For good or ill, the world with which the Humanist contends is always a world that reveals itself to him. Reality, as it is assumed, presumed, or guessed to be 'in itself,' apart from our experience of it, is cancelled from his reckonings. For he cannot discover how he (or anyone) can get any 'knowledge' or 'intuition' which transcends all human faculties. The theories of metaphysicians on these lofty themes he regards as personal postulates which, in so far as they cannot be subjected to the pragmatic method, must remain open questions. Human experience does not warrant such gratuitous demands. It confirms neither the rigid system of unchanging fact which realism postulates (seeing that the only facts that science speaks of are ever changing in its progress), nor finds its problems, conflicts, and errors credible as a reflexion of any Universal Mind, unless Idealism ultimately repudiates the sanity of its Absolute. The superiority of Humanism, then, lies in this, that it does not discourage human enterprise by assuming that the real is completely rigid and eternally achieved without regard to human effort. In the drama that unrolls reality, every man, it teaches, has a duty and a power to play his humble but essential part. Humanism is neither an Optimism nor a Pessimism--both of which must consistently, in their extreme form, deny that reality can be improved--but concedes to man the right and duty to improve the world. It impresses us with the necessity of acting, it vindicates the procedure of acting on our hopes, it shows us how we may correct our errors, and so gives reasons for our faith in the possibility of Progress. BIBLIOGRAPHY WILLIAM JAMES: _The Principles of Psychology_, 1890. _The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy_, 1897. _The Varieties of Religious Experience_, 1902. _Pragmatism, a New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking_, 1907. _A Pluralistic Universe_, 1909. _The Meaning of Truth_, 1909. _Some Problems of Philosophy_, 1911. _Radical Empiricism_, 1912. F.C.S. SCHILLER: _Riddles of the Sphinx_, 1891 (revised edition, 1910). _Axioms as Postulates_ (in _Personal Idealism_, ed. Henry Sturt, 1902). _Humanism: Philosophical Essays_, 1903. _Studies in Humanism_, 1907. _Formal Logic, a Scientific and Social Problem_, 1912. HENRY STURT: _Idola Theatri, a Criticism of Oxford Thought and Thinkers from the Standpoint of Personal Idealism_, 1906. J. DEWEY AND OTHERS: _Studies in Logical Theory_, 1903. J. DEWEY: _The Influence of Darwinism, and Other Essays_, 1910. H.V. KNOX: _The Evolution of Truth_, Quarterly Review, No. 419. April, 1909. A.W. MOORE: _Pragmatism and its Critics_, 1911. A. SIDGWICK: _The Application of Logic_, 1910. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Pragmatism, by D.L. Murray