decree of Fate has fixed any
ultimate limits to our efforts we have no means of knowing, and no
occasion to assume. Is not our wisest course, then, to persist in
trying? It is bad method ever to despair of knowing what we need.

For good or ill, the world with which the Humanist contends is always a
world that reveals itself to him. Reality, as it is assumed, presumed,
or guessed to be 'in itself,' apart from our experience of it, is
cancelled from his reckonings. For he cannot discover how he (or anyone)
can get any 'knowledge' or 'intuition' which transcends all human
faculties. The theories of metaphysicians on these lofty themes he
regards as personal postulates which, in so far as they cannot be
subjected to the pragmatic method, must remain open questions. Human
experience does not warrant such gratuitous demands. It confirms neither
the rigid system of unchanging fact which realism postulates (seeing
that the only facts that science speaks of are ever changing in its
progress), nor finds its problems, conflicts, and errors credible as a
reflexion of any Universal Mind, unless Idealism ultimately repudiates
the sanity of its Absolute.

The superiority of Humanism, then, lies in this, that it does not
discourage human enterprise by assuming that the real is completely
rigid and eternally achieved without regard to human effort. In the
drama that unrolls reality, every man, it teaches, has a duty and a
power to play his humble but essential part. Humanism is neither an
Optimism nor a Pessimism--both of which must consistently, in their
extreme form, deny that reality can be improved--but concedes to man the
right and duty to improve the world. It impresses us with the necessity
of acting, it vindicates the procedure of acting on our hopes, it shows
us how we may correct our errors, and so gives reasons for our faith in
the possibility of Progress.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WILLIAM JAMES:
_The Principles of Psychology_, 1890.
_The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy_, 1897.
_The Varieties of Religious Experience_, 1902.
_Pragmatism, a New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking_, 1907.
_A Pluralistic Universe_, 1909.
_The Meaning of Truth_, 1909.
_Some Problems of Philosophy_, 1911.
_Radical Empiricism_, 1912.

F.C.S. SCHILLER:
_Riddles of the Sphinx_, 1891 (revised edition, 1910).
_Axioms as Postulates_ (in _Personal Idealism_, ed. Henry
Sturt,