188 BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES 



them as methods in the same active experience. 

 It all comes to experience personally conducted 

 and personally consummated. 



Let consciousness of these facts dawn a little 

 more brightly over the horizon of epistemological 

 prejudices, and it will be seen that nothing pre 

 vents admitting the genuineness both of thinking 

 activities and of their characteristic results, ex 

 cept the notion that belief itself is not a genuine 

 ingredient of existence a notion which itself is not 

 only a belief, but a belief which, unlike the convic 

 tions of the common man and the hypotheses of 

 science, finds its proud proof in the fact that it 

 does not demean itself so unworthily as to work. 



Once believe that beliefs themselves are as 

 &quot; real &quot; as anything else can ever be, and we have 

 a world in which uncertainty, doubtfulness, really 

 inhere ; and in which personal attitudes and re 

 sponses are real both in their own distinctive ex 

 istence, and as the only ways in which an as yet 

 undetermined factor of reality takes on shape, 

 meaning, value, truth. If &quot; to wilful men the in 

 juries that they themselves procure, must be their 

 schoolmasters &quot; and all beliefs are wilful then 

 by the same token the propitious evolutions of 

 meaning, which wilful men secure to an expectant 

 universe, must be their compensation and their 

 justification. In a doubtful and needy universe 

 elements must be beggarly, and the development 



