< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu
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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY

uncertainties of language and the limitations of human thought and understanding will not serve to explain it. It could not really have been asked or expected that the entire essence of the principle should have been compressed into one concise definition or even into one formal or rigid statement. As its protagonist himself has said in an article entitled "Humanism and Truth Once More," published in Mind for April, 1905:

As I apprehend the movement toward humanism, it is based on no particular discovery or principle that can be driven into one precise formula which thereupon can be impaled upon a logical skewer. It is much more like one of those secular changes that come upon public opinion over-night, as it were, borne upon tides "too full for sound or foam," that survive all the crudities' and extravagances of their advocates, that you can pin to no one absolutely essential statement, nor kill by any one decisive stab.

In the same article he says:

The one condition of understanding humanism is to become inductiveminded oneself, to drop rigorous definitions, and follow lines of least resistance "on the whole."

It would seem that this was expecting entirely too much. He had also said in The Journal of Philosophy for March 2, 1905:

It is not a single hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as from a new center of interest or point of sight. Some writers are strongly conscious of the shifting, others half unconscious, even though their own vision may have undergone much change. The result is no small confusion in debate, the half-conscious humanists taking part against the radical ones, as if they wished to count upon the other side.

I am inclined to think that its very simplicity has been the chief barrier in the way of its acceptance. "Unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness." Has it not ever been so in both the philosophical and religious worlds? Would it not find more ready acceptance if it required "some great things "? Perhaps, one barrier in the way of those who have "seriously tried to comprehend what the pragmatic movement may intelligibly mean" is mental myopia, which prevents them from assuming the proper attitude in order to gain the right point of view. They are too wedded to their idols of dogma and authority to experience that change of heart which would enable them to break the shackles which bind them to "absolutists hopes" and acquire the freedom which would permit them to enter into such "conditions of belief." Dr. Schiller has said:

Concerning any considerable novelty of thought the prediction may be made that hardly any one above thirty will be psychologically capable of adopting it, unless he had previously been looking for just such a solution.

Whether this be true or not, many have failed to understand it simply for the reason that they have not really tried to do so. They "have boggled at every word they could boggle at, and refused to

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