Not all, I dare say, who afterwards read this “Will to Believe” will have experienced any such shock and bewilderment, nor will many have felt what we found so upsetting in a bit of writing that was, as writing, certainly, altogether delightful. But you must know that this particular gathering was made up of students who had been brought up in that theory of truth which I have called the realistic, and their habitual attitude toward truth was such that they held their truth the truer the more they were its discoverers and the less they had had to do with the making of it. There were, to begin with, the laboratory men. Now, a laboratory is a school of the most rigid discipline--a discipline whose first principle is “keep yourself out of your experiment.” I think you will understand what I mean by this when I say that a scrupulous experimenter about to take conclusive readings in a matter that promises to be of some value to science will, if possible, get another observer ignorant of their import to take these readings for him, lest something of his own excitement and anxiety corrupt his very touch, sight and hearing, and warp his result to his will. And, what was this James was defending--a “Will to Believe”? No wonder some wag of the lot dubbed it “The Will to Make Believe”! And what was this again James was saying--“For purposes of discovery ... indifference is to be less highly recommended, and science would be far less advanced than she is if the passionate desires of individuals to get their own faiths confirmed had been kept out of the game.... On the other hand, if you want an absolute duffer in an investigation, you must, after all, take the man who has no interest whatever in its results: he is the warranted incapable, the positive fool.” Had James addressed a gathering of the Sons of St. Patrick, in the sense of demonstrating to them that the Pope of Rome was the Beast mentioned in Revelations, he might have called forth a noisier response, but none less sympathetic than ours. One who would invite a man to bring his enthusiasms, his likings and dislikings, in short, any will of his other than the will to persevere, into a laboratory with him would naturally not forbid him to keep all this equipment by him in whatever pursuit of truth he might engage, whether of history, economics, morals or religion. And just as James shocked the realist spirit of that little Harvard gathering of a score of years ago, so have his writings fallen afoul of realism wherever they have been read--and perhaps few writers on philosophy have been more widely read than William James. This is to have made enemies indeed, for the genius of realism, the spirit of the seeker who would find what he might find and call it truth, naked, unclothed upon with garments of human interpretation, has sometime breathed in every science and every art. * * * * *