Page:Humanism; philosophical essays (IA cu31924029012171).pdf/22

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and with enhanced powers over our experience, from all the journeyings of Science. Of course this frank, though not therefore uncritical,' acceptance of our immediate experience and experienced self will seem a great deal to be granted by those addicted to abstruser methods. They have dreamt for ages of a priori philosophies

without presuppositions or assumptions,' whereby Being

might be conjured out of Nothing and the sage might penetrate the secret of creative power. But no obscurity of verbiage has in the end succeeded in concealing the utter failure of such preposterous attempts. The a priori philosophies have all been found out.

And what is worse, have they not all been detected in doing what they pretended to disclaim? Do they not all take surreptitiously for granted the human nature. they pride themselves on disavowing? Are they not trying to solve human problems with human faculties? It is true that in form they claim to transcend our nature, or to raise it to the superhuman. But while they profess to exalt human nature, they are really mutilating it—all for the kingdom of Abstraction's sake! For what are their professed starting-points, Pure Being, the Idea, the Absolute, the Universal I, but pitiable abstractions from experience, mutilated shreds of human nature, whose real value for the understanding of life is easily outweighed by the living experience of an honest man?

All these theories then de facto start from the immediate facts of our experience. Only they are ashamed of it, and assume without inquiry that it is worthless as a principle of explanation, and that no thinker worthy of the name can tolerate the thought of expressly setting out from anything so vulgar. Thus, so far from assuming less than the humanist, these speculations really must assume a great deal more. addition to ordinary human They must assume, in nature, their own met-