3.  By ‘conforming,’ humanism means taking account-of in such a way as to gain any intellectually and practically satisfactory result.

4.  To ‘take account-of’ and to be ‘satisfactory’ are terms that admit of no definition, so many are the ways in which these requirements can practically be worked out.

5.  Vaguely and in general, we take account of a reality by preserving it in as unmodified a form as possible.  But, to be then satisfactory, it must not contradict other realities outside of it which claim also to be preserved.  That we must preserve all the experience we can and minimize contradiction in what we preserve, is about all that can be said in advance.

6.  The truth which the conforming experience embodies may be a positive addition to the previous reality, and later judgments may have to conform to it.  Yet, virtually at least, it may have been true previously.  Pragmatically, virtual and actual truth mean the same thing:  the possibility of only one answer, when once the question is raised.

IV

THE RELATION BETWEEN KNOWER AND KNOWN

[Footnote:  Extract from an article entitled ’A World of Pure Experience,’ in the Journal of Philosophy, etc., September 29,1904.]

Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and thereupon the presence of the latter to the former, or the ‘apprehension’ by the former of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome.  Representative theories put a mental ‘representation,’ ‘image,’ or ‘content’ into the gap, as a sort of intermediary.  Commonsense theories left the gap untouched, declaring our mind able to clear it by a self-transcending leap.  Transcendentalist theories left it impossible to traverse by finite knowers, and brought an absolute in to perform the saltatory act.  All the while, in the very bosom of the finite experience, every conjunction required to make the relation intelligible is given in full.  Either the knower and the known are: 

(1) the self-same piece of experience taken twice over in different contexts; or they are

(2) two pieces of actual experience belonging to the same subject, with definite tracts of conjunctive transitional experience between them; or

(3) the known is a possible experience either of that subject or another, to which the said conjunctive transitions would lead, if sufficiently prolonged.

To discuss all the ways in which one experience may function as the knower of another, would be incompatible with the limits of this essay.  I have treated of type 1, the kind of knowledge called perception, in an article in the Journal of Philosophy, for September 1, 1904, called ‘Does consciousness exist?’ This is the type of case in which the mind enjoys direct ‘acquaintance’ with a present object.  In the other types the mind has ‘knowledge-about’ an object not immediately there.  Type 3 can always formally and hypothetically be reduced to type 2, so that a brief description of that type will now put the present reader sufficiently at my point of view, and make him see what the actual meanings of the mysterious cognitive relation may be.