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All the SANCTIONS of a law of truth lie in the very texture of
experience. Absolute or no absolute, the concrete truth FOR US will
always be that way of thinking in which our various experiences most
profitably combine.

And yet, the opponent obstinately urges, your humanist will always
have a greater liberty to play fast and loose with truth than
will your believer in an independent realm of reality that makes the
standard rigid. If by this latter believer he means a man who
pretends to know the standard and who fulminates it, the humanist
will doubtless prove more flexible; but no more flexible than the
absolutist himself if the latter follows (as fortunately
our present-day absolutists do follow) empirical methods of inquiry
in concrete affairs. To consider hypotheses is surely always better
than to DOGMATISE ins blaue hinein.

Nevertheless this probable flexibility of temper in him has been
used to convict the humanist of sin. Believing as he does, that
truth lies in rebus, and is at every moment our own line of most
propitious reaction, he stands forever debarred, as I have heard a
learned colleague say, from trying to convert opponents, for does
not their view, being THEIR most propitious momentary reaction,
already fill the bill? Only the believer in the ante-rem brand of
truth can on this theory seek to make converts without self-
stultification. But can there be self-stultification in urging any
account whatever of truth? Can the definition ever contradict the
deed? ‘Truth is what I feel like saying’–suppose that to be the
definition. ‘Well, I feel like saying that, and I want you to feel
like saying it, and shall continue to say it until I get you to
agree.’ Where is there any contradiction? Whatever truth may be
said to be, that is the kind of truth which the saying can be held
to carry. The TEMPER which a saying may comport is an extra-logical
matter. It may indeed be hotter in some individual absolutist than
in a humanist, but it need not be so in another. And the humanist,
for his part, is perfectly consistent in compassing sea and land to
make one proselyte, if his nature be enthusiastic enough.

‘But how can you be enthusiastic over any view of things which you
know to have been partly made by yourself, and which is liable to
alter during the next minute? How is any heroic devotion to the
ideal of truth possible under such paltry conditions?’

This is just another of those objections by which the anti-humanists
show their own comparatively slack hold on the realities of
the situation. If they would only follow the pragmatic method and
ask: ‘What is truth KNOWN-AS? What does its existence stand for in
the way of concrete goods?’–they would see that the name of it is
the inbegriff of almost everything that is valuable in our lives.
The true is the opposite of whatever is instable, of whatever is
practically disappointing, of whatever is useless, of whatever is
lying and unreliable, of whatever is unverifiable and
unsupported, of whatever is inconsistent and contradictory, of
whatever is artificial and eccentric, of whatever is unreal in the
sense of being of no practical account. Here are pragmatic reasons
with a vengeance why we should turn to truth–truth saves us from a
world of that complexion. What wonder that its very name awakens
loyal feeling! In particular what wonder that all little provisional
fool’s paradises of belief should appear contemptible in comparison
with its bare pursuit! When absolutists reject humanism because they
feel it to be untrue, that means that the whole habit of their
mental needs is wedded already to a different view of reality, in
comparison with which the humanistic world seems but the whim of a
few irresponsible youths. Their own subjective apperceiving mass is
what speaks here in the name of the eternal natures and bids them
reject our humanism–as they apprehend it. Just so with us
humanists, when we condemn all noble, clean-cut, fixed,
eternal, rational, temple-like systems of philosophy. These
contradict the DRAMATIC TEMPERAMENT of nature, as our dealings with
nature and our habits of thinking have so far brought us to conceive
it. They seem oddly personal and artificial, even when not
bureaucratic and professional in an absurd degree. We turn from them
to the great unpent and unstayed wilderness of truth as we feel it
to be constituted, with as good a conscience as rationalists
are moved by when they turn from our wilderness into their neater
and cleaner intellectual abodes. [Footnote: I cannot forbear quoting
as an illustration of the contrast between humanist and rationalist
tempers of mind, in a sphere remote from philosophy, these remarks
on the Dreyfus ‘affaire,’ written by one who assuredly had
never heard of humanism or pragmatism. ‘Autant que la Revolution,
“l’Affaire” est desormais une de nos “origines.” Si elle n’a pas
fait ouvrir le gouffre, c’est elle du moins qui a rendu patent et
visible le long travail souterrain qui, silencieusement,
avait prepare la separation entre nos deux camps d’aujourd’hui, pour
ecarter enfin, d’un coup soudain, la France des traditionalistes
(poseurs de principes, chercheurs d’unite, constructeurs de systemes
a priori) el la France eprise du fait positif et de libre examen;–
la France revolutionnaire et romantique si l’on veut, celle qui met
tres haut l’individu, qui ne veut pas qu’un juste perisse, fut-ce
pour sauver la nation, et qui cherche la verite dans toutes ses
parties aussi bien que dans une vue d’ensemble … Duclaux ne
pouvait pas concevoir qu’on preferat quelque chose a la verite.
Mais il voyait autour de lui de fort honnetes gens qui, mettant
en balance la vie d’un homme et la raison d’Etat, lui avouaient de
quel poids leger ils jugeaient une simple existence
individuelle, pour innocente qu’elle fut. C’etaient des
classiques, des gens a qui l’ensemble seul importe.’ La Vie de
Emile Duclaux, par Mme. Em. D., Laval, 1906, pp. 243, 247-248.]