50 HUMANISM m 



in our eyes ; the demand for system is but part of a 

 larger demand for a harmony (actual or at least ideal) 

 in our experience ; it is not merely a matter of formal 

 logical consistency, but also of emotional satisfaction. 

 Hence no system is judged intellectually true unless it 

 is also a good deal more than this, and embraces and 

 satisfies other than the abstractly intellectual aspects of 

 experience. Thus no completely pessimistic system is 

 ever judged completely true ; because it leaves unre- 

 moved and unresolved a sense of final discord in existence, 

 it must ever stimulate anew to fresh efforts to overcome 

 the discrepancy. 1 And conversely, it is by no means rare 

 that what impresses us as conducive to harmony should 

 be declared true with little or no inquiry into its syste 

 matic coherence ; indeed, it is probably such perception 

 of their aesthetic self-evidence that often accounts for the 

 adoption of the axiomatic postulates that form first 

 principles for knowledge. 2 



Thus the notion of system proves doubly insufficient 

 to define truth. There is system which is not valued 

 as true, and there is truth which is so valuable that it 

 need not be system. We need system only as a 

 means to the higher notion of harmony, 3 and where we 

 can get the latter without the former, we can readily dis 

 pense with it. 



The bulk, however, of logicians would in all probability 

 strenuously object to this last argument. They would 

 protest against the contamination of the question of 

 truth with questions of harmony and valuation. To 

 refer to these is to overpass the bounds of logic, it is to 

 trespass on the lower ground of psychology in which 

 thought soon gets bogged in the reedy marshes of psychical 

 fact. No good can come of such an intermixture of 

 psychology with logic ; our criterion of truth must be 

 logical, our thought pure. To talk of desire, interest, 

 and feeling in a logical context is sheer madness, and to 

 require logical theory to take account of their existence 

 is to require it to adjust itself to the alogical. 



1 Cp. p. 200. 2 Cp. Axioms as Postulates, 48. 3 Cp. p. 189. 



