Here are pragmatic reasons with a vengeance why we should turn to truth—­truth saves us from a world of that complexion.  What wonder that its very name awakens loyal feeling!  In particular what wonder that all little provisional fool’s paradises of belief should appear contemptible in comparison with its bare pursuit!  When absolutists reject humanism because they feel it to be untrue, that means that the whole habit of their mental needs is wedded already to a different view of reality, in comparison with which the humanistic world seems but the whim of a few irresponsible youths.  Their own subjective apperceiving mass is what speaks here in the name of the eternal natures and bids them reject our humanism—­as they apprehend it.  Just so with us humanists, when we condemn all noble, clean-cut, fixed, eternal, rational, temple-like systems of philosophy.  These contradict the dramatic temperament of nature, as our dealings with nature and our habits of thinking have so far brought us to conceive it.  They seem oddly personal and artificial, even when not bureaucratic and professional in an absurd degree.  We turn from them to the great unpent and unstayed wilderness of truth as we feel it to be constituted, with as good a conscience as rationalists are moved by when they turn from our wilderness into their neater and cleaner intellectual abodes. [Footnote:  I cannot forbear quoting as an illustration of the contrast between humanist and rationalist tempers of mind, in a sphere remote from philosophy, these remarks on the Dreyfus ‘affaire,’ written by one who assuredly had never heard of humanism or pragmatism.  ’Autant que la Revolution, “l’Affaire” est desormais une de nos “origines.”  Si elle n’a pas fait ouvrir le gouffre, c’est elle du moins qui a rendu patent et visible le long travail souterrain qui, silencieusement, avait prepare la separation entre nos deux camps d’aujourd’hui, pour ecarter enfin, d’un coup soudain, la France des traditionalistes (poseurs de principes, chercheurs d’unite, constructeurs de systemes a priori) el la France eprise du fait positif et de libre examen;—­ la France revolutionnaire et romantique si l’on veut, celle qui met tres haut l’individu, qui ne veut pas qu’un juste perisse, fut-ce pour sauver la nation, et qui cherche la verite dans toutes ses parties aussi bien que dans une vue d’ensemble ...  Duclaux ne pouvait pas concevoir qu’on preferat quelque chose a la verite.  Mais il voyait autour de lui de fort honnetes gens qui, mettant en balance la vie d’un homme et la raison d’Etat, lui avouaient de quel poids leger ils jugeaient une simple existence individuelle, pour innocente qu’elle fut.  C’etaient des classiques, des gens a qui l’ensemble seul importe.’  La Vie de Emile Duclaux, par Mme. Em.  D., Laval, 1906, pp. 243, 247-248.]

This is surely enough to show that the humanist does not ignore the character of objectivity and independence in truth.  Let me turn next to what his opponents mean when they say that to be true, our thoughts must ‘correspond.’