to see how it will work.  It seems to me that it is emphatically not a case for instant execution, by conviction of intrinsic absurdity or of self-contradiction, or by caricature of what it would look like if reduced to skeleton shape.  Humanism is in fact much more like one of those secular changes that come upon public opinion overnight, as it were, borne upon tides ’too deep for sound or foam,’ that survive all the crudities and extravagances of their advocates, that you can pin to no one absolutely essential statement, nor kill by any one decisive stab.

Such have been the changes from aristocracy to democracy, from classic to romantic taste, from theistic to pantheistic feeling, from static to evolutionary ways of understanding life—­changes of which we all have been spectators.  Scholasticism still opposes to such changes the method of confutation by single decisive reasons, showing that the new view involves self-contradiction, or traverses some fundamental principle.  This is like stopping a river by planting a stick in the middle of its bed.  Round your obstacle flows the water and ‘gets there all the same.’  In reading some of our opponents, I am not a little reminded of those catholic writers who refute darwinism by telling us that higher species cannot come from lower because minus nequit gignere plus, or that the notion of transformation is absurd, for it implies that species tend to their own destruction, and that would violate the principle that every reality tends to persevere in its own shape.  The point of view is too myopic, too tight and close to take in the inductive argument.  Wide generalizations in science always meet with these summary refutations in their early days; but they outlive them, and the refutations then sound oddly antiquated and scholastic.  I cannot help suspecting that the humanistic theory is going through this kind of would-be refutation at present.

The one condition of understanding humanism is to become inductive-minded oneself, to drop rigorous definitions, and follow lines of least, resistance ‘on the whole.’  ‘In other words,’ an opponent might say, ‘resolve your intellect into a kind of slush.’  ‘Even so,’ I make reply,—­’if you will consent to use no politer word.’  For humanism, conceiving the more ‘true’ as the more ‘satisfactory’ (Dewey’s term), has sincerely to renounce rectilinear arguments and ancient ideals of rigor and finality.  It is in just this temper of renunciation, so different from that of pyrrhonistic scepticism, that the spirit of humanism essentially consists.  Satisfactoriness has to be measured by a multitude of standards, of which some, for aught we know, may fail in any given case; and what is more satisfactory than any alternative in sight, may to the end be a sum of pluses and minuses, concerning which we can only trust that by ulterior corrections and improvements a maximum of the one and a minimum of the other may some day be approached.  It means a real change of heart, a break with absolutistic hopes, when one takes up this inductive view of the conditions of belief.