The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular PhilosophyJames, William
Religion
The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
James, William
Belief and doubt; Essays; Philosophy
Even when the process stops short of this ultimatum, the reader will
have noticed from the phrases quoted how often it ends by losing the
clue. Something 'fades,' 'escapes;' and the feeling of insight is
changed into an intense one of bewilderment, puzzle, confusion,
astonishment. I know no more singular sensation than this intense
bewilderment, with nothing particular left to be bewildered at save the
bewilderment itself. It seems, indeed, _a causa sui_, or 'spirit
become its own object.'
My conclusion is that the togetherness of things in a common world, the
law of sharing, of which I have said so much, may, when perceived,
engender a very powerful emotion, that Hegel was so unusually
susceptible to this emotion throughout his life that its gratification
became his supreme end, and made him tolerably unscrupulous as to the
means he employed; that _indifferentism_ is the true outcome of every
view of the world which makes infinity and continuity to be its
essence, and that pessimistic or optimistic attitudes pertain to the
mere accidental subjectivity of the moment; finally, that the
identification of contradictories, so far from being the
self-developing process which Hegel supposes, is really a
self-consuming process, passing from the less to the more abstract, and
terminating either in a laugh at the ultimate nothingness, or in a mood
of vertiginous amazement at a meaningless infinity.
[1] Reprinted from Mind, April, 1882.
[2] The seeming contradiction between the infinitude of space and the
fact that it is all finished and given and there, can be got over in
more than one way. The simplest way is by idealism, which
distinguishes between space as actual and space as potential. For
idealism, space only exists so far as it is represented; but all
actually represented spaces are finite; it is only possibly
representable spaces that are infinite.
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