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Are they not all mere matters of CONSISTENCY–and emphatically NOT
of consistency between an absolute reality and the mind’s copies of
it, but of actually felt consistency among judgments, objects, and
habits of reacting, in the mind’s own experienceable world? And
are not both our need of such consistency and our pleasure in it
conceivable as outcomes of the natural fact that we are beings that
do develop mental HABITS–habit itself proving adaptively beneficial
in an environment where the same objects, or the same kinds of
objects, recur and follow ‘law’? If this were so, what would have
come first would have been the collateral profits of habit as such,
and the theoretic life would have grown up in aid of these. In point
of fact, this seems to have been the probable case. At life’s
origin, any present perception may have been ‘true’–if such a
word could then be applicable. Later, when reactions became
organized, the reactions became ‘true’ whenever expectation was
fulfilled by them. Otherwise they were ‘false’ or ‘mistaken’
reactions. But the same class of objects needs the same kind of
reaction, so the impulse to react consistently must gradually have
been established, and a disappointment felt whenever the results
frustrated expectation. Here is a perfectly plausible germ for all
our higher consistencies. Nowadays, if an object claims from us a
reaction of the kind habitually accorded only to the opposite class
of objects, our mental machinery refuses to run smoothly. The
situation is intellectually unsatisfactory.

Theoretic truth thus falls WITHIN the mind, being the accord of some
of its processes and objects with other processes and objects–
‘accord’ consisting here in well-definable relations. So long as
the satisfaction of feeling such an accord is denied us, whatever
collateral profits may seem to inure from what we believe in are but
as dust in the balance–provided always that we are highly
organized intellectually, which the majority of us are not. The
amount of accord which satisfies most men and women is merely the
absence of violent clash between their usual thoughts and
statements and the limited sphere of sense-perceptions in which
their lives are cast. The theoretic truth that most of us think we
‘ought’ to attain to is thus the possession of a set of predicates
that do not explicitly contradict their subjects. We preserve it as
often as not by leaving other predicates and subjects out.

In some men theory is a passion, just as music is in others. The
form of inner consistency is pursued far beyond the line at
which collateral profits stop. Such men systematize and classify and
schematize and make synoptical tables and invent ideal objects for
the pure love of unifying. Too often the results, glowing with
‘truth’ for the inventors, seem pathetically personal and artificial
to bystanders. Which is as much as to say that the purely theoretic
criterion of truth can leave us in the lurch as easily as any other
criterion, and that the absolutists, for all their pretensions,
are ‘in the same boat’ concretely with those whom they attack.

I am well aware that this paper has been rambling in the extreme.
But the whole subject is inductive, and sharp logic is hardly yet in
order. My great trammel has been the non-existence of any
definitely stated alternative on my opponents’ part. It may conduce
to clearness if I recapitulate, in closing, what I conceive the main
points of humanism to be. They are these:–

1. An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality
in order to be true.

2. By ‘reality’ humanism means nothing more than the other
conceptual or perceptual experiences with which a given present
experience may find itself in point of fact mixed up.
[Footnote: This is meant merely to exclude reality of an
‘unknowable’ sort, of which no account in either perceptual
or conceptual terms can be given. It includes of course any
amount if empirical reality independent of the knower.
Pragmatism, is thus ‘epistemologically’ realistic in its account.]

3. By ‘conforming,’ humanism means taking account-of in such a way
as to gain any intellectually and practically satisfactory result.

4. To ‘take account-of’ and to be ‘satisfactory’ are terms that
admit of no definition, so many are the ways in which these
requirements can practically be worked out.

5. Vaguely and in general, we take account of a reality by
preserving it in as unmodified a form as possible. But, to be then
satisfactory, it must not contradict other realities outside of it
which claim also to be preserved. That we must preserve all the
experience we can and minimize contradiction in what we preserve, is
about all that can be said in advance.

6. The truth which the conforming experience embodies may be a
positive addition to the previous reality, and later judgments
may have to conform to it. Yet, virtually at least, it may have been
true previously. Pragmatically, virtual and actual truth mean the
same thing: the possibility of only one answer, when once the
question is raised.