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This is Mr. Schiller’s butt-end-foremost statement of the humanist position, and it has exposed him to severe attack. I mean to defend the humanist position in this lecture, so I will insinuate a few remarks at this point.

Mr. Schiller admits as emphatically as anyone the presence of resisting factors in every actual experience of truth-making, of which the new-made special truth must take account, and with which it has perforce to ‘agree.’ All our truths are beliefs about ‘Reality’; and in any particular belief the reality acts as something independent, as a thing FOUND, not manufactured. Let me here recall a bit of my last lecture.

‘REALITY’ IS IN GENERAL WHAT TRUTHS HAVE TO TAKE ACCOUNT OF; [Footnote: Mr. Taylor in his Elements of Metaphysics uses this excellent pragmatic definition.] and the FIRST part of reality from this point of view is the flux of our sensations. Sensations are forced upon us, coming we know not whence. Over their nature, order, and quantity we have as good as no control. THEY are neither true nor false; they simply ARE. It is only what we say about them, only the names we give them, our theories of their source and nature and remote relations, that may be true or not.

The SECOND part of reality, as something that our beliefs must also obediently take account of, is the RELATIONS that obtain between our sensations or between their copies in our minds. This part falls into two sub-parts: 1) the relations that are mutable and accidental, as those of date and place; and 2) those that are fixed and essential because they are grounded on the inner natures of their terms–such as likeness and unlikeness. Both sorts of relation are matters of immediate perception. Both are ‘facts.’ But it is the latter kind of fact that forms the more important sub-part of reality for our theories of knowledge. Inner relations namely are ‘eternal,’ are perceived whenever their sensible terms are compared; and of them our thought–mathematical and logical thought, so- called–must eternally take account.

The THIRD part of reality, additional to these perceptions (tho largely based upon them), is the PREVIOUS TRUTHS of which every new inquiry takes account. This third part is a much less obdurately resisting factor: it often ends by giving way. In speaking of these three portions of reality as at all times controlling our belief’s formation, I am only reminding you of what we heard in our last hour.

Now however fixed these elements of reality may be, we still have a certain freedom in our dealings with them. Take our sensations. THAT they are is undoubtedly beyond our control; but WHICH we attend to, note, and make emphatic in our conclusions depends on our own interests; and, according as we lay the emphasis here or there, quite different formulations of truth result. We read the same facts differently. ‘Waterloo,’ with the same fixed details, spells a ‘victory’ for an englishman; for a frenchman it spells a ‘defeat.’ So, for an optimist philosopher the universe spells victory, for a pessimist, defeat.

What we say about reality thus depends on the perspective into which we throw it. The THAT of it is its own; but the WHAT depends on the WHICH; and the which depends on US. Both the sensational and the relational parts of reality are dumb: they say absolutely nothing about themselves. We it is who have to speak for them. This dumbness of sensations has led such intellectualists as T.H. Green and Edward Caird to shove them almost beyond the pale of philosophic recognition, but pragmatists refuse to go so far. A sensation is rather like a client who has given his case to a lawyer and then has passively to listen in the courtroom to whatever account of his affairs, pleasant or unpleasant, the lawyer finds it most expedient to give.

Hence, even in the field of sensation, our minds exert a certain arbitrary choice. By our inclusions and omissions we trace the field’s extent; by our emphasis we mark its foreground and its background; by our order we read it in this direction or in that. We receive in short the block of marble, but we carve the statue ourselves.