Other pragmatists may reach more positive beliefs about the sensible core of reality.  They may think to get at it in its independent nature, by peeling off the successive man-made wrappings.  They may make theories that tell us where it comes from and all about it; and if these theories work satisfactorily they will be true.  The transcendental idealists say there is no core, the finally completed wrapping being reality and truth in one.  Scholasticism still teaches that the core is ‘matter.’  Professor Bergson, Heymans, Strong, and others, believe in the core and bravely try to define it.  Messrs. Dewey and Schiller treat it as a ‘limit.’  Which is the truer of all these diverse accounts, or of others comparable with them, unless it be the one that finally proves the most satisfactory?  On the one hand there will stand reality, on the other an account of it which proves impossible to better or to alter.  If the impossibility prove permanent, the truth of the account will be absolute.  Other content of truth than this I can find nowhere.  If the anti-pragmatists have any other meaning, let them for heaven’s sake reveal it, let them grant us access to it!

Not being reality, but only our belief about reality, it will contain human elements, but these will know the non-human element, in the only sense in which there can be knowledge of anything.  Does the river make its banks, or do the banks make the river?  Does a man walk with his right leg or with his left leg more essentially?  Just as impossible may it be to separate the real from the human factors in the growth of our cognitive experience.

Let this stand as a first brief indication of the humanistic position.  Does it seem paradoxical?  If so, I will try to make it plausible by a few illustrations, which will lead to a fuller acquaintance with the subject.

In many familiar objects everyone will recognize the human element.  We conceive a given reality in this way or in that, to suit our purpose, and the reality passively submits to the conception.  You can take the number 27 as the cube of 3, or as the product of 3 and 9, or as 26 plus 1, or 100 minus 73, or in countless other ways, of which one will be just as true as another.  You can take a chessboard as black squares on a white ground, or as white squares on a black ground, and neither conception is a false one.  You can treat the adjoined figure [Figure of a ‘Star of David’] as a star, as two big triangles crossing each other, as a hexagon with legs set up on its angles, as six equal triangles hanging together by their tips, etc.  All these treatments are true treatments—­the sensible that upon the paper resists no one of them.  You can say of a line that it runs east, or you can say that it runs west, and the line per se accepts both descriptions without rebelling at the inconsistency.

We carve out groups of stars in the heavens, and call them constellations, and the stars patiently suffer us to do so—­tho if they knew what we were doing, some of them might feel much surprised at the partners we had given them.  We name the same constellation diversely, as Charles’s Wain, the Great Bear, or the Dipper.  None of the names will be false, and one will be as true as another, for all are applicable.