THE WILL TO BELIEVE (abridged)
William James
For the full text, see here.
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I.
Let us give the name of hypothesis
to anything that may be proposed to our belief; and just as the electricians
speak of live and dead wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either live or
dead. A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to
whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no
electric connection with your nature,—it refuses to scintillate with any
credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however
(even if he be not one of the Mahdi's followers), the hypothesis is among the
mind's possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an
hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual
thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. The maximum of liveness
in an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably. Practically, that means
belief; but there is some believing tendency wherever there is willingness to act
at all.
Next, let us call the decision
between two hypotheses an option. Options may be of several kinds. They may
be—1, living or dead; 2, forced or avoidable; 3, momentous or trivial; and for
our purposes we may call an option a genuine option when it is of the forced,
living, and momentous kind.
1. A living option is one in which
both hypotheses are live ones. If I say to you: "Be a theosophist or be a
Mohammedan," it is probably a dead option, because for you neither
hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: "Be an agnostic or be a
Christian," it is otherwise: trained as you are, each hypothesis makes
some appeal, however small, to your belief.
2. Next, if I say to you:
"Choose between going out with your umbrella or without it," I do not
offer you a genuine option, for it is not forced. You can easily avoid it by
not going out at all. Similarly, if I say, "Either love me or hate
me," "Either call my theory true or call it false," your option
is avoidable. You may remain indifferent to me, neither loving nor hating, and
you may decline to offer any judgment as to my theory. But if I say,
"Either accept this truth or go without it," I put on you a forced
option, for there is no standing place outside of the alternative. Every
dilemma based on a complete logical disjunction, with no possibility of not
choosing, is an option of this forced kind.
3. Finally, if I were Dr. Nansen
and proposed to you to join my North Pole expedition, your option would be
momentous; for this would probably be your only similar opportunity, and your
choice now would either exclude you from the North Pole sort of immortality
altogether or put at least the chance of it into your hands. He who refuses to
embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried and failed.
Per contra, the option is trivial when the opportunity is not unique, when the
stake is insignificant, or when the decision is reversible if it later prove
unwise. Such trivial options abound in the scientific life. A chemist finds an
hypothesis live enough to spend a year in its verification: he believes in it
to that extent. But if his experiments prove inconclusive either way, he is
quit for his loss of time, no vital harm being done.
It will facilitate our discussion
if we keep all these distinctions well in mind.
II.
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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…
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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?
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III.
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.
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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.
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IV.
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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.
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V.
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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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VII.
One more point, small but
important, and our preliminaries are done. There are two ways of looking at our
duty in the matter of opinion,—ways entirely different, and yet ways about
whose difference the theory of knowledge seems hitherto to have shown very
little concern. We must know the truth; and we must avoid error,—these are our
first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of
stating an identical commandment, they are two separable laws. Although it may
indeed happen that when we believe the truth A, we escape as an incidental
consequence from believing the falsehood B, it hardly ever happens that by
merely disbelieving B we necessarily believe A. We may in escaping B fall into
believing other falsehoods, C or D, just as bad as B; or we may escape B by not
believing anything at all, not even A.
Believe truth! Shun error!—these,
we see, are two materially different laws; and by choosing between them we may
end by coloring differently our whole intellectual life. We may regard the
chase for truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we
may, on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and
let truth take its chance. Clifford, in the instructive passage which I have
quoted, exhorts us to the latter course. Believe nothing, he tells us, keep
your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing it on insufficient
evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies. You, on the other hand, may
think that the risk of being in error is a very small matter when compared with
the blessings of real knowledge, and be ready to be duped many times in your
investigation rather than postpone indefinitely the chance of guessing true. I
myself find it impossible to go with Clifford. We must remember that these
feelings of our duty about either truth or error are in any case only
expressions of our passional life. Biologically considered, our minds are as
ready to grind out falsehood as veracity, and he who says, "Better go
without belief forever than believe a lie!" merely shows his own
preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe. He may be critical of many of
his desires and fears, but this fear he slavishly obeys. He cannot imagine any
one questioning its binding force. For my own part, I have also a horror of
being duped; but I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to
a man in this world: so Clifford's exhortation has to my ears a thoroughly
fantastic sound. It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better
to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories
either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such
awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in
spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than
this excessive nervousness on their behalf. At any rate, it seems the fittest
thing for the empiricist philosopher.
VIII.
And now, after all this
introduction, let us go straight at our question. I have said, and now repeat
it, that not only as a matter of fact do we find our passional nature
influencing us in our opinions, but that there are some options between
opinions in which this influence must be regarded both as an inevitable and as
a lawful determinant of our choice.
I fear here that some of you my
hearers will begin to scent danger, and lend an inhospitable ear. Two first
steps of passion you have indeed had to admit as necessary,—we must think so as
to avoid dupery, and we must think so as to gain truth; but the surest path to
those ideal consummations, you will probably consider, is from now onwards to
take no further passional step.
Well, of course, I agree as far as
the facts will allow. Wherever the option between losing truth and gaining it
is not momentous, we can throw the chance of gaining truth away, and at any
rate save ourselves from any chance of believing falsehood, by not making up
our minds at all till objective evidence has come. In scientific questions,
this is almost always the case; and even in human affairs in general, the need
of acting is seldom so urgent that a false belief to act on is better than no
belief at all. Law courts, indeed, have to decide on the best evidence
attainable for the moment, because a judge's duty is to make law as well as to
ascertain it, and (as a learned judge once said to me) few cases are worth
spending much time over: the great thing is to have them decided on any
acceptable principle, and got out of the way. But in our dealings with
objective nature we obviously are recorders, not makers, of the truth; and
decisions for the mere sake of deciding promptly and getting on to the next
business would be wholly out of place. Throughout the breadth of physical
nature facts are what they are quite independently of us, and seldom is there
any such hurry about them that the risks of being duped by believing a
premature theory need be faced. The questions here are always trivial options,
the hypotheses are hardly living (at any rate not living for us spectators),
the choice between believing truth or falsehood is seldom forced. The attitude
of sceptical balance is therefore the absolutely wise one if we would escape
mistakes.
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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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X.
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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.
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