The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
that the thought of my universe made him sick, like the sight of the
horrible motion of a mass of maggots in their carrion bed.
But while I freely admit that the pluralism and the restlessness are
repugnant and irrational in a certain way, I find that every
alternative to them is irrational in a deeper way. The indeterminism
with its maggots, if you please to speak so about it, offends only the
native absolutism of my intellect,--an absolutism which, after all,
perhaps, deserves to be snubbed and kept in check. But the determinism
with its necessary carrion, to continue the figure of speech, and with
no possible maggots to eat the latter up, violates my sense of moral
reality through and through. When, for example, I imagine such carrion
as the Brockton murder, I cannot conceive it as an act by which the
universe, as a whole, logically and necessarily expresses its nature
without shrinking from complicity with such a whole. And I
deliberately refuse to keep on terms of loyalty with the universe by
saying blankly that the murder, since it does flow from the nature of
the whole, is not carrion. There are some instinctive reactions which
{178} I, for one, will not tamper with. The only remaining
alternative, the attitude of gnostical romanticism, wrenches my
personal instincts in quite as violent a way. It falsifies the simple
objectivity of their deliverance. It makes the goose-flesh the murder
excites in me a sufficient reason for the perpetration of the crime.
It transforms life from a tragic reality into an insincere melodramatic
exhibition, as foul or as tawdry as any one's diseased curiosity
pleases to carry it out. And with its consecration of the 'roman
naturaliste' state of mind, and its enthronement of the baser crew of
Parisian _littérateurs_ among the eternally indispensable organs by
which the infinite spirit of things attains to that subjective
illumination which is the task of its life, it leaves me in presence of
a sort of subjective carrion considerably more noisome than the
objective carrion I called it in to take away.
No! better a thousand times, than such systematic corruption of our
moral sanity, the plainest pessimism, so that it be straightforward;
but better far than that the world of chance. Make as great an uproar
about chance as you please, I know that chance means pluralism and
nothing more. If some of the members of the pluralism are bad, the
philosophy of pluralism, whatever broad views it may deny me, permits
me, at least, to turn to the other members with a clean breast of
affection and an unsophisticated moral sense. And if I still wish to
think of the world as a totality, it lets me feel that a world with a
chance in it of being altogether good, even if the chance never come to
pass, is better than a world with no such chance at all. That 'chance'
whose very notion I am exhorted and conjured to banish {179} from my
view of the future as the suicide of reason concerning it, that
'chance' is--what? Just this,--the chance that in moral respects the
future may be other and better than the past has been. This is the
only chance we have any motive for supposing to exist. Shame, rather,
on its repudiation and its denial! For its presence is the vital air
which lets the world live, the salt which keeps it sweet.
And here I might legitimately stop, having expressed all I care to see
admitted by others to-night. But I know that if I do stop here,
misapprehensions will remain in the minds of some of you, and keep all
I have said from having its effect; so I judge it best to add a few
more words.
In the first place, in spite of all my explanations, the word 'chance'
will still be giving trouble. Though you may yourselves be adverse to
the deterministic doctrine, you wish a pleasanter word than 'chance' to
name the opposite doctrine by; and you very likely consider my
preference for such a word a perverse sort of a partiality on my part.
It certainly _is_ a bad word to make converts with; and you wish I had
not thrust it so butt-foremost at you,--you wish to use a milder term.
Well, I admit there may be just a dash of perversity in its choice.
The spectacle of the mere word-grabbing game played by the soft
determinists has perhaps driven me too violently the other way; and,
rather than be found wrangling with them for the good words, I am
willing to take the first bad one which comes along, provided it be
unequivocal. The question is of things, not of eulogistic names for
them; and the best word is the one that enables men to {180} know the
quickest whether they disagree or not about the things. But the word
'chance,' with its singular negativity, is just the word for this
purpose. Whoever uses it instead of 'freedom,' squarely and resolutely
gives up all pretence to control the things he says are free. For
_him_, he confesses that they are no better than mere chance would be.
It is a word of _impotence_, and is therefore the only sincere word we
can use, if, in granting freedom to certain things, we grant it
honestly, and really risk the game. "Who chooses me must give and
forfeit all he hath." Any other word permits of quibbling, and lets
us, after the fashion of the soft determinists, make a pretence of
restoring the caged bird to liberty with one hand, while with the other
we anxiously tie a string to its leg to make sure it does not get
beyond our sight.
But now you will bring up your final doubt. Does not the admission of
such an unguaranteed chance or freedom preclude utterly the notion of a
Providence governing the world? Does it not leave the fate of the
universe at the mercy of the chance-possibilities, and so far insecure?
Does it not, in short, deny the craving of our nature for an ultimate
peace behind all tempests, for a blue zenith above all clouds?
To this my answer must be very brief. The belief in free-will is not
in the least incompatible with the belief in Providence, provided you
do not restrict the Providence to fulminating nothing but _fatal_
decrees. If you allow him to provide possibilities as well as
actualities to the universe, and to carry on his own thinking in those
two categories just as we do ours, chances may be there, uncontrolled
even by him, and the course of the universe be really ambiguous; {181}
and yet the end of all things may be just what he intended it to be
from all eternity.
An analogy will make the meaning of this clear. Suppose two men before
a chessboard,--the one a novice, the other an expert player of the
game. The expert intends to beat. But he cannot foresee exactly what
any one actual move of his adversary may be. He knows, however, all
the _possible_ moves of the latter; and he knows in advance how to meet
each of them by a move of his own which leads in the direction of
victory. And the victory infallibly arrives, after no matter how
devious a course, in the one predestined form of check-mate to the
novice's king.
Let now the novice stand for us finite free agents, and the expert for
the infinite mind in which the universe lies. Suppose the latter to be
thinking out his universe before he actually creates it. Suppose him
to say, I will lead things to a certain end, but I will not _now_[10]
decide on all the steps thereto. At various points, ambiguous
possibilities shall be left {182} open, _either_ of which, at a given
instant, may become actual. But whichever branch of these bifurcations
become real, I know what I shall do at the _next_ bifurcation to keep
things from drifting away from the final result I intend.[11]
The creator's plan of the universe would thus be left blank as to many
of its actual details, but all possibilities would be marked down. The
realization of some of these would be left absolutely to chance; that
is, would only be determined when the moment of realization came.
Other possibilities would be _contingently_ determined; that is, their
decision would have to wait till it was seen how the matters of
absolute chance fell out. But the rest of the plan, including its
final upshot, would be rigorously determined once for all. So the
creator himself would not need to know _all_ the details of actuality
until they came; and at any time his own view of the world would be a
view partly of facts and partly of possibilities, exactly as ours is
now. Of one thing, however, he might be certain; and that is that his
world was safe, and that no matter how much it might zig-zag he could
surely bring it home at last.
{183}
Now, it is entirely immaterial, in this scheme, whether the creator
leave the absolute chance-possibilities to be decided by himself, each
when its proper moment arrives, or whether, on the contrary, he
alienate this power from himself, and leave the decision out and out to
finite creatures such as we men are. The great point is that the
possibilities are really _here_. Whether it be we who solve them, or
he working through us, at those soul-trying moments when fate's scales
seem to quiver, and good snatches the victory from evil or shrinks
nerveless from the fight, is of small account, so long as we admit that
the issue is decided nowhere else than here and now. _That_ is what
gives the palpitating reality to our moral life and makes it tingle, as
Mr. Mallock says, with so strange and elaborate an excitement. This
reality, this excitement, are what the determinisms, hard and soft
alike, suppress by their denial that _anything_ is decided here and
now, and their dogma that all things were foredoomed and settled long
ago. If it be so, may you and I then have been foredoomed to the error
of continuing to believe in liberty.[12] It is fortunate for the
winding up of controversy that in every discussion with determinism
this _argumentum ad hominem_ can be its adversary's last word.
[1] An Address to the Harvard Divinity Students, published in the
Unitarian Review for September, 1884.
[2] And I may now say Charles S. Peirce,--see the Monist, for 1892-93.
[3] "The whole history of popular beliefs about Nature refutes the
notion that the thought of a universal physical order can possibly have
arisen from the purely passive reception and association of particular
perceptions. Indubitable as it is that men infer from known cases to
unknown, it is equally certain that this procedure, if restricted to
the phenomenal materials that spontaneously offer themselves, would
never have led to the belief in a general uniformity, but only to the
belief that law and lawlessness rule the world in motley alternation.
From the point of view of strict experience, nothing exists but the sum
of particular perceptions, with their coincidences on the one hand,
their contradictions on the other.
"That there is more order in the world than appears at first sight is
not discovered; _till the order is looked for_. The first impulse to
look for it proceeds from practical needs: where ends must be attained,
or produce a result. But the practical need is only the first occasion
for our reflection on the conditions of true knowledge; and even were
there no such need, motives would still be present for carrying us
beyond the stage of mere association. For not with an equal interest,
or rather with an equal lack of interest, does man contemplate those
natural processes in which a thing is linked with its former mate, and
those in which it is linked to something else. _The former processes
harmonize with the conditions of his own thinking_: the latter do not.
In the former, his _concepts_, _general judgments_, and _inferences_
apply to reality: in the latter, they have no such application. And
thus the intellectual satisfaction which at first comes to him without
reflection, at last excites in him the conscious wish to find realized