Produced by Al Haines. (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive.) THE WILL TO BELIEVE AND OTHER ESSAYS IN POPULAR PHILOSOPHY BY WILLIAM JAMES NEW IMPRESSION LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. FOURTH AVENUE & 30TH STREET, NEW YORK LONDON, BOMBAY, AND CALCUTTA 1912 _Copyright, 1896_ BY WILLIAM JAMES First Edition. February, 1897, Reprinted, May, 1897, September, 1897, March, 1898, August, 1899, June, 1902, January, 1903, May, 1904, June, 1905, March, 1907, April, 1908, September, 1909, December, 1910, November, 1911, November, 1912 To My Old Friend, CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE, To whose philosophic comradeship in old times and to whose writings in more recent years I owe more incitement and help than I can express or repay. {vii} PREFACE. At most of our American Colleges there are Clubs formed by the students devoted to particular branches of learning; and these clubs have the laudable custom of inviting once or twice a year some maturer scholar to address them, the occasion often being made a public one. I have from time to time accepted such invitations, and afterwards had my discourse printed in one or other of the Reviews. It has seemed to me that these addresses might now be worthy of collection in a volume, as they shed explanatory light upon each other, and taken together express a tolerably definite philosophic attitude in a very untechnical way. Were I obliged to give a short name to the attitude in question, I should call it that of _radical empiricism_, in spite of the fact that such brief nicknames are nowhere more misleading than in philosophy. I say 'empiricism,' because it is contented to regard its most assured conclusions concerning matters of fact as hypotheses liable to modification in the course of future experience; and I say 'radical,' because it treats the doctrine of monism itself as an hypothesis, and, {viii} unlike so much of the half-way empiricism that is current under the name of positivism or agnosticism or scientific naturalism, it does not dogmatically affirm monism as something with which all experience has got to square. The difference between monism and pluralism is perhaps the most pregnant of all the differences in philosophy. _Primâ facie_ the world is a pluralism; as we find it, its unity seems to be that of any collection; and our higher thinking consists chiefly of an effort to redeem it from that first crude form. Postulating more unity than the first experiences yield, we also discover more. But absolute unity, in spite of brilliant dashes in its direction, still remains undiscovered, still remains a _Grenzbegriff_. "Ever not quite" must be the rationalistic philosopher's last confession concerning it. After all that reason can do has been done, there still remains the opacity of the finite facts as merely given, with most of their peculiarities mutually unmediated and unexplained.