William James

“ Is it to be wondered at that 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 that grows up in the school of science goes dead against its toleration. It is only natural that those who have caught the scientific fever should pass over to the opposite extreme and write as if the incorruptibly truthful intellect ought positively to prefer bitterness and unacceptableness to the heart, in its cup. ”

“ 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 that 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. ”

“ 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 an organ of knowledge in not trusting to it exclusively, in not waiting for its solving 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. ”

“ 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 don’t 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ The truth of truths might come in merely oracular or affirmative form, and she would decline to look at 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. ”

“ 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 100 dollars? ”

“ Wherever the option between losing truth and gaining it is not momentous, we can throw the chance of gaining truth away, and at any rate save ourselves from any chance of believing falsehood, by not making up our minds at all till objective evidence has come. In scientific questions, this is almost always the case. And in human affairs in general, even, the need of acting is seldom so urgent that a false belief to act on is better than no belief at all. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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 skeptical 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 sure whether she would prove an angel or a devil after he brought her home. ”

“ 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 very start. ”

“ 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 ”

“ There are passional tendencies and volitions that run before, and others that 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Let us agree, however, that wherever there is no forced option, the dispassionately judicial intellect, with no pet hypothesis, saving us at any rate from dupery, 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 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. ”

“ 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 skepticism, 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. ”

“ Would he not cut himself off from that particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married some one else? Skepticism, 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yes, in spite of the performances of your crew and ball teams, we still believe that justification by faith and not by works is what you are really willing to live and die for. And to show you that we for our part at Harvard have not lost all interest in these vital subjects, I have brought with me to-night something very like a sermon on justification by faith to read to you—I mean an essay in justification of faith, a defense of our right willfully to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced. ”

“ It is outworn scholasticism to say that “good” is a category that the intellect must first perceive before the heart can follow with its desires. Wherever it is a question of goods the heart at last decides; and there is no middle course between letting our passional nature coöperate in our moral beliefs, and resigning ourselves to going without moral beliefs at all.
The question of having moral beliefs at all or not having them is decided by our will. ”

“ His faith acts on the powers above him as a claim, and creates its own verification.
Where faith in a fact, based on need of the fact, can create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith based on inner need, and 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! ”