making of truth is itself, in their eyes, the making of reality. Secondly, it is another familiar characteristic of Pragmatism that, although it fails to give a satisfying account either of truth or reality, the one thing of which it is for ever talking of, as fundamental to our entire life as men, is _belief_.[117] This is the one thing upon which it makes everything else to hang--all knowledge and all action and all theory. And it is, of course, its manifest acceptance of belief as a fundamental principle of our human life, and as a true measure of reality, that has given to Pragmatism its religious atmosphere.[118] It is this that has made it such a welcome and such a credible creed to so many disillusioned and free-thinking people to-day, as well as to so many of the faithful and the orthodox. “For, in principle, Pragmatism overcomes the old antithesis of Faith and Reason. It shows, on the one hand, that faith must underlie all reason and pervade it, nay, that at bottom rationality itself is the supremest postulate of Faith.”[119] “Truth,” again, as James reminds us, “lives in fact for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs [how literally true this is!] pass so long as nobody challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them.”[120] Now it requires but the reflection of a moment to see that the various facts and considerations upon which the two last quotations, and the general devotion of Pragmatism to “belief,” both repose, are all distinctly in favour of the acceptability of Pragmatism at the present time. There is nothing in which people in general are more interested at the beginning of this twentieth century than in belief. It is this, for example, that explains such a thing as the great success to-day in our English-speaking world of such an enterprise as the _Hibbert Journal of Philosophy and Religion_, or the still greater phenomenon of the world-wide interest of the hour in the subject of comparative religion. Most modern men, the writer is inclined to think, believe[121] a great deal more than they know, the chief difficulty about this fact being that there is no recognized way of expressing it in our science or in our philosophy, or of acting upon it in our behaviour in society. It is, however, only the undue prominence of mathematical and physical science since the time of Descartes[122] that has made evidence and demonstration the main consideration of philosophy instead of belief, man’s true and fundamental estimate of reality.