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.

To what effect?  That we may the better foresee the course of our experiences, communicate with one another, and steer our lives by rule.  Also that we may have a cleaner, clearer, more inclusive mental view.