So of an 'army,'
of a 'nation.' But in your own eyes, ladies and gentlemen, to call
you 'audience' is an accidental way of taking you. The permanently
real things for you are your individual persons. To an anatomist,
again, those persons are but organisms, and the real things are the
organs. Not the organs, so much as their constituent cells, say the
histologists; not the cells, but their molecules, say in turn the
chemists.
We break the flux of sensible reality into things, then, at our
will. We create the subjects of our true as well as of our false
propositions.
We create the predicates also. Many of the predicates of things
express only the relations of the things to us and to our feelings.
Such predicates of course are human additions. Caesar crossed the
Rubicon, and was a menace to Rome's freedom. He is also an American
school-room pest, made into one by the reaction of our schoolboys on
his writings. The added predicate is as true of him as the earlier
ones.
You see how naturally one comes to the humanistic principle: you
can't weed out the human contribution. Our nouns and adjectives are
all humanized heirlooms, and in the theories we build them into, the
inner order and arrangement is wholly dictated by human
considerations, intellectual consistency being one of them.
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