"Will to Believe" - читать интересную книгу автора (James William)

embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if
he tried and failed. , 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.

2. Pascal's Wager. 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 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

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