To recognize this is to appreciate the wisdom of Humanism’s refusal to treat the world, for good or bad, as a given and completed whole.  For not only is what we call the real world always a selection from a larger whole from which we have ventured to exclude great masses of irrelevance, but every day brings fresh experience, and may bring fresh enlightenment.  And since man has always an interest in improving his condition, is it not futile to forbid him to re-make his world as beat he can?  Why prematurely claim to have reached finality, when unexpected novelties may shatter any system before it is even completed?  Our world is plastic, it is most ‘really’ what we can make of it, and the process of our making is not ended.  Whether a decree of Fate has fixed any ultimate limits to our efforts we have no means of knowing, and no occasion to assume.  Is not our wisest course, then, to persist in trying?  It is bad method ever to despair of knowing what we need.

For good or ill, the world with which the Humanist contends is always a world that reveals itself to him.  Reality, as it is assumed, presumed, or guessed to be ‘in itself,’ apart from our experience of it, is cancelled from his reckonings.  For he cannot discover how he (or anyone) can get any ‘knowledge’ or ‘intuition’ which transcends all human faculties.  The theories of metaphysicians on these lofty themes he regards as personal postulates which, in so far as they cannot be subjected to the pragmatic method, must remain open questions.  Human experience does not warrant such gratuitous demands.  It confirms neither the rigid system of unchanging fact which realism postulates (seeing that the only facts that science speaks of are ever changing in its progress), nor finds its problems, conflicts, and errors credible as a reflexion of any Universal Mind, unless Idealism ultimately repudiates the sanity of its Absolute.

The superiority of Humanism, then, lies in this, that it does not discourage human enterprise by assuming that the real is completely rigid and eternally achieved without regard to human effort.  In the drama that unrolls reality, every man, it teaches, has a duty and a power to play his humble but essential part.  Humanism is neither an Optimism nor a Pessimism—­both of which must consistently, in their extreme form, deny that reality can be improved—­but concedes to man the right and duty to improve the world.  It impresses us with the necessity of acting, it vindicates the procedure of acting on our hopes, it shows us how we may correct our errors, and so gives reasons for our faith in the possibility of Progress.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

  WILLIAM JAMES: 
    The Principles of Psychology, 1890.
    The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 1897.
    The Varieties of Religious Experience, 1902.
    Pragmatism, a New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, 1907.
    A Pluralistic Universe, 1909.
    The Meaning of Truth, 1909.
    Some Problems of Philosophy, 1911.
    Radical Empiricism, 1912.