And yet, the opponent obstinately urges, your humanist will always have a greater liberty to play fast and loose with truth than will your believer in an independent realm of reality that makes the standard rigid.  If by this latter believer he means a man who pretends to know the standard and who fulminates it, the humanist will doubtless prove more flexible; but no more flexible than the absolutist himself if the latter follows (as fortunately our present-day absolutists do follow) empirical methods of inquiry in concrete affairs.  To consider hypotheses is surely always better than to dogmatise ins blaue hinein.

Nevertheless this probable flexibility of temper in him has been used to convict the humanist of sin.  Believing as he does, that truth lies in rebus, and is at every moment our own line of most propitious reaction, he stands forever debarred, as I have heard a learned colleague say, from trying to convert opponents, for does not their view, being their most propitious momentary reaction, already fill the bill?  Only the believer in the ante-rem brand of truth can on this theory seek to make converts without self-stultification.  But can there be self-stultification in urging any account whatever of truth?  Can the definition ever contradict the deed?  ’Truth is what I feel like saying’—­suppose that to be the definition.  ’Well, I feel like saying that, and I want you to feel like saying it, and shall continue to say it until I get you to agree.’  Where is there any contradiction?  Whatever truth may be said to be, that is the kind of truth which the saying can be held to carry.  The temper which a saying may comport is an extra-logical matter.  It may indeed be hotter in some individual absolutist than in a humanist, but it need not be so in another.  And the humanist, for his part, is perfectly consistent in compassing sea and land to make one proselyte, if his nature be enthusiastic enough.

’But how can you be enthusiastic over any view of things which you know to have been partly made by yourself, and which is liable to alter during the next minute?  How is any heroic devotion to the ideal of truth possible under such paltry conditions?’

This is just another of those objections by which the anti-humanists show their own comparatively slack hold on the realities of the situation.  If they would only follow the pragmatic method and ask:  ’What is truth known-as?  What does its existence stand for in the way of concrete goods?’—­they would see that the name of it is the inbegriff of almost everything that is valuable in our lives.  The true is the opposite of whatever is instable, of whatever is practically disappointing, of whatever is useless, of whatever is lying and unreliable, of whatever is unverifiable and unsupported, of whatever is inconsistent and contradictory, of whatever is artificial and eccentric, of whatever is unreal in the sense of being of no practical account.