thought, 96 ; of truth, 65, 69, 157 n. , 
 177, 182 
 
 Indetermination, 248,392-420, 427, 448 
 
 Indeterminism, 392-420 
 
 Infinite, 295, 314, 449 
 
 Intellect, its games, 7, 154 ; its satis- 
 faction, 115, 246; pure, 7, 128 
 
 Intellectualism, xii, xiv, 4, 5, 10, 98, 
 99, 126, 129, 131, 160, 180, 228-9, 
 237, 244, 246, 264, 396 n. , 441, 
 444, 458-9 ; its psychology, 14 ; re- 
 lation to experience, 13, 191 ; to 
 Plato, 25, 145 ; to scepticism, xiii, 
 
 69, 96, in, 176. See also ' Ration- 
 alism ' and ' Sensationalism ' 
 Interest, logical and psychological, 81; 
 relation to purpose, 82 ; to reality, 
 199-200, 221, 438 ; to science, 98, 
 235 ; to truth, 5, 188, 190 
 
 James, W., x, 5 n., 19 n., 119, 131, 
 135, 136, 231 ., 299, 352, 373, 375, 
 378 n., 391 n., 393, 406, 420, 445, 
 461, 479 
 
 'Jericho,' xiii, 119, 134, 138, 139, 
 170 n. , 225 
 
 Jerusalem, W., xii 
 
 Joachim, H. H., 163-78 passim, 3 . , 
 14 n., 103, 105-9, I22 ' J 47' 283,284 
 
 Joseph, H. W. ., 122 
 
 JoTvett, B., 145 n. , 278 
 
 Judgment, 89-90, 96, no, in n., 
 191-2, 356 
 
 Kant, 126, 127, 178, 220, 230, 237, 
 
 278, 280, 467, 468 
 
 Knowing, makes real differences, 438-44 
 Knox, H. V., x, xv, 96, 150, 220 n., 
 
 239 n. , 282 n. 
 
 Language, pragmatic, 7 n. 
 
 Law, application of, 8, 173-4 ' con- 
 stancy of, 416-7 ; and miracle, 293, 
 413 ; as habit, 320, 409-10, 446 ; 
 as mechanical, 414 ; as postulate, 
 396, 398 ; as rule, 409 
 
 Leibniz, 219, 288 
 
 Liberum Veto, 297 
 
 Lie, 94, 323, 340 
 
 Logic, definition of, 78, 100 ; formal, 
 3, 79, 96, 142-3, 148-9 ; Humanist, 
 82 ; normative, 99-101, 159 ; prag- 
 matic, 115, 143 ; traditional, 4, 142 ; 
 of sophists, 32 ; relation to actual 
 knowing, 74 ; to Psychology, 77- 
 77j, 162 n., 366, 436 
 
 Logical connection, also psychological, 
 16, 76, 80, 95, 436 
 
 Lotze, 435 
 
 Lytton, 480 
 
 Mac A, ., xi, 7 
 
 Mackenzie, J. S., 59 n, 283, 284-5 
 
 McTaggart, J. M. ., 276 ., 284, 
 
 287, 350, 422 
 Mainldnder, 272 
 Man the Measure, xv, 13, 33-9, 210, 
 
 298, 307-11, 315, 320 
 Mansel, 280 
 
 Materialism, n, 267, 284, 378 
 Mathematics, 55, 84, 222, 353 
 Matter, 377. 415, 434, 443, 449. 468 
 Meaning, 86-89 ; and ambiguity, 87 ;
 
 49 
 
 STUDIES IN HUMANISM 
 
 and application, 9, 149, 171, 243 ; 
 and context, 86, 95, 102, 149 ; and 
 fact, 77 n., 86, 95 ; and purpose, 9, 
 82, 112, 149, 171, 371 
 
 Mechanism, 367, 414 
 
 Melissus, 314 
 
 Mellone, S. H., 16 n. 
 
 Metaphysics, xiii, i, u, 16-21, 201, 
 277, 426, 437-8, 462 ; aids to faith, 
 278 ; depend on personality, 18 ; 
 not coercive, 17, 359 ; Plato's, 58/1 
 relation to ethics, 273 ; to evolution, 
 225-8, 411 ; to freedom, 398, 405, 
 408, 417-20 ; to Humanism and 
 Pragmatism, 16, 20, 244, 428-9, 
 434-5, 450 ; to practice, 246 ; to 
 higher realities, 222 ; to scepticism, 
 74, 100, 108, 116-7 
 
 Mill, J. S., ioon., 115, 236 n., 278, 
 279 
 
 Miracle, 293, 396, 413 
 
 Monism, 159, 219, 267. See also 
 ' Absolutism ' 
 
 Moore, A. W., 178 
 
 Moore, G. ., 177, 228, 458 
 
 Muirhead, J. H. , 418 
 
 Myers, F. W. H. , 373-88 passim 
 
 Myths, of Plato, 41-2 ; of religions, 
 305. 336, 342-8 
 
 Naturalism, 10, 158, 230, 284 
 
 Natural Selection, 38 
 
 Necessity, 83 
 
 Newman, J. H., 136, 352 
 
 Newton, 441 
 
 Not-being, 56, no 
 
 Novelty, 244-5, 2 94. 333"4. 385 
 
 One, the, 314-6, 320, 328-34, 369; 
 and the Many, 271-2, 315, 328-9, 
 450 ; as Absolute, 61 ; as the Good, 
 55 ; as the Idea, 52-3 
 
 Ontological proof, 228, 241, 251-2 
 
 Origin and history, 244-5, 396 n. 
 
 Ostwald, W., xi 
 
 Panpsychism, 443 
 
 Pantheism, 26-7, 364 
 
 Papini, G., xi, 19 n. 
 
 Parmenides, 61, 312, 313, 322 
 
 ' Parmenides ' of Plato, 45-7, 49, 59, 
 
 60, 62, 67 
 Participation difficulty in Plato, 45, 
 
 54-5- 59- 169 
 
 Particularity unknowable, 56 
 Pascal, 352 
 Pattison, M., 278 
 Peirce, C. S., ix, 5, 161 n. 
 Perception, 177, 311, 316-20 
 Personal Idealism, 4 w. , 16, 228 n, 463 
 
 Personal Idealism, vii, 129, and notes 
 16, 83, 85, 118, 120, 197, 353, 428, 
 436, 468, 473 
 
 Personality, its dissociation, 266-73 > 
 implied in science, 98 ; its nature, 
 129, 381-2 ; not to be abstracted 
 from, 95, 353-4, 424, 463 ; relation 
 to meaning, 86, 88 
 
 Pessimism, 189, 257, 272 
 
 Philosophy, difficulty of, 139-40, 308 ; 
 failure of, 137-8, 359 
 
 Plato, xiii, xiv, 6, 25, 30, 32-70, 109- 
 10, 113, 123, 127, 132, 145, 162 n., 
 168, 169 n. , 177, 228 n. , 229, 
 283, 286, 298-300, 306-11, 322, 
 434, 441, 456, 457, 458, 461 
 
 Plato's Chasm, 57, 58, 59, 62, 69, 109, 
 175, 289, 455, 458 
 
 Pluralism, 97, 127, 138, 219, 267, 271, 
 
 273. 459 
 
 Plutarch, 30 
 
 Podmore, F., 373, 380, 384 
 
 Poincare', H., xi, 205, 319 n. 
 
 Postulates, 120, 197, 234, 241-5, 353, 
 356-62, 471 ; of the Absolute, 252-4; 
 of determinism, 394-9, 405-7 ; of 
 freedom, 399-401 ; of Logic, 116-8, 
 236-7 ; methodological, 397-8, 405- 
 407, 417, 449 ; of rationality, 194, 
 292 
 
 Postulation, 91, 93, 280, 394 
 
 Practice, ambiguity of, 131 ; definition 
 of, 129-30 ; relation to theory, 126-8, 
 246 
 
 Pragmatic Method, x, xiii, 367, 428-9, 
 433. 436-8 
 
 Pragmatic Reality, 190, 433, 475 
 
 Pragmatic Test, 93, 157, 186, 192, 
 358-9, 366, 469 
 
 Pragmatic Value, of religion, 359, 
 368 ; of science, 359 
 
 Pragmaticism, 5 n. 
 
 Pragmatism, 154-5, 198, 246, 418, 
 441 ; definition of, 3-12 ; as method, 
 16, 20 n. , 186, 429-30; relation to 
 F. H. Bradley, 115, 133; to Hum- 
 anism, 15-6, 245, 437; to Kant, 
 128 ; to metaphysics, 16, 19, 224, 
 428-9, 434 
 
 Predication, experimental, 192 ; a 
 puzzle, 73 
 
 Prince, Dr. Morton, 269, 272, 382 
 
 Proof, 386-7 
 
 Protagoras, xiv, 4 . , 15, 25, 31 . , 
 33-8, 69, 113, 132, 145-6, 298-348, 
 
 457 
 
 Psychical Research, 370-90 
 Psychologism, xii, 72, 95 
 Psychology, definition of,75; abnormal, 
 
 268, 387 ; relation to evidence, 363 ;
 
 INDEX 
 
 491 
 
 to Humanism, 354 ; to idealism, 
 268 ; to Logic, 71-113, 275, 2<)if., 
 366 ; to purpose, 12 ; to religion, 
 337-4L 3 6 3> 3 6 7-8 ; to subjectivity, 
 468-9 
 
 Pure Thought, 14, 96-7, 143, 354 
 Purpose, and Absolutism, 10, 230-5, 
 248 ; and interest, 82 ; and reality, 
 412 ; and science, 152 ; definition 
 of, 133 ; ultimate, 55, 156, 158 
 Purposiveness of mental life, 10, 82, 
 99, 128, 191, 235, 247, 354 
 
 Questions, 90-1 
 
 Rashdall, ff., 71 n. , 77, 136, 137 
 Rationalism, 350, 352, 425 ; fears 
 experience, 255 ; not rational, xiii, 
 252, 355. See also Intellectualism 
 Realism, 13, 122, 181, 201, 228 n. , 
 258, 425, 439, 453-62, 464-6, 470, 
 473-4. 476, 481-3. 486 
 
 Reality, absolute, 214-223, 321, 486 ; 
 dynamic, 215 ; higher, 222, 431-2, 
 475-7,480; incomplete, 411, 419, 
 427, 448-51 ; independent, 321, 430, 
 461-2, 465, 470, 473, 481 ; initial, 
 432-3; plastic, 427, 433, 444-5; 
 primary, 187, 201-2, 220-2, 233, 
 460, 470, 474 ; real, 221-2, 438, 
 474-5, 484 ; rigid, 419, 427, 433 ; 
 static, 225, 427 ; ultimate, 250, 
 436, 485 ; its antedating, 339, 430 ; 
 itsdegrees, 249-50 ; its discovery, 429- 
 31, 439 ; its 'making,' 422-451, 120, 
 198-203, 218, 320-2, 34O/~. , 462, 467; 
 relation to dreams, 202, 473, 477, 
 479-81 ; toexperience, 469-70, 482-4; 
 to interest, 199, 438 ; to predication, 
 192-8 ; to truth, 185, 198, 422-5 ; 
 as claim, 252, 430 ; as value, 473, 
 480 ; as a whole, 248, 251 
 
 Reason, its relation to Faith and 
 Religion, 349-69 \ its function, 
 355-6, 409, 410 ; pure, viii, 65, 67, 
 255, 281-2 
 
 Religion, its relation to Absolutism, 
 274-97, 345 ; to Faith and Reason, 
 349-69 ; its definition, 135-7 
 
 Revelation, 344-5, 389 
 
 Kiddles of the Sphinx, notes 19, 202, 
 275, 402, 436, 476 
 
 Ritschl, 136, 352 
 
 Royce, /. , 120 ., 139, 230 n. 
 
 Russell, B. A. W., 177, 458 
 
 St. Paul, 36 
 
 Santayana, G., x, 20 n. , 429 n. 
 Satisfaction, of intellect, 115, 246 ; of 
 truth, 83 ; of ultimate reality, 436 
 
 Scepticism, about Logic, 73-4 ; relation 
 to intellectualism, xiii, 69, 96, 100, 
 116,118,178,206, 210,237; toProta- 
 goreanism, 38, 68, 113, 298, 456 ; 
 to subjectivism, 69 
 
 Schopenhauer, xi 
 
 Sckultz, /. , xii 
 
 Science, and Aristophanes, 32 n. ; and 
 ' contradictions,' 39 ; and faith, 301, 
 361, 366 ; and freedom, 397-9 ; and 
 man, 98, 171, 412 ; and pantheism, 
 27 ; and postulates, 236 ; and 
 Protagoras, 34-5 ; and purpose, 
 152 ; and theology, 26-8, 277-82, 
 364 ; and time, 73 ; as system, 
 151-2 ; its aim, 235 n. 
 
 Selection, 38, 125, 132, 187, 190-1, 
 
 202, 231-5, 360, 371, 382, 392, 
 
 429, 460, 484 
 Self-determination, 393-4 
 Sensationalism, 177, 228, 277, 299, 
 
 309-10 
 
 Sense-perception, becomes objective, 38 
 Sensible, its Becoming, 66 ; relation to 
 
 Idea, 56, 59 
 Shakespeare, 478 
 
 Sidgwick, Alfred, x, 8, 9, 20 n. , 149 
 Sidgwick, Henry, 397 
 Sidis, B., 460, 471 
 Society for Psychical Research, 372-90, 
 
 478 
 Socrates, 32, 35, 37, 43, 52, 220, 
 
 298-9, 304, 307, 311 
 Solipsism, 69, 234, 257 n. , 258-265, 
 
 463-4, 469-73 
 ' Somehow,' as the ultima ratio, 58, 61, 
 
 168, 250, 255, 276, 297 
 'Sophist,' of Plato, 46 ., 67, 286 
 Sophists, 30-3, 299 
 Spencer, H., 137, 225-6, 279 
 Spinoza, 159 
 
 Stewart, J. A., 68 n., 284 n. 
 Stout, G. F., 170, 225, 230 
 Sturt, H. C., x, I9., 97, 118, 129, 
 
 131, 282 
 
 Subjectivism, 457, 463-4 ; and Prota- 
 goras, 38, 68, 70, 456 ; and 
 
 scepticism, 69, 456 
 Subliminal Self, 375-9 
 
 Taylor, A. ., 224-51 passim, 122, 
 
 139, 146, 157, 161 n. , 284 
 Teichmiiller ; 57 
 Teleology, 12, 230-5 ; and Idea of 
 
 Good, 55 
 
 Telepathy, 380, 384 
 Thales, 339 
 ' Theaetetus,' of Plato, xiii, 35, 37, 38, 
 
 48 n., 109-10, 123, 132, 145, 299, 
 
 308
 
 492 
 
 STUDIES IN HUMANISM 
 
 and 
 
 Theology, 26, 135, 178, 196, 278-81, 
 283, 285, 288, 349, 351-2, 368 ; of 
 Protagoras, 298, 300, 341-6 
 Theory vs. practice, 126-8 
 Time, and Christianity, 280 ; 
 eternity, 422 ; and science, 73 
 Transcendence, illusory, 183, 461 ; of 
 Ideas, 57; of knowing, 122, 177, 455 
 Transmission theory of soul, 378, 386 
 Truth, absolute, 48, 67-8, 122, 181, 
 204-214, 263 ; abstract, 8, 193 ; 
 dehumanised, xiii, 64-5 ; disagree- 
 able, 93 ; efficacious, 118, 195 ; 
 eternal, 174, 205 ; ideal, non-human, 
 60, 67, 106-9, I 7' 207-9 i inde- 
 pendent, 64, 157 n., 182; methodo- 
 logical, 194 ; objective, 34, 38, 70, 
 92, 153, 182 ; potential, 8 ; its 
 ambiguity, 141-162, 241 ; its ante- 
 dating, 157 n., 195, 430; its de- 
 personalising, xiii, 112, 171, 353; 
 its etherealising, 111-2; its ' making, ' 
 4, 120, 124, 142, 151, 161, 179-203, 
 312, 422, 425-6, 431, 438, 462 ; its 
 progressiveness, 65, 157, 194-5, 
 211-3 ; its variety, 360 ; as claim, 
 3, 66, 76, 77, 78, 94, in, 144-162, 
 183, 186, 206, 299-300, 367, 389, 425, 
 432 ; as consistency, 100, 107, 241 ; 
 as correspondence with reality, ix, 
 xiv, 116-8, 122-4, 177, 181, 241, 
 425, 426, 455 ; as dependent, 182-3, 
 195-6, 206; as system, 123, 169 f., 
 195 ; as valuation, 38, 76, 130, i43/i , 
 162, 195, 211, 299, 310 ; in relation 
 to consequences, 6, 91, in, 154-5, 
 185, 186, 192, 357 ; to context, 8 ; 
 to desire, 91-3, 338-41, 374 ; to dis- 
 covery, 157 n., 194-5, 4 2 9I to fact, 
 121-5, 180, 185, 370-2 ; to interest, 
 
 5, 154; to man, 5, 143, 263, 426; 
 to meaning, vii, 142 ; to purpose, 
 10, 112, 152-4, 156, 193, 194; to 
 reality, 185, 198, 422-5 ; to satis- 
 faction, 83 ; to success, 1 18, 193, 362 
 
 Universals, Aristotle's, 63, 175 : as 
 applicable, 113 ; as concrete, 172-5 ; 
 and particulars, 113, 173-4 
 
 Universe, alternatives, 219 ; as fated, 
 418 ; idea of, 295, 333 ; as monistic, 
 218 ; as plastic, 448 ; as satisfied, 
 223 ; as system, 247-8 ; its unity, 
 127, 136, 290, 292-5, 332-4 
 
 Universities, 15, 277 
 
 Usefulness, and truth, 8, 161, 185, 
 2 43' 3 I 3-5. 323 I and good, 191 
 
 ' Useless ' knowledge, 24, 242 
 
 Validity, and claim, 144-59, 247 ; and 
 
 origin, 242-5 ; of postulates, 357 ; 
 
 objective, 90 
 Values, distinguished by Protagoras, 
 
 35, 299-300, 309-11 ; dependent on 
 
 use, 244 ; as psychical facts, 174 ; 
 
 logical, 7, 157 ; vital, 76, 358 ; 
 
 subject to logic, 78 ; to psychology, 
 
 76 
 Verification, essential to truth, 8, 193, 
 
 197, 246, 253, 357-8, 362, 365-6, 
 
 389-90, 432 
 Voluntarism, 11, 92, 128, 130, 142, 143 
 
 Ward, J. , 230 n. 
 Wells, H. G., 293 
 
 Will, 99, 128, 133, 357 ; to believe, 
 13. 35. 353. 358 
 
 Zeller, ., 44 
 Zeno, 27, 420 
 
 THE END 
 
 Printed by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, EdMurgh.
 
 University of California 
 
 SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 405 Hilgard Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90024-1388 
 
 Return this material to the library 
 
 from which it was borrowed. 
 
 JAN 21 1993
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 A 000 879 465 3 
 
 A