170 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 



behave and respond and provoke. In the behavior 

 that exemplifies and tests their character, they 

 help and hinder; disturb and pacify; resist and 

 comply; are dismal and mirthful, orderly and 

 deformed, queer and commonplace ; they agree and 

 disagree; are better and worse. 



Thus the human world, whether or no it have 

 core and axis, has presence and transfiguration. 

 It means here and now, not in some transcendent 

 sphere. It moves, of itself, to varied incremental 

 meaning, not to some far off event, whether divine 

 or diabolic. Such movement constitutes conduct, 

 for conduct is the working out of the commitments 

 of belief. That believed better is held to, asserted, 

 affirmed, acted upon. The moments of its crucial 

 fulfilment are the natural &quot; transcendentals &quot; ; the 

 decisive, the critical, standards of further estima 

 tion, selection, and rejection. That believed worse 

 is fled, resisted, transformed into an instrument for 

 the better. Characters, in being condensations of 

 belief, are thus at once the reminders and the 

 prognostications of weal and woe ; they concrete 

 and they regulate the terms of effective apprehen 

 sion and appropriation of things. This general 

 regulative function is what we mean in calling 

 them characters, forms. 



For beliefs, made in the course of existence, 

 reciprocate by making existence still farther, by 

 developing it. Beliefs are not made by existence 



