The greatest common-sense achievement, after the discovery of one Time and one Space, is probably the concept of permanently existing things.  When a rattle first drops out of the hand of a baby, he does not look to see where it has gone.  Non-perception he accepts as annihilation until he finds a better belief.  That our perceptions mean beings, rattles that are there whether we hold them in our hands or not, becomes an interpretation so luminous of what happens to us that, once employed, it never gets forgotten.  It applies with equal felicity to things and persons, to the objective and to the ejective realm.  However a Berkeley, a Mill, or a Cornelius may criticise it, it works; and in practical life we never think of ‘going back’ upon it, or reading our incoming experiences in any other terms.  We may, indeed, speculatively imagine a state of ‘pure’ experience before the hypothesis of permanent objects behind its flux had been framed; and we can play with the idea that some primeval genius might have struck into a different hypothesis.  But we cannot positively imagine today what the different hypothesis could have been, for the category of trans-perceptual reality is now one of the foundations of our life.  Our thoughts must still employ it if they are to possess reasonableness and truth.

This notion of a first in the shape of a most chaotic pure experience which sets us questions, of a second in the way of fundamental categories, long ago wrought into the structure of our consciousness and practically irreversible, which define the general frame within which answers must fall, and of a third which gives the detail of the answers in the shapes most congruous with all our present needs, is, as I take it, the essence of the humanistic conception.  It represents experience in its pristine purity to be now so enveloped in predicates historically worked out that we can think of it as little more than an other, of a that, which the mind, in Mr. Bradley’s phrase, ‘encounters,’ and to whose stimulating presence we respond by ways of thinking which we call ‘true’ in proportion as they facilitate our mental or physical activities and bring us outer power and inner peace.  But whether the Other, the universal that, has itself any definite inner structure, or whether, if it have any, the structure resembles any of our predicated whats, this is a question which humanism leaves untouched.  For us, at any rate, it insists, reality is an accumulation of our own intellectual inventions, and the struggle for ‘truth’ in our progressive dealings with it is always a struggle to work in new nouns and adjectives while altering as little as possible the old.