e that
it truly _was_ there and at work before the human mind began? Time,
space, kind, number, serial order, cause, consciousness, are hard things
not to objectify--even transcendental idealism leaves them standing as
'empirically real.' Substance, matter, force, fall down more easily
before criticism, and secondary qualities make almost no resistance at
all. Nevertheless, when we survey the field of speculation, from
Scholasticism through Kantism to Spencerism, we find an ever-recurring
tendency to convert the pre-human into a merely logical object, an
unknowable _ding-an-sich_, that but starts the process, or a vague
_materia prima_ that but receives our forms.[135]

The reasons for this are not so much logical as they are material. We
can postulate an extra-mental _that_ freely enough (though some
idealists have denied us the privilege), but when we have done so, the
_what_ of it is hard to determine satisfactorily, because of the
oppositions and entanglements of the variously proposed _whats_ with one
another and with the history of the human mind. The literature of
speculative cosmology bears witness to this difficulty. Humanism suffers
from it no more than any other philosophy suffers, but it makes all our
cosmogonic theories so unsatisfactory that some thinkers seek relief in
the denial of any primal dualism. Absolute Thought or 'pure experience'
is postulated, and endowed with attributes calculated to justify the
belief that it may 'run itself.' Both these truth-claiming hypotheses
are non-dualistic in the old mind-and-matter sense; but the one is
monistic and the other pluralistic as to the world process itself. Some
humanists are non-dualists of this sort--I myself am one _und zwar_ of
the pluralistic brand. But doubtless dualistic humanists also exist, as
well as non-dualistic ones of the monistic wing.

Mr. Joseph pins these general philosophic difficulties on humanism
alone, or possibly on me alone. My article spoke vaguely of a 'most
chaotic pure experience' coming first, and building up the mind.[136]
But how can two structureless things interact so as to produce a
structure? my critic triumphantly asks. Of course they can't, as purely
so-named entities. We must make additional hypotheses. We must beg a
minimum of structure for them. The _kind_ of minimum that _might_ have
tended to increase towards what we now find actually developed is the
philosophical desideratum here. The question is that of the mo