xxiv HUMANISM 



take human experience as the clue to the world of human 

 experience, content to take Man on his own merits, just 

 as he is to start with, without insisting that he must first 

 be disembowelled of his interests and have his individu 

 ality evaporated and translated into technical jargon, 

 before he can be deemed deserving of scientific notice. 

 To remember that Man is the measure of all things, i.e. 

 of his whole experience-world, and that if our standard 

 measure be proved false all our measurements are vitiated ; 

 to remember that Man is the maker of the sciences 

 which subserve his human purposes ; to remember that an 

 ultimate philosophy which analyses us away is thereby 

 merely exhibiting its failure to achieve its purpose, that, 

 and more that might be stated to the same effect, is the real 

 root of Humanism, whence all its auxiliary doctrines spring. 

 It is a natural consequence, for instance, that, if the 

 facts require it, &quot; real possibilities, real indeterminations, 

 real beginnings, real ends, real evil, real crises, catastrophes 

 and escapes, a real God and a real moral life, just as 

 common sense conceives these things, may remain in 

 humanism as conceptions which philosophy gives up the 

 attempt either to overcome or to reinterpret.&quot; ] And 

 whether or not Humanism will have to recognize the 

 ultimate reality of all the gloomier possibilities of James s 

 enumeration, it may safely be predicted that its radical 

 empiricism will grant to the possibilities of pluralism a 

 more careful and unbiassed inquiry than monistic pre 

 conceptions have as yet deigned to bestow upon them. 

 For seeing that man is a social being it is natural that 

 Humanism should be hospitable to the view that the 

 universe is ultimately a joint-stock affair. And again, 

 it will receive with appropriate suspicion all attempts to 

 explain away the human personality which is the formal 



1 James, Will to Believe (p. ix. ). I have substituted humanism for 

 empiricism 



