262
PARTISAN REVIEW
If
the supernaturalist humanists differed among themselves so
did the naturalist humanists.
It
was interesting to note how often
the appeal was made at the Congress for a "Copernican" and "Gali–
lean" conception of man which would take human existence and
its
improvement as the center of concern and which would accept the
unfinished
character of human life as a challenge to create a more
desirable future. So long as the discussion kept on the level of ab–
stractions there seemed to be unanimity among the naturalists. But
as soon as methods and concrete proposals were discussed an abyss
separated those whom we may call democratic humanists from the
Soviet variety. Here the dividing line was the question whether the
means used to achieve the abstractly desirable ends were to be con·
tinuous with those ends and whether the costs of progress were to
be
voluntarily
assumed through democratic process by those involved
in history, or were to be imposed upon them by those who "knew"
what was best. When these matters arose
in
concrete form, the philoso–
phers of all schools broke ranks and realigned themselves indepen–
dently of their metaphysical differences. The "Communist humanists"
found themselves isolated, charged with defending inhumanism
in
practice and nonsensical doctrines
in
science.
The same phenomenon was .apparent
in
the discussions of value.
Logical positivism was criticized, sometimes unfairly, for its belief
that so-called judgments of value were neither true nor false, and
therefore not cases of knowledge. Existentialism was criticized for
making judgments of value arbitrary and subjective, for conceiving of
value decisions as a romantic defiance
in
a necessarily hostile world.
There seemed to be wide agreement that reasonable judgments of
worth could be distinguished from unreasonable. But when it came
to the conception of Reason-which all philosophers invoked
in
some
form-the naturalists maintained that since human values acquire
their quality of value by being related to human desire, only the use
of scientific intelligence could help us discover the differences between
reliable and unreliable values. The metaphysicians, both religious and
non-religious, maintained that since values were eternal objects com–
manding absolute allegiance, scientific intelligence was not appro–
priate. Either a logic based on the coherent structure of the world or
the intuitions of direct insight were the only reliable instruments. Pro–
fessor A. C. Ewing, in a very able paper, defended the use of both
