"The world," he says,
"is essentially [u lambda nu], it is what we make of it. It is
fruitless to define it by what it originally was or by what it is
apart from us; it IS what is made of it. Hence ... the world is
PLASTIC." [Footnote: Personal Idealism, p. 60.] He adds that we can
learn the limits of the plasticity only by trying, and that we ought
to start as if it were wholly plastic, acting methodically on that
assumption, and stopping only when we are decisively rebuked.
This is Mr. Schiller's butt-end-foremost statement of the humanist
position, and it has exposed him to severe attack. I mean to defend
the humanist position in this lecture, so I will insinuate a few
remarks at this point.
Mr. Schiller admits as emphatically as anyone the presence of
resisting factors in every actual experience of truth-making, of
which the new-made special truth must take account, and with which
it has perforce to 'agree.' All our truths are beliefs about
'Reality'; and in any particular belief the reality acts as
something independent, as a thing FOUND, not manufactured. Let me
here recall a bit of my last lecture.
'REALITY' IS IN GENERAL WHAT TRUTHS HAVE TO TAKE ACCOUNT OF;
[Footnote: Mr. Taylor in his Elements of Metaphysics uses this
excellent pragmatic definition.
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