12 HUMANISM i 



It is no exaggeration therefore to contend, with Plato, 

 that in a way the Good, meaning thereby the conception 

 of a final systematisation of our purposes, is the supreme 

 controlling power in our whole experience, and that in 

 abstraction from it neither the True nor the Real can 

 exist. For whatever forms of the latter we may have 

 discovered, some purposive activity, some conception of a 

 good to be attained, was involved as a condition of the 

 discovery. If there had been no activity on our part, or 

 if that activity had been directed to ends other than it 

 was, there could not have been discovery, or that discovery. 



We must discard, therefore, the notion that in the 

 constitution of the world we count for nothing, that it 

 matters not what we do, because Reality is what it is, 

 whatever we may do. It is true on the contrary that our 

 action is essential and indispensable, that to some extent 

 the world (our world) is of our making, and that without 

 us nothing is made that is made. To what extent and 

 in what directions the world is plastic and to be moulded 



Things behave in similar ways in their reaction to modes of treatment, the 

 differences between which seem to us important. From this we have chosen to 

 infer that things have a rigid and unalterable nature. It might however have been 

 better to infer that therefore the differences must seem unimportant to the things. 



The truth is that the nature of things is not determinate but determinable, like 

 that of our fellow-men. Previous to trial it is indeterminate, not merely for our 

 ignorance, but really and from every point of view, within limits which it is our 

 business to discover. It grows determinate by our experiments, like human 

 character. We all know that in our social relations we frequently put questions 

 which are potent in determining their own answers, and without the putting 

 would leave their subjects undetermined. Will you love me, hate me, trust 

 me, help me ? are conspicuous examples, and we should consider it absurd to 

 argue that because a man had begun social intercourse with another by knocking 

 him down, the hatred he had thus provoked must have been a pre-existent reality 

 which the blow had merely elicited. All that the result entitles us to assume 

 is a capacity for social feeling variously responsive to various modes of stimulation. 

 Why, then, should we not transfer this conception of a determinable indeter- 

 mination to nature at large, why should we antedate the results of our manipula 

 tion and regard as unalterable facts the reactions which our ignorance and 

 blundering provoke? To the objection that even in our social dealings not all 

 the responses are indeterminate, the reply is that it is easy to regard them as 

 having been determined by earlier experiments. 



In this way, then, the notion of a fact-in-itself might become as much of a 

 philosophic anachronism as that of a thing-in-itself, and we should conceive 

 the process of knowledge as extending from absolute chaos at the one end (before 

 a determinate response had been established) to absolute satisfaction at the other, 

 which would have no motive to question the absolutely factual nature of its 

 objects. But in the intermediate condition of our present experience all 

 recognition of fact would be provisional and relative to our purposes and 

 inquiries. 



