james - will-751

james - will-751, książki, Philosphy

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William JamesThe Will To Believe.1897Copyright 1995, James Fieser (jfieser@utm.edu). See end notefor details on copyright and editing conventions. This e-text is based on the 1897 edition of <The Will to Believe>published by Longmans, Green & Co. This is a working draft;please report errors.[1]* * * *The Will To Believe.[2]In the recently published Life by Leslie Stephen of Ihis brother, Fitz-James, there is an account of a school towhich the latter went when he was a boy. The teacher, acertain Mr. Guest, used to converse with his pupils in thiswise: "Gurney, what is the difference between justificationand sanctification? Stephen, prove the omnipotence of God!"etc. In the midst of our Harvard freethinking andindifference we are prone to imagine that here at your goodold orthodox College conversation continues to be somewhatupon this order; and to show you that we at Harvard have notlost all interest in these vital subjects, I have broughtwith me to-night something like a sermon on justification byfaith to read to you, -- I mean an essay in justification offaith, a defense of our right to adopt a believing attitudein religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merelylogical intellect may not have been coerced. I The Will toBelieve,' accordingly, is the title of my paper.I have long defended to my own students the lawfulnessof voluntarily adopted faith; but as soon as they have gotwell imbued with the logical spirit, they have as a rulerefused to admit my contention I to be lawfulphilosophically, even though in point of fact they werepersonally all the time chock-full of some faith or otherthemselves. I am all the while, however, so profoundlyconvinced that my own position is correct, that yourinvitation has seemed to me a good occasion to make mystatements more clear. Perhaps your minds will be more openthan those with which I have hitherto had to deal, I will beas little technical as I can, though I must begin by settingup some technical distinctions that will help us in the end.1. Hypotheses and Options. Let us give the name of<hypothesis> to anything thatmay be proposed to our belief; and just as the electriciansspeak of live and dead wires, let us speak of any hypothesisas either <live> or <dead>. A live hypothesis is one whichappeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed.If I asked you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes noelectric connection with your nature, -- it refuses toscintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis itis completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be notone of the Mahdi's followers), the hypothesis is among themind's possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadnessand liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties,but relations to the individual thinker. They are measuredby his willingness to act. The maximum of liveness in anhypothesis , means willingness to act irrevocably.Practically, that means belief; but there is some believingtendency wherever there is willingness to act at all.Next, let us call the decision between two hypothesesan <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 callan option a genuine option when it is of the forced, living,and momentous kind.1. A living option is one in which both hypotheses arelive ones. If I say to you: "Be a theosophist or be aMohammedan," it is probably a dead option, because for youneither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: " Bean agnostic or be a Christian," it is otherwise: trained asyou are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small,to your belief.2. Next, if I say to you: "Choose between going outwith your umbrella or without it," I do not offer you agenuine option, for it is not forced. You can easily avoidit by not going out at all. Similarly, if I say, "Eitherlove me or hate me," "Either call my theory true or call itfalse," your option is avoidable. You may remain indifferentto me, neither loving nor hating, and you may decline tooffer any judgment as to my theory. But if I say, "Eitheraccept this truth or go without it," I put on you a forcedoption, for there is no standing place outside of thealternative. Every dilemma based on a complete logicaldisjunction, with no possibility of not choosing, is anoption of this forced kind.3. Finally, if I were Dr. Nansen and proposed to you tojoin my North Pole expedition, your option would bemomentous; for this would probably be your only similaropportunity, and your choice now would either exclude youfrom the North Pole sort of immortality altogether or put atleast the chance of it into your hands. He who refuses toembrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as ifhe tried and failed. <Per contra>, the option is trivialwhen the opportunity is not unique, when the stake isinsignificant, or when the decision is reversible if itlater prove unwise. Such trivial options abound in thescientific life. A chemist finds an hypothesis live enoughto spend a year in its verification: he believes in it tothat extent. But if his experiments prove inconclusiveeither way, he is quit for his loss of time, no vital harmbeing done.It will facilitate our discussion if we keep all thesedistinctions well in mind.2. Pascal's Wager. The next matter to consider is theactual psychology of human opinion. When we look at certainfacts, it seems as if our passional and volitional naturelay at the root of all our convictions. When we look atothers, it seems as if they could do nothing when theintellect had once said its say. Let us take the latterfacts up firstDoes it not seem preposterous on the very face of it totalk of our opinions being modifiable at will? Can our willeither help or hinder our 'intellect in its perceptions oftruth? Can we, by just willing it, believe that AbrahamLincoln's existence is a myth, and that the portraits of himin McClure's Magazine are all of some one else? Can we, byany effort of our will, or by any strength of wish that itwere true, believe ourselves well and about when we areroaring with rheumatism in bed, or feel certain that the sumof the two one-dollar bills in our pocket must be a hundreddollars? We can <say> any of these things, but we areabsolutely impotent to believe them; and of just such thingsis the whole fabric of the truths that we do believe in madeup, -- matters of fact, immediate or remote, as Hume said,and relations between ideas, which are either there or notthere for us if we see them so, and which if not therecannot be put there by any action of our own.In Pascal's Thoughts there is a celebrated passageknown in literature as Pascal's wager. In it he tries toforce us into Christianity by reasoning as if our concernwith truth resembled our concern with the stakes in a gameof chance. Translated freely his words are these: You musteither believe or not believe that God is -- which will youdo? Your human reason cannot say. A game is going on betweenyou and the nature of 'things which at the day of judgmentwill bring out either heads or tails. Weigh what your gainsand your losses would be if you should stake all you have onheads, or God's existence: if you win in such case, you gaineternal beatitude; if you lose, you lose nothing at all. Ifthere were an infinity of chances, and only one for God inthis wager, still you ought to stake your all. on God; forthough you surely risk a finite loss by this procedure, anyfinite loss is reasonable, even a certain one is reasonable,if there is but the possibility of infinite gain. Go, then,and take holy water, and have masses said; belief will comeand stupefy your scruples, -- <Cela vous fera croire et vousabltira>. Why should you not? At bottom, what have you tolose?You probably feel that when religious faith expressesitself thus, in the language of the gamingtable, it is putto its last trumps. Surely Pascal's own personal belief inmasses and holy water had far other springs; and thiscelebrated page of his is but an argument for others, a lastdesperate snatch at a weapon against the hardness of theunbelieving heart. We feel that a faith in masses and holywater adopted willfully after such a mechanical calculation-- would lack the inner soul of faith's reality; and if wewere ourselves in the place of the Deity, we should probablytake particular pleasure in cutting off believers of thispattern from their infinite reward. It is evident thatunless there be some pre-existing tendency to believe inmasses and holy water, the option offered to 'the will byPascal is not a living option. Certainly no Turk ever tookto masses and holy water on its account; and even to usProtestants these means of salvation seem such foregoneimpossibilities that Pascal's logic, invoked for themspecifically, leaves us unmoved. As well might the Mahdiwrite to us, saying, "I am the Expected One whom God hascreated in his effulgence. You shall be infinitely happy ifyou confess me; otherwise you shall be cut off from thelight of the sun. Weigh, then, your infinite gain if I amgenuine against your finite sacrifice if I am not! " Hislogic would be that of Pascal; but he would vainly use it onus, for the hypothesis he offers us is dead. No tendency toact on it exists in us to any degree.The talk of believing by our volitio... [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]