The Will to Believe

by William James

"The Will to Believe" is one of the most lucid and enduring arguments in the philosophy of religion. Delivered as an address to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities in 1896 and published in the New World the same year, it defends the right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters even when evidence alone cannot compel assent. James's argument turns on three distinctions: between live and dead hypotheses, between forced and avoidable options, and between momentous and trivial decisions. Where a genuine option is living, forced, and momentous, James contends that our "passional nature" not only may but must decide — and that withholding belief is itself a decision carrying its own risks.

The essay is a direct response to W. K. Clifford's 1877 essay "The Ethics of Belief," which declared it "wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence." James does not deny that credulity is dangerous. He denies that Clifford's rule escapes risk: the person who will not act on insufficient evidence pays the price of never winning certain truths that can only be won by those willing to "meet the hypothesis half-way." Faith, on James's account, is not wishful thinking but a wager on a live option — and in the domain of religion, the wager may call forth its own verification.

William James (1842–1910) was an American philosopher and psychologist, the founder of pragmatism and functional psychology. Born in New York, he studied medicine at Harvard before turning to philosophy and psychology. His Principles of Psychology (1890) established him as the foremost psychologist in the English-speaking world. "The Will to Believe" was collected the following year in a volume of the same name, alongside "Is Life Worth Living?", "The Dilemma of Determinism," and six other essays in popular philosophy. This archive presents the complete essay from the Project Gutenberg digital edition of The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (PG #26659), produced from images made available by the Internet Archive.

In the recently published Life by Leslie Stephen of his brother,
Fitz-James, there is an account of a school to which the latter went
when he was a boy. The teacher, a certain Mr. Guest, used to converse
with his pupils in this wise: "Gurney, what is the difference between
justification and sanctification?--Stephen, prove the omnipotence of
God!" etc. In the midst of our Harvard freethinking and indifference
we are prone to imagine that here at your good old orthodox College
conversation continues to be somewhat upon this order; and to show you
that we at Harvard have not lost all interest in these vital subjects,
I have brought with me to-night something like a sermon on
justification by faith to read to you,--I mean an essay in
justification of faith, a defence of our right to adopt a believing
attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely
logical intellect may not have been coerced. 'The Will to
Believe,' accordingly, is the title of my paper.

I have long defended to my own students the lawfulness of voluntarily
adopted faith; but as soon as they have got well imbued with the
logical spirit, they have as a rule refused to admit my contention to
be lawful philosophically, even though in point of fact they were
personally all the time chock-full of some faith or other themselves.
I am all the while, however, so profoundly convinced that my own
position is correct, that your invitation has seemed to me a good
occasion to make my statements more clear. Perhaps your minds will be
more open than those with which I have hitherto had to deal. I will be
as little technical as I can, though I must begin by setting up some
technical distinctions that will help us in the end.

I

Let us give the name of hypothesis to anything that may be proposed
to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead
wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either live or dead. A
live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to
whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion
makes no electric connection with your nature,--it refuses to
scintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is
completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the
Mahdi's followers), the hypothesis is among the mind's possibilities:
it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis
are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual
thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. The maximum of
liveness in an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably.
Practically, that means belief; but there is some believing tendency
wherever there is willingness to act at all.

Next, let us call the decision between two hypotheses an option.
Options may be of several kinds. They may be--1, living or dead;
2, forced or avoidable; 3, momentous or trivial; and for our
purposes we may call an option a genuine option when it is of the
forced, living, and momentous kind.

A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. If
I say to you: "Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan," it is probably a
dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive.
But if I say: "Be an agnostic or be a Christian," it is otherwise:
trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small,
to your belief.
Next, if I say to you: "Choose between going out with your umbrella
or without it," I do not offer you a genuine option, for it is not
forced. You can easily avoid it by not going out at all. Similarly,
if I say, "Either love me or hate me," "Either call my theory true or
call it false," your option is avoidable. You may remain indifferent
to me, neither loving nor hating, and you may decline to offer any
judgment as to my theory. But if I say, "Either accept this truth or
go without it," I put on you a forced option, for there is no standing
place outside of the alternative. Every dilemma based on a complete
logical disjunction, with no possibility of not choosing, is an option
of this forced kind.
Finally, if I were Dr. Nansen and proposed to you to join my North
Pole expedition, your option would be momentous; for this would
probably be your only similar opportunity, and your choice now would
either exclude you from the North Pole sort of immortality altogether
or put at least the chance of it into your hands. He who refuses to
embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried
and failed. Per contra, the option is trivial when the opportunity
is not unique, when the stake is insignificant, or when the decision is
reversible if it later prove unwise. Such trivial options abound in
the scientific life. A chemist finds an hypothesis live enough to
spend a year in its verification: he believes in it to that extent.
But if his experiments prove inconclusive either way, he is quit for
his loss of time, no vital harm being done.

It will facilitate our discussion if we keep all these distinctions
well in mind.

II

The next matter to consider is the actual psychology of human opinion.
When we look at certain facts, it seems as if our passional and
volitional nature lay at the root of all our convictions. When we look
at others, it seems as if they could do nothing when the intellect had
once said its say. Let us take the latter facts up first.

Does it not seem preposterous on the very face of it to talk of our
opinions being modifiable at will? Can our will either help or hinder
our intellect in its perceptions of truth? Can we, by just willing it,
believe that Abraham Lincoln's existence is a myth, and that the
portraits of him in McClure's Magazine are all of some one else? Can
we, by any effort of our will, or by any strength of wish that it were
true, believe ourselves well and about when we are roaring with
rheumatism in bed, or feel certain that the sum of the two one-dollar
bills in our pocket must be a hundred dollars? We can say any of these
things, but we are absolutely impotent to believe them; and of just
such things is the whole fabric of the truths that we do believe in
made up,--matters of fact, immediate or remote, as Hume said, and
relations between ideas, which are either there or not there for us if
we see them so, and which if not there cannot be put there by any
action of our own.

In Pascal's Thoughts there is a celebrated passage known in literature
as Pascal's wager. In it he tries to force us into Christianity by
reasoning as if our concern with truth resembled our concern with the
stakes in a game of chance. Translated freely his words are these: You
must either believe or not believe that God is--which will you do?
Your human reason cannot say. A game is going on between you and the
nature of things which at the day of judgment will bring out either
heads or tails. Weigh what your gains and your losses would be if you
should stake all you have on heads, or God's existence: if you win in
such case, you gain eternal beatitude; if you lose, you lose nothing at
all. If there were an infinity of chances, and only one for God in
this wager, still you ought to stake your all on God; for though you
surely risk a finite loss by this procedure, any finite loss is
reasonable, even a certain one is reasonable, if there is but the
possibility of infinite gain. Go, then, and take holy water, and
have masses said; belief will come and stupefy your scruples,--Cela
vous fera croire et vous abêtira. Why should you not? At bottom,
what have you to lose?

You probably feel that when religious faith expresses itself thus, in
the language of the gaming-table, it is put to its last trumps. Surely
Pascal's own personal belief in masses and holy water had far other
springs; and this celebrated page of his is but an argument for others,
a last desperate snatch at a weapon against the hardness of the
unbelieving heart. We feel that a faith in masses and holy water
adopted wilfully after such a mechanical calculation would lack the
inner soul of faith's reality; and if we were ourselves in the place of
the Deity, we should probably take particular pleasure in cutting off
believers of this pattern from their infinite reward. It is evident
that unless there be some pre-existing tendency to believe in masses
and holy water, the option offered to the will by Pascal is not a
living option. Certainly no Turk ever took to masses and holy water on
its account; and even to us Protestants these means of salvation seem
such foregone impossibilities that Pascal's logic, invoked for them
specifically, leaves us unmoved. As well might the Mahdi write to us,
saying, "I am the Expected One whom God has created in his effulgence.
You shall be infinitely happy if you confess me; otherwise you shall be
cut off from the light of the sun. Weigh, then, your infinite gain if
I am genuine against your finite sacrifice if I am not!" His logic
would be that of Pascal; but he would vainly use it on us, for the
hypothesis he offers us is dead. No tendency to act on it exists in us
to any degree.

The talk of believing by our volition seems, then, from one point of
view, simply silly. From another point of view it is worse than silly,
it is vile. When one turns to the magnificent edifice of the physical
sciences, and sees how it was reared; what thousands of disinterested
moral lives of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience
and postponement, what choking down of preference, what submission to
the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into its very stones and mortar;
how absolutely impersonal it stands in its vast augustness,--then how
besotted and contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes
blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to decide things
from out of his private dream! Can we wonder if those bred in the
rugged and manly school of science should feel like spewing such
subjectivism out of their mouths? The whole system of loyalties which
grow up in the schools of science go dead against its toleration; so
that it is only natural that those who have caught the scientific fever
should pass over to the opposite extreme, and write sometimes as if the
incorruptibly truthful intellect ought positively to prefer bitterness
and unacceptableness to the heart in its cup.

It fortifies my soul to know
That, though I perish, Truth is so--

sings Clough, while Huxley exclaims: "My only consolation lies in the
reflection that, however bad our posterity may become, so far as they
hold by the plain rule of not pretending to believe what they have no
reason to believe, because it may be to their advantage so to pretend
[the word 'pretend' is surely here redundant], they will not have
reached the lowest depth of immorality." And that delicious
enfant terrible Clifford writes; "Belief is desecrated when given to
unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private
pleasure of the believer,... Whoso would deserve well of his fellows
in this matter will guard the purity of his belief with a very
fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an
unworthy object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away....
If [a] belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence [even though
the belief be true, as Clifford on the same page explains] the pleasure
is a stolen one.... It is sinful because it is stolen in defiance of
our duty to mankind. That duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefs
as from a pestilence which may shortly master our own body and then
spread to the rest of the town.... It is wrong always, everywhere, and
for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."

III

All this strikes one as healthy, even when expressed, as by Clifford,
with somewhat too much of robustious pathos in the voice. Free-will
and simple wishing do seem, in the matter of our credences, to be only
fifth wheels to the coach. Yet if any one should thereupon assume that
intellectual insight is what remains after wish and will and
sentimental preference have taken wing, or that pure reason is what
then settles our opinions, he would fly quite as directly in the teeth
of the facts.

It is only our already dead hypotheses that our willing nature is
unable to bring to life again But what has made them dead for us is
for the most part a previous action of our willing nature of an
antagonistic kind. When I say 'willing nature,' I do not mean only
such deliberate volitions as may have set up habits of belief that we
cannot now escape from,--I mean all such factors of belief as fear and
hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the
circumpressure of our caste and set. As a matter of fact we find
ourselves believing, we hardly know how or why. Mr. Balfour gives the
name of 'authority' to all those influences, born of the intellectual
climate, that make hypotheses possible or impossible for us, alive or
dead. Here in this room, we all of us believe in molecules and the
conservation of energy, in democracy and necessary progress, in
Protestant Christianity and the duty of fighting for 'the doctrine of
the immortal Monroe,' all for no reasons worthy of the name. We see
into these matters with no more inner clearness, and probably with much
less, than any disbeliever in them might possess. His
unconventionality would probably have some grounds to show for its
conclusions; but for us, not insight, but the prestige of the
opinions, is what makes the spark shoot from them and light up our
sleeping magazines of faith. Our reason is quite satisfied, in nine
hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand of us, if it can
find a few arguments that will do to recite in case our credulity is
criticised by some one else. Our faith is faith in some one else's
faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief
in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our
minds and it are made for each other,--what is it but a passionate
affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? We want
to have a truth; we want to believe that our experiments and
studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better
position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our
thinking lives. But if a pyrrhonistic sceptic asks us how we know
all this, can our logic find a reply? No! certainly it cannot. It is
just one volition against another,--we willing to go in for life upon a
trust or assumption which he, for his part, does not care to make.

As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no
use. Clifford's cosmic emotions find no use for Christian feelings.
Huxley belabors the bishops because there is no use for sacerdotalism
in his scheme of life. Newman, on the contrary, goes over to Romanism,
and finds all sorts of reasons good for staying there, because a
priestly system is for him an organic need and delight. Why do so few
'scientists' even look at the evidence for telepathy, so called?
Because they think, as a leading biologist, now dead, once said to me,
that even if such a thing were true, scientists ought to band together
to keep it suppressed and concealed. It would undo the uniformity of
Nature and all sorts of other things without which scientists cannot
carry on their pursuits. But if this very man had been shown something
which as a scientist he might do with telepathy, he might not only
have examined the evidence, but even have found it good enough. This
very law which the logicians would impose upon us--if I may give the
name of logicians to those who would rule out our willing nature
here--is based on nothing but their own natural wish to exclude all
elements for which they, in their professional quality of
logicians, can find no use.

Evidently, then, our non-intellectual nature does influence our
convictions. There are passional tendencies and volitions which run
before and others which come after belief, and it is only the latter
that are too late for the fair; and they are not too late when the
previous passional work has been already in their own direction.
Pascal's argument, instead of being powerless, then seems a regular
clincher, and is the last stroke needed to make our faith in masses and
holy water complete. The state of things is evidently far from simple;
and pure insight and logic, whatever they might do ideally, are not the
only things that really do produce our creeds.

IV

Our next duty, having recognized this mixed-up state of affairs, is to
ask whether it be simply reprehensible and pathological, or whether, on
the contrary, we must treat it as a normal element in making up our
minds. The thesis I defend is, briefly stated, this: Our passional
nature not only lawfully may, but must, decide an option between
propositions, whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature
be decided on intellectual grounds; for to say, under such
circumstances, "Do not decide, but leave the question open," is itself
a passional decision,--just like deciding yes or no,--and is attended
with the same risk of losing the truth. The thesis thus abstractly
expressed will, I trust, soon become quite clear. But I must first
indulge in a bit more of preliminary work.

V

It will be observed that for the purposes of this discussion we are on
'dogmatic' ground,--ground, I mean, which leaves systematic
philosophical scepticism altogether out of account. The postulate that
there is truth, and that it is the destiny of our minds to attain it,
we are deliberately resolving to make, though the sceptic will not make
it. We part company with him, therefore, absolutely, at this point.
But the faith that truth exists, and that our minds can find it, may be
held in two ways. We may talk of the empiricist way and of the
absolutist way of believing in truth. The absolutists in this matter
say that we not only can attain to knowing truth, but we can know
when we have attained to knowing it; while the empiricists think that
although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know when. To know
is one thing, and to know for certain that we know is another. One
may hold to the first being possible without the second; hence the
empiricists and the absolutists, although neither of them is a sceptic
in the usual philosophic sense of the term, show very different degrees
of dogmatism in their lives.

If we look at the history of opinions, we see that the empiricist
tendency has largely prevailed in science, while in philosophy the
absolutist tendency has had everything its own way. The characteristic
sort of happiness, indeed, which philosophies yield has mainly
consisted in the conviction felt by each successive school or system
that by it bottom-certitude had been attained. "Other philosophies are
collections of opinions, mostly false; my philosophy gives
standing-ground forever,"--who does not recognize in this the key-note
of every system worthy of the name? A system, to be a system at all,
must come as a closed system, reversible in this or that detail,
perchance, but in its essential features never!

Scholastic orthodoxy, to which one must always go when one wishes to
find perfectly clear statement, has beautifully elaborated this
absolutist conviction in a doctrine which it calls that of 'objective
evidence.' If, for example, I am unable to doubt that I now exist
before you, that two is less than three, or that if all men are mortal
then I am mortal too, it is because these things illumine my intellect
irresistibly. The final ground of this objective evidence possessed by
certain propositions is the adaequatio intellectûs nostri cum rê.
The certitude it brings involves an aptitudinem ad extorquendum certum
assensum on the part of the truth envisaged, and on the side of the
subject a quietem in cognitione, when once the object is mentally
received, that leaves no possibility of doubt behind; and in the whole
transaction nothing operates but the entitas ipsa of the object and
the entitas ipsa of the mind. We slouchy modern thinkers dislike to
talk in Latin,--indeed, we dislike to talk in set terms at all; but at
bottom our own state of mind is very much like this whenever we
uncritically abandon ourselves: You believe in objective evidence, and
I do. Of some things we feel that we are certain: we know, and we know
that we do know. There is something that gives a click inside of us, a
bell that strikes twelve, when the hands of our mental clock have swept
the dial and meet over the meridian hour. The greatest empiricists
among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their
instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes. When the Cliffords
tell us how sinful it is to be Christians on such 'insufficient
evidence,' insufficiency is really the last thing they have in mind.
For them the evidence is absolutely sufficient, only it makes the other
way. They believe so completely in an anti-christian order of the
universe that there is no living option: Christianity is a dead
hypothesis from the start.

VI

But now, since we are all such absolutists by instinct, what in our
quality of students of philosophy ought we to do about the fact? Shall
we espouse and indorse it? Or shall we treat it as a weakness of our
nature from which we must free ourselves, if we can?

I sincerely believe that the latter course is the only one we can
follow as reflective men. Objective evidence and certitude are
doubtless very fine ideals to play with, but where on this moonlit and
dream-visited planet are they found? I am, therefore, myself a
complete empiricist so far as my theory of human knowledge goes. I
live, to be sure, by the practical faith that we must go on
experiencing and thinking over our experience, for only thus can our
opinions grow more true; but to hold any one of them--I absolutely do
not care which--as if it never could be reinterpretable or corrigible,
I believe to be a tremendously mistaken attitude, and I think that the
whole history of philosophy will bear me out. There is but one
indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic
scepticism itself leaves standing,--the truth that the present
phenomenon of consciousness exists. That, however, is the bare
starting-point of knowledge, the mere admission of a stuff to be
philosophized about. The various philosophies are but so many attempts
at expressing what this stuff really is. And if we repair to our
libraries what disagreement do we discover! Where is a certainly true
answer found? Apart from abstract propositions of comparison (such as
two and two are the same as four), propositions which tell us nothing
by themselves about concrete reality, we find no proposition ever
regarded by any one as evidently certain that has not either been
called a falsehood, or at least had its truth sincerely questioned by
some one else. The transcending of the axioms of geometry, not in play
but in earnest, by certain of our contemporaries (as Zöllner and
Charles H. Hinton), and the rejection of the whole Aristotelian logic
by the Hegelians, are striking instances in point.

No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon.
Some make the criterion external to the moment of perception, putting
it either in revelation, the consensus gentium, the instincts of the
heart, or the systematized experience of the race. Others make the
perceptive moment its own test,--Descartes, for instance, with his
clear and distinct ideas guaranteed by the veracity of God; Reid with
his 'common-sense;' and Kant with his forms of synthetic judgment a
priori. The inconceivability of the opposite; the capacity to be
verified by sense; the possession of complete organic unity or
self-relation, realized when a thing is its own other,--are standards
which, in turn, have been used. The much lauded objective
evidence is never triumphantly there, it is a mere aspiration or
Grenzbegriff, marking the infinitely remote ideal of our thinking
life. To claim that certain truths now possess it, is simply to say
that when you think them true and they are true, then their evidence
is objective, otherwise it is not. But practically one's conviction
that the evidence one goes by is of the real objective brand, is only
one more subjective opinion added to the lot. For what a contradictory
array of opinions have objective evidence and absolute certitude been
claimed! The world is rational through and through,--its existence is
an ultimate brute fact; there is a personal God,--a personal God is
inconceivable; there is an extra-mental physical world immediately
known,--the mind can only know its own ideas; a moral imperative
exists,--obligation is only the resultant of desires; a permanent
spiritual principle is in every one,--there are only shifting states of
mind; there is an endless chain of causes,--there is an absolute first
cause; an eternal necessity,--a freedom; a purpose,--no purpose; a
primal One,--a primal Many; a universal continuity,--an essential
discontinuity in things; an infinity,--no infinity. There is
this,--there is that; there is indeed nothing which some one has not
thought absolutely true, while his neighbor deemed it absolutely false;
and not an absolutist among them seems ever to have considered that the
trouble may all the time be essential, and that the intellect, even
with truth directly in its grasp, may have no infallible signal for
knowing whether it be truth or no. When, indeed, one remembers that
the most striking practical application to life of the doctrine of
objective certitude has been the conscientious labors of the Holy
Office of the Inquisition, one feels less tempted than ever to lend the
doctrine a respectful ear.

But please observe, now, that when as empiricists we give up the
doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or
hope of truth itself. We still pin our faith on its existence, and
still believe that we gain an ever better position towards it by
systematically continuing to roll up experiences and think. Our great
difference from the scholastic lies in the way we face. The strength
of his system lies in the principles, the origin, the terminus a quo
of his thought; for us the strength is in the outcome, the upshot, the
terminus ad quem. Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to
decide. It matters not to an empiricist from what quarter an
hypothesis may come to him: he may have acquired it by fair means or by
foul; passion may have whispered or accident suggested it; but if the
total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is what he means
by its being true.

VII

One more point, small but important, and our preliminaries are done.
There are two ways of looking at our duty in the matter of
opinion,--ways entirely different, and yet ways about whose difference
the theory of knowledge seems hitherto to have shown very little
concern. We must know the truth; and we must avoid error,--these
are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are
not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two
separable laws. Although it may indeed happen that when we believe the
truth A, we escape as an incidental consequence from believing
the falsehood B, it hardly ever happens that by merely disbelieving
B we necessarily believe A. We may in escaping B fall into
believing other falsehoods, C or D, just as bad as B; or we may
escape B by not believing anything at all, not even A.

Believe truth! Shun error!--these, we see, are two materially
different laws; and by choosing between them we may end by coloring
differently our whole intellectual life. We may regard the chase for
truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may,
on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and
let truth take its chance. Clifford, in the instructive passage which
I have quoted, exhorts us to the latter course. Believe nothing, he
tells us, keep your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing it
on insufficient evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies. You,
on the other hand, may think that the risk of being in error is a very
small matter when compared with the blessings of real knowledge, and be
ready to be duped many times in your investigation rather than postpone
indefinitely the chance of guessing true. I myself find it impossible
to go with Clifford. We must remember that these feelings of our duty
about either truth or error are in any case only expressions of our
passional life. Biologically considered, our minds are as ready to
grind out falsehood as veracity, and he who says, "Better go without
belief forever than believe a lie!" merely shows his own preponderant
private horror of becoming a dupe. He may be critical of many of his
desires and fears, but this fear he slavishly obeys. He cannot imagine
any one questioning its binding force. For my own part, I have
also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than
being duped may happen to a man in this world: so Clifford's
exhortation has to my ears a thoroughly fantastic sound. It is like a
general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle
forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over
enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully
solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in
spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier
than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. At any rate, it seems
the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher.

VIII

And now, after all this introduction, let us go straight at our
question. I have said, and now repeat it, that not only as a matter of
fact do we find our passional nature influencing us in our opinions,
but that there are some options between opinions in which this
influence must be regarded both as an inevitable and as a lawful
determinant of our choice.

I fear here that some of you my hearers will begin to scent danger, and
lend an inhospitable ear. Two first steps of passion you have indeed
had to admit as necessary,--we must think so as to avoid dupery, and we
must think so as to gain truth; but the surest path to those ideal
consummations, you will probably consider, is from now onwards to take
no further passional step.

Well, of course, I agree as far as the facts will allow. Wherever the
option between losing truth and gaining it is not momentous, we can
throw the chance of gaining truth away, and at any rate save
ourselves from any chance of believing falsehood, by not making up
our minds at all till objective evidence has come. In scientific
questions, this is almost always the case; and even in human affairs in
general, the need of acting is seldom so urgent that a false belief to
act on is better than no belief at all. Law courts, indeed, have to
decide on the best evidence attainable for the moment, because a
judge's duty is to make law as well as to ascertain it, and (as a
learned judge once said to me) few cases are worth spending much time
over: the great thing is to have them decided on any acceptable
principle, and got out of the way. But in our dealings with objective
nature we obviously are recorders, not makers, of the truth; and
decisions for the mere sake of deciding promptly and getting on to the
next business would be wholly out of place. Throughout the breadth of
physical nature facts are what they are quite independently of us, and
seldom is there any such hurry about them that the risks of being duped
by believing a premature theory need be faced. The questions here are
always trivial options, the hypotheses are hardly living (at any rate
not living for us spectators), the choice between believing truth or
falsehood is seldom forced. The attitude of sceptical balance is
therefore the absolutely wise one if we would escape mistakes. What
difference, indeed, does it make to most of us whether we have or have
not a theory of the Röntgen rays, whether we believe or not in
mind-stuff, or have a conviction about the causality of conscious
states? It makes no difference. Such options are not forced on us.
On every account it is better not to make them, but still keep weighing
reasons pro et contra with an indifferent hand.

I speak, of course, here of the purely judging mind. For purposes of
discovery such 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. See for example the sagacity which Spencer and
Weismann now display. 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. The most useful investigator, because the most
sensitive observer, is always he whose eager interest in one side of
the question is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he become
deceived. Science has organized this nervousness into a regular
technique, her so-called method of verification; and she has fallen
so deeply in love with the method that one may even say she has ceased
to care for truth by itself at all. It is only truth as technically
verified that interests her. The truth of truths might come in merely
affirmative form, and she would decline to touch it. Such truth as
that, she might repeat with Clifford, would be stolen in defiance of
her duty to mankind. Human passions, however, are stronger than
technical rules. "Le coeur a ses raisons," as Pascal says, "que la
raison ne connaît pas;" and however indifferent to all but the bare
rules of the game the umpire, the abstract intellect, may be, the
concrete players who furnish him the materials to judge of are usually,
each one of them, in love with some pet 'live hypothesis' of his own.
Let us agree, however, that wherever there is no forced option, the
dispassionately judicial intellect with no pet hypothesis, saving
us, as it does, from dupery at any rate, ought to be our ideal.

The question next arises: Are there not somewhere forced options in our
speculative questions, and can we (as men who may be interested at
least as much in positively gaining truth as in merely escaping dupery)
always wait with impunity till the coercive evidence shall have
arrived? It seems a priori improbable that the truth should be so
nicely adjusted to our needs and powers as that. In the great
boarding-house of nature, the cakes and the butter and the syrup seldom
come out so even and leave the plates so clean. Indeed, we should view
them with scientific suspicion if they did.

IX

Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose
solution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is a
question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be
good if it did exist. Science can tell us what exists; but to compare
the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must
consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart. Science herself
consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite
ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme
goods for man. Challenge the statement, and science can only repeat it
oracularly, or else prove it by showing that such ascertainment and
correction bring man all sorts of other goods which man's heart in turn
declares. The question of having moral beliefs at all or not having
them is decided by our will. Are our moral preferences true or
false, or are they only odd biological phenomena, making things good or
bad for us, but in themselves indifferent? How can your pure
intellect decide? If your heart does not want a world of moral
reality, your head will assuredly never make you believe in one.
Mephistophelian scepticism, indeed, will satisfy the head's
play-instincts much better than any rigorous idealism can. Some men
(even at the student age) are so naturally cool-hearted that the
moralistic hypothesis never has for them any pungent life, and in their
supercilious presence the hot young moralist always feels strangely ill
at ease. The appearance of knowingness is on their side, of naïveté
and gullibility on his. Yet, in the inarticulate heart of him, he
clings to it that he is not a dupe, and that there is a realm in which
(as Emerson says) all their wit and intellectual superiority is no
better than the cunning of a fox. Moral scepticism can no more be
refuted or proved by logic than intellectual scepticism can. When we
stick to it that there is truth (be it of either kind), we do so with
our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. The
sceptic with his whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which
of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows.

Turn now from these wide questions of good to a certain class of
questions of fact, questions concerning personal relations, states of
mind between one man and another. Do you like me or not?--for
example. Whether you do or not depends, in countless instances, on
whether I meet you half-way, am willing to assume that you must like
me, and show you trust and expectation. The previous faith on my part
in your liking's existence is in such cases what makes your liking
come. But if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have
objective evidence, until you shall have done something apt, as the
absolutists say, ad extorquendum assensum meum, ten to one your
liking never comes. How many women's hearts are vanquished by the mere
sanguine insistence of some man that they must love him! he will not
consent to the hypothesis that they cannot. The desire for a certain
kind of truth here brings about that special truth's existence; and so
it is in innumerable cases of other sorts. Who gains promotions,
boons, appointments, but the man in whose life they are seen to play
the part of live hypotheses, who discounts them, sacrifices other
things for their sake before they have come, and takes risks for them
in advance? His faith acts on the powers above him as a claim, and
creates its own verification.

A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is
because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the
other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result
is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its
existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in
one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a
commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on
this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing
is even attempted. A whole train of passengers (individually brave
enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter
can count on one another, while each passenger fears that if he makes a
movement of resistance, he will be shot before any one else backs him
up. If we believed that the whole car-full would rise at once
with us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would never
even be attempted. There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at
all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. And where faith
in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic
which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the
'lowest kind of immorality' into which a thinking being can fall. Yet
such is the logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend to
regulate our lives!

X

In truths dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on desire
is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable thing.

But now, it will be said, these are all childish human cases, and have
nothing to do with great cosmical matters, like the question of
religious faith. Let us then pass on to that. Religions differ so
much in their accidents that in discussing the religious question we
must make it very generic and broad. What then do we now mean by the
religious hypothesis? Science says things are; morality says some
things are better than other things; and religion says essentially two
things.

First, she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the
overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last
stone, so to speak, and say the final word. "Perfection is
eternal,"--this phrase of Charles Secrétan seems a good way of putting
this first affirmation of religion, an affirmation which obviously
cannot yet be verified scientifically at all.

The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now
if we believe her first affirmation to be true.

Now, let us consider what the logical elements of this situation are
in case the religious hypothesis in both its branches be really true.
(Of course, we must admit that possibility at the outset. If we are to
discuss the question at all, it must involve a living option. If for
any of you religion be a hypothesis that cannot, by any living
possibility be true, then you need go no farther. I speak to the
'saving remnant' alone.) So proceeding, we see, first, that religion
offers itself as a momentous option. We are supposed to gain, even
now, by our belief, and to lose by our non-belief, a certain vital
good. Secondly, religion is a forced option, so far as that good
goes. We cannot escape the issue by remaining sceptical and waiting
for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way if
religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as
certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve. It is as if a man
should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him
because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after
he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from that particular
angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married some one
else? Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a
certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than
chance of error,--that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is
actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing
the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is
backing the religious hypothesis against the field. To preach
scepticism to us as a duty until 'sufficient evidence' for
religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in
presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of its
being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may
be true. It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only
intellect with one passion laying down its law. And by what, forsooth,
is the supreme wisdom of this passion warranted? Dupery for dupery,
what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than
dupery through fear? I, for one, can see no proof; and I simply refuse
obedience to the scientist's command to imitate his kind of option, in
a case where my own stake is important enough to give me the right to
choose my own form of risk. If religion be true and the evidence for
it be still insufficient, I do not wish, by putting your extinguisher
upon my nature (which feels to me as if it had after all some business
in this matter), to forfeit my sole chance in life of getting upon the
winning side,--that chance depending, of course, on my willingness to
run the risk of acting as if my passional need of taking the world
religiously might be prophetic and right.

All this is on the supposition that it really may be prophetic and
right, and that, even to us who are discussing the matter, religion is
a live hypothesis which may be true. Now, to most of us religion comes
in a still further way that makes a veto on our active faith even more
illogical. The more perfect and more eternal aspect of the universe is
represented in our religions as having personal form. The universe is
no longer a mere It to us, but a Thou, if we are religious; and any
relation that may be possible from person to person might be possible
here. For instance, although in one sense we are passive portions
of the universe, in another we show a curious autonomy, as if we were
small active centres on our own account. We feel, too, as if the
appeal of religion to us were made to our own active good-will, as if
evidence might be forever withheld from us unless we met the hypothesis
half-way. To take a trivial illustration: just as a man who in a
company of gentlemen made no advances, asked a warrant for every
concession, and believed no one's word without proof, would cut himself
off by such churlishness from all the social rewards that a more
trusting spirit would earn,--so here, one who should shut himself up in
snarling logicality and try to make the gods extort his recognition
willy-nilly, or not get it at all, might cut himself off forever from
his only opportunity of making the gods' acquaintance. This feeling,
forced on us we know not whence, that by obstinately believing that
there are gods (although not to do so would be so easy both for our
logic and our life) we are doing the universe the deepest service we
can, seems part of the living essence of the religious hypothesis. If
the hypothesis were true in all its parts, including this one, then
pure intellectualism, with its veto on our making willing advances,
would be an absurdity; and some participation of our sympathetic nature
would be logically required. I, therefore, for one cannot see my way
to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or wilfully agree to
keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain
reason, that a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from
acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were
really there, would be an irrational rule. That for me is the
long and short of the formal logic of the situation, no matter what the
kinds of truth might materially be.

I confess I do not see how this logic can be escaped. But sad
experience makes me fear that some of you may still shrink from
radically saying with me, in abstracto, that we have the right to
believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our
will. I suspect, however, that if this is so, it is because you have
got away from the abstract logical point of view altogether, and are
thinking (perhaps without realizing it) of some particular religious
hypothesis which for you is dead. The freedom to 'believe what we
will' you apply to the case of some patent superstition; and the faith
you think of is the faith defined by the schoolboy when he said, "Faith
is when you believe something that you know ain't true." I can only
repeat that this is misapprehension. In concreto, the freedom to
believe can only cover living options which the intellect of the
individual cannot by itself resolve; and living options never seem
absurdities to him who has them to consider. When I look at the
religious question as it really puts itself to concrete men, and when I
think of all the possibilities which both practically and theoretically
it involves, then this command that we shall put a stopper on our
heart, instincts, and courage, and wait--acting of course meanwhile
more or less as if religion were not true--till doomsday, or
till such time as our intellect and senses working together may have
raked in evidence enough,--this command, I say, seems to me the
queerest idol ever manufactured in the philosophic cave. Were we
scholastic absolutists, there might be more excuse. If we had an
infallible intellect with its objective certitudes, we might feel
ourselves disloyal to such a perfect organ of knowledge in not trusting
to it exclusively, in not waiting for its releasing word. But if we
are empiricists, if we believe that no bell in us tolls to let us know
for certain when truth is in our grasp, then it seems a piece of idle
fantasticality to preach so solemnly our duty of waiting for the bell.
Indeed we may wait if we will,--I hope you do not think that I am
denying that,--but if we do so, we do so at our peril as much as if we
believed. In either case we act, taking our life in our hands. No
one of us ought to issue vetoes to the other, nor should we bandy words
of abuse. We ought, on the contrary, delicately and profoundly to
respect one another's mental freedom: then only shall we bring about
the intellectual republic; then only shall we have that spirit of inner
tolerance without which all our outer tolerance is soulless, and which
is empiricism's glory; then only shall we live and let live, in
speculative as well as in practical things.

I began by a reference to Fitz James Stephen; let me end by a quotation
from him. "What do you think of yourself? What do you think of
the world?... These are questions with which all must deal as it seems
good to them. They are riddles of the Sphinx, and in some way or other
we must deal with them.... In all important transactions of life we
have to take a leap in the dark.... If we decide to leave the riddles
unanswered, that is a choice; if we waver in our answer, that, too, is
a choice: but whatever choice we make, we make it at our peril. If a
man chooses to turn his back altogether on God and the future, no one
can prevent him; no one can show beyond reasonable doubt that he is
mistaken. If a man thinks otherwise and acts as he thinks, I do not
see that any one can prove that he is mistaken. Each must act as he
thinks best; and if he is wrong, so much the worse for him. We stand
on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist,
through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be
deceptive. If we stand still we shall be frozen to death. If we take
the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know
whether there is any right one. What must we do? 'Be strong and of a
good courage.' Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what
comes.... If death ends all, we cannot meet death better."

Notes

An Address to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities. Published in the New World, June, 1896.
Compare the admirable page 310 in S. H. Hodgson's "Time and Space," London, 1865.
Compare Wilfrid Ward's Essay, "The Wish to Believe," in his Witnesses to the Unseen, Macmillan & Co., 1893.
Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true. The whole defence of religious faith hinges upon action. If the action required or inspired by the religious hypothesis is in no way different from that dictated by the naturalistic hypothesis, then religious faith is a pure superfluity, better pruned away, and controversy about its legitimacy is a piece of idle trifling, unworthy of serious minds. I myself believe, of course, that the religious hypothesis gives to the world an expression which specifically determines our reactions, and makes them in a large part unlike what they might be on a purely naturalistic scheme of belief.
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, p. 353, 2d edition. London, 1874.

Colophon

"The Will to Believe" was first delivered as an address to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities and published in the New World (June 1896). It was collected in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy by William James, published by Longmans, Green, and Co. (New York and London, 1897). William James (1842–1910) is in the public domain in all jurisdictions. This archive presents the complete essay from the Project Gutenberg digital edition (PG #26659), produced from images generously made available by the Internet Archive.

Compiled and formatted for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026.

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