I know of—­it being essentially a social philosophy, a philosophy of ‘co,’ in which conjunctions do the work.  But my primary reason for advocating it is its matchless intellectual economy.  It gets rid, not only of the standing ‘problems’ that monism engenders (’problem of evil,’ ‘problem of freedom,’ and the like), but of other metaphysical mysteries and paradoxes as well.

It gets rid, for example, of the whole agnostic controversy, by refusing to entertain the hypothesis of trans-empirical reality at all.  It gets rid of any need for an absolute of the bradleyan type (avowedly sterile for intellectual purposes) by insisting that the conjunctive relations found within experience are faultlessly real.  It gets rid of the need of an absolute of the roycean type (similarly sterile) by its pragmatic treatment of the problem of knowledge.  As the views of knowledge, reality and truth imputed to humanism have been those so far most fiercely attacked, it is in regard to these ideas that a sharpening of focus seems most urgently required.  I proceed therefore to bring the views which I impute to humanism in these respects into focus as briefly as I can.

 II

If the central humanistic thesis, printed above in italics, be accepted, it will follow that, if there be any such thing at all as knowing, the knower and the object known must both be portions of experience.  One part of experience must, therefore, either

(1) Know another part of experience—­in other words, parts must, as Professor Woodbridge says, [Footnote:  In Science, November 4, 1904, p. 599.] represent one another instead of representing realities outside of ’consciousness’—­this case is that of conceptual knowledge; or else

(2) They must simply exist as so many ultimate thats or facts of being, in the first instance; and then, as a secondary complication, and without doubling up its entitative singleness, any one and the same that in experience must figure alternately as a thing known and as a knowledge of the thing, by reason of two divergent kinds of context into which, in the general course of experience, it gets woven. [Footnote:  This statement is probably excessively obscure to any one who has not read my two articles ‘Does Consciousness Exist?’ and ’A World of Pure Experience’ in the Journal of Philosophy, vol. i, 1904.]

This second case is that of sense-perception.  There is a stage of thought that goes beyond common sense, and of it I shall say more presently; but the common-sense stage is a perfectly definite halting-place of thought, primarily for purposes of action; and, so long as we remain on the common-sense stage of thought, object and subject fuse in the fact of ‘presentation’ or sense-perception-the pen and hand which I now see writing, for example, are the physical realities which those words designate.  In this case there is no self-transcendency implied in the knowing.  Humanism, here, is only a more comminuted Identitatsphilosophie.