PREFACE xix 



empirical starting-points and the correctness (always 

 more than dubious) of the deductions whereby they have 

 de facto reached them. 



Do you propose then to accept as sacrosanct the 

 gross unanalysed conceptions of crude Common Sense, 

 and to exempt them from all criticism ? No, I only 

 propose to start with them, and to try and see whether 

 we could not get as far with them as with any other, nay, 

 as far as we may want to get. I have faith that the 

 process of experience that has brought us to our present 

 stand-point has not been wholly error and delusion, and 

 may on the whole be trusted. And I am quite sure that, 

 right or wrong, we have no other, and that it is e.g. 

 grotesque extravagance to imagine that we can put our 

 selves at the standpoint of the Absolute. I would 

 protest, therefore, against every form of a priori meta 

 physical criticism that condemns the results of our 

 experience up to date as an illusory appearance without 

 trial. For I hold that the only valid criticism they can 

 receive must come in, and through, their actual use. It 

 is just where and in so far as common-sense assumptions 

 fail to work that we are theoretically justified, and 

 practically compelled, to modify them. But in each such 

 case sufficient reasons must be shown ; it is not enough 

 merely to show that other assumptions can be made, and 

 couched in technical language, and that our data are 

 abstractly capable of different arrangements. There are, 

 I am aware, infinite possibilities of conceptual re 

 arrangement, but their discovery and construction is but 

 a sort of intellectual game, and has no real importance. 



In point of method, therefore, Humanism is fully able 

 to vindicate itself, and so we can now define it as the 

 philosophic attitude which, without wasting thought upon 

 attempts to construct experience a priori, is content to 

 take human experience as the clue to the world of human 



