xui HUMISM AND HUMANISM 231 



worldly wisdom, but hard-working professionals, them 

 selves leading the academic life, and exposed to all the 

 rigours of the academic atmosphere. (2) They do not 

 themselves draw the sceptical conclusions attributed to 

 them, but protest that their doctrines mean a rescue 

 and a reform and an advance of philosophy. (3) Such 

 a reform, they declare, is rendered necessary by the 

 deplorable state to which metaphysics has been reduced 

 by the collapse of idealism into scepticism, while an 

 advance is no less urgently required if philosophy is to 

 keep pace with the developments of the sciences, particu 

 larly of psychology and biology. As regards doctrine, 

 again, the differences are at least as well marked as the 

 resemblances. For though both Humanism and Humism 

 may be classified as empiricisms, there is evidently ample 

 room for divergence within empiricism. 



It is not too much to say that the philosophic 

 character of an empiricism depends entirely on how it con 

 ceives experience. Now Humanism manifestly conceives 

 experience very differently from Humism. (i) It does 

 not accept Hume s psychology with its associationism and 

 its sensationalism. Its voluntaristic is essentially different 

 from his sensationalistic empiricism, and by comparison 

 with the latter may even be called a sort of apriorism. 

 For a postulate, however much it may have been suggested 

 by experience, is still an anticipation of nature, which we 

 bring to the facts. It has to be assumed before it can be 

 proved. Even though it was meant for application to 

 experience, it was assumed because it was desired, even 

 though it serves as a guide in experimentation and a 

 major premiss in argumentation, it is clearly prior to the 

 experience we try to organize thereby. It becomes, there 

 fore, from one point of view, a merely verbal question 

 how the Humanist voluntarism should be classified, and 

 if the form of intellectualism against which it had to 

 contend had been sensationalistic instead of rationalistic, 

 it would doubtless have laid more stress on the very real 

 affinities of the postulate with the a priori. 



In fact its epistemological achievement may be said to 



