It seems, at first sight, to confine itself to
denying theism and pantheism.  But, in fact,
it need not deny either; everything would
depend on the exegesis; and if the formula
ever became canonical, it would certainly
develop both right-wing and left-wing interpreters.
I myself read humanism theistically
and pluralistically.  If there be a God, he is
no absolute all-experiencer, but simply the
experiencer of widest actual conscious span.
Read thus, humanism is for me a religion
susceptible of reasoned defence, though I am
well aware how many minds there are to whom
it can appeal religiously only when it has
been monistically translated.  Ethically the
pluralistic form of it takes for me a stronger
hold on reality than any other philosophy I
know of -- it being essentially a _social_ philosophy,
a philosophy of _'co,'_ in which conjunctions
do the work.  But my primary reason
for advocating it is its matchless intellectual
economy.  It gets rid, not only of the standing
'problems' that monism engenders ('problem
of evil,' 'problem of freedom,' and the

like), but of other metaphysical mysteries and
paradoxes as well.

     It gets rid, for example, of the whole agnostic
controversy, by refusing to entertain the hypothesis
of trans-empirical reality at all.  It gets rid
of any need for an absolute of the Bradleyan
type (avowedly sterile for intellectual
purposes) by insisting that the conjunctive
relations found within experience are faultlessly
real.  It gets rid of the need of an absolute
of the Roycean type (similarly sterile) by
its pragmatic treatment of the problem of
knowledge [a treatment of which I have already
given a version in two very inadequate
articles].(1)  As the views of knowledge, reality
and truth imputed to humanism have been
those so far most fiercely attacked, it is in
regard to these ideas that a sharpening of
focus seems most urgently required.  I proceed
therefore to bring the view which _I_ impute
to humanism in these respects into focus as
briefly as I can.
---

   1 [Omitted from reprint in _Meaning_of_Truth_.  The articles referred
to are 'Does Consciousness Exist?' and 'A World of Pure Experience,'
reprinted above.]

196

                         II

     If the central humanistic thesis, printed
above in italics, be accepted, it will follow
that, if there be any such thing at all as knowing,
the knower and the object known must
both be portions of experience.  One part of
experience must, therefore, either

     (1) Know another part of experience -- in
other words, parts must, as Professor Woodbridge
says,(1) represent _one_another_ instead of
representing realities outside of 'consciousness'
-- this case is that of conceptual knowledge; or else

     (2) They must simply exist as so many ultimate
_thats_ or facts of being, in the first instance;
an then, as a secondary complication,
and without doubling up its entitative singleness,
any one and the same _that_ must figure
alternately as a thing known and as a knowledge
of the thing, by reason of two divergent
kinds of context into which, in the general
course of experience, it gets woven.(2)
---

   1 In _Science_, November 4, 1904, p. 599.

   2 This statement is probably excessively obscure to any who
has not read my two articles, 'Does Consciousness Exist?' and 'A World
of Pure Experience.'

197

     This second case is that of sense-perception.
There is a stage of thought that goes beyond
common sense, and of it I shall say more presently;
but the common-sense stage is a perfectly
definite halting-place of thought, primarily
for the purposes of action; and, so long
as we remain on the common-sense stage of
thought, object and subject _fuse_ in the fact of
'presentation' or sense-perception -- the pen
and hand which I now _see_ writing, for example,