Essays by
William Kingdon Clifford
William James
A.J. Burger
Copyright © 1997, 2001, 2008 by A.J. Burger. All rights reserved.
CONTENTS
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.
About the Text
of the printed book
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.
About the Text
at this website
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.
About the REVISED EDITION
printed book only
The Revised Edition of the book has an Afterword added in 2008.
The
REVISED EDITION of the book is now available in print. Click here to find
out more.
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The Ethics of Belief |
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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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 enough,—this command, I say, seems to me the
queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave. Were we
scholastic absolutists, there might be more excuse. If we had an
infallible intellect with its objective certitudes, we might feel ourselves
disloyal to such a perfect organ of knowledge in not trusting to it exclusively,
in not waiting for its releasing word. But if we are empiricists,
if we believe that no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when
truth is in our grasp, then it seems a piece of idle fantasticality to
preach so solemnly our duty of waiting for the bell. Indeed we may
wait if we will,—I hope you do not think that I am denying that,—but if
we do so, we do so at our peril as much as if we believed. In either
case we act, taking our life in our hands. No one of us ought
to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words of abuse.
We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to respect one another’s
mental freedom: then only shall we bring about the intellectual republic;
then only shall we have that spirit of inner tolerance without which all
our outer tolerance is soulless, and which is empiricism’s glory; then
only shall we live and let live, in speculative as well as in practical
things.
I began by a reference to
Fitz James Stephen; let me end by a quotation from him. “What do
you think of yourself? What do you think of the world? . .
. These are questions with which all must deal as it seems good to
them. They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other we
must deal with them. . . . In all important transactions of
life we have to take a leap in the dark. . . . If we decide
to leave the riddles unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer,
that, too, is a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at
our peril. If a man chooses to turn his back altogether on God and
the future, no one can prevent him; no one can show beyond reasonable doubt
that he is mistaken. If a man thinks otherwise and acts as he thinks,
I do not see that any one can prove that he is mistaken. Each
must act as he thinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him.
We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding
mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be
deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If
we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly
know whether there is any right one. What must we do? ‘Be strong
and of a good courage.’ Act for the best, hope for the best, and
take what comes. . . . If death ends all, we cannot meet death
better.”{11)
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“A wise man . . . proportions his belief to the evidence.”
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The popularity
of “The Will to Believe” by William James{12}
is not surprising, given the inadequacy of the traditional arguments for
the existence of a god or gods, and the strong desire that many people
have to believe. James’ response is simple and direct: Believe,
if one wishes, by faith—that is, without evidence. To be sure,
he puts restrictions on when he believes that faith is appropriate, but,
as shall be seen, his restrictions are by no means adequate to protect
others from the pernicious effects of having beliefs in the absence of
evidence—that is, having faith.
To avoid accusations of
misrepresentation, it will be well to consider the matter in James’ words:
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.
…
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. [2-4, 11]
First, it may be observed that James confuses actions and beliefs. According to James, hypotheses are potential beliefs, not actions—potential or otherwise (“Let us give the name of hypothesis to anything that may be proposed to our belief…”). An option is “the decision between two hypotheses”—that is, a decision between two potential beliefs—not a decision between two potential actions. However, his examples to explain the difference between a forced option and an avoidable option leave something to be desired, for several involve actions, not beliefs. “‘Choose between going out with your umbrella or without it’” is a choice between potential actions, not potential beliefs. The same may be said of his examples to explain the difference between a momentous option and a trivial option.
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 nothing, he [Clifford] 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. [17-18]
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. [21]
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. [23-25]
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. [25-26]
The first “thing” religion says, to wit, “the best things are the more
eternal things,” is demonstrably false. All one need consider is
the relative value of eternal pain and a momentary pleasure to know that
duration, by itself, is wholly irrelevant to whether something is better
or worse. (In general, at least, it may be said that good things
are better when, all else being equal, they last longer, but bad things
are worse when, all else being equal, they last longer.) Undoubtedly,
someone will wish to defend James by giving his remarks some mystical meaning—which
is to say, no meaning at all. The second affirmation of religion,
which can be seen to state that we are better off if we believe something
that is demonstrably false (the first affirmation of religion), now seems
wholly improbable. Were we to really believe it, we might prefer
nuclear waste to wholesome, ripe fruit.
James’ remarks about the
benefits of religion—which is really a good deal more robust than one might
think from his remarks above about the “religious hypothesis”—need not
be examined here. The disadvantages of religion have been laboriously
enumerated elsewhere—the opposition to freedom, the opposition to science
and advances in knowledge, the torture, oppression, and murder of innocents
by various religious groups including the Holy Office of the Roman Catholic
Church (more commonly called the Inquisition, which was started in the
13th century under Pope Innocent III, and whose governing body, the Congregation
of the Holy Office, still exists to this day{13}
—so it cannot reasonably be called a momentary aberration of religion—and
whose function is still the same—to suppress heresy, though its methods
have been curtailed with the loss of influence of the Church), etc.
One must take care when
reading James in order to avoid being misled about his position from carelessly
chosen expressions. For example:
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. [29]
If this were the position that James were defending—that we may have faith whenever we wish—it would not have been necessary for him to introduce his distinctions regarding a “genuine option.” This particular quote also shows the self-centeredness of James—no concern is expressed for how the belief might affect others. We may believe “at our own risk”—but what about the risk to others?
And where faith in a
fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane [italics
added] 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 [italics added]! [25]
And:
If the [religious] 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. [28]
If calling “scientific absolutists” and “pure intellectualism” “insane,”
“an absurdity,” and “irrational” is not to “bandy words of abuse,” then
nothing is.
James’ hypocrisy should,
however, come as no surprise, for although he claims to be writing in favor
of tolerance, he is in reality defending bigotry—bigotry is “obstinate
or blind [italics added] attachment to a particular creed."{14}
In other words, faith is bigotry, and it should come as no surprise that
such an advocate would have many hateful and damning beliefs.
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Now it might well be said that, whatever flaws there are in James’ examples and other parts of his essay, it does not prove that his basic thesis is incorrect. Proofs in ethics are hard to come by, and one ought not expect to find this essay different from others in this respect. However, the consequences of his thesis may be very easily examined, and they are such that few, if any, would be willing to accept.
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It is clear that more needs to be said about why one would require reasons or evidence for beliefs, rather than simply having beliefs without evidence—that is, having faith. The reason for this is not hard to understand—it becomes very clear when one is presented with potential beliefs that are in conflict with each other. Should you trust your friend or not? Here we see the utter impossibility of doing both (at the same time, with respect to the same attribute), for one either trusts someone or one does not. And if one trusts someone to a limited extent, then one is trusting that someone—it cannot truthfully be said that one does not trust that person at all. But which should one choose—to trust or not to trust? If one simply chooses, without regard to reason and evidence, why does one choose what one chooses? Why not choose the opposite? Or in matters of religion, if one chooses to be a Muslim, rather than a Christian or some other alternative, by faith, rather than with evidence, why choose those beliefs rather than any others? To see the need for evidence in matters of religion, one need only consider that the various religions all contradict each other, and, therefore, they cannot all be true. And why choose one religion rather than another? When a believer is attempting to convert others, what can be said to someone who claims faith in another religion? The believer can say that only his or her faith is faith in something true, but that is no evidence at all, and the prospective convert can make the same claim about his or her own religion. The religionist who advocates faith is, therefore, in a rather interesting position—he or she must also advocate rejecting faith. The reason for this is clear from the above remarks—one must reject all conflicting faiths if one is to embrace a particular faith. This may be obscured by the fact that people are often inconsistent (and consequently they are necessarily wrong no matter what the truth might be), but it does not alter the fact that, for example, it is impossible to fully embrace both Catholicism and Buddhism, or even Catholicism and Lutheranism. Anyone who is acquainted with the doctrines of each of these religions will be able to come up with examples of how the doctrine of each conflicts with that of the others. And, indeed, all different religions have conflicting doctrines, for, after all, if their doctrines were all the same, then they would not be different religions.
It is clear
from these remarks that it can be very beneficial for individuals to form
their beliefs based upon evidence, for they may save their time and money
by not wasting them on unworthy endeavors and products. It is also
clear that it is beneficial to society as a whole, for, not only would
there be an improvement in politics, there would also be fewer people ready
to deceive, for there would be fewer gullible people ready to be cheated.
Or, to put this in Clifford’s words, “The credulous man is father to the
liar and the cheat….” [Vol. II, 186] Thus we see, by the rejection
of faith, beneficial consequences both to ourselves and others. What
could be more desirable than this?
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{1}See, for example, A History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell (Simon & Schuster, 1945), ch. XXIX, particularly p 814-816; and “The Dark Side of Religion” in The Faith of a Liberal by Morris R. Cohen (Henry Holt, 1946), a relevant section of which is also reprinted as “Religion and the Will to Believe” in Introductory Readings in Philosophy, Marcus G. Singer and Robert R. Ammerman, eds. (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1962), p 231-234, and also as “A Critique of the Will to Believe” in Decisions in Philosophy of Religion, William B. Williamson, ed. (Prometheus Books, 1985), p 125-128. {return}
{2}Contemporary Review, January 1877. {return}
{3}Areopagitica. {return}
{4}Aids to Reflection. {return}
{5}The following excerpt from a letter of 2 July 1876 by Clifford to Lady Pollock, with an editor’s remarks, printed in Clifford’s Lectures and Essays, 2nd edition, may throw some light on Clifford’s remarks:
To-morrow we go by a Spanish boat to Almeira, and thence by diligence or
another boat to Malaga. The Spanish boat will be nasty, but it is
only twelve hours or so. I am very much better, and shall be glad
of a rest at Granada after this gadding about.
P.S.— …
We have seen the Spanish
boat, which is called La Encarnacion, and that rightly; for it is
the incarnation of everything bad.
[The Encarnacion
aforesaid more than justified the worst expectations: the engines
broke down at sea, nobody on board was competent to repair them, and the
ship lay helpless till a vessel was hailed which had a French engineer
on board.]
[This note has been added by the current editor.] {return}
{6}An Address to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities. Published in the New World, June, 1896. {return}
{7}Compare the admirable page 310 in S. H. Hodgson’s “Time and Space,” London, 1865. {return}
{8}Wilhelm Röntgen is the German physicist who, in 1895, discovered X-rays, which were called “Röntgen rays.” [This note has been added by the current editor.] {return}
{9}Compare Wilfrid Ward’s Essay, “The Wish to Believe,” in his Witnesses to the Unseen, Macmillan & Co., 1893. {return}
{10}Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true. The whole defense of religious faith hinges upon action. If the action required or inspired by the religious hypothesis is in no way different from that dictated by the naturalistic hypothesis, then religious faith is a pure superfluity, better pruned away, and controversy about its legitimacy is a piece of idle trifling, unworthy of serious minds. I myself believe, of course, that the religious hypothesis gives to the world an expression which specifically determines our reactions, and makes them in a large part unlike what they might be on a purely naturalistic scheme of belief. {return}
{11}Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, p. 353, 2d edition. London, 1874. {return}
{12}In The Will to Believe and other essays in popular philosophy, Longmans, Green & Co., 1897. {return}
{13}The remarks in the text are taken from The Oxford English Dictionary, 1971, Compact Edition, Vol. 1, p. 1444 (in the non-compact version, Vol. I-K, p. 324). The Roman Catholic Church has, however, renamed the Congregation of the Holy Office, now calling it the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. This has led many people to the erroneous belief that this institution has been abolished. (This is not the first time that its name has been changed, which makes research into its origin and history much more difficult, which undoubtedly is desired by the Catholic Church, as keeping the truth about such things in greater obscurity may save some embarrassment.) Its lists of banned literature are not made easily available to the public, evidently to avoid the just ridicule of such practices. Much of its activity is hidden and shrouded in mystery, though it clearly pressures individuals within the Church to comply with its demands. {return}
{14}Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd edition, Dorset & Baber, p. 181. {return}
{15}See “The Ethics of Belief” by William Kingdon Clifford, and “The Will to Believe” by William James, which was written as a response to ideas like those in Clifford’s essay, in which Clifford describes a ship owner who has faith that his ship is safe, so he sends it out to sea without inspecting it, with predictable results. {return}
{16}And if this “reconstruction” is not what really happened, it could have happened this way, which is all that is required for the present purposes. {return}
{17}If it be objected that not believing something is not a belief, and, therefore, the choice between having a belief or not having that belief will not be an option, the reply is simple: Although that is, strictly speaking, correct, it must be ignored if we are to proceed at all. For, otherwise, nothing could possibly be a forced option. No matter what two particular potential beliefs are presented as an option, one can always reject both, and simply have no belief about the matter at all. Consequently, on this strict interpretation of James’ thesis, no instance of faith is permitted, for only hypotheses that are part of genuine options—which are always forced options—are we permitted to believe without evidence. Indeed, James’ example of a forced option is exactly like the one here in this respect. {return}
{18} Bertrand Russell, “Free Thought and Official Propaganda”, in Skeptical Essays, 1928, W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., p. 157. {return}
{19}Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary, 2nd edition, Dorset & Baber, p. 1420. {return}
{20}Blaise Pascal, Pensées, translated
by W.F. Trotter, The Modern Library, 1941, section XIV, no. 894, p. 314.
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REVISED EDITION:
Copyright © 1997, 2001, 2008 by
A.J. Burger. All rights reserved.