unstable, it can
build that proof on nothing more stable than human faculty as at the
moment it happens to be.

[Sidenote: All criticism likewise.]

Nor is abstraction a less human process, as if by becoming very
abstruse indeed we could hope to become divine. Is it not a commonplace
of the schools that to form abstract ideas is the prerogative of man's
reason? Is not abstraction a method by which mortal intelligence makes
haste? Is it not the makeshift of a mind overloaded with its experience,
the trick of an eye that cannot master a profuse and ever-changing
world? Shall these diagrams drawn in fancy, this system of signals in
thought, be the Absolute Truth dwelling within us? Do we attain reality
by making a silhouette of our dreams? If the scientific world be a
product of human faculties, the metaphysical world must be doubly so;
for the material there given to human understanding is here worked over
again by human art. This constitutes the dignity and value of dialectic,
that in spite of appearances it is so human; it bears to experience a
relation similar to that which the arts bear to the same, where sensible
images, selected by the artist's genius and already coloured by his
aesthetic bias, are redyed in the process of reproduction whenever he has
a great style, and saturated anew with his mind.

There can be no question, then, of eluding human nature or of conceiving
it and its environment in such a way as to stop its operation. We may
take up our position in one region of experience or in another, we may,
in unconsciousness of the interests and assumptions that support us,
criticise the truth or value of results obtained elsewhere. Our
criticism will be solid in proportion to the solidity of the unnamed
convictions that inspire it, that is, in proportion to the deep roots
and fruitful ramifications which those convictions may have in human
life. Ultimate truth and ultimate value will be reasonably attributed to
those ideas and possessions which can give human nature, as it is, the
highest satisfaction. We may admit that human nature is variable; but
that admission, if justified, will be justified by the satisfaction
which it gives human nature to make it. We might even admit that human
ideals are vain but only if they were nothing worth for the attainment
of the veritable human ideal.

[Sidenote: Origins inessential.]

The given constitution of reason, with whatever a dialectical philosophy
might elicit