It may be thought that this can apply only to beliefs concerning the consequences of our own personal actions, affairs in which we individually play a part. It is from them, no doubt, that our nature takes this set: but the habit once formed is extended to all sorts of matters in which we have no personal interest. Tell an ordinary Englishman, it has been wittily said, that it is a question whether the planets are inhabited, and he feels bound at once to have a confident opinion on the point. The strength of the conviction bears no proportion to the amount of reason spent in reaching it, unless it may be said that as a general rule the less a belief is reasoned the more confidently it is held. "A grocer," writes Mr. Bagehot in an acute essay on "The Emotion of Conviction,"[2] "has a full creed as to foreign policy, a young lady a complete theory of the Sacraments, as to which neither has any doubt. A girl in a country parsonage will be sure that Paris never can be taken, or that Bismarck is a wretch." An attitude of philosophic doubt, of suspended judgment, is repugnant to the natural man. Belief is an independent joy to him. This bias works in all men. While there is life, there is pressure from within on belief, tending to push reason aside. The force of the pressure, of course, varies with individual temperament, age, and other circumstances. The young are more credulous than the old, as having greater energy: they are apt, as Bacon puts it, to be "carried away by the sanguine element in their temperament". Shakespeare's Laertes is a study of the impulsive temperament, boldly contrasted with Hamlet, who has more discourse of reason. When Laertes hears that his father has been killed, he hurries home, collects a body of armed sympathisers, bursts into the presence of the king, and threatens with his vengeance--the wrong man. He never pauses to make inquiry: like Hotspur he is "a wasp-stung and impatient fool"; he must wreak his revenge on somebody, and at once. Hamlet's father also has been murdered, but his reason must be satisfied before he proceeds to his revenge, and when doubtful proof is offered, he waits for proof more relative.