Preface

The Ethics of Belief
 William Kingdon Clifford

The Will to Believe
 William James

An Examination of ‘The Will to Believe’
 A.J. Burger
 

    People have long been interested in the circumstances under which it is appropriate to believe.  Often, the source of this interest is the desire to believe something for which one has insufficient evidence.  Extensive excerpts of the following essays by William Kingdon Clifford and William James are often reprinted in anthologies.  This is sufficient proof of the enduring interest in this subject, and of the importance of these particular essays.  But since they are excerpts, and since Clifford’s Lectures and Essays is no longer in print, there is a need for the present book.  Indeed, usually the excerpts from Clifford’s essay come exclusively from part one of his three-part essay.  And James’ essay is usually reprinted without parts II, III, V, VI, and VII, with the other parts not reprinted in their entirety.  Following are “The Ethics of Belief” and “The Will to Believe” in their entirety, along with added explanatory notes.  Following these essays is “An Examination of ‘The Will to Believe.’”  It is not the first examination of that work;{1} however, it is, I believe, one that adds a unique contribution to the discussion.  The reader is advised to read the essays in the order presented here (which is the order in which they were written), as James’ essay is a response to Clifford’s essay, as well as to ideas of a like nature; and my own essay is a response to James’ essay.
    It is to be hoped that the present volume will be useful to anyone interested in the question of whether it is appropriate to have faith—that is, believe in the absence of evidence.  Indeed, even if my own essay is not as useful as I believe it to be, the availability of Clifford’s and James’ essays, reprinted in their entirety, in one convenient book, should prove worthwhile.

    The text of William Kingdon Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief” is based upon the first edition of Lectures and Essays, Macmillan and Co., 1879, edited by Leslie Stephen and Frederick Pollock.  The text of William James’ “The Will to Believe” is based upon the first edition of The Will to Believe and other essays in popular philosophy, Longmans, Green and Co., 1897.  In the essays by Clifford and James, the added footnotes are indicated by “—AJB”.  This is the first printing of “An Examination of ‘The Will to Believe,’” which was originally written in 1994, and has been subsequently revised.
 
 

        The text of William Kingdon Clifford’s “The Ethics of Belief” is based upon the second edition of Lectures and Essays, Macmillan and Co., 1886, edited by Leslie Stephen and Frederick Pollock.  The text of William James’ “The Will to Believe” is based upon the Dover reprint of The Will to Believe and other essays in popular philosophy, which is said to be “an unabridged and unaltered republication of the first edition” printed by Longmans, Green & Co. in 1897, as I was unable to obtain an original when this was first put on the internet in 1997.  My essay, however, has been updated.

A SHIPOWNER was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship.  He knew that she was old, and not over-well built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs.  Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy.  These doubts preyed upon his mind and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him to great expense.  Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections.  He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also.  He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere.  He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors.  In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.
        What shall we say of him?  Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men.  It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in no wise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him.  He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts.  And although in the end he may have felt so sure about it that he could not think otherwise, yet inasmuch as he had knowingly and willingly worked himself into that frame of mind, he must be held responsible for it.
        Let us alter the case a little, and suppose that the ship was not unsound after all; that she made her voyage safely, and many others after it.  Will that diminish the guilt of her owner?  Not one jot.  When an action is once done, it is right or wrong for ever; no accidental failure of its good or evil fruits can possibly alter that.  The man would not have been innocent, he would only have been not found out.  The question of right or wrong has to do with the origin of his belief, not the matter of it; not what it was, but how he got it; not whether it turned out to be true or false, but whether he had a right to believe on such evidence as was before him.
        There was once an island in which some of the inhabitants professed a religion teaching neither the doctrine of original sin nor that of eternal punishment.  A suspicion got abroad that the professors of this religion had made use of unfair means to get their doctrines taught to children.  They were accused of wresting the laws of their country in such a way as to remove children from the care of their natural and legal guardians; and even of stealing them away and keeping them concealed from their friends and relations.  A certain number of men formed themselves into a society for the purpose of agitating the public about this matter.  They published grave accusations against individual citizens of the highest position and character, and did all in their power to injure these citizens in their exercise of their professions.  So great was the noise they made, that a Commission was appointed to investigate the facts; but after the Commission had carefully inquired into all the evidence that could be got, it appeared that the accused were innocent.  Not only had they been accused on insufficient evidence, but the evidence of their innocence was such as the agitators might easily have obtained, if they had attempted a fair inquiry.  After these disclosures the inhabitants of that country looked upon the members of the agitating society, not only as persons whose judgment was to be distrusted, but also as no longer to be counted honourable men.  For although they had sincerely and conscientiously believed in the charges they had made, yet they had no right to believe on such evidence as was before them.  Their sincere convictions, instead of being honestly earned by patient inquiring, were stolen by listening to the voice of prejudice and passion.
        Let us vary this case also, and suppose, other things remaining as before, that a still more accurate investigation proved the accused to have been really guilty.  Would this make any difference in the guilt of the accusers?  Clearly not; the question is not whether their belief was true or false, but whether they entertained it on wrong grounds.  They would no doubt say, “Now you see that we were right after all; next time perhaps you will believe us.”  And they might be believed, but they would not thereby become honourable men.  They would not be innocent, they would only be not found out.  Every one of them, if he chose to examine himself in foro conscientiæ, would know that he had acquired and nourished a belief, when he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him; and therein he would know that he had done a wrong thing.
        It may be said, however, that in both of these supposed cases it is not the belief which is judged to be wrong, but the action following upon it.  The shipowner might say, “I am perfectly certain that my ship is sound, but still I feel it my duty to have her examined, before trusting the lives of so many people to her.”  And it might be said to the agitator, “However convinced you were of the justice of your cause and the truth of your convictions, you ought not to have made a public attack upon any man’s character until you had examined the evidence on both sides with the utmost patience and care.”
        In the first place, let us admit that, so far as it goes, this view of the case is right and necessary; right, because even when a man’s belief is so fixed that he cannot think otherwise, he still has a choice in regard to the action suggested by it, and so cannot escape the duty of investigating on the ground of the strength of his convictions; and necessary, because those who are not yet capable of controlling their feelings and thoughts must have a plain rule dealing with overt acts.
        But this being premised as necessary, it becomes clear that it is not sufficient, and that our previous judgment is required to supplement it.  For it is not possible so to sever the belief from the action it suggests as to condemn the one without condemning the other.  No man holding a strong belief on one side of a question, or even wishing to hold a belief on one side, can investigate it with such fairness and completeness as if he were really in doubt and unbiassed; so that the existence of a belief not founded on fair inquiry unfits a man for the performance of this necessary duty.
        Nor is it that truly a belief at all which has not some influence upon the actions of him who holds it.  He who truly believes that which prompts him to an action has looked upon the action to lust after it, he has committed it already in his heart.  If a belief is not realized immediately in open deeds, it is stored up for the guidance of the future.  It goes to make a part of that aggregate of beliefs which is the link between sensation and action at every moment of all our lives, and which is so organized and compacted together that no part of it can be isolated from the rest, but every new addition modifies the structure of the whole.  No real belief, however trifling and fragmentary it may seem, is ever truly insignificant; it prepares us to receive more of its like, confirms those which resembled it before, and weakens others; and so gradually it lays a stealthy train in our inmost thoughts, which may some day explode into overt action, and leave its stamp upon our character for ever.
        And no one man’s belief is in any case a private matter which concerns himself alone.  Our lives are guided by that general conception of the course of things which has been created by society for social purposes.  Our words, our phrases, our forms and processes and modes of thought, are common property, fashioned and perfected from age to age; an heirloom which every succeeding generation inherits as a precious deposit and a sacred trust to be handed on to the next one, not unchanged but enlarged and purified, with some clear marks of its proper handiwork.  Into this, for good or ill, is woven every belief of every man who has speech of his fellows.  An awful privilege, and an awful responsibility, that we should help to create the world in which posterity will live.
        In the two supposed cases which have been considered, it has been judged wrong to believe on insufficient evidence, or to nourish belief by suppressing doubts and avoiding investigation.  The reason of this judgment is not far to seek:  it is that in both these cases the belief held by one man was of great importance to other men.  But forasmuch as no belief held by one man, however seemingly trivial the belief, and however obscure the believer, is ever actually insignificant or without its effect on the fate of mankind, we have no choice but to extend our judgment to all cases of belief whatever.  Belief, that sacred faculty which prompts the decisions of our will, and knits into harmonious working all the compacted energies of our being, is ours not for ourselves, but for humanity.  It is rightly used on truths which have been established by long experience and waiting toil, and which have stood in the fierce light of free and fearless questioning.  Then it helps to bind men together, and to strengthen and direct their common action.  It is desecrated when given to unproved and unquestioned statements, for the solace and private pleasure of the believer; to add a tinsel splendour to the plain straight road of our life and display a bright mirage beyond it; or even to drown the common sorrows of our kind by a self-deception which allows them not only to cast down, but also to degrade us.  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.
        It is not only the leader of men, statesmen, philosopher, or poet, that owes this bounden duty to mankind.  Every rustic who delivers in the village alehouse his slow, infrequent sentences, may help to kill or keep alive the fatal superstitions which clog his race.  Every hard-worked wife of an artisan may transmit to her children beliefs which shall knit society together, or rend it in pieces.  No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe.
        It is true that this duty is a hard one, and the doubt which comes out of it is often a very bitter thing.  It leaves us bare and powerless where we thought that we were safe and strong.  To know all about anything is to know how to deal with it under all circumstances.  We feel much happier and more secure when we think we know precisely what to do, no matter what happens, then when we have lost our way and do not know where to turn.  And if we have supposed ourselves to know all about anything, and to be capable of doing what is fit in regard to it, we naturally do not like to find that we are really ignorant and powerless, that we have to begin again at the beginning, and try to learn what the thing is and how it is to be dealt with—if indeed anything can be learnt about it.  It is the sense of power attached to a sense of knowledge that makes men desirous of believing, and afraid of doubting.
        This sense of power is the highest and best of pleasures when the belief on which it is founded is a true belief, and has been fairly earned by investigation.  For then we may justly feel that it is common property, and holds good for others as well as for ourselves.  Then we may be glad, not that I have learned secrets by which I am safer and stronger, but that we men have got mastery over more of the world; and we shall be strong, not for ourselves, but in the name of Man and his strength.  But if the belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence, the pleasure is a stolen one.  Not only does it deceive ourselves by giving us a sense of power which we do not really possess, but 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.  What would be thought of one who, for the sake of a sweet fruit, should deliberately run the risk of bringing a plague upon his family and his neighbours?
        And, as in other such cases, it is not the risk only which has to be considered; for a bad action is always bad at the time when it is done, no matter what happens afterwards.  Every time we let ourselves believe for unworthy reasons, we weaken our powers of self-control, of doubting, of judicially and fairly weighing evidence.  We all suffer severely enough from the maintenance and support of false beliefs and the fatally wrong actions which they lead to, and the evil born when one such belief is entertained is great and wide.  But a greater and wider evil arises when the credulous character is maintained and supported, when a habit of believing for unworthy reasons is fostered and made permanent.  If I steal money from any person, there may be no harm done by the mere transfer of possession; he may not feel the loss, or it may prevent him from using the money badly.  But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself dishonest.  What hurts society is not that it should lose its property, but that it should become a den of thieves; for then it must cease to be society.  This is why we ought not to do evil that good may come; for at any rate this great evil has come, that we have done evil and are made wicked thereby.  In like manner, if I let myself believe anything on insufficient evidence, there may be no great harm done by the mere belief; it may be true after all, or I may never have occasion to exhibit it in outward acts.  But I cannot help doing this great wrong towards Man, that I make myself credulous.  The danger to society is not merely that it should believe wrong things, though that is great enough; but that it should become credulous, and lose the habit of testing things and inquiring into them; for then it must sink back into savagery.
        The harm which is done by credulity in a man is not confined to the fostering of a credulous character in others, and consequent support of false beliefs.  Habitual want of care about what I believe leads to habitual want of care in others about the truth of what is told to me.  Men speak the truth to one another when each reveres the truth in his own mind and in the other’s mind; but how shall my friend revere the truth in my mind when I myself am careless about it, when I believe things because I want to believe them, and because they are comforting and pleasant?  Will he not learn to cry, “Peace,” to me, when there is no peace?  By such a course I shall surround myself with a thick atmosphere of falsehood and fraud, and in that I must live.  It may matter little to me, in my cloud-castle of sweet illusions and darling lies; but it matters much to Man that I have made my neighbours ready to deceive.  The credulous man is father to the liar and the cheat; he lives in the bosom of this his family, and it is no marvel if he should become even as they are.  So closely are our duties knit together, that whoso shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.
        To sum up:  it is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.
        If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call in question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it—the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.
        If this judgment seems harsh when applied to those simple souls who have never known better, who have been brought up from the cradle with a horror of doubt, and taught that their eternal welfare depends on what they believe, then it leads to the very serious question, Who hath made Israel to sin?
        It may be permitted me to fortify this judgment with the sentence of Milton{3}—
        “A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determine, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.”
        And with this famous aphorism of Coleridge{4} —
        “He who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all.”
        Inquiry into the evidence of a doctrine is not to be made once for all, and then taken as finally settled.  It is never lawful to stifle a doubt; for either it can be honestly answered by means of the inquiry already made, or else it proves that the inquiry was not complete.
        “But,” says one, “I am a busy man; I have no time for the long course of study which would be necessary to make me in any degree a competent judge of certain questions, or even able to understand the nature of the arguments.”  Then he should have no time to believe. 
 

II.—THE WEIGHT OF AUTHORITY

        Are we then to become universal sceptics, doubting everything, afraid always to put one foot before the other until we have personally tested the firmness of the road?  Are we to deprive ourselves of the help and guidance of that vast body of knowledge which is daily growing upon the world, because neither we nor any other one person can possibly test a hundredth part of it by immediate experiment or observation, and because it would not be completely proved if we did?  Shall we steal and tell lies because we have had no personal experience wide enough to justify the belief that it is wrong to do so?
        There is no practical danger that such consequences will ever follow from scrupulous care and self-control in the matter of belief.  Those men who have most nearly done their duty in this respect have found that certain great principles, and these most fitted for the guidance of life, have stood out more and more clearly in proportion to the care and honesty with which they were tested, and have acquired in this way a practical certainty.  The beliefs about right and wrong which guide our actions in dealing with men in society, and the beliefs about physical nature which guide our actions in dealing with animate and inanimate bodies, these never suffer from investigation; they can take care of themselves, without being propped up by “acts of faith,” the clamour of paid advocates, or the suppression of contrary evidence.  Moreover there are many cases in which it is our duty to act upon probabilities, although the evidence is not such as to justify present belief; because it is precisely by such action, and by observation of its fruits, that evidence is got which may justify future belief.  So that we have no reason to fear lest a habit of conscientious inquiry should paralyse the actions of our daily life.
        But because it is not enough to say, “It is wrong to believe on unworthy evidence,” without saying also what evidence is worthy, we shall now go on to inquire under what circumstances it is lawful to believe on the testimony of others; and then, further, we shall inquire more generally when and why we may believe that which goes beyond our own experience, or even beyond the experience of mankind.
        In what cases, then, let us ask in the first place, is the testimony of a man unworthy of belief?  He may say that which is untrue either knowingly or unknowingly.  In the first case he is lying, and his moral character is to blame; in the second case he is ignorant or mistaken, and it is only his knowledge or his judgment which is in fault.  In order that we may have the right to accept his testimony as ground for believing what he says, we must have reasonable grounds for trusting his veracity, that he is really trying to speak the truth so far as he knows it; his knowledge, that he has had opportunities of knowing the truth about this matter; and his judgment, that he has made proper use of those opportunities in coming to the conclusion which he affirms.
        However plain and obvious these reasons may be, so that no man of ordinary intelligence, reflecting upon the matter, could fail to arrive at them, it is nevertheless true that a great many persons do habitually disregard them in weighing testimony.  Of the two questions, equally important to the trustworthiness of a witness, “Is he dishonest?” and “May he be mistaken?” the majority of mankind are perfectly satisfied if one can, with some show of probability, be answered in the negative.  The excellent moral character of a man is alleged as ground for accepting his statements about things which he cannot possibly have known.  A Mohammedan, for example, will tell us that the character of his Prophet was so noble and majestic that it commands the reverence even of those who do not believe in his mission.  So admirable was his moral teaching, so wisely put together the great social machine which he created, that his precepts have not only been accepted by a great portion of mankind, but have actually been obeyed.  His institutions have on the one hand rescued the negro from savagery, and on the other hand have taught civilization to the advancing West; and although the races which held the highest forms of his faith, and most fully embodied his mind and thought, have all been conquered and swept away by barbaric tribes, yet the history of their marvellous attainments remains as an imperishable glory to Islam.  Are we to doubt the word of a man so great and so good?  Can we suppose that this magnificent genius, this splendid moral hero, has lied to us about the most solemn and sacred matters?  The testimony of Mohammed is clear, that there is but one God, and that he, Mohammed, is his Prophet; that if we believe in him we shall enjoy everlasting felicity, but that if we do not we shall be damned.  This testimony rests on the most awful of foundations, the revelation of heaven itself; for was he not visited by the angel Gabriel, as he fasted and prayed in his desert cave, and allowed to enter into the blessed fields of Paradise?  Surely God is God and Mohammed is the Prophet of God.
        What should we answer to this Mussulman?  First, no doubt, we should be tempted to take exception against his view of the character of the Prophet and the uniformly beneficial influence of Islam:  before we could go with him altogether in these matters it might seem that we should have to forget many terrible things of which we have heard or read.  But if we chose to grant him all these assumptions, for the sake of argument, and because it is difficult both for the faithful and for infidels to discuss them fairly and without passion, still we should have something to say which takes away the ground of his belief, and therefore shows that it is wrong to entertain it.  Namely this:  the character of Mohammed is excellent evidence that he was honest and spoke the truth so far as he knew it; but it is no evidence at all that he knew what the truth was.  What means could he have of knowing that the form which appeared to him to be the angel Gabriel was not a hallucination, and that his apparent visit to Paradise was not a dream?  Grant that he himself was fully persuaded and honestly believed that he had the guidance of heaven, and was the vehicle of a supernatural revelation, how could he know that this strong conviction was not a mistake?  Let us put ourselves in his place; we shall find that the more completely we endeavour to realise what passed through his mind, the more clearly we shall perceive that the Prophet could have had no adequate ground for the belief in his own inspiration.  It is most probable that he himself never doubted of the matter, or thought of asking the question; but we are in the position of those to whom the question has been asked, and who are bound to answer it.  It is known to medical observers that solitude and want of food are powerful means of producing delusion and of fostering a tendency to mental disease.  Let us suppose, then, that I, like Mohammed, go into desert places to fast and pray; what things can happen to me which will give me the right to believe that I am divinely inspired?  Suppose that I get information, apparently from a celestial visitor, which upon being tested is found to be correct.  I cannot be sure, in the first place, that the celestial visitor is not a figment of my own mind, and that the information did not come to me, unknown at the time to my consciousness, through some subtle channel of sense.  But if my visitor were a real visitor, and for a long time gave me information which was found to be trustworthy, this would indeed be good ground for trusting him in the future as to such matters as fall within human powers of verification; but it would not be ground for trusting his testimony as to any other matters.  For although his tested character would justify me in believing that he spoke the truth so far as he knew, yet the same question would present itself—what ground is there for supposing that he knows?
        Even if my supposed visitor had given me such information, subsequently verified by me, as proved him to have means of knowledge about verifiable matters far exceeding my own; this would not justify me in believing what he said about matters that are not at present capable of verification by man.  It would be ground for interesting conjecture, and for the hope that, as the fruit of our patient inquiry, we might by and by attain to such a means of verification as should rightly turn conjecture into belief.  For belief belongs to man, and to the guidance of human affairs:  no belief is real unless it guide our actions, and those very actions supply a test of its truth.
        But, it may be replied, the acceptance of Islam as a system is just that action which is prompted by belief in the mission of the Prophet, and which will serve for a test of its truth.  Is it possible to believe that a system which has succeeded so well is really founded upon a delusion?  Not only have individual saints found joy and peace in believing, and verified those spiritual experiences which are promised to the faithful, but nations also have been raised from savagery or barbarism to a higher social state.  Surely we are at liberty to say that the belief has been acted upon, and that it has been verified.
        It requires, however, but little consideration to show that what has really been verified is not at all the supernal character of the Prophet’s mission, or the trustworthiness of his authority in matters which we ourselves cannot test, but only his practical wisdom in certain very mundane things.  The fact that believers have found joy and peace in believing gives us the right to say that the doctrine is a comfortable doctrine, and pleasant to the soul; but it does not give us the right to say that it is true.  And the question which our conscience is always asking about that which we are tempted to believe is not, “Is it comfortable and pleasant?” but, “Is it true?”  That the Prophet preached certain doctrines, and predicted that spiritual comfort would be found in them, proves only his sympathy with human nature and his knowledge of it; but it does not prove his superhuman knowledge of theology.
        And if we admit for the sake of argument (for it seems that we cannot do more) that the progress made by Moslem nations in certain cases was really due to the system formed and sent forth into the world by Mohammed, we are not at liberty to conclude from this that he was inspired to declare the truth about things which we cannot verify.  We are only at liberty to infer the excellence of his moral precepts, or of the means which he devised for so working upon men as to get them obeyed, or of the social and political machinery which he set up.  And it would require a great amount of careful examination into the history of those nations to determine which of these things had the greater share in the result.  So that here again it is the Prophet’s knowledge of human nature, and his sympathy with it, that are verified; not his divine inspiration or his knowledge of theology.
        If there were only one Prophet, indeed, it might well seem a difficult and even an ungracious task to decide upon what points we would trust him, and on what we would doubt his authority; seeing what help and furtherance all men have gained in all ages from those who saw more clearly, who felt more strongly, and who sought the truth with more single heart than their weaker brethren.  But there is not only one Prophet; and while the consent of many upon that which, as men, they had real means of knowing and did know, has endured to the end, and been honourably built into the great fabric of human knowledge, the diverse witness of some about that which they did not and could not know remains as a warning to us that to exaggerate the prophetic authority is to misuse it, and to dishonor those who have sought only to help and further us after their power.  It is hardly in human nature that a man should quite accurately gauge the limits of his own insight; but it is the duty of those who profit by his work to consider carefully where he may have been carried beyond it.  If we must needs embalm his possible errors along with his solid achievements, and use his authority as an excuse for believing what he cannot have known, we make of his goodness an occasion to sin.
        To consider only one other such witness:  the followers of the Buddha have at least as much right to appeal to individual and social experience in support of the authority of the Eastern saviour.  The special mark of his religion, it is said, that in which it has never been surpassed, is the comfort and consolation which it gives to the sick and sorrowful, the tender sympathy with which it soothes and assuages all the natural griefs of men.  And surely no triumph of social morality can be greater or nobler than that which has kept nearly half the human race from persecuting in the name of religion.  If we are to trust the accounts of his early followers, he believed himself to have come upon earth with a divine and cosmic mission to set rolling the wheel of the law.  Being a prince, he divested himself of his kingdom, and of his free will became acquainted with misery, that he might learn how to meet and subdue it.  Could such a man speak falsely about solemn things?  And as for his knowledge, was he not a man miraculous with powers more than man’s?  He was born of woman without the help of man; he rose into the air and was transfigured before his kinsmen; at last he went up bodily into heaven from the top of Adam’s Peak.  Is not his word to be believed in when he testifies of heavenly things?
        If there were only he, and no other, with such claims!  But there is Mohammed with his testimony; we cannot choose but listen to them both.  The Prophet tells us that there is one God, and that we shall live for ever in joy or misery, according as we believe in the Prophet or not.  The Buddha says that there is no God, and that we shall be annihilated by and by if we are good enough.  Both cannot be infallibly inspired; one or other must have been the victim of a delusion, and thought he knew that which he really did not know.  Who shall dare to say which? and how can we justify ourselves in believing that the other was not also deluded?
        We are led, then, to these judgments following.  The goodness and greatness of a man do not justify us in accepting a belief upon the warrant of his authority, unless there are reasonable grounds for supposing that he knew the truth of what he was saying.  And there can be no grounds for supposing that a man knows that which we, without ceasing to be men, could not be supposed to verify.
        If a chemist tells me, who am no chemist, that a certain substance can be made by putting together other substances in certain proportions and subjecting them to a known process, I am quite justified in believing this upon his authority, unless I know anything against his character or his judgment.  For his professional training is one which tends to encourage veracity and the honest pursuit of truth, and to produce a dislike of hasty conclusions and slovenly investigation.  And I have reasonable ground for supposing that he knows the truth of what he is saying, for although I am no chemist, I can be made to understand so much of the methods and processes of the science as makes it conceivable to me that, without ceasing to be man, I might verify the statement.  I may never actually verify it, or even see any experiment which goes towards verifying it; but still I have quite reason enough to justify me in believing that the verification is within the reach of human appliances and powers, and in particular that it has been actually performed by my informant.  His result, the belief to which he has been led by his inquiries, is valid not only for himself but for others; it is watched and tested by those who are working in the same ground, and who know that no greater service can be rendered to science than the purification of accepted results from the errors which may have crept into them.  It is in this way that the result becomes common property, a right object of belief, which is a social affair and matter of public business.  Thus it is to be observed that his authority is valid because there are those who question it and verify it; that it is precisely this process of examining and purifying that keeps alive among investigators the love of that which shall stand all possible tests, the sense of public responsibility as of those whose work, if well done, shall remain as the enduring heritage of mankind.
        But if my chemist tells me that an atom of oxygen has existed unaltered in weight and rate of vibration throughout all time I have no right to believe this on his authority, for it is a thing which he cannot know without ceasing to be man.  He may quite honestly believe that this statement is a fair inference from his experiments, but in that case his judgment is at fault.  A very simple consideration of the character of experiments would show him that they never can lead to results of such a kind; that being themselves only approximate and limited, they cannot give us knowledge which is exact and universal.  No eminence of character and genius can give a man authority enough to justify us in believing him when he makes statements implying exact or universal knowledge.
        Again, an Arctic explorer may tell us that in a given latitude and longitude he has experienced such and such a degree of cold, that the sea was of such a depth, and the ice of such a character.  We should be quite right to believe him, in the absence of any stain upon his veracity.  It is conceivable that we might, without ceasing to be men, go there and verify his statement; it can be tested by the witness of his companions, and there is adequate ground for supposing that he knows the truth of what he is saying.  But if an old whaler tells us that the ice is 300 feet thick all the way up to the Pole, we shall not be justified in believing him.  For although the statement may be capable of verification by man, it is certainly not capable of verification by him, with any means and appliances which he has possessed; and he must have persuaded himself of the truth of it by some means which does not attach any credit to his testimony.  Even if, therefore, the matter affirmed is within the reach of human knowledge, we have no right to accept it upon authority unless it is within the reach of our informant’s knowledge.
        What shall we say of that authority, more venerable and august than any individual witness, the time-honoured tradition of the human race?  An atmosphere of beliefs and conceptions has been formed by the labours and struggles of our forefathers, which enables us to breathe amid the various and complex circumstances of our life.  It is around and about us and within us; we cannot think except in the forms and processes of thought which it supplies.  Is it possible to doubt and to test it? and if possible, is it right?
        We shall find reason to answer that it is not only possible and right, but our bounden duty; that the main purpose of the tradition itself is to supply us with the means of asking questions, of testing and inquiring into things; that if we misuse it, and take it as a collection of cut-and-dried statements to be accepted without further inquiry, we are not only injuring ourselves here, but, by refusing to do our part towards the building up of the fabric which shall be inherited by our children, we are tending to cut off ourselves and our race from the human line.
        Let us first take care to distinguish a kind of tradition which especially requires to be examined and called in question, because it especially shrinks from inquiry.  Suppose that a medicine-man in Central Africa tells his tribe that a certain powerful medicine in his tent will be propitiated if they kill their cattle, and that the tribe believe him.  Whether the medicine was propitiated or not there are no means of verifying, but the cattle are gone.  Still the belief may be kept up in the tribe that propitiation has been effected in this way; and in a later generation it will be all the easier for another medicine-man to persuade them to a similar act.  Here the only reason for belief is that everybody has believed the thing for so long that it must be true.  And yet the belief was founded on fraud, and has been propagated by credulity.  That man will undoubtedly do right, and be a friend of men, who shall call it in question and see that there is no evidence for it, help his neighbours to see as he does, and even, if need be, go into the holy tent and break the medicine.
        The rule which should guide us in such cases is simple and obvious enough:  that the aggregate testimony of our neighbours is subject to the same conditions as the testimony of any one of them.  Namely, we have no right to believe a thing true because everybody says so unless there are good grounds for believing that some one person at least has the means of knowing what is true, and is speaking the truth so far as he knows it.  However many nations and generations of men are brought into the witness-box they cannot testify to anything which they do not know.  Every man who has accepted the statement from somebody else, without himself testing and verifying it, is out of court; his word is worth nothing at all.  And when we get back at last to the true birth and beginning of the statement, two serious questions must be disposed of in regard to him who first made it:  was he mistaken in thinking that he knew about this matter, or was he lying?
        This last question is unfortunately a very actual and practical one even to us at this day and in this country.  We have no occasion to go to La Salette, or to Central Africa, or to Lourdes, for examples of immoral and debasing superstition.  It is only too possible for a child to grow up in London surrounded by an atmosphere of beliefs fit only for the savage, which have in our own time been founded in fraud and propagated by credulity.
        Laying aside, then, such tradition as is handed on without testing by successive generations, let us consider that which is truly built up out of the common experience of mankind.  This great fabric is for the guidance of our thoughts, and through them of our actions, both in the moral and in the material world.  In the moral world, for example, it gives us the conceptions of right in general, of justice, of truth, of beneficence, and the like.  These are given as conceptions, not as statements or propositions; they answer to certain definite instincts which are certainly within us, however they came there.  That it is right to be beneficent is matter of immediate personal experience; for when a man retires within himself and there finds something, wider and more lasting than his solitary personality, which says, “I want to do right,” as well as, “I want to do good to man,” he can verify by direct observation that one instinct is founded upon and agrees fully with the other.  And it is his duty so to verify this and all similar statements.
        The tradition says also, at a definite place and time, that such and such actions are just, or true, or beneficent.  For all such rules a further inquiry is necessary, since they are sometimes established by an authority other than that of the moral sense founded on experience.  Until recently, the moral tradition of our own country—and indeed of all Europe—taught that it was beneficent to give money indiscriminately to beggars.  But the questioning of this rule, and investigation into it, led men to see that true beneficence is that which helps a man to do the work which he is most fitted for, not that which keeps and encourages him in idleness; and that to neglect this distinction in the present is to prepare pauperism and misery for the future.  By this testing and discussion not only has practice been purified and made more beneficent, but the very conception of beneficence has been made wider and wiser.  Now here the great social heirloom consists of two parts:  the instinct of beneficence, which makes a certain side of our nature, when predominant, wish to do good to men; and the intellectual conception of beneficence, which we can compare with any proposed course of conduct and ask, “Is this beneficent or not?”  By the continual asking and answering of such questions the conception grows in breadth and distinctness, and the instinct becomes strengthened and purified.  It appears, then, that the great use of the conception, the intellectual part of the heirloom, is to enable us to ask questions; that it grows and is kept straight by means of these questions; and if we do not use it for that purpose we shall gradually lose it altogether, and be left with a mere code of regulations which cannot rightly be called morality at all.
        Such considerations apply even more obviously and clearly, if possible, to the store of beliefs and conceptions which our fathers have amassed for us in respect of the material world.  We are ready to laugh at the rule of thumb of the Australian who continues to tie his hatchet to the side of the handle, although the Birmingham fitter has made a hole on purpose for him to put the handle in.  His people have tied up hatchets so for ages:  who is he that he should set himself up against their wisdom?  He has sunk so low that he cannot do what some of them must have done in the far distant past—call in question an established usage, and invent or learn something better.  Yet here, in the dim beginning of knowledge, where science and art are one, we find only the same simple rule which applies to the highest and deepest growths of that cosmic Tree; to its loftiest flower-tipped branches as well as to the profoundest of its hidden roots; the rule, namely, that what is stored up and handed down to us is rightly used by those who act as the makers acted, when they stored it up; those who use it to ask further questions, to examine, to investigate; who try honestly and solemnly to find out what is the right way of looking at things and of dealing with them.
        A question rightly asked is already half answered, said Jacobi; we may add that the method of solution is the other half of the answer, and that the actual result counts for nothing by the side of these two.  For an example let us go to the telegraph, where theory and practice, grown each to years of discretion, are marvellously wedded for the fruitful service of men.  Ohm found that the strength of an electric current is directly proportional to the strength of the battery which produces it, and inversely as the length of the wire along which it has to travel.  This is called Ohm’s law; but the result, regarded as a statement to be believed, is not the valuable part of it.  The first half of the question:  what relation holds good between these quantities?  So put, the question involves already the conception of strength of current, and of strength of battery, as quantities to be measured and compared; it hints clearly that these are the things to be attended to in the study of electric currents.  The second half is the method of investigation; how to measure these quantities, what instruments are required for the experiment, and how are they to be used?  The student who begins to learn about electricity is not asked to believe in Ohm’s law:  he is made to understand the question, he is placed before the apparatus, and he is taught to verify it.  He learns to do things, not to think he knows things; to use instruments and to ask questions, not to accept a traditional statement.  The question which required a genius to ask it rightly is answered by a tiro.  If Ohm’s law were suddenly lost and forgotten by all men, while the question and the method of solution remained, the result could be rediscovered in an hour.  But the result by itself, if known to a people who could not comprehend the value of the question or the means of solving it, would be like a watch in the hands of a savage who could not wind it up, or an iron steamship worked by Spanish engineers.{5}
        In regard, then, to the sacred tradition of humanity, we learn that it consists, not in propositions or statements which are to be accepted and believed on the authority of the tradition, but in questions rightly asked, in conceptions which enable us to ask further questions, and in methods of answering questions.  The value of all these things depends on their being tested day by day.  The very sacredness of the precious deposit imposes upon us the duty and the responsibility of testing it, of purifying and enlarging it to the utmost of our power.  He who makes use of its results to stifle his own doubts, or to hamper the inquiry of others, is guilty of a sacrilege which centuries shall never be able to blot out.  When the labours and questionings of honest and brave men shall have built up the fabric of known truth to a glory which we in this generation can neither hope for nor imagine, in that pure and holy temple he shall have no part nor lot, but his name and his works shall be cast out into the darkness of oblivion for ever. 
 

III.—THE LIMITS OF INFERENCE

        The question in what cases we may believe that which goes beyond our experience, is a very large and delicate one, extending to the whole range of scientific method, and requiring a considerable increase in the application of it before it can be answered with anything approaching to completeness.  But one rule, lying on the threshold of the subject, of extreme simplicity and vast practical importance, may here be touched upon and shortly laid down.
        A little reflection will show us that every belief, even the simplest and most fundamental, goes beyond experience when regarded as a guide to our actions.  A burnt child dreads the fire, because it believes that the fire will burn it to-day just as it did yesterday; but this belief goes beyond experience, and assumes that the unknown fire of to-day is like the known fire of yesterday.  Even the belief that the child was burnt yesterday goes beyond present experience, which contains only the memory of a burning, and not the burning itself; it assumes, therefore, that this memory is trustworthy, although we know that a memory may often be mistaken.  But if it is to be used as a guide to action, as a hint of what the future is to be, it must assume something about that future, namely, that it will be consistent with the supposition that the burning really took place yesterday; which is going beyond experience.  Even the fundamental “I am,” which cannot be doubted, is no guide to action until it takes to itself “I shall be,” which goes beyond experience.  The question is not, therefore, “May we believe what goes beyond experience?” for this is involved in the very nature of belief; but “How far and in what manner may we add to our experience in forming our beliefs?”
        And an answer, of utter simplicity and universality, is suggested by the example we have taken:  a burnt child dreads the fire.  We may go beyond experience by assuming that what we do not know is like what we do know; or, in other words, we may add to our experience on the assumption of a uniformity in nature.  What this uniformity precisely is, how we grow in the knowledge of it from generation to generation, these are questions which for the present we lay aside, being content to examine two instances which may serve to make plainer the nature of the rule.
        From certain observations made with the spectroscope, we infer the existence of hydrogen in the sun.  By looking into the spectroscope when the sun is shining on its slit, we see certain definite bright lines:  and experiments made upon bodies on the earth have taught us that when these bright lines are seen hydrogen is the source of them.  We assume, then, that the unknown bright lines in the sun are like the known bright lines of the laboratory, and that hydrogen in the sun behaves as hydrogen under similar circumstances would behave on the earth.
        But are we not trusting our spectroscope too much?  Surely, having found it to be trustworthy for terrestrial substances, where its statements can be verified by man, we are justified in accepting its testimony in other like cases; but not when it gives us information about things in the sun, where its testimony cannot be directly verified by man?
        Certainly, we want to know a little more before this inference can be justified; and fortunately we do know this.  The spectroscope testifies to exactly the same thing in the two cases; namely, that light-vibrations of a certain rate are being sent through it.  Its construction is such that if it were wrong about this in one case, it would be wrong in the other.  When we come to look into the matter, we find that we have really assumed the matter of the sun to be like the matter of the earth, made up of a certain number of distinct substances; and that each of these, when very hot, has a distinct rate of vibration, by which it may be recognised and singled out from the rest.  But this is the kind of assumption which we are justified in using when we add to our experience.  It is an assumption of uniformity in nature, and can only be checked by comparison with many similar assumptions which we have to make in other such cases.
        But is this a true belief, of the existence of hydrogen in the sun?  Can it help in the right guidance of human action?
        Certainly not, if it is accepted on unworthy grounds, and without some understanding of the process by which it is got at.  But when this process is taken in as the ground of the belief, it becomes a very serious and practical matter.  For if there is no hydrogen in the sun, the spectroscope—that is to say, the measurement of rates of vibration—must be an uncertain guide in recognising different substances; and consequently it ought not to be used in chemical analysis—in assaying, for example—to the great saving of time, trouble, and money.  Whereas the acceptance of the spectroscopic method as trustworthy has enriched us not only with new metals, which is a great thing, but with new processes of investigation, which is vastly greater.
        For another example, let us consider the way in which we infer the truth of an historical event—say the siege of Syracuse in the Peloponnesian war.  Our experience is that manuscripts exist which are said to be and which call themselves manuscripts of the history of Thucydides; that in other manuscripts, stated to be by later historians, he is described as living during the time of the war; and that books, supposed to date from the revival of learning, tell us how these manuscripts had been preserved and were then acquired.  We find also that men do not, as a rule, forge books and histories without a special motive; we assume that in this respect men in the past were like men in the present; and we observe that in this case no special motive was present.  That is, we add to our experience on the assumption of a uniformity in the characters of men.  Because our knowledge of this uniformity is far less complete and exact than our knowledge of that which obtains in physics, inferences of the historical kind are more precarious and less exact than inferences in many other sciences.
        But if there is any special reason to suspect the character of the persons who wrote or transmitted certain books, the case becomes altered.  If a group of documents give internal evidence that they were produced among people who forged books in the names of others, and who, in describing events, suppressed those things which did not suit them, while they amplified such as did suit them; who not only committed these crimes, but gloried in them as proofs of humility and zeal; then we must say that upon such documents no true historical inference can be founded, but only unsatisfactory conjecture.
        We may, then, add to our experience on the assumption of a uniformity in nature; we may fill in our picture of what is and has been, as experience gives it us, in such a way as to make the whole consistent with this uniformity.  And practically demonstrative inference—that which gives us a right to believe in the result of it—is a clear showing that in no other way than by the truth of this result can the uniformity of nature be saved.
        No evidence, therefore, can justify us in believing the truth of a statement which is contrary to, or outside of, the uniformity of nature.  If our experience is such that it cannot be filled up consistently with uniformity, all we have a right to conclude is that there is something wrong somewhere; but the possibility of inference is taken away; we must rest in our experience, and not go beyond it at all.  If an event really happened which was not a part of the uniformity of nature, it would have two properties:  no evidence could give the right to believe it to any except those whose actual experience it was; and no inference worthy of belief could be founded upon it at all.
        Are we then bound to believe that nature is absolutely and universally uniform?  Certainly not; we have no right to believe anything of this kind.  The rule only tells us that in forming beliefs which go beyond our experience, we may make the assumption that nature is practically uniform so far as we are concerned.  Within the range of human action and verification, we may form, by help of this assumption, actual beliefs; beyond it, only those hypotheses which serve for the more accurate asking of questions.
        To sum up:—
        We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not know is like what we know.
        We may believe the statement of another person, when there is reasonable ground for supposing that he knows the matter of which he speaks, and that he is speaking the truth so far as he knows it.
        It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence; and where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, there it is worse than presumption to believe.

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 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 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.
        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, 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 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.
        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 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 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 criticized 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 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.{7}
        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 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. 
 

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 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 adæquatio 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 chance of gainingtruth 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{8}, 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.
        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.{9}   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 cœur 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 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 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 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 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 which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the ‘lowest kind of immorality’ into which a thinking being can fall.  Yet such is the logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend to regulate our lives! 
 

X.

        In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on desire is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing.
        But now, it will be said, these are all childish human cases, and have nothing to do with great cosmical matters, like the question of religious faith.  Let us then pass on to that.  Religions differ so much in their accidents that in discussing the religious question we must make it very generic and broad.  What then do we now mean by the religious hypothesis?  Science says things are; morality says some things are better than other things; and religion says essentially two things.
        First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word.  “Perfection is eternal,”—this phrase of Charles Secrétan seems a good way of putting this first affirmation of religion, an affirmation which obviously cannot yet be verified scientifically at all.
        The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to be true.
        Now, let us consider what the logical elements of this situation are in case the religious hypothesis in both its branches be really true.  (Of course, we must admit that possibility at the outset.  If we are to discuss the question at all, it must involve a living option.  If for any of you religion be a hypothesis that cannot, by any living possibility be true, then you need go no farther.  I speak to the ‘saving remnant’ alone.)  So proceeding, we see, first, that religion offers itself as a momentous option.  We are supposed to gain, even now, by our belief, and to lose by our non-belief, a certain vital good.  Secondly, religion is a forced option, so far as that good goes.  We cannot escape the issue by remaining sceptical and waiting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve.  It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home.  Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married some one else?  Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk.  Better risk loss of truth than chance of error,—that is your faith-vetoer’s exact position.  He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field.  To preach scepticism to us as a duty until ‘sufficient evidence’ for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true.  It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only intellect with one passion laying down its law.  And by what, forsooth, is the supreme wisdom of this passion warranted?  Dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear?  I, for one, can see no proof; and I simply refuse obedience to the scientist’s command to imitate his kind of option, in a case where my own stake is important enough to give me the right to choose my own form of risk.  If religion be true and the evidence for it be still insufficient, I do not wish, by putting your extinguisher upon my nature (which feels to me as if it had after all some business in this matter), to forfeit my sole chance in life of getting upon the winning side,—that chance depending, of course, on my willingness to run the risk of acting as if my passional need of taking the world religiously might be prophetic and right.
        All this is on the supposition that it really may be prophetic and right, and that, even to us who are discussing the matter, religion is a live hypothesis which may be true.  Now, to most of us religion comes in a still further way that makes a veto on our active faith even more illogical.  The more perfect and more eternal aspect of the universe is represented in our religions as having personal form.  The universe is no longer a mere It to us, but a Thou, if we are religious; and any relation that may be possible from person to person might be possible here.  For instance, although in one sense we are passive portions of the universe, in another we show a curious autonomy, as if we were small active centres on our own account.  We feel, too, as if the appeal of religion to us were made to our own active good-will, as if evidence might be forever withheld from us unless we met the hypothesis half-way.  To take a trivial illustration:  just as a man who in a company of gentlemen made no advances, asked a warrant for every concession, and believed no one’s word without proof, would cut himself off by such churlishness from all the social rewards that a more trusting spirit would earn,—so here, one who should shut himself up in snarling logicality and try to make the gods extort his recognition willy-nilly, or not get it at all, might cut himself off forever from his only opportunity of making the gods’ acquaintance.  This feeling, forced on us we know not whence, that by obstinately believing that there are gods (although not to do so would be so easy both for our logic and our life) we are doing the universe the deepest service we can, seems part of the living essence of the religious hypothesis.  If the hypothesis were true in all its parts, including this one, then pure intellectualism, with its veto on our making willing advances, would be an absurdity; and some participation of our sympathetic nature would be logically required.  I, therefore, for one, cannot see my way to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or wilfully agree to keep my willing nature out of the game.  I cannot do so for this plain reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule.  That for me is the long and short of the formal logic of the situation, no matter what the kinds of truth might materially be.

        I confess I do not see how this logic can be escaped.  But sad experience makes me fear that some of you may still shrink from radically saying with me, in abstracto, that we have the right to believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our will.  I suspect, however, that if this is so, it is because you have got away from the abstract logical point of view altogether, and are thinking (perhaps without realizing it) of some particular religious hypothesis which for you is dead.  The freedom to ‘believe what we will’ you apply to the case of some patent superstition; and the faith you think of is the faith defined by the schoolboy when he said, “Faith is when you believe something that you know ain’t true.”  I can only repeat that this is misapprehension.  In concreto, the freedom to believe can only cover living options which the intellect of the individual cannot by itself resolve; and living options never seem absurdities to him who has them to consider.  When I look at the religious question as it really puts itself to concrete men, and when I think of all the possibilities which both practically and theoretically it involves, then this command that we shall put a stopper on our heart, instincts, and courage, and wait—acting of course meanwhile more or less as if religion were not true{10} —till doomsday, or till such time as our intellect and senses working together may have raked in evidence eno