176 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 



&quot; absolute &quot; results reduce to phenomenality, in 

 terms of the very immediate experience which is 

 infected with worthlessness, and on the basis of 

 preference, of selection that are declared to be 

 unreal ! Can the thing be done ? 



Anyway, the snubbed and excluded factor may 

 always reassert itself. The very pushing it out 

 of &quot; Reality &quot; may but add to its potential energy, 

 and invoke a more violent recoil. When affections 

 and aversions, with the beliefs in which they record 

 themselves and the efforts they exact, are re 

 duced to epiphenomena, dancing an idle attendance 

 upon a reality complete without them, to which 

 they vainly strive to accommodate themselves by 

 mirroring, then may the emotions flagrantly burst 

 forth with the claim that, as a friend of mine puts 

 it, reason is only a fig leaf for their nakedness. 

 When one man says that need, uncertainty, choice, 

 novelty, and strife have no place in Reality, which 

 is made up wholly of established things behaving 

 by foregone rules, then may another man be pro 

 voked to reply that all such fixities, whether named 

 atoms or God, whether they be fixtures of a sensa 

 tional, a positivistic, or an idealistic system, have 

 existence and import only in the problems, needs, 

 struggles, and instrumentalities of conscious 

 agents and patients. For home rule may be found 

 in the unwritten efficacious constitution of ex 

 perience. 



