The fact that thought essentially refers to a 'reality' external to it in no way diminishes its purposive character. Whether the mind is idealizing an aspect of reality (as in mathematics) or abstracting, classifying, and predicting (as in science), it is always the fact that a particular kind of reality is needed for some serious or trivial purpose which guides the operations of the thinker. A mind which craved to embrace all or 'any' reality need not think; it would do better to float without discrimination upon the flux of change. This procedure would be so absolutely antithetical to human knowing that it seems a wanton paradox on that account to treat it as the final goal of knowledge.

Actually, of course, the philosophers who claim to be devoted to pure theory follow no such course. They deliberately choose their ideal of what is worth knowing—e.g., 'God,' or 'the unity of all things,' or 'the laws of the universe'—and, disregarding all other existences, they pursue the kind of reality they desire because of its religious or moral or aesthetic value. For there could be no greater mistake than to suppose that the common antithesis between 'reality' and the 'un-real' usually means the same thing as the distinction between what 'exists' and what is absolutely non-existent. On the contrary, it is usually a judgment of value. We may say that the 'haunted' house is real and the 'ghost' is not; but as an hallucination the ghost is real enough. Utopia is unreal for the politician, but exists as an ideal for the theorist. The Platonist treats our physical world of sight and touch, which we think the most real of all, as a mere illusion compared to the 'Ideas' of his metaphysical world. The thinker who declares he wants to know all about 'reality' does not mean that he wishes to investigate everything which in any sense exists, but that he wishes to know what he considers best worth knowing—and this, of course, implies a personal valuation, a purged and expurgated extract, which will not offend his taste. So all philosophies are, in fact, selective. Even the more conscientious rationalists show very little anxiety to include in their intellectual scheme a knowledge of their opponents' opinions—indeed, they seem to think that the existence of such facts may be made dependent wholly on their will to recognize them. An exposition of Pragmatism is for them a 'reality' which does not count: it is not worth knowing about. And this is only natural, after all. For 'reality,' the object of the mind's search, is always a selection, conceived after the likeness of the heart's desire, the product of a human purpose.

To recognize this is to appreciate the wisdom of Humanism's refusal to treat the world, for good or bad, as a given and completed whole. For not only is what we call the real world always a selection from a larger whole from which we have ventured to exclude great masses of irrelevance, but every day brings fresh experience, and may bring fresh enlightenment. And since man has always an interest in improving his condition, is it not futile to forbid him to re-make his world as beat he can? Why prematurely claim to have reached finality, when unexpected novelties may shatter any system before it is even completed? Our world is plastic, it is most 'really' what we can make of it, and the process of our making is not ended. Whether a decree of Fate has fixed any ultimate limits to our efforts we have no means of knowing, and no occasion to assume. Is not our wisest course, then, to persist in trying? It is bad method ever to despair of knowing what we need.

For good or ill, the world with which the Humanist contends is always a world that reveals itself to him. Reality, as it is assumed, presumed, or guessed to be 'in itself,' apart from our experience of it, is cancelled from his reckonings. For he cannot discover how he (or anyone) can get any 'knowledge' or 'intuition' which transcends all human faculties. The theories of metaphysicians on these lofty themes he regards as personal postulates which, in so far as they cannot be subjected to the pragmatic method, must remain open questions. Human experience does not warrant such gratuitous demands. It confirms neither the rigid system of unchanging fact which realism postulates (seeing that the only facts that science speaks of are ever changing in its progress), nor finds its problems, conflicts, and errors credible as a reflexion of any Universal Mind, unless Idealism ultimately repudiates the sanity of its Absolute.

The superiority of Humanism, then, lies in this, that it does not discourage human enterprise by assuming that the real is completely rigid and eternally achieved without regard to human effort. In the drama that unrolls reality, every man, it teaches, has a duty and a power to play his humble but essential part. Humanism is neither an Optimism nor a Pessimism—both of which must consistently, in their extreme form, deny that reality can be improved—but concedes to man the right and duty to improve the world. It impresses us with the necessity of acting, it vindicates the procedure of acting on our hopes, it shows us how we may correct our errors, and so gives reasons for our faith in the possibility of Progress.



BIBLIOGRAPHY

WILLIAM JAMES: The Principles of Psychology, 1890. The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1897. The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902. Pragmatism, a New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, 1907. A Pluralistic Universe, 1909. The Meaning of Truth, 1909. Some Problems of Philosophy, 1911. Radical Empiricism, 1912.

F.C.S. SCHILLER: Riddles of the Sphinx, 1891 (revised edition, 1910). Axioms as Postulates (in Personal Idealism, ed. Henry Sturt, 1902). Humanism: Philosophical Essays, 1903. Studies in Humanism, 1907. Formal Logic, a Scientific and Social Problem, 1912.

HENRY STURT: Idola Theatri, a Criticism of Oxford Thought and Thinkers from the Standpoint of Personal Idealism, 1906.

J. DEWEY AND OTHERS: Studies in Logical Theory, 1903.

J. DEWEY: The Influence of Darwinism, and Other Essays, 1910.

H.V. KNOX: The Evolution of Truth, Quarterly Review, No. 419. April, 1909.

A.W. MOORE: Pragmatism and its Critics, 1911.

A. SIDGWICK: The Application of Logic, 1910.

THE END