William James

“ This evil which we feel so deeply is something which we can also help to overthrow, for its sources, now that no “Substance” or “Spirit” is behind them, are finite, and we can deal with each of them in turn. It is, indeed, a remarkable fact that sufferings and hardships do not, as a rule, abate the love of life; they seem, on the contrary, usually to give it a keener zest. The sovereign source of melancholy is repletion. Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void. ”

“ And to trust our religious demands means first of all to live in the light of them, and to act as if the invisible world which they suggest were real. It is a fact of human nature that men can live and die by the help of a sort of faith that goes without a single dogma or definition. The bare assurance that this natural order is not ultimate but a mere sign or vision, the external staging of a many-storied universe, in which spiritual forces have the last word and are eternal ”

“ Take Science herself! Without an imperious inner demand on our part for ideal, logical, and mathematical harmonies, we should never have attained to proving that such harmonies lie hidden between all the chinks and interstices of the crude natural world. Hardly a law has been established in Science, hardly a fact ascertained, that was not first sought after, often with sweat and blood, to gratify an inner need. ”

“ But the inner need of believing that this world of nature is a sign of something more spiritual and eternal than itself is just as strong and authoritative in those who feel it, as the inner need of uniform laws of causation ever can be in a professionally scientific head. The toil of many generations has proved the latter need prophetic. Why may not the former one be prophetic, too? And if needs of ours outrun the visible universe, why may not that be a sign that an invisible universe is there? What, in short, has authority to debar us from trusting our religious demands? ”

“ Life is worth living, no matter what it bring, if only such combats may be carried to successful terminations and one’s heel set on the tyrant’s throat. To the suicide, then, in his supposed world of multifarious and immoral Nature, you can appeal, and appeal in the name of the very evils that make his heart sick there, to wait and see his part of the battle out. ”

“ Beauty and hideousness, love and cruelty, life and death keep house together in indissoluble partnership; and there gradually steals over us, instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that of an awful Power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all things together meaninglessly to a common doom. ”

“ That is why I call pessimism an essentially religious disease. The nightmare view of life has plenty of organic sources, but its great reflective source in these days, and at all times, has been the contradiction between the phenomena of Nature and the craving of the heart to believe that behind Nature there is a spirit whose expression Nature is. What philosophers call natural theology has been one way of appeasing this craving. ”

“ With many men the question of life’s worth is answered by a temperamental optimism that makes them incapable of believing that anything seriously evil can exist. Our dear old Walt Whitman’s works are the standing text-book of this kind of optimism; the mere joy of living is so immense in Walt Whitman’s veins that it abolishes the possibility of any other kind of feeling. ”

“ Is it credible that such a mushroom knowledge, such a growth overnight as this, can represent more than the minutest glimpse of what the Universe will really prove to be when adequately understood? No! our Science is a drop, our ignorance a sea. Whatever else be certain, this at least is certain: that the world of our present natural knowledge is enveloped in a larger world of some sort of whose residual properties we at present can frame no positive idea. ”

“ Four thinkers since Galileo, each informing his successor of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, might have passed the torch of Science into our hands as we sit here in this room. Indeed, for the matter of that, an audience much smaller than the present one, an audience of some five or six score people, if each person in it could speak for his own generation, would carry us away to the black unknown of the human species, to days without a document or monument to tell their tale. ”

“ That life is not worth living the whole army of suicides declare–an army whose roll-call, like the famous evening drum-beat of the British army, follows the sun round the world and never terminates. We, too, as we sit here in our comfort, must “ponder these things” also, for we are of one substance with these suicides, and their life is the life we share. The plainest intellectual integrity, nay, more, the simplest manliness and honor, forbid us to forget their case. ”

“ And similarly if, as the agnostics tell me, I must not believe that the world is divine, I can only express that refusal by declining ever to act distinctively as if it were so, which can only mean acting on certain critical occasions as if it were not so, or in an unmoral and irreligious way. There are, you see, inevitable occasions in life when inaction is a kind of action and must count as action, and when not to be for is to be practically against. And in all such cases strict and consistent neutrality is an unattainable thing. ”

“ The submission which you demand of yourself to the general fact of evil in the world, your apparent acquiescence in it, is here nothing but the conviction that evil at large is none of your business until your business with your private particular evils is liquidated and settled up. A challenge of this sort, with proper designation of detail, is one that need only be made to be accepted by men whose normal instincts are not decayed, and your reflective would-be suicide may easily be moved by it to face life with a certain interest again. The sentiment of honor is a very penetrating thing. ”

“ This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the natural point of view, and we are determined to make it from that point of view, so far as we have anything to do with it, a success. ”

“ Now, in this description of faiths that verify themselves I have assumed that our faith in an invisible order is what inspires those efforts and that patience of ours that make this visible order good for moral men. Our faith in the seen world’s goodness (goodness now meaning fitness for successful moral and religious life) has verified itself by leaning on our faith in the unseen world. But will our faith in the unseen world similarly verify itself? Who knows?
Once more it is a case of maybe. And once more maybes are the essence of the situation. ”

“ In the more developed religions this world has always been regarded as the mere scaffolding or vestibule of a truer, more eternal world, and affirmed to be a sphere of education, trial, or redemption. One must in some fashion die to this world before one can enter into life eternal. The notion that this physical world of wind and water, where the sun rises and the moon sets, is absolutely and ultimately the divinely aimed at and established thing, is one that we find only in very early religions, such as that of the most primitive Jews. ”

“ If there be a divine Spirit of the universe, Nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to man. Either there is no spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and (as all the higher religions have assumed) what we call visible nature, or this world, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen or other world. ”

“ And some men seem launched upon the world even from their birth with souls as incapable of happiness as Walt Whitman’s was of gloom, and they have left us their messages in even more lasting verse than his–the exquisite Leopardi, for example, or our own contemporary, James Thomson, in that pathetic book, “The City of Dreadful Night,” which I think is less well-known than it should be for its literary beauty, simply because men are afraid to quote its words–they are so gloomy and at the same time so sincere. ”

“ Too much questioning and too little active responsibility lead, almost as often as too much sensualism does, to the edge of the slope, at the bottom of which lie pessimism and the nightmare or suicidal view of life. ”

“ In human life, although we only see our world, and his within it, yet encompassing both these worlds a still wider world may be there as unseen by us as our world is by him; and to believe in that world may be the most essential function that our lives in this world have to perform. But “may be! may be!” one now hears the positivist contemptuously exclaim; “what use can a scientific life have for maybes?” Well, I reply, the “scientific” life itself has much to do with maybes, and human life at large has everything to do with them. ”

“ Minds of either class may, however, be intensely religious. They may equally desire atonement, harmony, reconciliation, and crave acquiescence and communion with the total Soul of Things. But the craving, when the mind is pent in to the hard facts, especially as “Science” now reveals them, can breed pessimism, quite as easily as it breeds optimism when it inspires religious trust and fancy to wing their way to an other and a better world. ”

“ Have faith that you can successfully make it, and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself, and think of all the sweet things you have heard the scientists say of maybes, and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in the abyss. ”

“ Religion has meant many things in human history, but when from now onward I use the word I mean to use it in the supernaturalist sense, as declaring that the so-called order of nature that constitutes this world’s experience is only one portion of the total Universe, and that there stretches beyond this visible world an unseen world of which we now know nothing positive, but in its relation to which the true significance of our present mundane life consists. ”

“ Truly all we know of good and beauty proceeds from nature, but none the less so all we know of evil. Visible nature is all plasticity and indifference, a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a moral universe. ”

“ Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not; and the agnostic “thou shalt not believe without coercive sensible evidence” is simply an expression (free to any one to make) of private personal appetite for evidence of a certain peculiar kind.
Now, when I speak of trusting our religious demands, just what do I mean by “trusting”? Is the word to carry with it license to define in detail an invisible world and to anathematize and excommunicate those whose trust is different? ”

“ So far as man stands for anything, and is productive or originative at all, his entire vital function may be said to be to deal with maybes. Not a victory is gained, not a deed of faithfulness or courage is done, except upon a maybe; not a service, not a sally of generosity, not a scientific exploration or experiment or text-book, that may not be a mistake. It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true. ”

“ But granting we are not certain, does it then follow that a bare trust in such a world is a fool’s paradise and lubberland, or rather that it is a living attitude in which we are free to indulge? Well, we are free to trust at our own risks anything that is not impossible and that can bring analogies to bear in its behalf. That the world of physics is probably not absolute, all the converging multitude of arguments that make in favor of idealism tend to prove. ”

“ It is this natural religion (primitive still in spite of the fact that poets and men of science whose goodwill exceeds their perspicacity keep publishing it in new editions tuned to our contemporary ears) that, as I said a while ago, has suffered definitive bankruptcy in the opinion of a circle of persons, amongst whom I must count myself, and who are growing more numerous every day. For such persons the physical order of nature, taken simply as Science knows it, cannot be held to reveal any one harmonious spiritual intent. ”