Secular humanism has been described as ‘hubristic’, as we have seen, and I hope that I have countered that assessment by denying that humanists must conceive the moral life as a product, or the bare affirmation, of ‘the will’ and, therefore, as much liable to change as its essentially fickle dispositions. Such criticism tends to go with the further claim that the moral life requires a ‘transcendent source’ not available to the humanist, and I have sought to counter that by the claim that a viable notion of ‘transcendence’ may be found in the distinction between paramartha-satya and samvrti-satya, where the latter conceals what the former reveals – a perspective on the human and the natural world that emerges when the klesas recede.

Earlier in this essay, I endorsed a remark of Nicholas Lash that the various religions should better be thought of as ‘schools of wisdom’, but I wanted to include humanism within this rubric.