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

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, -- abltira>. 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 gamingtable, 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 willfully 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

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