The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
can never come so long as we are passive. But nature has put into our
hands two keys, by which we may test the lock. If we try the moral key
_and it fits_, it is a moral lock. If we try the unmoral key and _it_
fits, it is an unmoral lock. I cannot possibly conceive of any other
sort of 'evidence' or 'proof' than this. It is quite true that the
co-operation of generations is needed to educe it. But in these
matters the solidarity (so called) of the human race is a patent fact.
The essential thing to notice is that our active preference is a
legitimate part of the game,--that it is our plain business as men to
try one of the keys, and the one in which we most confide. If then the
proof exist not till I have acted, and I must needs in acting run the
risk of being wrong, how can the popular science professors be right in
objurgating in me as infamous a 'credulity' which the strict logic of
the situation requires? If this really be a moral universe; if by my
acts I be a factor of its destinies; if to believe where I may doubt be
itself a moral act {109} analogous to voting for a side not yet sure to
win,--by what right shall they close in upon me and steadily negate the
deepest conceivable function of my being by their preposterous command
that I shall stir neither hand nor foot, but remain balancing myself in
eternal and insoluble doubt? Why, doubt itself is a decision of the
widest practical reach, if only because we may miss by doubting what
goods we might be gaining by espousing the winning side. But more than
that! it is often practically impossible to distinguish doubt from
dogmatic negation. If I refuse to stop a murder because I am in doubt
whether it be not justifiable homicide, I am virtually abetting the
crime. If I refuse to bale out a boat because I am in doubt whether my
efforts will keep her afloat, I am really helping to sink her. If in
the mountain precipice I doubt my right to risk a leap, I actively
connive at my destruction. He who commands himself not to be credulous
of God, of duty, of freedom, of immortality, may again and again be
indistinguishable from him who dogmatically denies them. Scepticism in
moral matters is an active ally of immorality. Who is not for is
against. The universe will have no neutrals in these questions. In
theory as in practice, dodge or hedge, or talk as we like about a wise
scepticism, we are really doing volunteer military service for one side
or the other.
Yet obvious as this necessity practically is, thousands of innocent
magazine readers lie paralyzed and terrified in the network of shallow
negations which the leaders of opinion have thrown over their souls.
All they need to be free and hearty again in the exercise of their
birthright is that these fastidious vetoes should be swept away. All
that the human {110} heart wants is its chance. It will willingly
forego certainty in universal matters if only it can be allowed to feel
that in them it has that same inalienable right to run risks, which no
one dreams of refusing to it in the pettiest practical affairs. And if
I, in these last pages, like the mouse in the fable, have gnawed a few
of the strings of the sophistical net that has been binding down its
lion-strength, I shall be more than rewarded for my pains.
To sum up: No philosophy will permanently be deemed rational by all men
which (in addition to meeting logical demands) does not to some degree
pretend to determine expectancy, and in a still greater degree make a
direct appeal to all those powers of our nature which we hold in
highest esteem. Faith, being one of these powers, will always remain a
factor not to be banished from philosophic constructions, the more so
since in many ways it brings forth its own verification. In these
points, then, it is hopeless to look for literal agreement among
mankind.
The ultimate philosophy, we may therefore conclude, must not be too
strait-laced in form, must not in all its parts divide heresy from
orthodoxy by too sharp a line. There must be left over and above the
propositions to be subscribed, _ubique, semper, et ab omnibus_, another
realm into which the stifled soul may escape from pedantic scruples and
indulge its own faith at its own risks; and all that can here be done
will be to mark out distinctly the questions which fall within faith's
sphere.
[1] This essay as far as page 75 consists of extracts from an article
printed in Mind for July, 1879. Thereafter it is a reprint of an
address to the Harvard Philosophical Club, delivered in 1880, and
published in the Princeton Review, July, 1882.
[2] At most, the command laid upon us by science to believe nothing not
yet verified by the senses is a prudential rule intended to maximize
our right thinking and minimize our errors _in the long run_. In the
particular instance we must frequently lose truth by obeying it; but on
the whole we are safer if we follow it consistently, for we are sure to
cover our losses with our gains. It is like those gambling and
insurance rules based on probability, in which we secure ourselves
against losses in detail by hedging on the total run. But this hedging
philosophy requires that long run should be there; and this makes it
inapplicable to the question of religious faith as the latter comes
home to the individual man. He plays the game of life not to escape
losses, for he brings nothing with him to lose; he plays it for gains;
and it is now or never with him, for the long run which exists indeed
for humanity, is not there for him. Let him doubt, believe, or deny,
he runs his risk, and has the natural right to choose which one it
shall be.
[3] Life of James Hinton, pp. 172, 173. See also the excellent chapter
on Faith and Sight in the Mystery of Matter, by J. Allanson Picton.
Hinton's Mystery of Pain will undoubtedly always remain the classical
utterance on this subject.
[4] Observe that in all this not a word has been said of free-will. It
all applies as well to a predetermined as to an indeterminate universe.
If _M_ + _x_ is fixed in advance, the belief which leads to _x_ and the
desire which prompts the belief are also fixed. But fixed or not,
these subjective states form a phenomenal condition necessarily
preceding the facts; necessarily constitutive, therefore, of the truth
_M_ + _x_ which we seek. If, however, free acts be possible, a faith
in their possibility, by augmenting the moral energy which gives them
birth, will increase their frequency in a given individual.
[5] In either case, as a later essay explains (see p. 193), the
_should_ which the moralist regards as binding upon him must be rooted
in the feeling of some other thinker, or collection of thinkers, to
whose demands he individually bows.
{111}
REFLEX ACTION AND THEISM.[1]
MEMBERS OF THE MINISTERS' INSTITUTE:
Let me confess to the diffidence with which I find myself standing here
to-day. When the invitation of your committee reached me last fall,
the simple truth is that I accepted it as most men accept a
challenge,--not because they wish to fight, but because they are
ashamed to say no. Pretending in my small sphere to be a teacher, I
felt it would be cowardly to shrink from the keenest ordeal to which a
teacher can be exposed,--the ordeal of teaching other teachers.
Fortunately, the trial will last but one short hour; and I have the
consolation of remembering Goethe's verses,--
"Vor den Wissenden sich stellen,
Sicher ist 's in allen Fällen,"--
for if experts are the hardest people to satisfy, they have at any rate
the liveliest sense of the difficulties of one's task, and they know
quickest when one hits the mark.
Since it was as a teacher of physiology that I was most unworthily
officiating when your committee's {112} invitation reached me, I must
suppose it to be for the sake of bringing a puff of the latest winds of
doctrine which blow over that somewhat restless sea that my presence is
desired. Among all the healthy symptoms that characterize this age, I
know no sounder one than the eagerness which theologians show to
assimilate results of science, and to hearken to the conclusions of men
of science about universal matters. One runs a better chance of being
listened to to-day if one can quote Darwin and Helmholtz than if one
can only quote Schleiermacher or Coleridge. I almost feel myself this
moment that were I to produce a frog and put him through his
physiological performances in a masterly manner before your eyes, I
should gain more reverential ears for what I have to say during the
remainder of the hour. I will not ask whether there be not something
of mere fashion in this prestige which the words of the physiologists
enjoy just now. If it be a fashion, it is certainly a beneficial one
upon the whole; and to challenge it would come with a poor grace from
one who at the moment he speaks is so conspicuously profiting by its
favors.
I will therefore only say this: that the latest breeze from the
physiological horizon need not necessarily be the most important one.
Of the immense amount of work which the laboratories of Europe and
America, and one may add of Asia and Australia, are producing every
year, much is destined to speedy refutation; and of more it may be said
that its interest is purely technical, and not in any degree
philosophical or universal.
This being the case, I know you will justify me if I fall back on a
doctrine which is fundamental and well established rather than novel,
and ask you whether {113} by taking counsel together we may not trace
some new consequences from it which shall interest us all alike as men.
I refer to the doctrine of reflex action, especially as extended to the
brain. This is, of course, so familiar to you that I hardly need
define it. In a general way, all educated people know what reflex
action means.
It means that the acts we perform are always the result of outward
discharges from the nervous centres, and that these outward discharges
are themselves the result of impressions from the external world,
carried in along one or another of our sensory nerves. Applied at
first to only a portion of our acts, this conception has ended by being
generalized more and more, so that now most physiologists tell us that
every action whatever, even the most deliberately weighed and
calculated, does, so far as its organic conditions go, follow the
reflex type. There is not one which cannot be remotely, if not
immediately, traced to an origin in some incoming impression of sense.
There is no impression of sense which, unless inhibited by some other
stronger one, does not immediately or remotely express itself in action
of some kind. There is no one of those complicated performances in the
convolutions of the brain to which our trains of thought correspond,
which is not a mere middle term interposed between an incoming
sensation that arouses it and an outgoing discharge of some sort,
inhibitory if not exciting, to which itself gives rise. The structural
unit of the nervous system is in fact a triad, neither of whose
elements has any independent existence. The sensory impression exists
only for the sake of awaking the central process of reflection, and the
central process of reflection exists {114} only for the sake of calling
forth the final act. All action is thus _re_-action upon the outer
world; and the middle stage of consideration or contemplation or
thinking is only a place of transit, the bottom of a loop, both whose
ends have their point of application in the outer world. If it should
ever have no roots in the outer world, if it should ever happen that it
led to no active measures, it would fail of its essential function, and
would have to be considered either pathological or abortive. The