Now, we may express this same result in another and an even more significant way. To say that reality is essentially one with immediate feeling, is only another way of saying that the real is essentially that which is of significance for the attainment of purpose. For feeling is essentially teleological, as we may see even in the case of simple pleasure and pain. Amid all the confusion and complexity of the psychological problems which can be raised about these most simple forms of feeling, one thing seems clear, that pleasure is essentially connected with unimpeded, pain with impeded, discharge of nervous activity. Pleasure seems to be inseparable from successful, pain from thwarted or baffled, tendency.[33] And if we consider not so much the abstractions “pleasure in general,” “pain in general,” as a specific pleasure or pain, or again a complex emotional state, the case seems even clearer. Only a being whose behaviour is consciously or unconsciously determined by ends or purposes seems capable of finding existence, according as those purposes are advanced or hindered, pleasant or painful, glad or wretched, good or bad. Hence our original decision that reality is to be found in what is immediately experienced, as opposed to what is severed by subsequent reflective analysis from its union with feeling, and our later statement that that is real of which we are constrained to take account for the fulfilment of our purposes, fully coincide. This point may perhaps be made clearer by a concrete example. Suppose that some purpose of more or less importance requires my immediate presence in the next town. Then the various routes by which I may reach that town become at once circumstances of which I have to take note and to which I must adapt my conduct, if my important purpose is not to be frustrated. It may be that there are alternative routes, or it may be that there is only one. In any case, and this is fundamental for us, the number of alternatives which my purpose leaves open to me will be strictly limited. I can, as a matter of mere mathematical possibility, go from A to B in an indefinite number of ways. If I have to make the journey in actual fact on a given day, and with existing means of transit, the theoretical infinity of possible ways is speedily reduced to, at the outside, two or three. For simplicity’s sake we will consider the case in which there happens to be only one available way. This one available way is “real” to me, as contrasted with the infinity of mathematically possible routes, precisely because the execution of my purpose restricts me to it and no other. The mathematically possible infinity of routes remain unreal just because they are thought of as all alike mere possibilities; no actual purpose limits me to some one or some definite number out of the infinity, and compels me to adapt myself to their peculiarities or fail of my end. They are “imaginary” or