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
This only is certain, that the theoretic faculty lives between two
fires which never give her rest, and make her incessantly revise her
formulations. If she sink into a premature, short-sighted, and
idolatrous theism, in comes department Number One with its battery of
facts of sense, and dislodges her from her dogmatic repose. If she
lazily subside into equilibrium with the same facts of sense viewed in
their simple mechanical outwardness, up starts the practical reason
with its demands, and makes _that_ couch a bed of thorns. From
generation to generation thus it goes,--now a movement of reception
from without, now one of expansion from within; department Number Two
always worked to death, yet never excused from taking the most
responsible part in the arrangements. To-day, a crop of new facts;
to-morrow, a flowering of new motives,--the theoretic faculty always
having to effect the transition, and life growing withal so complex and
subtle and immense that her powers of conceiving are almost ruptured
with the strain. See how, in France, the mummy-cloths of the academic
and official theistic philosophy are rent by the facts of evolution,
and how the young thinkers are at work! See, in Great Britain, how the
dryness of the strict associationist school, which under the
ministration of Mill, Bain, and Spencer dominated us but yesterday,
gives way to more generous idealisms, born of more urgent emotional
needs and wrapping the same facts in far more massive intellectual
harmonies! These are but tackings to the common {129} port, to that
ultimate _Weltanschauung_ of maximum subjective as well as objective
richness, which, whatever its other properties may be, will at any rate
wear the theistic form.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account