"James, William - The Will To Believe [PG]" - читать интересную книгу автора (James William)

William James
The Will To Believe.
1897

Copyright 1995, James Fieser ([email protected]). See end note
for details on copyright and editing conventions. This e-
text is based on the 1897 edition of
published by Longmans, Green & Co. This is a working draft;
please report errors.[1]

* * * *

The Will To Believe.[2]

In the recently published Life by Leslie Stephen of I
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 defense 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. I 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 I 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.

1. Hypotheses and Options. Let us give the name of
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

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