in either perceptual or
conceptual terms can be given. It includes, of course, any amount of
empirical reality independent of the knower." _Meaning of Truth_, p.
100, note. ED.]

XI

HUMANISM AND TRUTH ONCE MORE.[129]

Mr. Joseph's criticism of my article 'Humanism and Truth'[130] is a
useful contribution to the general clearing up. He has seriously tried
to comprehend what the pragmatic movement may intelligibly mean; and if
he has failed, it is the fault neither of his patience nor of his
sincerity, but rather of stubborn tricks of thought which he could not
easily get rid of. Minute polemics, in which the parties try to rebut
every detail of each of the other's charges, are a useful exercise only
to the disputants. They can but breed confusion in a reader. I will
therefore ignore as much as possible the text of both our articles (mine
was inadequate enough) and treat once more the general objective
situation.

As I apprehend the movement towards humanism, it is based on no
particular discovery or principle that can be driven into one precise
formula which thereupon can be impaled upon a logical skewer. It is much
more like one of those secular changes that come upon public opinion
over-night, as it were, borne upon tides 'too full for sound or foam,'
that survive all the crudities and extravagances of their advocates,
that you can pin to no one absolutely essential statement, nor kill by
any one decisive stab.

Such have been the changes from aristocracy to democracy, from classic
to romantic taste, from theistic to pantheistic feeling, from static to
evolutionary ways of understanding life--changes of which we all have
been spectators. Scholasticism still opposes to such changes the method
of confutation by single decisive reasons, showing that the new view
involves self-contradiction, or traverses some fundamental principle.
This is like stopping a river by planting a stick in the middle of its
bed. Round your obstacle flows the water and 'gets there all the same.'
In reading Mr. Joseph, I am not a little reminded of those Catholic
writers who refute Darwinism by telling us that higher species can not
come from lower because _minus nequit gignere plus_, or that the notion
of transformation is absurd, for it implies that species tend to their
own destruction, and that would violate the principle that every reality
tends to persevere in its own shape. The point of view is too myopic,
too tight and clos