BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 187 



the long damnation and longer neglect to which 

 the principle of belief has been subjected. The 

 whole procedure of thinking as developed in those 

 extensive and intensive inquiries that constitute 

 the sciences, is but rendering into a systematic 

 technique, into an art deliberately and delightfully 

 pursued, the rougher and cruder means by which 

 practical human beings have in all ages worked 

 out the implications of their beliefs, tested them, 

 and endeavored in the interests of economy, effi 

 ciency, and freedom, to render them coherent with 

 one another. Belief, sheer, direct, unmitigated 

 belief, reappears as the working hypothesis ; 

 action that at once develops and tests belief re 

 appears in experimentation, deduction, demon 

 stration ; while the machinery of universals, axioms, 

 a priori truths, etc., becomes a systematization of 

 the way in which men have always worked out, in 

 anticipation of overt action, the implications of 

 their beliefs, with a view to revising them, in the 

 interests of obviating unfavorable, and securing 

 welcome consequences. Observation, with its ma 

 chinery of sensations, measurements, etc., is the 

 resurrection of the way in which agents have always 

 faced and tried to define the problems that face 

 them ; truth is the union of abstract postulated 

 meanings and of concrete brute facts in a way 

 that circumvents the latter by judging them from 

 a new standpoint, while it tests concepts by using 



