FullReads

Truth thus means, according to humanism, the relation of less fixed
parts of experience (predicates) to other relatively more fixed
parts (subjects); and we are not required to seek it in a relation
of experience as such to anything beyond itself. We can stay at
home, for our behavior as exponents is hemmed in on every side. The
forces both of advance and of resistance are exerted by our own
objects, and the notion of truth as something opposed to waywardness
or license inevitably grows up SOLIPSISTICALLY inside of every human
life.

So obvious is all this that a common charge against the humanistic
authors ‘makes me tired.’ ‘How can a deweyite discriminate sincerity
from bluff?’ was a question asked at a philosophic meeting where I
reported on Dewey’s Studies. ‘How can the mere [Footnote: I know of
no ‘mere’ pragmatist, if MERENESS here means, as it seems to, the
denial of all concreteness to the pragmatist’s THOUGHT.] pragmatist
feel any duty to think truly?’ is the objection urged by Professor
Royce. Mr. Bradley in turn says that if a humanist understands his
own doctrine, ‘he must hold any idea, however mad, to be the truth,
if any one will have it so.’ And Professor Taylor
describes pragmatism as believing anything one pleases and calling
it truth.

Such a shallow sense of the conditions under which men’s thinking
actually goes on seems to me most surprising. These critics appear
to suppose that, if left to itself, the rudderless raft of our
experience must be ready to drift anywhere or nowhere. Even
THO there were compasses on board, they seem to say, there would be
no pole for them to point to. There must be absolute sailing-
directions, they insist, decreed from outside, and an
independent chart of the voyage added to the ‘mere’ voyage itself,
if we are ever to make a port. But is it not obvious that even
THO there be such absolute sailing-directions in the shape of pre-
human standards of truth that we OUGHT to follow, the only
guarantee that we shall in fact follow them must lie in our human
equipment. The ‘ought’ would be a brutum fulmen unless there were a
felt grain inside of our experience that conspired. As a matter of
fact the DEVOUTEST believers in absolute standards must admit that
men fail to obey them. Waywardness is here, in spite of the eternal
prohibitions, and the existence of any amount of reality ante rem is
no warrant against unlimited error in rebus being incurred. The only
REAL guarantee we have against licentious thinking is the
CIRCUMPRESSURE of experience itself, which gets us sick of
concrete errors, whether there be a trans-empirical reality or not.
How does the partisan of absolute reality know what this orders him
to think? He cannot get direct sight of the absolute; and he has no
means of guessing what it wants of him except by following the
humanistic clues. The only truth that he himself will ever
practically ACCEPT will be that to which his finite experiences lead
him of themselves. The state of mind which shudders at the idea of a
lot of experiences left to themselves, and that augurs protection
from the sheer name of an absolute, as if, however inoperative,
that might still stand for a sort of ghostly security, is like the
mood of those good people who, whenever they hear of a social
tendency that is damnable, begin to redden and to puff, and say
‘Parliament or Congress ought to make a law against it,’ as if an
impotent decree would give relief.