xviii HUMANISM 



and with enhanced powers over our experience, from all 

 the journeyings of Science. Of course this frank, though 

 not therefore uncritical, acceptance of our immediate 

 experience and experienced self will seem a great deal to 

 be granted by those addicted to abstruser methods. 

 They have dreamt for ages of a priori philosophies 

 without presuppositions or assumptions, whereby Being 

 might be conjured out of Nothing and the sage might 

 penetrate the secret of creative power. But no obscurity 

 of verbiage has in the end succeeded in concealing the 

 utter failure of such preposterous attempts. The a priori 

 philosophies have all been found out. 



And what is worse, have they not all been detected in 

 doing what they pretended to disclaim ? Do they not 

 all take surreptitiously for granted the human nature 

 they pride themselves on disavowing ? Are they not 

 trying to solve human problems with human faculties ? 

 It is true that in form they claim to transcend our nature, 

 or to raise it to the superhuman. But while they profess 

 to exalt human nature, they are really mutilating it all 

 for the kingdom of Abstraction s sake ! For what are 

 their professed starting-points, Pure Being, the Idea, the 

 Absolute, the Universal I, but pitiable abstractions from 

 experience, mutilated shreds of human nature, whose real 

 value for the understanding of life is easily outweighed 

 by the living experience of an honest man ? 



All these theories then de facto start from the im 

 mediate facts of our experience. Only they are ashamed 

 of it, and assume without inquiry that it is worthless as a 

 principle of explanation, and that no thinker worthy of 

 the name can tolerate the thought of expressly setting 

 out from anything so vulgar. Thus, so far from assum 

 ing less than the humanist, these speculations really must 

 assume a great deal more. They must assume, in 

 addition to ordinary human nature, their own met- 



