302 HUMANISM 



XVI 



experience confirms. There is no more mystical nor 

 higher test of their truth. 



Nor does the general postulate that there are specific 

 laws really rest upon any other ground. It too is held to 

 be true, because it works. And no cunning of philo 

 sophic system-building can really safeguard it any other or 

 any a priori truth. Our postulate might cease to work at 

 any point or time. However dear and indispensable it 

 had been to us, however deeply we had grafted it upon 

 the roots of our being, however strenuously we might 

 protest against a failure that would put us to intellectual 

 confusion, we should have to submit to the rulings of 

 experience and to recognize the de facto limitations of 

 our principle. In point of fact our intellectual debacle 

 would not be quite so terrible as is often represented. 

 If our postulate ceased to be usefully applicable to our 

 experience, we should say that it had only seemed to be 

 true, but was not, and search for some more tenable 

 assumption. Or again it might work for some things 

 and not for others. There is nothing inconceivable in a 

 universe only partly subject to law. It would be incon 

 venient, no doubt, especially if we were uncertain about 

 the limits of its law-abidingness, and we should therefore 

 admit the existence of this defect only in the last 

 extremity. Some heroic souls might even persist to the 

 last in their faith that the whole must be subject to law, 

 though no mortal vision could ever detect its laws. But 

 the majority of men would judge it better to get half a 

 loaf than no bread, and would content themselves with 

 believing the world as calculable as they could practically 

 make it, and would not declare the world irrational and 

 Science vain, merely because they could not calculate 

 everything. 



If then the world, or any part of it, happened to be 

 free and therefore incalculable, we should so far find it 

 inconvenient. But the inconvenience need not be con 

 siderable, if in point of fact the sphere of Freedom is 

 restricted and its amount is not great. Hence the in 

 convenience of abandoning a complete Determinism may 



