172 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 



by eating it, just as there is digestion only for 

 life as well as by life. 



So far the standpoint of the common man. 

 But the professional man, the philosopher, has been 

 largely occupied in a systematic effort to discredit 

 the standpoint of the common man, that is, to 

 disable belief as an ultimately valid principle. Phi 

 losophy is shocked at the frank, almost brutal, 

 evocation of beliefs by and in natural existence, 

 like witches out of a desert heath at a mode of 

 production which is neither logical, nor physical, 

 nor psychological, but just natural, empirical. 

 For modern philosophy is, as every college senior 

 recites, epistemology ; and epistemology, as per 

 haps our books and lectures sometimes forget to tell 

 the senior, has absorbed Stoic dogma. Passionless 

 imperturbability, absolute detachment, complete 

 subjection to a ready-made and finished reality 

 physical it may be, mental it may be, logical it may 

 be is its professed ideal. Forswearing the reality 

 of affection, and the gallantry of adventure, the 

 genuineness of the incomplete, the tentative, it has 

 taken an oath of allegiance to Reality, objective, 

 universal, complete ; made perhaps of atoms, per 

 haps of sensations, perhaps of logical meanings. 

 This ready-made reality, already including every 

 thing, must of course swallow and absorb belief, 

 must produce it psychologically, mechanically, or 

 logically, according to its own nature ; must in any 



