The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
romantic and personal view of nature may lead, if wholly unchecked by
impersonal rationalism, are direful. Central African Mumbo-jumboism is
one of unchecked romanticism's fruits. One ought accordingly to
sympathize with that abhorrence of romanticism as a sufficient
world-theory; one ought to understand that lively intolerance of the
least grain of romanticism in the views of life of other people, which
are such characteristic marks of those who {325} follow the scientific
professions to-day. Our debt to science is literally boundless, and
our gratitude for what is positive in her teachings must be
correspondingly immense. But the S. P. R.'s Proceedings have, it seems
to me, conclusively proved one thing to the candid reader; and that is
that the verdict of pure insanity, of gratuitous preference for error,
of superstition without an excuse, which the scientists of our day are
led by their intellectual training to pronounce upon the entire thought
of the past, is a most shallow verdict. The personal and romantic view
of life has other roots besides wanton exuberance of imagination and
perversity of heart. It is perennially fed by _facts of experience_,
whatever the ulterior interpretation of those facts may prove to be;
and at no time in human history would it have been less easy than
now--at most times it would have been much more easy--for advocates
with a little industry to collect in its favor an array of contemporary
documents as good as those which our publications present. These
documents all relate to real experiences of persons. These experiences
have three characters in common: They are capricious, discontinuous,
and not easily controlled; they require peculiar persons for their
production; their significance seems to be wholly for personal life.
Those who preferentially attend to them, and still more those who are
individually subject to them, not only easily may find, but are
logically bound to find, in them valid arguments for their romantic and
personal conception of the world's course. Through my slight
participation in the investigations of the S. P. R. I have become
acquainted with numbers of persons of this sort, for whom the very word
'science' has become a name of reproach, for reasons that I now both
understand {326} and respect. It is the intolerance of science for
such phenomena as we are studying, her peremptory denial either of
their existence or of their significance (except as proofs of man's
absolute innate folly), that has set science so apart from the common
sympathies of the race. I confess that it is on this, its humanizing
mission, that the Society's best claim to the gratitude of our
generation seems to me to depend. It has restored continuity to
history. It has shown some reasonable basis for the most superstitious
aberrations of the foretime. It has bridged the chasm, healed the
hideous rift that science, taken in a certain narrow way, has shot into
the human world.
I will even go one step farther. When from our present advanced
standpoint we look back upon the past stages of human thought, whether
it be scientific thought or theological thought, we are amazed that a
universe which appears to us of so vast and mysterious a complication
should ever have seemed to any one so little and plain a thing.
Whether it be Descartes's world or Newton's, whether it be that of the
materialists of the last century or that of the Bridgewater treatises
of our own, it always looks the same to us,--incredibly perspectiveless
and short. Even Lyell's, Faraday's, Mill's, and Darwin's consciousness
of their respective subjects are already beginning to put on an
infantile and innocent look. Is it then likely that the science of our
own day will escape the common doom; that the minds of its votaries
will never look old-fashioned to the grandchildren of the latter? It
would be folly to suppose so. Yet if we are to judge by the analogy of
the past, when our science once becomes old-fashioned, it will be more
for its omissions of fact, for its {327} ignorance of whole ranges and
orders of complexity in the phenomena to be explained, than for any
fatal lack in its spirit and principles. The spirit and principles of
science are mere affairs of method; there is nothing in them that need
hinder science from dealing successfully with a world in which personal
forces are the starting-point of new effects. The only form of thing
that we directly encounter, the only experience that we concretely
have, is our own personal life. The only complete category of our
thinking, our professors of philosophy tell us, is the category of
personality, every other category being one of the abstract elements of
that. And this systematic denial on science's part of personality as a
condition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential and
innermost nature our world is a strictly impersonal world, may,
conceivably, as the whirligig of time goes round, prove to be the very
defect that our descendants will be most surprised at in our own
boasted science, the omission that to their eyes will most tend to make
it look perspectiveless and short.
[1] This Essay is formed of portions of an article in Scribner's
Magazine for March, 1890, of an article in the Forum for July, 1892,
and of the President's Address before the Society for Psychical
Research, published in the Proceedings for June, 1896, and in Science.
[2] Written in 1891. Since then, Mr. Balfour, the present writer, and
Professor William Crookes have held the presidential office.
{329}
INDEX.
ABSOLUTISM, 12, 30.
Abstract conceptions, 219.
Action, as a measure of belief, 3, 29-30.
Actual world narrower than ideal, 202.
Agnosticism, 54, 81, 126.
Allen, G., 231, 235, 256.
Alps, leap in the, 59, 96.
Alternatives, 156, 161, 202, 269.
Ambiguity of choice, 156; of being, 292.
Anaesthetic revelation, 294.
A priori truths, 268.
Apparitions, 311.
Aristotle, 249.
Associationism, in Ethics, 186.
Atheist and acorn, 160.
Authorities in Ethics, 204; _versus_ champions, 207.
Axioms, 268.
BAGEHOT, 232.
Bain, 71, 91.
Balfour, 9.
Being, its character, 142; in Hegel, 281.
Belief, 59. See 'Faith.'
Bellamy, 188.
Bismarck, 228.
Block-universe, 292.
Blood, B. P., vi, 294.
Brockton murderer, 160, 177.
Bunsen, 203, 274.
CALVINISM, 45.
Carlyle, 42, 44, 45, 73, 87, 173.
'Casuistic question' in Ethics, 198.
Causality, 147.
Causation, Hume's doctrine of, 278.
Census of hallucinations, 312.
Certitude, 13, 30.
Chance, 149, 153-9, 178-180.
Choice, 156.
Christianity, 5, 14.
Cicero, 92.
City of dreadful night, 35.
Clark, X., 50.
Classifications, 67.
Clifford, 6, 7, 10, 14, 19, 21, 92, 230.
Clive, 228.
Clough, 6.
Common-sense, 270.
Conceptual order of world, 118.
Conscience, 186-8.
Contradiction, as used by Hegel, 275-277.
Contradictions of philosophers, 16.
Crillon, 62
Criterion of truth, 15, 16; in Ethics, 205.
Crude order of experience, 118.
Crystal vision, 314.
Cycles in Nature, 220, 223-4.
DARWIN, 221, 223, 226, 320.
Data, 271.
Davey, 313.
Demands, as creators of value, 201.
'Determination is negation,' 286-290.
Determinism, 150; the Dilemma of;
145-183; 163, 166; hard and soft, 149.
Dogs, 57.
Dogmatism, 12.
Doubt, 54, 109.
Dupery, 27.
EASY-GOING mood, 211, 213.
Elephant, 282.
Emerson, 23, 175.
Empiricism, i., 12, 14, 17, 278.
England, 228.
Environment, its relation to great men,
223, 226; to great thoughts, 250.
Error, 163; duty of avoiding, 18.
Essence of good and bad, 200-1.
Ethical ideals, 200.
Ethical philosophy, 208, 210, 216.
Ethical standards, 205; diversity of, 200.
Ethics, its three questions, 185.
Evidence, objective, 13, 15, 16.
Evil, 46, 49, 161, 190.
Evolution, social, 232, 237; mental, 245.
Evolutionism, its test of right, 98-100.
Expectancy, 77-80.
Experience, crude, _versus_ rationalized,
118; tests our faiths, 105.
FACTS, 271.
Faith, that truth exists, 9, 23; in our
fellows, 24-5; school boys' definition of, 29;
a remedy for pessimism, 60, 101; religious, 56;
defined, 90; defended against 'scientific'
objections, viii-xi, 91-4; may
create its own verification, 59, 96-103.
Familiarity confers rationality, 76.
Fatalism, 88.
Fiske, 255, 260.
Fitzgerald, 160.
Freedom, 103, 271.
Free-will, 103, 145, 157.
GALTON, 242.
Geniuses, 226, 229.
Ghosts, 315,
Gnosticism, 138-140, 165, 169.
God, 61, 68; of Nature, 43; the most
adequate object for our mind, 116,
122; our relations to him, 134-6;
his providence, 182; his demands
create obligation, 193; his function
in Ethics, 212-215.
Goethe, 111.
Good, 168, 200, 201.
Goodness, 190.
Great-man theory of history, 232.
Great men and their environment, 216-254.
Green, 206,
Gryzanowski, 240.
Gurney, 306, 307, 311.
Guthrie, 309.
Guyau, 188.
HALLUCINATIONS, Census of, 312.
Happiness, 33.
Harris, 282.
Hegel, 72, 263; his excessive claims,
272; his use of negation, 273, 290;
of contradiction, 274, 276; on being,
281; on otherness, 283; on infinity,
284; on identity, 285; on determination,
289; his ontological emotion, 297.
Hegelisms, on some, 263-298.
Heine, 203.
Helmholtz, 85, 91.
Henry IV., 62.
Herbart, 280.
Hero-worship, 261.
Hinton, C. H., 15.
Hinton, J., 101.
Hodgson, R., 308.
Hodgson, S, H., 10.
Honor, 50.
Hugo, 213.
Human mind, its habit of abstracting, 219.
Hume on causation, 278.
Huxley, 6, 10, 92.
Hypnotism, 302, 309.
Hypotheses, live or dead, 2; their
verification, 105; of genius, 249.
IDEALS, 200; their conflict, 202.
Idealism, 89, 291.
Identity, 285.
Imperatives, 211.
Importance of individuals, the, 255-262;
of things, its ground, 257.
Indeterminism, 150.
Individual differences, 259.
Individuals, the importance of, 255-262
Infinite, 284.
Intuitionism, in Ethics, 186, 189.
JEVONS, 249.
Judgments of regret, 159.
KNOWING, 12.
Knowledge, 85.
LEAP on precipice, 59, 96.
Leibnitz, 43.
Life, is it worth living, 32-62.
MAGGOTS, 176-7.
Mahdi, the, 2, 6.
Mallock, 32, 183.
Marcus Aurelius, 41.
Materialism, 126.
'Maybes,' 59.
Measure of good, 205.
Mediumship, physical, 313, 314.
Melancholy, 34, 39, 42.
Mental evolution, 246; structure, 114, 117.
Mill, 234.
Mind, its triadic structure, 114, 117;
its evolution, 246; its three departments,
114, 122, 127-8.
Monism, 279.
Moods, the strenuous and the easy, 211, 213
Moralists, objective and subjective, 103-108.
Moral judgments, their origin, 186-8;
obligation, 192-7; order, 193;
philosophy, 184-5.
Moral philosopher and the moral life, the, 184-215.
Murder, 178.
Murderer, 160, 177.
Myers, 308, 315, 320.
Mystical phenomena, 300.
Mysticism, 74.
NAKED, the, 281.
Natural theology, 40-4.
Nature, 20, 41-4, 56.
Negation, as used by Hegel, 273.
Newman, 10.
Nitrous oxide, 294.
Nonentity, 72.
OBJECTIVE evidence, 13, 15, 16.
Obligation, 192-7.
Occult phenomena, 300; examples of, 323.
Omar Khayam, 160.
Optimism, 60, 102, 163.
Options offered to belief, 3, 11, 27.
Origin of moral judgments, 186-8.
'Other,' in Hegel, 283.
PARSIMONY, law of, 132.
Partaking, 268, 270, 275, 291.
Pascal's wager, 5, 11.
Personality, 324, 327.
Pessimism, 39, 40, 47, 60, 100, 101, 161, 167.
Philosophy, 65; depends on personal
demands, 93; makes world unreal,
39; seeks unification, 67-70; the
ultimate, 110; its contradictions, 16.