57. The Right to Believe

IN APRIL 1896 James gave another talk to the Yale Philosophical Club. It was, James told Sarah Whitman, a “most remote and listless audience, my host Ladd, as on a former occasion, uttering no syllable of comment on the words to which his ears had been exposed.” The lecture was called “The Will to Believe,” and while James was ready to concede that it might more properly have been titled “The Right to Believe,” it was an important talk for him. Even before he delivered it, he began planning a book around it.¹

The essay, closely argued in ten parts, begins by saying it will be about “justification of faith,” not “justification by faith.” That is, it will be “a defence of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters.” The essay asks the reader to choose among competing hypotheses. Choosing one hypothesis over another is not, for James, a mere matter of logic. If we pay attention to how choices are actually made, he says, we will see that some hypotheses are live, others are dead. “A live hypothesis [or a live option] is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed.” The deadness or liveness of an option is measured by a person’s willingness to act on the option. The final point of the piece is prefigured when James says, “He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried and failed.”²

The essay unfolds a choice between a religious hypothesis and a scientific—that is, a positivist—hypothesis. James begins with Pascal’s wager. Either there is a God or there isn’t. If there is, you’d best believe. If there isn’t, you lose nothing by believing that you wouldn’t have lost anyway. On the whole, then, you’d best believe. It’s gambling, and the smart thing is to figure the odds. James dislikes both the gambling aspect and the coercive logic, which he calls “a last desperate snatch at a weapon against the hardness of the unbelieving heart.” It is, for him, unconvincing, not possible, a dead option.

Next—and this takes up most of the text—comes the opposite, and for James the even less possible, option, that of W. K. Clifford, who says, “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” This is the statement that evidently set James off, and he offers a detailed critique of the problems inherent in this view.³

Science was central for James. All his formal education, his interest in the natural world, in Darwin, in chemistry, in comparative anatomy, and in physiology gave him a permanent connection to science that he never abandoned. He writes here with a cool, wistful elegance about “the magnificent edifice of the physical sciences” and calls attention—as to the Great Wall of China—to the “thousands of disinterested moral lives of men [that] lie buried in its mere foundation; 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.” Now comes Clifford, exhorting us, in the name of science, to “believe nothing, [to] keep your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing it on insufficient evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies.” James quotes Clifford again: “Better go without belief forever than believe a lie.”⁴

James is not content simply to say, “I myself find it impossible to go with Clifford,” though he does begin with that. He pursues the issue, locating and exploiting the flaw in the logic of scientific verification. “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.” James does not use the word “nervousness” lightly or unintentionally. He goes on, “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.” Science is not interested in one-time-only events—in, for example, miracles. “The truth of truths,” James says, “might come in merely affirmative form, and she would decline to touch it.”⁵

Now James sets up the logical conditions for the hypothesis he is climbing toward. “Wherever a desired result is achieved by the cooperation 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 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 anyone 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.”⁶

Nine of the ten sections of “The Will to Believe” exist solely to ground—to make live—the option or hypothesis offered in section ten. “What then do we now mean by the religious hypothesis?” James asks. “Science says things are; morality says some things are better than other things.” Religion says, first, that “the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone... and say the final word.” Second, and crucially, religion says, “We are better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to be true.” It is true, you may be duped, but “dupery for dupery, what proof is there that dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear?”⁷

Granting all this, the conclusion, for James, is inescapable: “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.”⁸

 

In June 1896, after classes were over, James pulled together a collection of his essays for possible publication as a book; his title from the start was The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. Thinking to stir up a little rivalry between publishers so as to profit from the competition, James sent the manuscript off to editors at Scribner with a letter asking them to make an offer, then sent the manuscript to Holt so he could make an offer too. Holt heard from James about this scheme and contacted Scribner, which then declined to join in competitive bidding. James got his Irish up over what he saw as Holt’s undermining, and he fired off a stiff letter: “Your veto on the auction business has roused in me all the freeman-blood of my ancestors, and makes it now quite impossible to publish the book with you, when before it was not only possible but probable.”⁹

The Will to Believe was published by Longmans, Green in early 1897; it was dedicated to “my old friend, Charles Sanders Peirce,” acknowledging a debt to Peirce for “more incitement and help than I can express or repay.” The ten essays in the volume had been written over a span of seventeen years. Four of them, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” “Reflex Action and Theism,” “Great Men and Their Environment,” and “On Some Hegelisms,” had been written before the fall of 1881. “The Dilemma of Determinism” was written in 1884, “The Importance of Individuals” in 1890, “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” in 1891, and “What Psychical Research Has Accomplished” in 1892. The only recent works were the first two pieces in the book, “Is Life Worth Living?” and the title piece, which had grown out of “Is Life Worth Living?” and the not yet published “Gospel of Relaxation.”

Any unity the book has is thus a result of consistencies in James’s thinking over the years and the fact that nearly all the essays were written as talks for the same audience, college philosophy clubs. Parts of The Will to Believe look backward, then, to James’s early work; its first four pieces focus on his present concerns (especially “defending the legitimacy of religious faith”); and the preface James wrote for the book, in December 1896, looks forward to radical empiricism and pluralism. Seen another way, this volume is our best warrant for saying that James was always interested in psychology, religion, and philosophy, and that what we are sometimes tempted to regard as a progression is simply the continual turning this way and that of a grand central concern that had all three facets for James.¹⁰

The preface makes clear that by late 1896 James regarded himself as having a “tolerably definite philosophic attitude,” that of a radical empiricist committed to a pluralistic view of things. “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.” James now believed that “the difference between monism and pluralism is perhaps the most pregnant of all the differences in philosophy,” and he asserts that the world is, on the face of it, plural. Monism is, for James, the conviction—which he does not share—that the universe is at some level unified. Pluralism for him meant the possibility that the universe maybe a pluriverse. It maybe that we each apprehend a different aspect of the one true universe; it may also be that the universe itself is not a single system but a loose collection of many separate systems. He quotes his friend Benjamin Paul Blood, the homegrown philosopher-rhapsodist, for the clincher: “Not unfortunately the universe is wild—game flavored as a hawk’s wing. Nature is miracle all; the same returns not, save to bring the different.”¹¹

Religious questions and interests moved more and more to the center for James in 1896 and 1897. A new correspondent, Henry Rankin—a librarian at the Mount Hermon School in western Massachusetts—sent James books and lists of books, and elicited from James some of his least THE RIGHT TO BELIEVE coy and most direct descriptions of his own beliefs and intentions. “I am more interested in religion than in anything else,” he wrote Rankin in January 1896, “but with a strange shyness of closing my hand on any definite symbols that might be too restrictive. So I cannot call myself a Christian, and indeed [I] go with my father in not being able to tolerate the notion of a selective personal relation between God’s creatures and God himself as anything ultimate.”¹²

In June 1896, just as he was sending off the manuscript of The Will to Believe, James wrote Rankin, “I envy you the completeness of your Christian faith, and the concreteness of association between your abstract theism and the Christian symbols.” James reiterated his own problem, sounding a bit like his father and a bit like the Emerson of the “Divinity School Address.” “Historic Christianity, with its ecclesiasticism and whatnot, stands between me and the imperishable strength and freshness of the original books.” Then James revealed his hand: “I shall work out my destiny; and possibly as a mediator between scientific agnosticism and the religious view of the world (Christian or not) I may be more useful than if I were myself a positive Christian.”¹³

Something about Rankin drew James out; many of James’s best letters about religion went to Rankin. James’s newness and freshness—in religion as in psychology and philosophy—comes from his steady prizing of religious experience itself, the actual experiences of real people, not from the housings and casings, not from the histories and habits and received formulas, of religious observances. It is entirely characteristic that some of his most brilliant and far-reaching ideas about religion should appear first not in essays and books but in letters to friends. His bold rethinking of conversion, for example, first shows up in a letter to Rankin early in 1897, just as The Will to Believe was being published. “In the matter of conversion,” James wrote, “I am quite willing to believe that a new truth may be supernaturally revealed to a subject when he really asks. But I am sure that in many cases of conversion it is less a new truth than a new power gained over life by a truth always known.”¹⁴

It was just like James to call attention to what conversion enables one to do, not to what conversion does to one.