As for the whereabouts of the beings thus corresponded to, although they may be outside of the present thought as well as in it, humanism sees no ground for saying they are outside of finite experience itself.  Pragmatically, their reality means that we submit to them, take account of them, whether we like to or not, but this we must perpetually do with experiences other than our own.  The whole system of what the present experience must correspond to ‘adequately’ may be continuous with the present experience itself.  Reality, so taken as experience other than the present, might be either the legacy of past experience or the content of experience to come.  Its determinations for us are in any case the adjectives which our acts of judging fit to it, and those are essentially humanistic things.

To say that our thought does not ‘make’ this reality means pragmatically that if our own particular thought were annihilated the reality would still be there in some shape, though possibly it might be a shape that would lack something that our thought supplies.  That reality is ‘independent’ means that there is something in every experience that escapes our arbitrary control.  If it be a sensible experience it coerces our attention; if a sequence, we cannot invert it; if we compare two terms we can come to only one result.  There is a push, an urgency, within our very experience, against which we are on the whole powerless, and which drives us in a direction that is the destiny of our belief.  That this drift of experience itself is in the last resort due to something independent of all possible experience may or may not be true.  There may or may not be an extra-experiential ‘ding an sich’ that keeps the ball rolling, or an ‘absolute’ that lies eternally behind all the successive determinations which human thought has made.  But within our experience itself, at any rate, humanism says, some determinations show themselves as being independent of others; some questions, if we ever ask them, can only be answered in one way; some beings, if we ever suppose them, must be supposed to have existed previously to the supposing; some relations, if they exist ever, must exist as long as their terms exist.

Truth thus means, according to humanism, the relation of less fixed parts of experience (predicates) to other relatively more fixed parts (subjects); and we are not required to seek it in a relation of experience as such to anything beyond itself.  We can stay at home, for our behavior as exponents is hemmed in on every side.  The forces both of advance and of resistance are exerted by our own objects, and the notion of truth as something opposed to waywardness or license inevitably grows up SOLIPSISTICALLY inside of every human life.