life’s origin, any present perception may have been ’true’—­if such a word could then be applicable.  Later, when reactions became organized, the reactions became ‘true’ whenever expectation was fulfilled by them.  Otherwise they were ‘false’ or ‘mistaken’ reactions.  But the same class of objects needs the same kind of reaction, so the impulse to react consistently must gradually have been established, and a disappointment felt whenever the results frustrated expectation.  Here is a perfectly plausible germ for all our higher consistencies.  Nowadays, if an object claims from us a reaction of the kind habitually accorded only to the opposite class of objects, our mental machinery refuses to run smoothly.  The situation is intellectually unsatisfactory.

Theoretic truth thus falls within the mind, being the accord of some of its processes and objects with other processes and objects—­ ‘accord’ consisting here in well-definable relations.  So long as the satisfaction of feeling such an accord is denied us, whatever collateral profits may seem to inure from what we believe in are but as dust in the balance—­provided always that we are highly organized intellectually, which the majority of us are not.  The amount of accord which satisfies most men and women is merely the absence of violent clash between their usual thoughts and statements and the limited sphere of sense-perceptions in which their lives are cast.  The theoretic truth that most of us think we ‘ought’ to attain to is thus the possession of a set of predicates that do not explicitly contradict their subjects.  We preserve it as often as not by leaving other predicates and subjects out.

In some men theory is a passion, just as music is in others.  The form of inner consistency is pursued far beyond the line at which collateral profits stop.  Such men systematize and classify and schematize and make synoptical tables and invent ideal objects for the pure love of unifying.  Too often the results, glowing with ‘truth’ for the inventors, seem pathetically personal and artificial to bystanders.  Which is as much as to say that the purely theoretic criterion of truth can leave us in the lurch as easily as any other criterion, and that the absolutists, for all their pretensions, are ‘in the same boat’ concretely with those whom they attack.

I am well aware that this paper has been rambling in the extreme.  But the whole subject is inductive, and sharp logic is hardly yet in order.  My great trammel has been the non-existence of any definitely stated alternative on my opponents’ part.  It may conduce to clearness if I recapitulate, in closing, what I conceive the main points of humanism to be.  They are these:—­

1.  An experience, perceptual or conceptual, must conform to reality in order to be true.

2.  By ‘reality’ humanism means nothing more than the other conceptual or perceptual experiences with which a given present experience may find itself in point of fact mixed up. [Footnote:  This is meant merely to exclude reality of an ‘unknowable’ sort, of which no account in either perceptual or conceptual terms can be given.  It includes of course any amount if empirical reality independent of the knower.  Pragmatism, is thus ‘epistemologically’ realistic in its account.]