i THE ETHICAL BASIS OF METAPHYSICS 13 



and something to be fought with all our might ; it may 

 be unsuspectedly friendly, and something to be co-operated 

 with with our whole heart ; it must respond in varying 

 ways to our various efforts. 



Now, inasmuch as we are most familiar with such 

 varying responsiveness in our personal relations with 

 others, it is, I think, natural, though not perhaps necessary, 

 that a pragmatist will tend to put a personal interpre 

 tation upon his transactions with Nature and any agency 

 he may conceive to underlie it. Still even ordinary 

 language is aware that things behave differently according 

 as you treat them, that e.g., treated with fire sugar burns, 

 while treated with water it dissolves. Thus in the last 

 resort the anthropomorphic humanism of our whole 

 treatment of experience is unavoidable and obvious ; and 

 however much he wills to disbelieve it the philosopher 

 must finally confess that to escape anthropomorphism he 

 would have to escape from self. And further, seeing 

 that ethics is the science of our relations with other 

 persons, i.e. with our environment qua personal, this 

 ultimateness of the personal construction we put upon 

 our experience must increase the importance of the 

 ethical attitude towards it. In other words, our meta 

 physics must in any case be quasi-ethical. 



It may fairly be anticipated, secondly, that Pragmatism 

 will prove a great tonic to re-invigorate a grievously 

 depressed humanity. It sweeps away entirely the stock 

 excuse for fatalism and despair. It proves that human 

 action is always a perceptible, and never a negligible, 

 factor in the ordering of nature, and shows cause for the 

 belief that the disparity between our powers and the 

 forces of nature, great as it is, does not amount to 

 incommensurability. And it denies that any of the great 

 questions of human concern have been irrevocably 

 answered against us. For most of them have not even 

 been asked in a pragmatic manner, i.e. with a determina 

 tion to test the answers by the value of the consequences, 

 and in no case has there been that systematic and clear 

 sighted endeavour which extorts concessions, or at least 



