The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy

But it is a miserable thing for a question of truth to be confined to mere presumption and counter-presumption, with no decisive thunderbolt of fact to clear the baffling darkness. And, sooth to say, in talking so much of the merely presumption-weakening value of our records, I have myself been wilfully taking the point of view of the so-called 'rigorously scientific' disbeliever, and making an ad hominem plea. My own point of view is different. For me the thunderbolt has fallen, and the orthodox belief has not merely had its presumption weakened, but the truth itself of the belief is decisively overthrown. If I may employ the language of the professional logic-shop, a universal proposition can be made untrue by a particular instance. If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you must not seek to show that no crows are; it is enough if you prove one single crow to be white. My own white crow is Mrs. Piper. In the trances of this medium, I cannot resist the conviction that knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and wits. What the source of this knowledge may be I know not, and have not the glimmer of an explanatory suggestion to make; but from admitting the fact of such knowledge I can see no escape. So when I turn to the rest of the evidence, ghosts and all, I cannot carry with me the irreversibly negative bias of the 'rigorously scientific' mind, with its presumption as to what the true order of nature ought to be. I feel as if, though the evidence be flimsy in spots, it may nevertheless collectively carry heavy weight. The rigorously scientific mind may, in truth, easily overshoot the mark. Science means, first of all, a certain dispassionate method. To suppose that it means a certain set of results that one should pin one's faith upon and hug forever is sadly to mistake its genius, and degrades the scientific body to the status of a sect.

We all, scientists and non-scientists, live on some inclined plane of credulity. The plane tips one way in one man, another way in another; and may he whose plane tips in no way be the first to cast a stone! As a matter of fact, the trances I speak of have broken down for my own mind the limits of the admitted order of nature. Science, so far as science denies such exceptional occurrences, lies prostrate in the dust for me; and the most urgent intellectual need which I feel at present is that science be built up again in a form in which such things may have a positive place. Science, like life, feeds on its own decay. New facts burst old rules; then newly divined conceptions bind old and new together into a reconciling law.

And here is the real instructiveness of Messrs. Myers and Gurney's work. They are trying with the utmost conscientiousness to find a reconciling conception which shall subject the old laws of nature to the smallest possible strain. Mr. Myers uses that method of gradual approach which has performed such wonders in Darwin's hands. When Darwin met a fact which seemed a poser to his theory, his regular custom, as I have heard an able colleague say, was to fill in all round it with smaller facts, as a wagoner might heap dirt round a big rock in the road, and thus get his team over without upsetting. So Mr. Myers, starting from the most ordinary facts of inattentive consciousness, follows this clue through a long series which terminates in ghosts, and seeks to show that these are but extreme manifestations of a common truth,—the truth that the invisible segments of our minds are susceptible, under rarely realized conditions, of acting and being acted upon by the invisible segments of other conscious lives. This may not be ultimately true (for the theosophists, with their astral bodies and the like, may, for aught I now know, prove to be on the correcter trail), but no one can deny that it is in good scientific form,—for science always takes a known kind of phenomenon, and tries to extend its range.

I have myself, as American agent for the census, collected hundreds of cases of hallucination in healthy persons. The result is to make me feel that we all have potentially a 'subliminal' self, which may make at any time irruption into our ordinary lives. At its lowest, it is only the depository of our forgotten memories; at its highest, we do not know what it is at all. Take, for instance, a series of cases. During sleep, many persons have something in them which measures the flight of time better than the waking self does. It wakes them at a preappointed hour; it acquaints them with the moment when they first awake. It may produce an hallucination,—as in a lady who informs me that at the instant of waking she has a vision of her watch-face with the hands pointing (as she has often verified) to the exact time. It may be the feeling that some physiological period has elapsed; but, whatever it is, it is subconscious.

A subconscious something may also preserve experiences to which we do not openly attend. A lady taking her lunch in town finds herself without her purse. Instantly a sense comes over her of rising from the breakfast-table and hearing her purse drop upon the floor. On reaching home she finds nothing under the table, but summons the servant to say where she has put the purse. The servant produces it, saying; "How did you know where it was? You rose and left the room as if you did n't know you 'd dropped it." The same subconscious something may recollect what we have forgotten. A lady accustomed to taking salicylate of soda for muscular rheumatism wakes one early winter morning with an aching neck. In the twilight she takes what she supposes to be her customary powder from a drawer, dissolves it in a glass of water, and is about to drink it down, when she feels a sharp slap on her shoulder and hears a voice in her ear saying, "Taste it!" On examination, she finds she has got a morphine powder by mistake. The natural interpretation is that a sleeping memory of the morphine powders awoke in this quasi-explosive way. A like explanation offers itself as most plausible for the following case: A lady, with little time to catch the train, and the expressman about to call, is excitedly looking for the lost key of a packed trunk. Hurrying upstairs with a bunch of keys, proved useless, in her hand, she hears an 'objective' voice distinctly say, "Try the key of the cake-box." Being tried, it fits. This also may well have been the effect of forgotten experience.

Now, the effect is doubtless due to the same hallucinatory mechanism; but the source is less easily assigned as we ascend the scale of cases. A lady, for instance, goes after breakfast to see about one of her servants who has become ill over night. She is startled at distinctly reading over the bedroom door in gilt letters the word 'small-pox.' The doctor is sent for, and ere long pronounces small-pox to be the disease, although the lady says, "The thought of the girl's having small-pox never entered my mind till I saw the apparent inscription." Then come other cases of warning; for example, that of a youth sitting in a wagon under a shed, who suddenly hears his dead mother's voice say, "Stephen, get away from here quick!" and jumps out just in time to see the shed-roof fall.

After this come the experiences of persons appearing to distant friends at or near the hour of death. Then, too, we have the trance-visions and utterances, which may appear astonishingly profuse and continuous, and maintain a fairly high intellectual level. For all these higher phenomena, it seems to me that while the proximate mechanism is that of 'hallucination,' it is straining an hypothesis unduly to name any ordinary subconscious mental operation—such as expectation, recollection, or inference from inattentive perception—as the ultimate cause that starts it up. It is far better tactics, if you wish to get rid of mystery, to brand the narratives themselves as unworthy of trust. The trustworthiness of most of them is to my own mind far from proved. And yet in the light of the medium-trance, which is proved, it seems as if they might well all be members of a natural kind of fact of which we do not yet know the full extent.

Thousands of sensitive organizations in the United States to-day live as steadily in the light of these experiences, and are as indifferent to modern science, as if they lived in Bohemia in the twelfth century. They are indifferent to science, because science is so callously indifferent to their experiences. Although in its essence science only stands for a method and for no fixed belief, yet as habitually taken, both by its votaries and outsiders, it is identified with a certain fixed belief,—the belief that the hidden order of nature is mechanical exclusively, and that non-mechanical categories are irrational ways of conceiving and explaining even such things as human life. Now, this mechanical rationalism, as one may call it, makes, if it becomes one's only way of thinking, a violent breach with the ways of thinking that have played the greatest part in human history. Religious thinking, ethical thinking, poetical thinking, teleological, emotional, sentimental thinking, what one might call the personal view of life to distinguish it from the impersonal and mechanical, and the romantic view of life to distinguish it from the rationalistic view, have been, and even still are, outside of well-drilled scientific circles, the dominant forms of thought. But for mechanical rationalism, personality is an insubstantial illusion. The chronic belief of mankind, that events may happen for the sake of their personal significance, is an abomination; and the notions of our grandfathers about oracles and omens, divinations and apparitions, miraculous changes of heart and wonders worked by inspired persons, answers to prayer and providential leadings, are a fabric absolutely baseless, a mass of sheer untruth.

Now, of course, we must all admit that the excesses to which the romantic and personal view of nature may lead, if wholly unchecked by impersonal rationalism, are direful. Central African Mumbo-jumboism is one of unchecked romanticism's fruits. One ought accordingly to sympathize with that abhorrence of romanticism as a sufficient world-theory; one ought to understand that lively intolerance of the least grain of romanticism in the views of life of other people, which are such characteristic marks of those who follow the scientific professions to-day. Our debt to science is literally boundless, and our gratitude for what is positive in her teachings must be correspondingly immense. But the S. P. R.'s Proceedings have, it seems to me, conclusively proved one thing to the candid reader; and that is that the verdict of pure insanity, of gratuitous preference for error, of superstition without an excuse, which the scientists of our day are led by their intellectual training to pronounce upon the entire thought of the past, is a most shallow verdict. The personal and romantic view of life has other roots besides wanton exuberance of imagination and perversity of heart. It is perennially fed by facts of experience, whatever the ulterior interpretation of those facts may prove to be; and at no time in human history would it have been less easy than now—at most times it would have been much more easy—for advocates with a little industry to collect in its favor an array of contemporary documents as good as those which our publications present. These documents all relate to real experiences of persons. These experiences have three characters in common: They are capricious, discontinuous, and not easily controlled; they require peculiar persons for their production; their significance seems to be wholly for personal life. Those who preferentially attend to them, and still more those who are individually subject to them, not only easily may find, but are logically bound to find, in them valid arguments for their romantic and personal conception of the world's course. Through my slight participation in the investigations of the S. P. R. I have become acquainted with numbers of persons of this sort, for whom the very word 'science' has become a name of reproach, for reasons that I now both understand and respect. It is the intolerance of science for such phenomena as we are studying, her peremptory denial either of their existence or of their significance (except as proofs of man's absolute innate folly), that has set science so apart from the common sympathies of the race. I confess that it is on this, its humanizing mission, that the Society's best claim to the gratitude of our generation seems to me to depend. It has restored continuity to history. It has shown some reasonable basis for the most superstitious aberrations of the foretime. It has bridged the chasm, healed the hideous rift that science, taken in a certain narrow way, has shot into the human world.

I will even go one step farther. When from our present advanced standpoint we look back upon the past stages of human thought, whether it be scientific thought or theological thought, we are amazed that a universe which appears to us of so vast and mysterious a complication should ever have seemed to any one so little and plain a thing. Whether it be Descartes's world or Newton's, whether it be that of the materialists of the last century or that of the Bridgewater treatises of our own, it always looks the same to us,—incredibly perspectiveless and short. Even Lyell's, Faraday's, Mill's, and Darwin's consciousness of their respective subjects are already beginning to put on an infantile and innocent look. Is it then likely that the science of our own day will escape the common doom; that the minds of its votaries will never look old-fashioned to the grandchildren of the latter? It would be folly to suppose so. Yet if we are to judge by the analogy of the past, when our science once becomes old-fashioned, it will be more for its omissions of fact, for its ignorance of whole ranges and orders of complexity in the phenomena to be explained, than for any fatal lack in its spirit and principles. The spirit and principles of science are mere affairs of method; there is nothing in them that need hinder science from dealing successfully with a world in which personal forces are the starting-point of new effects. The only form of thing that we directly encounter, the only experience that we concretely have, is our own personal life. The only complete category of our thinking, our professors of philosophy tell us, is the category of personality, every other category being one of the abstract elements of that. And this systematic denial on science's part of personality as a condition of events, this rigorous belief that in its own essential and innermost nature our world is a strictly impersonal world, may, conceivably, as the whirligig of time goes round, prove to be the very defect that our descendants will be most surprised at in our own boasted science, the omission that to their eyes will most tend to make it look perspectiveless and short.

INDEX

ABSOLUTISM, 12, 30.

Abstract conceptions, 219.

Action, as a measure of belief, 3, 29-30.

Actual world narrower than ideal, 202.

Agnosticism, 54, 81, 126.

Allen, G., 231, 235, 256.

Alps, leap in the, 59, 96.

Alternatives, 156, 161, 202, 269.

Ambiguity of choice, 156; of being, 292.

Anaesthetic revelation, 294.

A priori truths, 268.

Apparitions, 311.

Aristotle, 249.

Associationism, in Ethics, 186.

Atheist and acorn, 160.

Authorities in Ethics, 204; versus champions, 207.

Axioms, 268.

BAGEHOT, 232.

Bain, 71, 91.

Balfour, 9.

Being, its character, 142; in Hegel, 281.

Belief, 59. See 'Faith.'

Bellamy, 188.

Bismarck, 228.

Block-universe, 292.

Blood, B. P., vi, 294.

Brockton murderer, 160, 177.

Bunsen, 203, 274.

CALVINISM, 45.

Carlyle, 42, 44, 45, 73, 87, 173.

'Casuistic question' in Ethics, 198.

Causality, 147.

Causation, Hume's doctrine of, 278.

Census of hallucinations, 312.

Certitude, 13, 30.

Chance, 149, 153-9, 178-180.

Choice, 156.

Christianity, 5, 14.

Cicero, 92.

City of dreadful night, 35.

Clark, X., 50.

Classifications, 67.

Clifford, 6, 7, 10, 14, 19, 21, 92, 230.

Clive, 228.

Clough, 6.

Common-sense, 270.

Conceptual order of world, 118.

Conscience, 186-8.

Contradiction, as used by Hegel, 275-277.

Contradictions of philosophers, 16.

Crillon, 62

Criterion of truth, 15, 16; in Ethics, 205.

Crude order of experience, 118.

Crystal vision, 314.

Cycles in Nature, 220, 223-4.

DARWIN, 221, 223, 226, 320.

Data, 271.

Davey, 313.

Demands, as creators of value, 201.

'Determination is negation,' 286-290.

Determinism, 150; the Dilemma of;

145-183; 163, 166; hard and soft, 149.

Dogs, 57.

Dogmatism, 12.

Doubt, 54, 109.

Dupery, 27.

EASY-GOING mood, 211, 213.

Elephant, 282.

Emerson, 23, 175.

Empiricism, i., 12, 14, 17, 278.

England, 228.

Environment, its relation to great men,

223, 226; to great thoughts, 250.

Error, 163; duty of avoiding, 18.

Essence of good and bad, 200-1.

Ethical ideals, 200.

Ethical philosophy, 208, 210, 216.

Ethical standards, 205; diversity of, 200.

Ethics, its three questions, 185.

Evidence, objective, 13, 15, 16.

Evil, 46, 49, 161, 190.

Evolution, social, 232, 237; mental, 245.

Evolutionism, its test of right, 98-100.

Expectancy, 77-80.

Experience, crude, versus rationalized,

118; tests our faiths, 105.

FACTS, 271.

Faith, that truth exists, 9, 23; in our

fellows, 24-5; school boys' definition of, 29;

a remedy for pessimism, 60, 101; religious, 56;

defined, 90; defended against 'scientific'

objections, viii-xi, 91-4; may

create its own verification, 59, 96-103.

Familiarity confers rationality, 76.

Fatalism, 88.

Fiske, 255, 260.

Fitzgerald, 160.

Freedom, 103, 271.

Free-will, 103, 145, 157.

GALTON, 242.

Geniuses, 226, 229.

Ghosts, 315,

Gnosticism, 138-140, 165, 169.

God, 61, 68; of Nature, 43; the most

adequate object for our mind, 116,

122; our relations to him, 134-6;

his providence, 182; his demands

create obligation, 193; his function

in Ethics, 212-215.

Goethe, 111.

Good, 168, 200, 201.

Goodness, 190.

Great-man theory of history, 232.

Great men and their environment, 216-254.

Green, 206,

Gryzanowski, 240.

Gurney, 306, 307, 311.

Guthrie, 309.

Guyau, 188.

HALLUCINATIONS, Census of, 312.

Happiness, 33.

Harris, 282.

Hegel, 72, 263; his excessive claims,

272; his use of negation, 273, 290;

of contradiction, 274, 276; on being,

281; on otherness, 283; on infinity,

284; on identity, 285; on determination,

289; his ontological emotion, 297.

Hegelisms, on some, 263-298.

Heine, 203.

Helmholtz, 85, 91.

Henry IV., 62.

Herbart, 280.

Hero-worship, 261.

Hinton, C. H., 15.

Hinton, J., 101.

Hodgson, R., 308.

Hodgson, S, H., 10.

Honor, 50.

Hugo, 213.

Human mind, its habit of abstracting, 219.

Hume on causation, 278.

Huxley, 6, 10, 92.

Hypnotism, 302, 309.

Hypotheses, live or dead, 2; their

verification, 105; of genius, 249.

IDEALS, 200; their conflict, 202.

Idealism, 89, 291.

Identity, 285.

Imperatives, 211.

Importance of individuals, the, 255-262;

of things, its ground, 257.

Indeterminism, 150.

Individual differences, 259.

Individuals, the importance of, 255-262

Infinite, 284.

Intuitionism, in Ethics, 186, 189.

JEVONS, 249.

Judgments of regret, 159.

KNOWING, 12.

Knowledge, 85.

LEAP on precipice, 59, 96.

Leibnitz, 43.

Life, is it worth living, 32-62.

MAGGOTS, 176-7.

Mahdi, the, 2, 6.

Mallock, 32, 183.

Marcus Aurelius, 41.

Materialism, 126.

'Maybes,' 59.

Measure of good, 205.

Mediumship, physical, 313, 314.

Melancholy, 34, 39, 42.

Mental evolution, 246; structure, 114, 117.

Mill, 234.

Mind, its triadic structure, 114, 117;

its evolution, 246; its three departments,

114, 122, 127-8.

Monism, 279.

Moods, the strenuous and the easy, 211, 213

Moralists, objective and subjective, 103-108.

Moral judgments, their origin, 186-8;

obligation, 192-7; order, 193;

philosophy, 184-5.

Moral philosopher and the moral life, the, 184-215.

Murder, 178.

Murderer, 160, 177.

Myers, 308, 315, 320.

Mystical phenomena, 300.

Mysticism, 74.

NAKED, the, 281.

Natural theology, 40-4.

Nature, 20, 41-4, 56.

Negation, as used by Hegel, 273.

Newman, 10.

Nitrous oxide, 294.

Nonentity, 72.

OBJECTIVE evidence, 13, 15, 16.

Obligation, 192-7.

Occult phenomena, 300; examples of, 323.

Omar Khayam, 160.

Optimism, 60, 102, 163.

Options offered to belief, 3, 11, 27.

Origin of moral judgments, 186-8.

'Other,' in Hegel, 283.

PARSIMONY, law of, 132.

Partaking, 268, 270, 275, 291.

Pascal's wager, 5, 11.

Personality, 324, 327.

Pessimism, 39, 40, 47, 60, 100, 101, 161, 167.

Philosophy, 65; depends on personal

demands, 93; makes world unreal,

39; seeks unification, 67-70; the

ultimate, 110; its contradictions, 16.

Physiology, its prestige, 112.

Piper, Mrs., 314, 319.

Plato, 268

Pluralism, vi, 151, 178, 192, 264, 267.

Positivism, 54, 108

Possibilities, 151, 181-2, 292, 294.

Postulates, 91-2.

Powers, our powers as congruous with the world, 86.

Providence, 180.

Psychical research, what it has accomplished, 299-327;

Society for, 303, 305, 325.

Pugnacity, 49, 51.

QUESTIONS, three, in Ethics, 185.

RATIONALISM, 12, 30.

Rationality, the sentiment of, 63-110;

limits of theoretic, 65-74; mystical,

74; practical, 82-4; postulates of, 152.

Rational order of world, 118, 125, 147.

Reflex action and theism, 111-144.

Reflex action defined, 113; it refutes gnosticism, 140-1.

Regret, judgments of, 159.

Religion, natural, 52; of humanity, 198.

Religious hypothesis, 25, 28, 51.

Religious minds, 40.

Renan, 170, 172.

Renouvier, 143.

Risks of belief or disbelief, ix, 26; rules for minimizing, 94.

Romantic view of world, 324.

Romanticism, 172-3.

Rousseau, 4, 33, 87.

Ruskin, 37.

SALTER, 62.

Scepticism, 12, 23, 109.

Scholasticism, 13.

Schopenhauer, 72, 169.

Science, 10, 21; its recency, 52-4;

due to peculiar desire, 129-132, 147;

its disbelief of the occult, 317-320;

its negation of personality, 324-6;

cannot decide question of determinism, 152.

Science of Ethics, 208-210.

Selection of great men, 226.

Sentiment of rationality, 63.

Seriousness, 86.

Shakespeare, 32, 235.

Sidgwick, 303, 307.

Sigwart, 120, 148.

Society for psychical research, 303; its 'Proceedings,' 305, 325.

Sociology, 259.

Solitude, moral, 191.

Space, 265.

Spencer, 168, 218, 232-235, 246, 251, 260.

Stephen, L., 1.

Stephen, Sir J., 1, 30, 212.

Stoics, 274.

Strenuous mood, 211, 213.

Subjectivism, 165, 170.

'Subliminal self,' 315, 321.

Substance, 80.

Suicide, 38, 50, 60.

System in philosophy, 13, 185, 199.

TELEPATHY, 10, 309.

Theism, and reflex action, 111-144.

Theism, 127, 134-6; see 'God.'

Theology, natural, 41; Calvinistic, 45.

Theoretic faculty, 128.

Thought-transference, 309.

Thomson, 35-7, 45, 46.

Toleration, 30.

Tolstoi, 188.

'Totality,' the principle of, 277.

Triadic structure of mind, 123.

Truth, criteria of, 15; and error, 18; moral, 190-1.

UNITARIANS, 126, 133.

Unknowable, the, 68, 81.

Universe = M + x, 101; its rationality, 125, 137.

Unseen world, 51, 54, 56, 61.

Utopias, 168.

VALUE, judgments of, 103.

Variations, in heredity, etc., 225, 249.

Vaudois, 48.

Veddah, 258.

Verification of theories, 95, 105-8.