may
be considered, experience as a whole is self-containing and leans on
nothing_.

Since this formula also expresses the main contention of transcendental
idealism, it needs abundant explication to make it unambiguous. It
seems, at first sight, to confine itself to denying theism and
pantheism. But, in fact, it need not deny either; everything would
depend on the exegesis; and if the formula ever became canonical, it
would certainly develop both right-wing and left-wing interpreters. I
myself read humanism theistically and pluralistically. If there be a
God, he is no absolute all-experiencer, but simply the experiencer of
widest actual conscious span. Read thus, humanism is for me a religion
susceptible of reasoned defence, though I am well aware how many minds
there are to whom it can appeal religiously only when it has been
monistically translated. Ethically the pluralistic form of it takes for
me a stronger hold on reality than any other philosophy I know of--it
being essentially a _social_ philosophy, a philosophy of '_co_,' in
which conjunctions do the work. But my primary reason for advocating it
is its matchless intellectual economy. It gets rid, not only of the
standing 'problems' that monism engenders ('problem of evil,' 'problem
of freedom,' and the like), but of other metaphysical mysteries and
paradoxes as well.

It gets rid, for example, of the whole agnostic controversy, by refusing
to entertain the hypothesis of trans-empirical reality at all. It gets
rid of any need for an absolute of the Bradleyan type (avowedly sterile
for intellectual purposes) by insisting that the conjunctive relations
found within experience are faultlessly real. It gets rid of the need of
an absolute of the Roycean type (similarly sterile) by its pragmatic
treatment of the problem of knowledge [a treatment of which I have
already given a version in two very inadequate articles].[110] As the
views of knowledge, reality and truth imputed to humanism have been
those so far most fiercely attacked, it is in regard to these ideas that
a sharpening of focus seems most urgently required. I proceed therefore
to bring the views which _I_ impute to humanism in these respects into
focus as briefly as I can.

II

If the central humanistic thesis, printed above in italics, be accepted,
it will follow that, if there be any such thing at all as knowing, the
knower and the object known must both be portions of experience. One
part of expe