e to take in the inductive argument. You can not
settle questions of fact by formal logic. I feel as if Mr. Joseph almost
pounced on my words singly, without giving the sentences time to get out
of my mouth.

The one condition of understanding humanism is to become
inductive-minded oneself, to drop rigorous definitions, and follow lines
of least resistance 'on the whole.' "In other words," Mr. Joseph may
probably say, "resolve your intellect into a kind of slush." "Even so,"
I make reply,--"if you will consent to use no politer word." For
humanism, conceiving the more 'true' as the more 'satisfactory' (Dewey's
term) has to renounce sincerely rectilinear arguments and ancient ideals
of rigor and finality. It is in just this temper of renunciation, so
different from that of pyrrhonistic scepticism, that the spirit of
humanism essentially consists. Satisfactoriness has to be measured by a
multitude of standards, of which some, for aught we know, may fail in
any given case; and what is 'more' satisfactory than any alternative in
sight, may to the end be a sum of _pluses_ and _minuses_, concerning
which we can only trust that by ulterior corrections and improvements a
maximum of the one and a minimum of the other may some day be
approached. It means a real change of heart, a break with absolutistic
hopes, when one takes up this view of the conditions of belief.

That humanism's critics have never imagined this attitude inwardly, is
shown by their invariable tactics. They do not get into it far enough to
see objectively and from without what their own opposite notion of
truth is. Mr. Joseph is possessed by some such notion; he thinks his
readers to be full of it, he obeys it, works from it, but never even
essays to tell us what it is. The nearest he comes to doing so is
where[131] he says it is the way "we ought to think," whether we be
psychologically compelled to or not.

Of course humanism agrees to this: it is only a manner of calling truth
an ideal. But humanism explicates the summarizing word 'ought' into a
mass of pragmatic motives from the midst of which our critics think that
truth itself takes flight. Truth is a name of double meaning. It stands
now for an abstract something defined only as that to which our thought
ought to conform; and again it stands for the concrete propositions
within which we believe that conformity already reigns--they being so
many 'truths.' Humanism sees that the only conformity we ever h