The fundamental fact about our experience is that it is a process of change.  For the ‘trower’ at any moment, truth, like the visible area round a man walking in a fog, or like what George Eliot calls ’the wall of dark seen by small fishes’ eyes that pierce a span in the wide Ocean,’ is an objective field which the next moment enlarges and of which it is the critic, and which then either suffers alteration or is continued unchanged.  The critic sees both the first trower’s truth and his own truth, compares them with each other, and verifies or confutes.  His field of view is the reality independent of that earlier trower’s thinking with which that thinking ought to correspond.  But the critic is himself only a trower; and if the whole process of experience should terminate at that instant, there would be no otherwise known independent reality with which his thought might be compared.

The immediate in experience is always provisionally in this situation.  The humanism, for instance, which I see and try so hard to defend, is the completest truth attained from my point of view up to date.  But, owing to the fact that all experience is a process, no point of view can ever be the last one.  Every one is insufficient and off its balance, and responsible to later points of view than itself.  You, occupying some of these later points in your own person, and believing in the reality of others, will not agree that my point of view sees truth positive, truth timeless, truth that counts, unless they verify and confirm what it sees.

You generalize this by saying that any opinion, however satisfactory, can count positively and absolutely as true only so far as it agrees with a standard beyond itself; and if you then forget that this standard perpetually grows up endogenously inside the web of the experiences, you may carelessly go on to say that what distributively holds of each experience, holds also collectively of all experience, and that experience as such and in its totality owes whatever truth it may be possessed-of to its correspondence with absolute realities outside of its own being.  This evidently is the popular and traditional position.  From the fact that finite experiences must draw support from one another, philosophers pass to the notion that experience uberhaupt must need an absolute support.  The denial of such a notion by humanism lies probably at the root of most of the dislike which it incurs.

But is this not the globe, the elephant and the tortoise over again?  Must not something end by supporting itself?  Humanism is willing to let finite experience be self-supporting.  Somewhere being must immediately breast nonentity.  Why may not the advancing front of experience, carrying its immanent satisfactions and dissatisfactions, cut against the black inane as the luminous orb of the moon cuts the caerulean abyss?  Why should anywhere the world be absolutely fixed and finished?  And if reality genuinely grows, why may it not grow in these very determinations which here and now are made?