FullReads

The fundamental fact about our experience is that it is a process of
change. For the ‘trower’ at any moment, truth, like the visible area
round a man walking in a fog, or like what George Eliot calls ‘the
wall of dark seen by small fishes’ eyes that pierce a span in the
wide Ocean,’ is an objective field which the next moment enlarges
and of which it is the critic, and which then either suffers
alteration or is continued unchanged. The critic sees both the first
trower’s truth and his own truth, compares them with each other, and
verifies or confutes. HIS field of view is the reality independent
of that earlier trower’s thinking with which that thinking ought to
correspond. But the critic is himself only a trower; and if the
whole process of experience should terminate at that instant, there
would be no otherwise known independent reality with which HIS
thought might be compared.

The immediate in experience is always provisionally in this
situation. The humanism, for instance, which I see and try so
hard to defend, is the completest truth attained from my point of
view up to date. But, owing to the fact that all experience is a
process, no point of view can ever be THE last one. Every one is
insufficient and off its balance, and responsible to later points of
view than itself. You, occupying some of these later points in your
own person, and believing in the reality of others, will not agree
that my point of view sees truth positive, truth timeless, truth
that counts, unless they verify and confirm what it sees.

You generalize this by saying that any opinion, however
satisfactory, can count positively and absolutely as true only so
far as it agrees with a standard beyond itself; and if you then
forget that this standard perpetually grows up endogenously inside
the web of the experiences, you may carelessly go on to say that
what distributively holds of each experience, holds also
collectively of all experience, and that experience as such and in
its totality owes whatever truth it may be possessed-of to its
correspondence with absolute realities outside of its own being.
This evidently is the popular and traditional position. From
the fact that finite experiences must draw support from one another,
philosophers pass to the notion that experience uberhaupt must
need an absolute support. The denial of such a notion by humanism
lies probably at the root of most of the dislike which it incurs.

But is this not the globe, the elephant and the tortoise over again?
Must not something end by supporting itself? Humanism is willing to
let finite experience be self-supporting. Somewhere being must
immediately breast nonentity. Why may not the advancing front of
experience, carrying its immanent satisfactions and
dissatisfactions, cut against the black inane as the luminous orb of
the moon cuts the caerulean abyss? Why should anywhere the world be
absolutely fixed and finished? And if reality genuinely grows,
why may it not grow in these very determinations which here and now
are made?

In point of fact it actually seems to grow by our mental
determinations, be these never so ‘true.’ Take the ‘great bear’ or
‘dipper’ constellation in the heavens. We call it by that name, we
count the stars and call them seven, we say they were seven before
they were counted, and we say that whether any one had ever noted
the fact or not, the dim resemblance to a long-tailed (or long-
necked?) animal was always truly there. But what do we mean by this
projection into past eternity of recent human ways of thinking? Did
an ‘absolute’ thinker actually do the counting, tell off the stars
upon his standing number-tally, and make the bear-comparison, silly
as the latter is? Were they explicitly seven, explicitly bear-like,
before the human witness came? Surely nothing in the truth of
the attributions drives us to think this. They were only implicitly
or virtually what we call them, and we human witnesses first
explicated them and made them ‘real.’ A fact virtually pre-exists
when every condition of its realization save one is already there.
In this case the condition lacking is the act of the counting and
comparing mind. But the stars (once the mind considers them)
themselves dictate the result. The counting in no wise modifies
their previous nature, and, they being what and where they are, the
count cannot fall out differently. It could then ALWAYS be
made. NEVER could the number seven be questioned, IF THE QUESTION
ONCE WERE RAISED.