Many other modernists reject the ideal of completeness itself as making for a dull uniformity, and propose instead the ideal of diversity. Life is “full of a number of things,” one of them prattles, remembering his _Child’s Garden_, but forgetting that humanism itself aims at diversity--not by urging men to be queerly “different,” each in his own infantile way, but by urging them to develop with mature reasonableness the diversities latent within themselves and thus to work toward a many-sided human type. Humanism believes, with Goethe, that “every one must form himself as a particular being, seeking, however, to attain that general idea of which all mankind are constituents.” There have been enough humanists in the world to prove that in fact (and not only in theory) this image of a dull humanistic uniformity is merely another scarecrow. It is not the humanists, certainly, who look forward to a millennium in which all men and women will be superbly alike! If they speak more of the past than of the future, it is because the wisdom of the ages is on record and the wisdom of the future a hope devoid of useful content. But they unreservedly agree with critics who protest that “beyond anything that has yet been said by the academic humanists, there is work for the humane imagination to do.” This does not exhaust the attacks on the humanists. They are reproached by romanticists for being romantic, but I let that pass. More sensibly, they are ridiculed by irreligionists for being religious, but I let that pass also. Something should be said, however, of still another attack--the objection, by impressionists, that they employ words and phrases as catchwords and labels in disregard of the elusiveness of truth. To offer this objection, surely, is to object to the use of language itself. If words are not more or less arbitrary labels for things and ideas and the relationship of things and ideas, all language is pure nonsense. When Mr. Van Wyck Brooks fifteen years ago, in _America’s Coming-of-Age_, called for “catchwords” as well as a “programme,” he showed a sounder instinct than he and his followers have displayed since: they have found no programme, and are increasingly averse to catchwords. No doubt the truth _an sich_ is hopelessly elusive, but the attainment of provisional or human truth is the reward of courage and labour. We cannot afford to shirk the task of achieving a reasonably clear and consistent terminology, even though every definition is by nature an affirmation that tends to shut out some portion of absolute truth. Whenever words become too hard and exclusive, humanism is concerned with reconsidering their frontiers; but whenever, as to-day, they become so vague and fluid as to imperil human communication, humanism aims to achieve a clear relation of labels to thought.