All the while, however, we pretend that the eternal is unrolling, that the one previous justice, grammar or truth is simply fulgurating, and not being made.  But imagine a youth in the courtroom trying cases with his abstract notion of ‘the’ law, or a censor of speech let loose among the theatres with his idea of ‘the’ mother-tongue, or a professor setting up to lecture on the actual universe with his rationalistic notion of ‘the Truth’ with a big T, and what progress do they make?  Truth, law, and language fairly boil away from them at the least touch of novel fact.  These things make themselves as we go.  Our rights, wrongs, prohibitions, penalties, words, forms, idioms, beliefs, are so many new creations that add themselves as fast as history proceeds.  Far from being antecedent principles that animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for its results.

Laws and languages at any rate are thus seen to be man-made:  things.  Mr. Schiller applies the analogy to beliefs, and proposes the name of ‘Humanism’ for the doctrine that to an unascertainable extent our truths are man-made products too.  Human motives sharpen all our questions, human satisfactions lurk in all our answers, all our formulas have a human twist.  This element is so inextricable in the products that Mr. Schiller sometimes seems almost to leave it an open question whether there be anything else.  “The world,” he says, “is essentially [u lambda nu], it is what we make of it.  It is fruitless to define it by what it originally was or by what it is apart from us; it is what is made of it.  Hence ... the world is plastic.” [Footnote:  Personal Idealism, p. 60.] He adds that we can learn the limits of the plasticity only by trying, and that we ought to start as if it were wholly plastic, acting methodically on that assumption, and stopping only when we are decisively rebuked.

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.