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Such have been the changes from aristocracy to democracy, from
classic to romantic taste, from theistic to pantheistic feeling,
from static to evolutionary ways of understanding life–changes of
which we all have been spectators. Scholasticism still opposes to
such changes the method of confutation by single decisive
reasons, showing that the new view involves self-contradiction, or
traverses some fundamental principle. This is like stopping a river
by planting a stick in the middle of its bed. Round your obstacle
flows the water and ‘gets there all the same.’ In reading some of
our opponents, I am not a little reminded of those catholic writers
who refute darwinism by telling us that higher species cannot come
from lower because minus nequit gignere plus, or that the notion of
transformation is absurd, for it implies that species tend to their
own destruction, and that would violate the principle that
every reality tends to persevere in its own shape. The point of view
is too myopic, too tight and close to take in the inductive
argument. Wide generalizations in science always meet with these
summary refutations in their early days; but they outlive them, and
the refutations then sound oddly antiquated and scholastic. I
cannot help suspecting that the humanistic theory is going through
this kind of would-be refutation at present.

The one condition of understanding humanism is to become inductive-
minded oneself, to drop rigorous definitions, and follow lines
of least, resistance ‘on the whole.’ ‘In other words,’ an opponent
might say, ‘resolve your intellect into a kind of slush.’ ‘Even so,’
I make reply,–‘if you will consent to use no politer word.’ For
humanism, conceiving the more ‘true’ as the more ‘satisfactory’
(Dewey’s term), has sincerely to renounce rectilinear arguments and
ancient ideals of rigor and finality. It is in just this temper of
renunciation, so different from that of pyrrhonistic
scepticism, that the spirit of humanism essentially
consists. Satisfactoriness has to be measured by a multitude of
standards, of which some, for aught we know, may fail in any given
case; and what is more satisfactory than any alternative in sight,
may to the end be a sum of PLUSES and MINUSES, concerning which we
can only trust that by ulterior corrections and improvements a
maximum of the one and a minimum of the other may some day be
approached. It means a real change of heart, a break with
absolutistic hopes, when one takes up this inductive view of the
conditions of belief.

As I understand the pragmatist way of seeing things, it owes its
being to the break-down which the last fifty years have brought
about in the older notions of scientific truth. ‘God geometrizes,’
it used to be said; and it was believed that Euclid’s elements
literally reproduced his geometrizing. There is an eternal and
unchangeable ‘reason’; and its voice was supposed to reverberate in
Barbara and Celarent. So also of the ‘laws of nature,’ physical and
chemical, so of natural history classifications–all were supposed
to be exact and exclusive duplicates of pre-human archetypes buried
in the structure of things, to which the spark of divinity hidden in
our intellect enables us to penetrate. The anatomy of the world
is logical, and its logic is that of a university professor, it was
thought. Up to about 1850 almost every one believed that sciences
expressed truths that were exact copies of a definite code of non-
human realities. But the enormously rapid multiplication of
theories in these latter days has well-nigh upset the notion of any
one of them being a more literally objective kind of thing than
another. There are so many geometries, so many logics, so many
physical and chemical hypotheses, so many classifications, each one
of them good for so much and yet not good for everything, that the
notion that even the truest formula may be a human device and not a
literal transcript has dawned upon us. We hear scientific laws now
treated as so much ‘conceptual shorthand,’ true so far as they are
useful but no farther. Our mind has become tolerant of symbol
instead of reproduction, of approximation instead of exactness, of
plasticity instead of rigor. ‘Energetics,’ measuring the bare
face of sensible phenomena so as to describe in a single formula all
their changes of ‘level,’ is the last word of this scientific
humanism, which indeed leaves queries enough outstanding as to the
reason for so curious a congruence between the world and the mind,
but which at any rate makes our whole notion of scientific truth
more flexible and genial than it used to be.