eve them. The past tense can figure in the humanist's world,
as well of belief as of representation, quite as harmoniously as in the
world of any one else.

Mr. Joseph gives a special turn to this accusation. He charges me[133]
with being self-contradictory when I say that the main categories of
thought were evolved in the course of experience itself. For I use these
very categories to define the course of experience by. Experience, as I
talk about it, is a product of their use; and yet I take it as true
anteriorly to them. This seems to Mr. Joseph to be an absurdity. I hope
it does not seem such to his readers; for if experiences can suggest
hypotheses at all (and they notoriously do so) I can see no absurdity
whatever in the notion of a retrospective hypothesis having for its
object the very train of experiences by which its own being, along with
that of other things, has been brought about. If the hypothesis is
'satisfactory' we must, of course, believe it to have been true
anteriorly to its formulation by ourselves. Every explanation of a
present by a past seems to involve this kind of circle, which is not a
vicious circle. The past is _causa existendi_ of the present, which in
turn is _causa cognoscendi_ of the past. If the present were treated as
_causa existendi_ of the past, the circle might indeed be vicious.

Closely connected with this pseudo-difficulty is another one of wider
scope and greater complication--more excusable therefore.[134]
Humanism, namely, asking how truth in point of fact is reached, and
seeing that it is by ever substituting more satisfactory for less
satisfactory opinions, is thereby led into a vague historic sketch of
truth's development. The earliest 'opinions,' it thinks, must have been
dim, unconnected 'feelings,' and only little by little did more and more
orderly views of things replace them. Our own retrospective view of this
whole evolution is now, let us say, the latest candidate for 'truth' as
yet reached in the process. To be a satisfactory candidate, it must give
some definite sort of a picture of what forces keep the process going.
On the subjective side we have a fairly definite picture--sensation,
association, interest, hypothesis, these account in a general way for
the growth into a cosmos of the relative chaos with which the mind
began.

But on the side of the object, so to call it roughly, our view is much
less satisfactory. Of which of our many objects are we to believ