PREFACE 



XXV 



and efficient and final cause of all explanation, and 

 will rather welcome it in its un mutilated, undistorted 

 immediacy as (though in an uncongenial tongue) the a 

 priori condition of all knowledge. And so it will approve 

 of that personal idealism which strives to redeem the 

 spiritual values an idealistic absolutism has so treacher 

 ously sold into the bondage of naturalism. 



With Common Sense it will ever keep in touch by 

 dint of refusing to value or validate the products of merely 

 speculative analyses, void of purpose and of use, which 

 betoken merely a power to play with verbal phrases. Thus 

 Humanism will derive, combine and include all the doctrines 

 which may be treated as anticipations of its attitude. 



For Pragmatism itself is in the same case with Personal 

 Idealism, Radical Empiricism and Pluralism. It is in 

 reality only the application of Humanism to the theory of 

 knowledge. If the entire man, if human nature as a whole, 

 be the clue to the theory of .all experience, then human 

 purposiveness must irrigate the arid soil of logic. The 

 facts of our thinking, freed from intellectualistic perver 

 sions, will clearly show that we are not dealing with abstract 

 concatenations of purely intellectual processes, but with 

 the rational aims of personal thinkers. Great, therefore, 

 as will be the value we must claim for Pragmatism as a 

 method, we must yet concede that man is greater than 

 any method he has made, and that our Humanism must 

 interpret it. 



IV 



It is a well-known fact that things are not only known 

 by their affinities but also by their opposites. And the 

 fitness of the term Humanism for our philosophic purpose 

 could hardly better be displayed than by the ready 

 transfer of its old associations to a novel context. 



A humanist philosopher is sure to be keenly interested 



