In all these cases we humanly make an addition to some sensible reality, and that reality tolerates the addition.  All the additions ‘agree’ with the reality; they fit it, while they build it out.  No one of them is false.  Which may be treated as the more true, depends altogether on the human use of it.  If the 27 is a number of dollars which I find in a drawer where I had left 28, it is 28 minus 1.  If it is the number of inches in a shelf which I wish to insert into a cupboard 26 inches wide, it is 26 plus 1.  If I wish to ennoble the heavens by the constellations I see there, ‘Charles’s Wain’ would be more true than ‘Dipper.’  My friend Frederick Myers was humorously indignant that that prodigious star-group should remind us Americans of nothing but a culinary utensil.

What shall we call a thing anyhow?  It seems quite arbitrary, for we carve out everything, just as we carve out constellations, to suit our human purposes.  For me, this whole ‘audience’ is one thing, which grows now restless, now attentive.  I have no use at present for its individual units, so I don’t consider them.  So of an ‘army,’ of a ‘nation.’  But in your own eyes, ladies and gentlemen, to call you ‘audience’ is an accidental way of taking you.  The permanently real things for you are your individual persons.  To an anatomist, again, those persons are but organisms, and the real things are the organs.  Not the organs, so much as their constituent cells, say the histologists; not the cells, but their molecules, say in turn the chemists.

We break the flux of sensible reality into things, then, at our will.  We create the subjects of our true as well as of our false propositions.

We create the predicates also.  Many of the predicates of things express only the relations of the things to us and to our feelings.  Such predicates of course are human additions.  Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and was a menace to Rome’s freedom.  He is also an American school-room pest, made into one by the reaction of our schoolboys on his writings.  The added predicate is as true of him as the earlier ones.

You see how naturally one comes to the humanistic principle:  you can’t weed out the human contribution.  Our nouns and adjectives are all humanized heirlooms, and in the theories we build them into, the inner order and arrangement is wholly dictated by human considerations, intellectual consistency being one of them.  Mathematics and logic themselves are fermenting with human rearrangements; physics, astronomy and biology follow massive cues of preference.  We plunge forward into the field of fresh experience with the beliefs our ancestors and we have made already; these determine what we notice; what we notice determines what we do; what we do again determines what we experience; so from one thing to another, altho the stubborn fact remains that there is a sensible flux, what is true of it seems from first to last to be largely a matter of our own creation.