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It is to be doubted whether any theorizer to-day, either in
mathematics, logic, physics or biology, conceives himself to be
literally re-editing processes of nature or thoughts of God. The
main forms of our thinking, the separation of subjects from
predicates, the negative, hypothetic and disjunctive judgments, are
purely human habits. The ether, as Lord Salisbury said, is only a
noun for the verb to undulate; and many of our theological ideas are
admitted, even by those who call them ‘true,’ to be humanistic in
like degree.

I fancy that these changes in the current notions of truth are what
originally gave the impulse to Messrs. Dewey’s and Schiller’s views.
The suspicion is in the air nowadays that the superiority of one of
our formulas to another may not consist so much in its
literal ‘objectivity,’ as in subjective qualities like
its usefulness, its ‘elegance’ or its congruity with our residual
beliefs. Yielding to these suspicions, and generalizing, we fall
into something like the humanistic state of mind. Truth we conceive
to mean everywhere, not duplication, but addition; not the
constructing of inner copies of already complete realities, but
rather the collaborating with realities so as to bring about a
clearer result. Obviously this state of mind is at first full of
vagueness and ambiguity. ‘Collaborating’ is a vague term; it must at
any rate cover conceptions and logical arrangements. ‘Clearer’ is
vaguer still. Truth must bring clear thoughts, as well as clear
the way to action. ‘Reality’ is the vaguest term of all. The only
way to test such a programme at all is to apply it to the various
types of truth, in the hope of reaching an account that shall be
more precise. Any hypothesis that forces such a review upon one has
one great merit, even if in the end it prove invalid: it gets
us better acquainted with the total subject. To give the theory
plenty of ‘rope’ and see if it hangs itself eventually is better
tactics than to choke it off at the outset by abstract
accusations of self-contradiction. I think therefore that a decided
effort at sympathetic mental play with humanism is the provisional
attitude to be recommended to the reader.

When I find myself playing sympathetically with humanism, something
like what follows is what I end by conceiving it to mean.

Experience is a process that continually gives us new material to
digest. We handle this intellectually by the mass of beliefs
of which we find ourselves already possessed, assimilating,
rejecting, or rearranging in different degrees. Some of the
apperceiving ideas are recent acquisitions of our own, but most of
them are common-sense traditions of the race. There is probably not
a common-sense tradition, of all those which we now live by, that
was not in the first instance a genuine discovery, an inductive
generalization like those more recent ones of the atom, of inertia,
of energy, of reflex action, or of fitness to survive The notions of
one Time and of one Space as single continuous receptacles; the
distinction between thoughts and things, matter and mind between
permanent subjects and changing attributes; the conception of
classes with sub classes within them; the separation of
fortuitous from regularly caused connections; surely all these were
once definite conquests made at historic dates by our ancestors in
their attempt to get the chaos of their crude individual experiences
into a more shareable and manageable shape. They proved of such
sovereign use as denkmittel that they are now a part of the very
structure of our mind. We cannot play fast and loose with them. No
experience can upset them. On the contrary, they apperceive every
experience and assign it to its place.