We build the flux out inevitably.  The great question is:  does it, with our additions, rise or fall in value?  Are the additions worthy or unworthy?  Suppose a universe composed of seven stars, and nothing else but three human witnesses and their critic.  One witness names the stars ‘Great Bear’; one calls them ‘Charles’s Wain’; one calls them the ‘Dipper.’  Which human addition has made the best universe of the given stellar material?  If Frederick Myers were the critic, he would have no hesitation in ‘turning-down’ the American witness.

Lotze has in several places made a deep suggestion.  We naively assume, he says, a relation between reality and our minds which may be just the opposite of the true one.  Reality, we naturally think, stands ready-made and complete, and our intellects supervene with the one simple duty of describing it as it is already.  But may not our descriptions, Lotze asks, be themselves important additions to reality?  And may not previous reality itself be there, far less for the purpose of reappearing unaltered in our knowledge, than for the very purpose of stimulating our minds to such additions as shall enhance the universe’s total value.  “Die erhohung des vorgefundenen daseins” is a phrase used by Professor Eucken somewhere, which reminds one of this suggestion by the great Lotze.

It is identically our pragmatistic conception.  In our cognitive as well as in our active life we are creative.  We add, both to the subject and to the predicate part of reality.  The world stands really malleable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hands.  Like the kingdom of heaven, it suffers human violence willingly.  Man engenders truths upon it.

No one can deny that such a role would add both to our dignity and to our responsibility as thinkers.  To some of us it proves a most inspiring notion.  Signer Papini, the leader of italian pragmatism, grows fairly dithyrambic over the view that it opens, of man’s divinely-creative functions.

The import of the difference between pragmatism and rationalism is now in sight throughout its whole extent.  The essential contrast is that for rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part of its complexion from the future.  On the one side the universe is absolutely secure, on the other it is still pursuing its adventures.

We have got into rather deep water with this humanistic view, and it is no wonder that misunderstanding gathers round it.  It is accused of being a doctrine of caprice.  Mr. Bradley, for example, says that a humanist, if he understood his own doctrine, would have to “hold any end however perverted to be rational if I insist on it personally, and any idea however mad to be the truth if only some one is resolved that he will have it so.”  The humanist view of ‘reality,’ as something resisting, yet malleable, which controls our thinking as an energy