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.
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