ave to
deal with concretely is that between our subjects and our predicates,
using these words in a very broad sense. It sees moreover that this
conformity is 'validated' (to use Mr. Schiller's term) by an indefinite
number of pragmatic tests that vary as the predicates and subjects vary.
If an S gets superseded by an SP that gives our mind a completer sum of
satisfactions, we always say, humanism points out, that we have advanced
to a better position in regard to truth.

Now many of our judgments thus attained are retrospective. The S'es, so
the judgment runs, were SP's already ere the fact was humanly recorded.
Common sense, struck by this state of things, now rearranges the whole
field; and traditional philosophy follows her example. The general
requirement that predicates must conform to their subject, they
translate into an ontological theory. A most previous Subject of all is
substituted for the lesser subjects and conceived of as an archetypal
Reality; and the conformity required of predicates in detail is
reinterpreted as a relation which our whole mind, with all its subjects
and predicates together, must get into with respect to this Reality.
It, meanwhile, is conceived as eternal, static, and unaffected by our
thinking. Conformity to a non-human Archetype like this is probably the
notion of truth which my opponent shares with common sense and
philosophic rationalism.

When now Humanism, fully admitting both the naturalness and the grandeur
of this hypothesis, nevertheless points to its sterility, and declines
to chime in with the substitution, keeping to the concrete and still
lodging truth between the subjects and the predicates in detail, it
provokes the outcry which we hear and which my critic echoes.

One of the commonest parts of the outcry is that humanism is
subjectivistic altogether--it is supposed to labor under a necessity of
'denying trans-perceptual reality.'[132] It is not hard to see how this
misconception of humanism may have arisen; and humanistic writers,
partly from not having sufficiently guarded their expressions, and
partly from not having yet "got round" (in the poverty of their
literature) to a full discussion of the subject, are doubtless in some
degree to blame. But I fail to understand how any one with a working
grasp of their principles can charge them wholesale with subjectivism. I
myself have never thought of humanism as being subjectivistic farther
than to this extent, that, in