The Will to Believe E-Book

William James

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Leseprobe

The Will to Believe

by William James

AND OTHER ESSAYS IN

POPULAR PHILOSOPHY

To

My Old Friend,

CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE,

  To whose philosophic comradeship in old times

  and to whose writings in more recent years

  I owe more incitement and help than

  I can express or repay.

{vii}

PREFACE.

At most of our American Colleges there are Clubs formed by the students

devoted to particular branches of learning; and these clubs have the

laudable custom of inviting once or twice a year some maturer scholar

to address them, the occasion often being made a public one.  I have

from time to time accepted such invitations, and afterwards had my

discourse printed in one or other of the Reviews.  It has seemed to me

that these addresses might now be worthy of collection in a volume, as

they shed explanatory light upon each other, and taken together express

a tolerably definite philosophic attitude in a very untechnical way.

Were I obliged to give a short name to the attitude in question, I

should call it that of _radical empiricism_, in spite of the fact that

such brief nicknames are nowhere more misleading than in philosophy.  I

say 'empiricism,' because it is contented to regard its most assured

conclusions concerning matters of fact as hypotheses liable to

modification in the course of future experience; and I say 'radical,'

because it treats the doctrine of monism itself as an hypothesis, and,

{viii} unlike so much of the half-way empiricism that is current under

the name of positivism or agnosticism or scientific naturalism, it does

not dogmatically affirm monism as something with which all experience

has got to square.  The difference between monism and pluralism is

perhaps the most pregnant of all the differences in philosophy.  _Primâ

facie_ the world is a pluralism; as we find it, its unity seems to be

that of any collection; and our higher thinking consists chiefly of an

effort to redeem it from that first crude form.  Postulating more unity

than the first experiences yield, we also discover more.  But absolute

unity, in spite of brilliant dashes in its direction, still remains

undiscovered, still remains a _Grenzbegriff_.  "Ever not quite" must be

the rationalistic philosopher's last confession concerning it.  After

all that reason can do has been done, there still remains the opacity

of the finite facts as merely given, with most of their peculiarities

mutually unmediated and unexplained.  To the very last, there are the

various 'points of view' which the philosopher must distinguish in

discussing the world; and what is inwardly clear from one point remains

a bare externality and datum to the other.  The negative, the alogical,

is never wholly banished.  Something--"call it fate, chance, freedom,

spontaneity, the devil, what you will"--is still wrong and other and

outside and unincluded, from _your_ point of view, even though you be

the greatest of philosophers.  Something is always mere fact and

_givenness_; and there may be in the whole universe no one point of

view extant from which this would not be found to be the case.

"Reason," as a gifted writer says, "is {ix} but one item in the

mystery; and behind the proudest consciousness that ever reigned,

reason and wonder blushed face to face.  The inevitable stales, while

doubt and hope are sisters.  Not unfortunately the universe is

wild,--game-flavored as a hawk's wing.  Nature is miracle all; the same

returns not save to bring the different.  The slow round of the

engraver's lathe gains but the breadth of a hair, but the difference is

distributed back over the whole curve, never an instant true,--ever not

quite."[1]

This is pluralism, somewhat rhapsodically expressed.  He who takes for

his hypothesis the notion that it is the permanent form of the world is

what I call a radical empiricist.  For him the crudity of experience

remains an eternal element thereof.  There is no possible point of view

from which the world can appear an absolutely single fact.  Real

possibilities, real indeterminations, real beginnings, real ends, real

evil, real crises, catastrophes, and escapes, a real God, and a real

moral life, just as common-sense conceives these things, may remain in

empiricism as conceptions which that philosophy gives up the attempt

either to 'overcome' or to reinterpret in monistic form.

Many of my professionally trained _confrères_ will smile at the

irrationalism of this view, and at the artlessness of my essays in

point of technical form.  But they should be taken as illustrations of

the radically empiricist attitude rather than as argumentations for its

validity.  That admits meanwhile of {x} being argued in as technical a

shape as any one can desire, and possibly I may be spared to do later a

share of that work.  Meanwhile these essays seem to light up with a

certain dramatic reality the attitude itself, and make it visible

alongside of the higher and lower dogmatisms between which in the pages

of philosophic history it has generally remained eclipsed from sight.

The first four essays are largely concerned with defending the

legitimacy of religious faith.  To some rationalizing readers such

advocacy will seem a sad misuse of one's professional position.

Mankind, they will say, is only too prone to follow faith

unreasoningly, and needs no preaching nor encouragement in that

direction.  I quite agree that what mankind at large most lacks is

criticism and caution, not faith.  Its cardinal weakness is to let

belief follow recklessly upon lively conception, especially when the

conception has instinctive liking at its back.  I admit, then, that

were I addressing the Salvation Army or a miscellaneous popular crowd

it would be a misuse of opportunity to preach the liberty of believing

as I have in these pages preached it.  What such audiences most need is

that their faiths should be broken up and ventilated, that the

northwest wind of science should get into them and blow their

sickliness and barbarism away.  But academic audiences, fed already on

science, have a very different need.  Paralysis of their native

capacity for faith and timorous _abulia_ in the religious field are

their special forms of mental weakness, brought about by the notion,

carefully instilled, that there is something called scientific evidence

by {xi} waiting upon which they shall escape all danger of shipwreck in

regard to truth.  But there is really no scientific or other method by

which men can steer safely between the opposite dangers of believing

too little or of believing too much.  To face such dangers is

apparently our duty, and to hit the right channel between them is the

measure of our wisdom as men.  It does not follow, because recklessness

may be a vice in soldiers, that courage ought never to be preached to

them.  What _should_ be preached is courage weighted with

responsibility,--such courage as the Nelsons and Washingtons never

failed to show after they had taken everything into account that might

tell against their success, and made every provision to minimize

disaster in case they met defeat.  I do not think that any one can

accuse me of preaching reckless faith.  I have preached the right of

the individual to indulge his personal faith at his personal risk.  I

have discussed the kinds of risk; I have contended that none of us

escape all of them; and I have only pleaded that it is better to face

them open-eyed than to act as if we did not know them to be there.

After all, though, you will say, Why such an ado about a matter

concerning which, however we may theoretically differ, we all

practically agree?  In this age of toleration, no scientist will ever

try actively to interfere with our religious faith, provided we enjoy

it quietly with our friends and do not make a public nuisance of it in

the market-place.  But it is just on this matter of the market-place

that I think the utility of such essays as mine may turn.  If {xii}

religious hypotheses about the universe be in order at all, then the

active faiths of individuals in them, freely expressing themselves in

life, are the experimental tests by which they are verified, and the

only means by which their truth or falsehood can be wrought out.  The

truest scientific hypothesis is that which, as we say, 'works' best;

and it can be no otherwise with religious hypotheses.  Religious

history proves that one hypothesis after another has worked ill, has

crumbled at contact with a widening knowledge of the world, and has

lapsed from the minds of men.  Some articles of faith, however, have

maintained themselves through every vicissitude, and possess even more

vitality to-day than ever before: it is for the 'science of religions'

to tell us just which hypotheses these are.  Meanwhile the freest

competition of the various faiths with one another, and their openest

application to life by their several champions, are the most favorable

conditions under which the survival of the fittest can proceed.  They

ought therefore not to lie hid each under its bushel, indulged-in

quietly with friends.  They ought to live in publicity, vying with each

other; and it seems to me that (the régime of tolerance once granted,

and a fair field shown) the scientist has nothing to fear for his own

interests from the liveliest possible state of fermentation in the

religious world of his time.  Those faiths will best stand the test

which adopt also his hypotheses, and make them integral elements of

their own.  He should welcome therefore every species of religious

agitation and discussion, so long as he is willing to allow that some

religious hypothesis _may_ be {xiii} true.  Of course there are plenty

of scientists who would deny that dogmatically, maintaining that

science has already ruled all possible religious hypotheses out of

court.  Such scientists ought, I agree, to aim at imposing privacy on

religious faiths, the public manifestation of which could only be a

nuisance in their eyes.  With all such scientists, as well as with

their allies outside of science, my quarrel openly lies; and I hope

that my book may do something to persuade the reader of their crudity,

and range him on my side.  Religious fermentation is always a symptom

of the intellectual vigor of a society; and it is only when they forget

that they are hypotheses and put on rationalistic and authoritative

pretensions, that our faiths do harm.  The most interesting and

valuable things about a man are his ideals and over-beliefs.  The same

is true of nations and historic epochs; and the excesses of which the

particular individuals and epochs are guilty are compensated in the

total, and become profitable to mankind in the long run.

The essay 'On some Hegelisms' doubtless needs an apology for the

superficiality with which it treats a serious subject.  It was written

as a squib, to be read in a college-seminary in Hegel's logic, several

of whose members, mature men, were devout champions of the dialectical

method.  My blows therefore were aimed almost entirely at that.  I

reprint the paper here (albeit with some misgivings), partly because I

believe the dialectical method to be wholly abominable when worked by

concepts alone, and partly because the essay casts some positive light

on the pluralist-empiricist point of view.

{xiv}

The paper on Psychical Research is added to the volume for convenience

and utility.  Attracted to this study some years ago by my love of

sportsmanlike fair play in science, I have seen enough to convince me

of its great importance, and I wish to gain for it what interest I can.

The American Branch of the Society is in need of more support, and if

my article draws some new associates thereto, it will have served its

turn.

Apology is also needed for the repetition of the same passage in two

essays (pp. 59-61 and 96-7, 100-1).  My excuse is that one cannot

always express the same thought in two ways that seem equally forcible,

so one has to copy one's former words.

The Crillon-quotation on page 62 is due to Mr. W. M. Salter (who

employed it in a similar manner in the 'Index' for August 24, 1882),

and the dream-metaphor on p. 174 is a reminiscence from some novel of

George Sand's--I forget which--read by me thirty years ago.

Finally, the revision of the essays has consisted almost entirely in

excisions.  Probably less than a page and a half in all of new matter

has been added.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY,

  CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS,

    December, 1896.

[1] B. P. Blood: The Flaw in Supremacy: Published by the Author,

Amsterdam, N. Y., 1893.

{x}

CONTENTS.

                                                                 PAGE

THE WILL TO BELIEVE  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .    1

  Hypotheses and options, 1.  Pascal's wager, 5.  Clifford's

  veto, 8.  Psychological causes of belief, 9.  Thesis of the

  Essay, 11.  Empiricism and absolutism, 12.  Objective certitude

  and its unattainability, 13. Two different sorts of risks in

  believing, 17.  Some risk unavoidable, 19.  Faith may bring

  forth its own verification, 22.  Logical conditions of religious

  belief, 25.

IS LIFE WORTH LIVING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   32

  Temperamental Optimism and Pessimism, 33.  How reconcile

  with life one bent on suicide? 38.  Religious melancholy and its

  cure, 39.  Decay of Natural Theology, 43.  Instinctive antidotes

  to pessimism, 46.  Religion involves belief in an unseen

  extension of the world, 51.  Scientific positivism, 52.  Doubt

  actuates conduct as much as belief does, 54.  To deny certain

  faiths is logically absurd, for they make their objects true, 56.

  Conclusion, 6l.

THE SENTIMENT OF RATIONALITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   63

  Rationality means fluent thinking, 63.  Simplification, 65.

  Clearness, 66.  Their antagonism, 66.  Inadequacy of the

  abstract, 68.  The thought of nonentity, 71.  Mysticism, 74.  Pure

  theory cannot banish wonder, 75.  The passage to practice may

  restore the feeling of rationality, 75.  Familiarity and

  expectancy, 76.  'Substance,' 80.  A rational world must appear

{xvi}

  congruous with our powers, 82.  But these differ from man to

  man, 88.  Faith is one of them, 90.  Inseparable from doubt, 95.

  May verify itself, 96.  Its rôle in ethics, 98.  Optimism and

  pessimism, 101.  Is this a moral universe?--what does the problem

  mean? 103.  Anaesthesia _versus_ energy, 107.  Active assumption

  necessary, 107.  Conclusion, 110.

REFLEX ACTION AND THEISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  111

  Prestige of Physiology, 112.  Plan of neural action, 113.  God

  the mind's adequate object, 116.  Contrast between world as

  perceived and as conceived, 118.  God, 120.  The mind's three

  departments, 123.  Science due to a subjective demand, 129.

  Theism a mean between two extremes, 134.  Gnosticism, 137.

  No intellection except for practical ends, 140.  Conclusion, 142.

THE DILEMMA OF DETERMINISM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  145

  Philosophies seek a rational world, 146.  Determinism and

  Indeterminism defined, 149.  Both are postulates of rationality,

  152.  Objections to chance considered, 153.  Determinism

  involves pessimism, 159.  Escape _via_ Subjectivism, 164.

  Subjectivism leads to corruption, 170.  A world with chance in

  it is morally the less irrational alternative, 176.  Chance not

  incompatible with an ultimate Providence, 180.

THE MORAL PHILOSOPHER AND THE MORAL LIFE . . . . . . . . . . . .  184

  The moral philosopher postulates a unified system, 185.

  Origin of moral judgments, 185.  Goods and ills are created by

  judgment?, 189.  Obligations are created by demands, 192.  The

  conflict of ideals, 198.  Its solution, 205.  Impossibility of an

  abstract system of Ethics, 208.  The easy-going and the

  strenuous mood, 211.  Connection between Ethics and Religion, 212.

GREAT MEN AND THEIR ENVIRONMENT  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  216

  Solidarity of causes in the world, 216.  The human mind abstracts

  in order to explain, 219.  Different cycles of operation in

  Nature, 220.  Darwin's distinction between causes that produce

  and causes that preserve a variation, 221.  Physiological causes

  produce, the environment only adopts or preserves, great men,

  225.  When adopted they become social ferments, 226.  Messrs.

{xvii}

  Spencer and Allen criticised, 232.  Messrs. Wallace and

  Gryzanowski quoted, 239.  The laws of history, 244.  Mental

  evolution, 245.  Analogy between original ideas and Darwin's

  accidental variations, 247.  Criticism of Spencer's views, 251.

THE IMPORTANCE OF INDIVIDUALS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  255

  Small differences may be important, 256.  Individual

  differences are important because they are the causes of social

  change, 259.  Hero-worship justified, 261.

ON SOME HEGELISMS  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  263

  The world appears as a pluralism, 264.  Elements of unity in

  the pluralism, 268.  Hegel's excessive claims, 273.  He makes of

  negation a bond of union, 273.  The principle of totality, 277.

  Monism and pluralism, 279.  The fallacy of accident in Hegel,

  280.  The good and the bad infinite, 284.  Negation, 286.

  Conclusion, 292.--Note on the Anaesthetic revelation, 294.

WHAT PSYCHICAL RESEARCH HAS ACCOMPLISHED . . . . . . . . . . . .  299

  The unclassified residuum, 299.  The Society for Psychical

  Research and its history, 303.  Thought-transference, 308.

  Gurney's work, 309.  The census of hallucinations, 312.

  Mediumship, 313.  The 'subliminal self,' 315.  'Science' and her

  counter-presumptions, 317.  The scientific character of

  Mr. Myers's work, 320.  The mechanical-impersonal view of life

  versus the personal-romantic view, 324.

INDEX  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  329

{1}

ESSAYS

IN

POPULAR PHILOSOPHY.

THE WILL TO BELIEVE.[1]

In the recently published Life by Leslie Stephen of his brother,

Fitz-James, there is an account of a school to which the latter went

when he was a boy.  The teacher, a certain Mr. Guest, used to converse

with his pupils in this wise: "Gurney, what is the difference between

justification and sanctification?--Stephen, prove the omnipotence of

God!" etc.  In the midst of our Harvard freethinking and indifference

we are prone to imagine that here at your good old orthodox College

conversation continues to be somewhat upon this order; and to show you

that we at Harvard have not lost all interest in these vital subjects,

I have brought with me to-night something like a sermon on

justification by faith to read to you,--I mean an essay in

justification _of_ faith, a defence of our right to adopt a believing

attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely

logical {2} intellect may not have been coerced.  'The Will to

Believe,' accordingly, is the title of my paper.

I have long defended to my own students the lawfulness of voluntarily

adopted faith; but as soon as they have got well imbued with the

logical spirit, they have as a rule refused to admit my contention to

be lawful philosophically, even though in point of fact they were

personally all the time chock-full of some faith or other themselves.

I am all the while, however, so profoundly convinced that my own

position is correct, that your invitation has seemed to me a good

occasion to make my statements more clear.  Perhaps your minds will be

more open than those with which I have hitherto had to deal.  I will be

as little technical as I can, though I must begin by setting up some

technical distinctions that will help us in the end.

I.

Let us give the name of _hypothesis_ to anything that may be proposed

to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead

wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either _live_ or _dead_.  A

live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to

whom it is proposed.  If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion

makes no electric connection with your nature,--it refuses to

scintillate with any credibility at all.  As an hypothesis it is

completely dead.  To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the

Mahdi's followers), the hypothesis is among the mind's possibilities:

it is alive.  This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis

are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the {3} individual

thinker.  They are measured by his willingness to act.  The maximum of

liveness in an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably.

Practically, that means belief; but there is some believing tendency

wherever there is willingness to act at all.

Next, let us call the decision between two hypotheses an _option_.

Options may be of several kinds.  They may be--1, _living_ or _dead_;

2, _forced_ or _avoidable_; 3, _momentous_ or _trivial_; and for our

purposes we may call an option a _genuine_ option when it is of the

forced, living, and momentous kind.

1.  A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones.  If

I say to you: "Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan," it is probably a

dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive.

But if I say: "Be an agnostic or be a Christian," it is otherwise:

trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small,

to your belief.

2.  Next, if I say to you: "Choose between going out with your umbrella

or without it," I do not offer you a genuine option, for it is not

forced.  You can easily avoid it by not going out at all.  Similarly,

if I say, "Either love me or hate me," "Either call my theory true or

call it false," your option is avoidable.  You may remain indifferent

to me, neither loving nor hating, and you may decline to offer any

judgment as to my theory.  But if I say, "Either accept this truth or

go without it," I put on you a forced option, for there is no standing

place outside of the alternative.  Every dilemma based on a complete

logical disjunction, with no possibility of not choosing, is an option

of this forced kind.

{4}

3.  Finally, if I were Dr. Nansen and proposed to you to join my North

Pole expedition, your option would be momentous; for this would

probably be your only similar opportunity, and your choice now would

either exclude you from the North Pole sort of immortality altogether

or put at least the chance of it into your hands.  He who refuses to

embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried

and failed.  _Per contra_, the option is trivial when the opportunity

is not unique, when the stake is insignificant, or when the decision is

reversible if it later prove unwise.  Such trivial options abound in

the scientific life.  A chemist finds an hypothesis live enough to

spend a year in its verification: he believes in it to that extent.

But if his experiments prove inconclusive either way, he is quit for

his loss of time, no vital harm being done.

It will facilitate our discussion if we keep all these distinctions

well in mind.

II.

The next matter to consider is the actual psychology of human opinion.

When we look at certain facts, it seems as if our passional and

volitional nature lay at the root of all our convictions.  When we look

at others, it seems as if they could do nothing when the intellect had

once said its say.  Let us take the latter facts up first.

Does it not seem preposterous on the very face of it to talk of our

opinions being modifiable at will?  Can our will either help or hinder

our intellect in its perceptions of truth?  Can we, by just willing it,

believe that Abraham Lincoln's existence is a myth, {5} and that the

portraits of him in McClure's Magazine are all of some one else?  Can

we, by any effort of our will, or by any strength of wish that it were

true, believe ourselves well and about when we are roaring with

rheumatism in bed, or feel certain that the sum of the two one-dollar

bills in our pocket must be a hundred dollars?  We can say any of these

things, but we are absolutely impotent to believe them; and of just

such things is the whole fabric of the truths that we do believe in

made up,--matters of fact, immediate or remote, as Hume said, and

relations between ideas, which are either there or not there for us if

we see them so, and which if not there cannot be put there by any

action of our own.

In Pascal's Thoughts there is a celebrated passage known in literature

as Pascal's wager.  In it he tries to force us into Christianity by

reasoning as if our concern with truth resembled our concern with the

stakes in a game of chance.  Translated freely his words are these: You

must either believe or not believe that God is--which will you do?

Your human reason cannot say.  A game is going on between you and the

nature of things which at the day of judgment will bring out either

heads or tails.  Weigh what your gains and your losses would be if you

should stake all you have on heads, or God's existence: if you win in

such case, you gain eternal beatitude; if you lose, you lose nothing at

all.  If there were an infinity of chances, and only one for God in

this wager, still you ought to stake your all on God; for though you

surely risk a finite loss by this procedure, any finite loss is

reasonable, even a certain one is reasonable, if there is but the

possibility of {6} infinite gain.  Go, then, and take holy water, and

have masses said; belief will come and stupefy your scruples,--_Cela

vous fera croire et vous abêtira_.  Why should you not?  At bottom,

what have you to lose?

You probably feel that when religious faith expresses itself thus, in

the language of the gaming-table, it is put to its last trumps.  Surely

Pascal's own personal belief in masses and holy water had far other

springs; and this celebrated page of his is but an argument for others,

a last desperate snatch at a weapon against the hardness of the

unbelieving heart.  We feel that a faith in masses and holy water

adopted wilfully after such a mechanical calculation would lack the

inner soul of faith's reality; and if we were ourselves in the place of

the Deity, we should probably take particular pleasure in cutting off

believers of this pattern from their infinite reward.  It is evident

that unless there be some pre-existing tendency to believe in masses

and holy water, the option offered to the will by Pascal is not a

living option.  Certainly no Turk ever took to masses and holy water on

its account; and even to us Protestants these means of salvation seem

such foregone impossibilities that Pascal's logic, invoked for them

specifically, leaves us unmoved.  As well might the Mahdi write to us,

saying, "I am the Expected One whom God has created in his effulgence.

You shall be infinitely happy if you confess me; otherwise you shall be

cut off from the light of the sun.  Weigh, then, your infinite gain if

I am genuine against your finite sacrifice if I am not!"  His logic

would be that of Pascal; but he would vainly use it on us, for the

hypothesis he offers us is dead.  No tendency to act on it exists in us

to any degree.

{7}

The talk of believing by our volition seems, then, from one point of

view, simply silly.  From another point of view it is worse than silly,

it is vile.  When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical

sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested

moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience

and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to

the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar;

how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness,--then how

besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes

blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to decide things

from out of his private dream!  Can we wonder if those bred in the

rugged and manly school of science should feel like spewing such

subjectivism out of their mouths?  The whole system of loyalties which

grow up in the schools of science go dead against its toleration; so

that it is only natural that those who have caught the scientific fever

should pass over to the opposite extreme, and write sometimes as if the

incorruptibly truthful intellect ought positively to prefer bitterness

and unacceptableness to the heart in its cup.

  It fortifies my soul to know

  That, though I perish, Truth is so--

sings Clough, while Huxley exclaims: "My only consolation lies in the

reflection that, however bad our posterity may become, so far as they

hold by the plain rule of not pretending to believe what they have no

reason to believe, because it may be to their advantage so to pretend

[the word 'pretend' is surely here redundant], they will not have

reached the {8} lowest depth of immorality."  And that delicious

_enfant terrible_ Clifford writes; "Belief is desecrated when given to

unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private

pleasure of the believer,...  Whoso would deserve well of his fellows

in this matter will guard the purity of his belief with a very

fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an

unworthy object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away....

If [a] belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence [even though

the belief be true, as Clifford on the same page explains] the pleasure

is a stolen one....  It is sinful because it is stolen in defiance of

our duty to mankind.  That duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefs

as from a pestilence which may shortly master our own body and then

spread to the rest of the town....  It is wrong always, everywhere, and

for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."

III.

All this strikes one as healthy, even when expressed, as by Clifford,

with somewhat too much of robustious pathos in the voice.  Free-will

and simple wishing do seem, in the matter of our credences, to be only

fifth wheels to the coach.  Yet if any one should thereupon assume that

intellectual insight is what remains after wish and will and

sentimental preference have taken wing, or that pure reason is what

then settles our opinions, he would fly quite as directly in the teeth

of the facts.

It is only our already dead hypotheses that our willing nature is

unable to bring to life again  But what has made them dead for us is

for the most part {9} a previous action of our willing nature of an

antagonistic kind.  When I say 'willing nature,' I do not mean only

such deliberate volitions as may have set up habits of belief that we

cannot now escape from,--I mean all such factors of belief as fear and

hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the

circumpressure of our caste and set.  As a matter of fact we find

ourselves believing, we hardly know how or why.  Mr. Balfour gives the

name of 'authority' to all those influences, born of the intellectual

climate, that make hypotheses possible or impossible for us, alive or

dead.  Here in this room, we all of us believe in molecules and the

conservation of energy, in democracy and necessary progress, in

Protestant Christianity and the duty of fighting for 'the doctrine of

the immortal Monroe,' all for no reasons worthy of the name.  We see

into these matters with no more inner clearness, and probably with much

less, than any disbeliever in them might possess.  His

unconventionality would probably have some grounds to show for its

conclusions; but for us, not insight, but the _prestige_ of the

opinions, is what makes the spark shoot from them and light up our

sleeping magazines of faith.  Our reason is quite satisfied, in nine

hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand of us, if it can

find a few arguments that will do to recite in case our credulity is

criticised by some one else.  Our faith is faith in some one else's

faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case.  Our belief

in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our

minds and it are made for each other,--what is it but a passionate

affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up?  We want

to have a truth; we want to believe that our {10} experiments and

studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better

position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our

thinking lives.  But if a pyrrhonistic sceptic asks us _how we know_

all this, can our logic find a reply?  No! certainly it cannot.  It is

just one volition against another,--we willing to go in for life upon a

trust or assumption which he, for his part, does not care to make.[2]

As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no

use.  Clifford's cosmic emotions find no use for Christian feelings.

Huxley belabors the bishops because there is no use for sacerdotalism

in his scheme of life.  Newman, on the contrary, goes over to Romanism,

and finds all sorts of reasons good for staying there, because a

priestly system is for him an organic need and delight.  Why do so few

'scientists' even look at the evidence for telepathy, so called?

Because they think, as a leading biologist, now dead, once said to me,

that even if such a thing were true, scientists ought to band together

to keep it suppressed and concealed.  It would undo the uniformity of

Nature and all sorts of other things without which scientists cannot

carry on their pursuits.  But if this very man had been shown something

which as a scientist he might _do_ with telepathy, he might not only

have examined the evidence, but even have found it good enough.  This

very law which the logicians would impose upon us--if I may give the

name of logicians to those who would rule out our willing nature

here--is based on nothing but their own natural wish to exclude all

elements for {11} which they, in their professional quality of

logicians, can find no use.

Evidently, then, our non-intellectual nature does influence our

convictions.  There are passional tendencies and volitions which run

before and others which come after belief, and it is only the latter

that are too late for the fair; and they are not too late when the

previous passional work has been already in their own direction.

Pascal's argument, instead of being powerless, then seems a regular

clincher, and is the last stroke needed to make our faith in masses and

holy water complete.  The state of things is evidently far from simple;

and pure insight and logic, whatever they might do ideally, are not the

only things that really do produce our creeds.

IV.

Our next duty, having recognized this mixed-up state of affairs, is to

ask whether it be simply reprehensible and pathological, or whether, on

the contrary, we must treat it as a normal element in making up our

minds.  The thesis I defend is, briefly stated, this:  _Our passional

nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between

propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature

be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such

circumstances, "Do not decide, but leave the question open," is itself

a passional decision,--just like deciding yes or no,--and is attended

with the same risk of losing the truth_.  The thesis thus abstractly

expressed will, I trust, soon become quite clear.  But I must first

indulge in a bit more of preliminary work.

{12}

V.

It will be observed that for the purposes of this discussion we are on

'dogmatic' ground,--ground, I mean, which leaves systematic

philosophical scepticism altogether out of account.  The postulate that

there is truth, and that it is the destiny of our minds to attain it,

we are deliberately resolving to make, though the sceptic will not make

it.  We part company with him, therefore, absolutely, at this point.

But the faith that truth exists, and that our minds can find it, may be

held in two ways.  We may talk of the _empiricist_ way and of the

_absolutist_ way of believing in truth.  The absolutists in this matter

say that we not only can attain to knowing truth, but we can _know

when_ we have attained to knowing it; while the empiricists think that

although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know when.  To _know_

is one thing, and to know for certain _that_ we know is another.  One

may hold to the first being possible without the second; hence the

empiricists and the absolutists, although neither of them is a sceptic

in the usual philosophic sense of the term, show very different degrees

of dogmatism in their lives.

If we look at the history of opinions, we see that the empiricist

tendency has largely prevailed in science, while in philosophy the

absolutist tendency has had everything its own way.  The characteristic

sort of happiness, indeed, which philosophies yield has mainly

consisted in the conviction felt by each successive school or system

that by it bottom-certitude had been attained.  "Other philosophies are

collections of opinions, mostly false; _my_ philosophy {13} gives

standing-ground forever,"--who does not recognize in this the key-note

of every system worthy of the name?  A system, to be a system at all,

must come as a _closed_ system, reversible in this or that detail,

perchance, but in its essential features never!

Scholastic orthodoxy, to which one must always go when one wishes to

find perfectly clear statement, has beautifully elaborated this

absolutist conviction in a doctrine which it calls that of 'objective

evidence.'  If, for example, I am unable to doubt that I now exist

before you, that two is less than three, or that if all men are mortal

then I am mortal too, it is because these things illumine my intellect

irresistibly.  The final ground of this objective evidence possessed by

certain propositions is the _adaequatio intellectûs nostri cum rê_.

The certitude it brings involves an _aptitudinem ad extorquendum certum

assensum_ on the part of the truth envisaged, and on the side of the

subject a _quietem in cognitione_, when once the object is mentally

received, that leaves no possibility of doubt behind; and in the whole

transaction nothing operates but the _entitas ipsa_ of the object and

the _entitas ipsa_ of the mind.  We slouchy modern thinkers dislike to

talk in Latin,--indeed, we dislike to talk in set terms at all; but at

bottom our own state of mind is very much like this whenever we

uncritically abandon ourselves: You believe in objective evidence, and

I do.  Of some things we feel that we are certain: we know, and we know

that we do know.  There is something that gives a click inside of us, a

bell that strikes twelve, when the hands of our mental clock have swept

the dial and meet over the meridian hour.  The greatest empiricists

among us are only empiricists on reflection: when {14} left to their

instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes.  When the Cliffords

tell us how sinful it is to be Christians on such 'insufficient

evidence,' insufficiency is really the last thing they have in mind.

For them the evidence is absolutely sufficient, only it makes the other

way.  They believe so completely in an anti-christian order of the

universe that there is no living option: Christianity is a dead

hypothesis from the start.

VI.

But now, since we are all such absolutists by instinct, what in our

quality of students of philosophy ought we to do about the fact?  Shall

we espouse and indorse it?  Or shall we treat it as a weakness of our

nature from which we must free ourselves, if we can?

I sincerely believe that the latter course is the only one we can

follow as reflective men.  Objective evidence and certitude are

doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and

dream-visited planet are they found?  I am, therefore, myself a

complete empiricist so far as my theory of human knowledge goes.  I

live, to be sure, by the practical faith that we must go on

experiencing and thinking over our experience, for only thus can our

opinions grow more true; but to hold any one of them--I absolutely do

not care which--as if it never could be reinterpretable or corrigible,

I believe to be a tremendously mistaken attitude, and I think that the

whole history of philosophy will bear me out.  There is but one

indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic

scepticism itself leaves {15} standing,--the truth that the present

phenomenon of consciousness exists.  That, however, is the bare

starting-point of knowledge, the mere admission of a stuff to be

philosophized about.  The various philosophies are but so many attempts

at expressing what this stuff really is.  And if we repair to our

libraries what disagreement do we discover!  Where is a certainly true

answer found?  Apart from abstract propositions of comparison (such as

two and two are the same as four), propositions which tell us nothing

by themselves about concrete reality, we find no proposition ever

regarded by any one as evidently certain that has not either been

called a falsehood, or at least had its truth sincerely questioned by

some one else.  The transcending of the axioms of geometry, not in play

but in earnest, by certain of our contemporaries (as Zöllner and

Charles H. Hinton), and the rejection of the whole Aristotelian logic

by the Hegelians, are striking instances in point.

No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon.

Some make the criterion external to the moment of perception, putting

it either in revelation, the _consensus gentium_, the instincts of the

heart, or the systematized experience of the race.  Others make the

perceptive moment its own test,--Descartes, for instance, with his

clear and distinct ideas guaranteed by the veracity of God; Reid with

his 'common-sense;' and Kant with his forms of synthetic judgment _a

priori_.  The inconceivability of the opposite; the capacity to be

verified by sense; the possession of complete organic unity or

self-relation, realized when a thing is its own other,--are standards

which, in turn, have been used.  The much {16} lauded objective

evidence is never triumphantly there, it is a mere aspiration or

_Grenzbegriff_, marking the infinitely remote ideal of our thinking

life.  To claim that certain truths now possess it, is simply to say

that when you think them true and they _are_ true, then their evidence

is objective, otherwise it is not.  But practically one's conviction

that the evidence one goes by is of the real objective brand, is only

one more subjective opinion added to the lot.  For what a contradictory

array of opinions have objective evidence and absolute certitude been

claimed!  The world is rational through and through,--its existence is

an ultimate brute fact; there is a personal God,--a personal God is

inconceivable; there is an extra-mental physical world immediately

known,--the mind can only know its own ideas; a moral imperative

exists,--obligation is only the resultant of desires; a permanent

spiritual principle is in every one,--there are only shifting states of

mind; there is an endless chain of causes,--there is an absolute first

cause; an eternal necessity,--a freedom; a purpose,--no purpose; a

primal One,--a primal Many; a universal continuity,--an essential

discontinuity in things; an infinity,--no infinity.  There is

this,--there is that; there is indeed nothing which some one has not

thought absolutely true, while his neighbor deemed it absolutely false;

and not an absolutist among them seems ever to have considered that the

trouble may all the time be essential, and that the intellect, even

with truth directly in its grasp, may have no infallible signal for

knowing whether it be truth or no.  When, indeed, one remembers that

the most striking practical application to life of the doctrine of

objective certitude has been {17} the conscientious labors of the Holy

Office of the Inquisition, one feels less tempted than ever to lend the

doctrine a respectful ear.

But please observe, now, that when as empiricists we give up the

doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or

hope of truth itself.  We still pin our faith on its existence, and

still believe that we gain an ever better position towards it by

systematically continuing to roll up experiences and think.  Our great

difference from the scholastic lies in the way we face.  The strength

of his system lies in the principles, the origin, the _terminus a quo_

of his thought; for us the strength is in the outcome, the upshot, the

_terminus ad quem_.  Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to

decide.  It matters not to an empiricist from what quarter an

hypothesis may come to him: he may have acquired it by fair means or by

foul; passion may have whispered or accident suggested it; but if the

total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is what he means

by its being true.

VII.

One more point, small but important, and our preliminaries are done.

There are two ways of looking at our duty in the matter of

opinion,--ways entirely different, and yet ways about whose difference

the theory of knowledge seems hitherto to have shown very little

concern.  _We must know the truth_; and _we must avoid error_,--these

are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are

not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two

separable laws.  Although it may indeed happen that when we believe the

truth _A_, we escape {18} as an incidental consequence from believing

the falsehood _B_, it hardly ever happens that by merely disbelieving

_B_ we necessarily believe _A_.  We may in escaping _B_ fall into

believing other falsehoods, _C_ or _D_, just as bad as _B_; or we may

escape _B_ by not believing anything at all, not even _A_.

Believe truth!  Shun error!--these, we see, are two materially

different laws; and by choosing between them we may end by coloring

differently our whole intellectual life.  We may regard the chase for

truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may,

on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and

let truth take its chance.  Clifford, in the instructive passage which

I have quoted, exhorts us to the latter course.  Believe nothing, he

tells us, keep your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing it

on insufficient evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies.  You,

on the other hand, may think that the risk of being in error is a very

small matter when compared with the blessings of real knowledge, and be

ready to be duped many times in your investigation rather than postpone

indefinitely the chance of guessing true.  I myself find it impossible

to go with Clifford.  We must remember that these feelings of our duty

about either truth or error are in any case only expressions of our

passional life.  Biologically considered, our minds are as ready to

grind out falsehood as veracity, and he who says, "Better go without

belief forever than believe a lie!" merely shows his own preponderant

private horror of becoming a dupe.  He may be critical of many of his

desires and fears, but this fear he slavishly obeys.  He cannot imagine

any one questioning its binding force.  For my own part, I {19} have

also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than

being duped may happen to a man in this world: so Clifford's

exhortation has to my ears a thoroughly fantastic sound.  It is like a

general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle

forever than to risk a single wound.  Not so are victories either over

enemies or over nature gained.  Our errors are surely not such awfully

solemn things.  In a world where we are so certain to incur them in

spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier

than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.  At any rate, it seems

the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher.

VIII.

And now, after all this introduction, let us go straight at our

question.  I have said, and now repeat it, that not only as a matter of

fact do we find our passional nature influencing us in our opinions,

but that there are some options between opinions in which this

influence must be regarded both as an inevitable and as a lawful

determinant of our choice.

I fear here that some of you my hearers will begin to scent danger, and

lend an inhospitable ear.  Two first steps of passion you have indeed

had to admit as necessary,--we must think so as to avoid dupery, and we

must think so as to gain truth; but the surest path to those ideal

consummations, you will probably consider, is from now onwards to take

no further passional step.

Well, of course, I agree as far as the facts will allow.  Wherever the

option between losing truth and gaining it is not momentous, we can

throw the {20} chance of _gaining truth_ away, and at any rate save

ourselves from any chance of _believing falsehood_, by not making up

our minds at all till objective evidence has come.  In scientific

questions, this is almost always the case; and even in human affairs in

general, the need of acting is seldom so urgent that a false belief to

act on is better than no belief at all.  Law courts, indeed, have to

decide on the best evidence attainable for the moment, because a

judge's duty is to make law as well as to ascertain it, and (as a

learned judge once said to me) few cases are worth spending much time

over: the great thing is to have them decided on _any_ acceptable

principle, and got out of the way.  But in our dealings with objective

nature we obviously are recorders, not makers, of the truth; and

decisions for the mere sake of deciding promptly and getting on to the

next business would be wholly out of place.  Throughout the breadth of

physical nature facts are what they are quite independently of us, and

seldom is there any such hurry about them that the risks of being duped

by believing a premature theory need be faced.  The questions here are

always trivial options, the hypotheses are hardly living (at any rate

not living for us spectators), the choice between believing truth or

falsehood is seldom forced.  The attitude of sceptical balance is

therefore the absolutely wise one if we would escape mistakes.  What

difference, indeed, does it make to most of us whether we have or have

not a theory of the Röntgen rays, whether we believe or not in

mind-stuff, or have a conviction about the causality of conscious

states?  It makes no difference.  Such options are not forced on us.

On every account it is better not to make them, but still keep weighing

reasons _pro et contra_ with an indifferent hand.

{21}

I speak, of course, here of the purely judging mind.  For purposes of

discovery such indifference is to be less highly recommended, and

science would be far less advanced than she is if the passionate

desires of individuals to get their own faiths confirmed had been kept

out of the game.  See for example the sagacity which Spencer and

Weismann now display.  On the other hand, if you want an absolute

duffer in an investigation, you must, after all, take the man who has

no interest whatever in its results: he is the warranted incapable, the

positive fool.  The most useful investigator, because the most

sensitive observer, is always he whose eager interest in one side of

the question is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he become

deceived.[3]  Science has organized this nervousness into a regular

_technique_, her so-called method of verification; and she has fallen

so deeply in love with the method that one may even say she has ceased

to care for truth by itself at all.  It is only truth as technically

verified that interests her.  The truth of truths might come in merely

affirmative form, and she would decline to touch it.  Such truth as

that, she might repeat with Clifford, would be stolen in defiance of

her duty to mankind.  Human passions, however, are stronger than

technical rules.  "Le coeur a ses raisons," as Pascal says, "que la

raison ne connaît pas;" and however indifferent to all but the bare

rules of the game the umpire, the abstract intellect, may be, the

concrete players who furnish him the materials to judge of are usually,

each one of them, in love with some pet 'live hypothesis' of his own.

Let us agree, however, that wherever there is no forced option, the

{22} dispassionately judicial intellect with no pet hypothesis, saving

us, as it does, from dupery at any rate, ought to be our ideal.

The question next arises: Are there not somewhere forced options in our

speculative questions, and can we (as men who may be interested at

least as much in positively gaining truth as in merely escaping dupery)

always wait with impunity till the coercive evidence shall have

arrived?  It seems _a priori_ improbable that the truth should be so

nicely adjusted to our needs and powers as that.  In the great

boarding-house of nature, the cakes and the butter and the syrup seldom

come out so even and leave the plates so clean.  Indeed, we should view

them with scientific suspicion if they did.

IX.

_Moral questions_ immediately present themselves as questions whose

solution cannot wait for sensible proof.  A moral question is a

question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be

good if it did exist.  Science can tell us what exists; but to compare

the _worths_, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must

consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart.  Science herself

consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite

ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme

goods for man.  Challenge the statement, and science can only repeat it

oracularly, or else prove it by showing that such ascertainment and

correction bring man all sorts of other goods which man's heart in turn

declares.  The question of having moral beliefs at all or not having

them is decided by {23} our will.  Are our moral preferences true or

false, or are they only odd biological phenomena, making things good or

bad for _us_, but in themselves indifferent?  How can your pure

intellect decide?  If your heart does not _want_ a world of moral

reality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in one.

Mephistophelian scepticism, indeed, will satisfy the head's

play-instincts much better than any rigorous idealism can.  Some men

(even at the student age) are so naturally cool-hearted that the

moralistic hypothesis never has for them any pungent life, and in their

supercilious presence the hot young moralist always feels strangely ill

at ease.  The appearance of knowingness is on their side, of naïveté

and gullibility on his.  Yet, in the inarticulate heart of him, he

clings to it that he is not a dupe, and that there is a realm in which

(as Emerson says) all their wit and intellectual superiority is no

better than the cunning of a fox.  Moral scepticism can no more be

refuted or proved by logic than intellectual scepticism can.  When we

stick to it that there _is_ truth (be it of either kind), we do so with

our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results.  The

sceptic with his whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which

of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows.

Turn now from these wide questions of good to a certain class of

questions of fact, questions concerning personal relations, states of

mind between one man and another.  _Do you like me or not?_--for

example.  Whether you do or not depends, in countless instances, on

whether I meet you half-way, am willing to assume that you must like

me, and show you trust and expectation.  The previous faith on my part

in your liking's existence is in such cases what makes {24} your liking

come.  But if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have

objective evidence, until you shall have done something apt, as the

absolutists say, _ad extorquendum assensum meum_, ten to one your

liking never comes.  How many women's hearts are vanquished by the mere

sanguine insistence of some man that they _must_ love him! he will not

consent to the hypothesis that they cannot.  The desire for a certain

kind of truth here brings about that special truth's existence; and so

it is in innumerable cases of other sorts.  Who gains promotions,

boons, appointments, but the man in whose life they are seen to play

the part of live hypotheses, who discounts them, sacrifices other

things for their sake before they have come, and takes risks for them

in advance?  His faith acts on the powers above him as a claim, and

creates its own verification.

A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is

because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the

other members will simultaneously do theirs.  Wherever a desired result

is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its

existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in

one another of those immediately concerned.  A government, an army, a

commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on

this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing

is even attempted.  A whole train of passengers (individually brave

enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter

can count on one another, while each passenger fears that if he makes a

movement of resistance, he will be shot before any one else backs him

up.  If we believed that the whole car-full would rise {25} at once

with us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would never

even be attempted.  There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at

all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming.  _And where faith

in a fact can help create the fact_, that would be an insane logic