_Pupil._ What you say calls to mind something of Chesterton’s that I read recently: “I agree with the pragmatists that apparent objective truth is not the whole matter; that there is an authoritative need to believe the things that are necessary to the human mind. But I say that one of those necessities precisely is a belief in objective truth. Pragmatism is a matter of human needs and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.” You would say, if I understand you aright, that to fall back upon a supposed necessity of the “human mind” to believe in certain absolute truths, is to evade a proper demand for testing the human mind and all its works. _Teacher._ My son, I am glad to leave the last word with you. This _enfant terrible_ of intellectualism has revealed that the chief objection of absolutists to the pragmatic doctrine of the personal (or “subjective”) factor in belief is that the pragmatist has spilled the personal milk in the absolutist’s cocoanut. BELIEFS AND EXISTENCES[26] I Beliefs look both ways, towards persons and toward things. They are the original Mr. Facing-both-ways. They form or judge--justify or condemn--the agents who entertain them and who insist upon them. They are of things whose immediate meanings form their content. To believe is to ascribe value, impute meaning, assign import. The collection and interaction of these appraisals and assessments is the world of the common man,--that is, of man as an individual and not as a professional being or class specimen. Thus things are characters, not mere entities; they behave and respond and provoke. In the behavior that exemplifies and tests their character, they help and hinder; disturb and pacify; resist and comply; are dismal and mirthful, orderly and deformed, queer and commonplace; they agree and disagree; are better and worse. Thus the human world, whether or no it have core and axis, has presence and transfiguration. It means here and now, not in some transcendent sphere. It moves, of itself, to varied incremental meaning, not to some far off event, whether divine or diabolic. Such movement constitutes conduct, for conduct is the working out of the commitments of belief. That believed better is held to, asserted, affirmed, acted upon. The moments of its crucial fulfilment are the natural “transcendentals”; the decisive, the critical, standards of further estimation, selection, and rejection. That believed worse is fled, resisted, transformed into an instrument for the better. Characters, in being condensations of belief, are thus at once the reminders and the prognostications of weal and woe; they concrete and they regulate the terms of effective apprehension and appropriation of things. This general regulative function is what we mean in calling them characters, forms.