asmuch as it treats the thinker as being
himself one portion of reality, it must also allow that _some_ of the
realities that he declares for true are created by his being there. Such
realities of course are either acts of his, or relations between other
things and him, or relations between things, which, but for him, would
never have been traced. Humanists are subjectivistic, also in this,
that, unlike rationalists (who think they carry a warrant for the
absolute truth of what they now believe in in their present pocket),
they hold all present beliefs as subject to revision in the light of
future experience. The future experience, however, may be of things
outside the thinker; and that this is so the humanist may believe as
freely as any other kind of empiricist philosopher.

The critics of humanism (though here I follow them but darkly) appear to
object to any infusion whatever of subjectivism into truth. All must be
archetypal; every truth must pre-exist to its perception. Humanism sees
that an enormous quantity of truth must be written down as having
pre-existed to its perception by us humans. In countless instances we
find it most satisfactory to believe that, though we were always
ignorant of the fact, it always _was_ a fact that S was SP. But humanism
separates this class of cases from those in which it is more
satisfactory to believe the opposite, e.g., that S is ephemeral, or P a
passing event, or SP created by the perceiving act. Our critics seem on
the other hand, to wish to universalize the retrospective type of
instance. Reality must pre-exist to every assertion for which truth is
claimed. And, not content with this overuse of one particular type of
judgment, our critics claim its monopoly. They appear to wish to cut off
Humanism from its rights to any retrospection at all.

Humanism says that satisfactoriness is what distinguishes the true from
the false. But satisfactoriness is both a subjective quality, and a
present one. _Ergo_ (the critics appear to reason) an object, _qua_
true, must always for humanism be both present and subjective, and a
humanist's belief can never be in anything that lives outside of the
belief itself or ante-dates it. Why so preposterous a charge should be
so current, I find it hard to say. Nothing is more obvious than the fact
that both the objective and the past existence of the object may be the
very things about it that most seem satisfactory, and that most invite
us to beli