The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
teacher say that all the fundamental conceptions of truth have already
been found by science, and that the future has only the details of the
picture to fill in. But the slightest reflection on the real
conditions will suffice to show how barbaric such notions are. They
show such a lack of scientific imagination, that it is hard to see how
one who is actively advancing any part of science can make a mistake so
crude. Think how many absolutely new scientific conceptions have
arisen in our own generation, how many new problems have been
formulated that were never thought of before, and then cast an eye upon
the brevity of science's career. It began with Galileo, not three
hundred years ago. 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, {54} to days without a document
or monument to tell their tale. 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.
Agnostic positivism, of course, admits this principle theoretically in
the most cordial terms, but insists that we must not turn it to any
practical use. We have no right, this doctrine tells us, to dream
dreams, or suppose anything about the unseen part of the universe,
merely because to do so may be for what we are pleased to call our
highest interests. We must always wait for sensible evidence for our
beliefs; and where such evidence is inaccessible we must frame no
hypotheses whatever. Of course this is a safe enough position _in
abstracto_. If a thinker had no stake in the unknown, no vital needs,
to live or languish according to what the unseen world contained, a
philosophic neutrality and refusal to believe either one way or the
other would be his wisest cue. But, unfortunately, neutrality is not
only inwardly difficult, it is also outwardly unrealizable, where our
relations to an alternative are practical and vital. This is because,
as the psychologists tell us, belief and doubt are living attitudes,
and involve conduct on our part. Our only way, for example, of
doubting, or refusing to believe, that a certain thing _is_, is
continuing to act as if it were _not_. If, for instance, {55} I refuse
to believe that the room is getting cold, I leave the windows open and
light no fire just as if it still were warm. If I doubt that you are
worthy of my confidence, I keep you uninformed of all my secrets just
as if you were _un_worthy of the same. If I doubt the need of insuring
my house, I leave it uninsured as much as if I believed there were no
need. And so if 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 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.
And, after all, is not this duty of neutrality where only our inner
interests would lead us to believe, the most ridiculous of commands?
Is it not sheer dogmatic folly to say that our inner interests can have
no real connection with the forces that the hidden world may contain?
In other cases divinations based on inner interests have proved
prophetic enough. Take science itself! Without an imperious inner
demand on our part for ideal logical and mathematical harmonies, we
should never have attained to proving that such harmonies be hidden
between all the chinks and interstices of the crude natural world.
Hardly a law has been established in science, hardly a fact
ascertained, which was not first sought after, often with sweat and
blood, to gratify an inner need. Whence such needs come from we do not
know; we find them in us, and biological psychology so far only classes
them with Darwin's 'accidental variations.' {56} 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? 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? Certainly not! Our faculties of belief were
not primarily given us to make orthodoxies and heresies withal; they
were given us to live by. 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,--this bare {57} assurance is to
such men enough to make life seem worth living in spite of every
contrary presumption suggested by its circumstances on the natural
plane. Destroy this inner assurance, however, vague as it is, and all
the light and radiance of existence is extinguished for these persons
at a stroke. Often enough the wild-eyed look at life--the suicidal
mood--will then set in.
And now the application comes directly home to you and me. Probably to
almost every one of us here the most adverse life would seem well worth
living, if we only could be _certain_ that our bravery and patience
with it were terminating and eventuating and bearing fruit somewhere in
an unseen spiritual world. 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;
and that our whole physical life may lie soaking in a spiritual
atmosphere, a dimension of being that we at present have no organ for
apprehending, is vividly suggested to us by the analogy of the life of
our domestic animals. Our dogs, for example, are in our human life but
not of it. They witness hourly the outward body of events whose inner
meaning cannot, by any possible operation, be revealed to their
intelligence,--events in which they themselves often play the cardinal
part. My terrier bites a teasing boy, for example, and the father
demands damages. The dog {58} may be present at every step of the
negotiations, and see the money paid, without an inkling of what it all
means, without a suspicion that it has anything to do with _him_; and
he never _can_ know in his natural dog's life. Or take another case
which used greatly to impress me in my medical-student days. Consider
a poor dog whom they are vivisecting in a laboratory. He lies strapped
on a board and shrieking at his executioners, and to his own dark
consciousness is literally in a sort of hell. He cannot see a single
redeeming ray in the whole business; and yet all these
diabolical-seeming events are often controlled by human intentions with
which, if his poor benighted mind could only be made to catch a glimpse
of them, all that is heroic in him would religiously acquiesce.
Healing truth, relief to future sufferings of beast and man, are to be
bought by them. It may be genuinely a process of redemption. Lying on
his back on the board there he may be performing a function
incalculably higher than any that prosperous canine life admits of; and
yet, of the whole performance, this function is the one portion that
must remain absolutely beyond his ken.
Now turn from this to the life of man. In the dog's life we see the
world invisible to him because we live in both worlds. 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 {59} 'scientific' life itself has much to do with maybes,
and human life at large has everything to do with them. So far as man
stands for anything, and is productive or originative at all, his
entire vital function may be said to have 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_.
Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain, and have
worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a
terrible leap. 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. In such a case (and it belongs to an enormous class), the
part of wisdom as well as of courage is to _believe what is in the line
of your needs_, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled. Refuse
to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably
perish. But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save
yourself. You make one or the other of two possible universes true by
your trust or mistrust,--both universes having been only _maybes_, in
this particular, before you contributed your act.
Now, it appears to me that the question whether life is worth living is
subject to conditions logically {60} much like these. It does, indeed,