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

contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes
blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to
decide things from out of his private dream! Can we wonder
if those bred in the rugged and manly school of science
should feel like spewing such subjectivism out of their
mouths? The whole system of loyalties which grow up in the
schools of science go dead against its toleration; so that
it is only natural that those who have caught the scientific
fever should pass over to the opposite extreme, and write
sometimes as if the incorruptibly truthful intellect ought
positively to prefer bitterness and unacceptableness to the
heart in its cup.

It fortifies my soul to know
That, though I perish, Truth is so --

sings Clough, while Huxley exclaims: "My only consolation
lies in the reflection that, however bad our posterity may
become, so far as they hold by the plain rule of not
pretending to believe what they have no reason to believe,
because it may be to their advantage so to pretend [the word
' pretend' is surely here redundant], they will not have
reached the lowest depth of immorality." And that delicious
Clifford writes: " Belief is desecrated
when given to unproved and unquestioned statements for the

solace and private pleasure of the believer. . . . Whoso
would deserve well of his fellows in this matter will guard
the purity of his belief with a very fanaticism of jealous
care, lest at any time it should rest on an unworthy object,
and catch a stain which can never be wiped away. . . . If
[a] belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence [even
though the belief be true, as Clifford on the same page
explains] the pleasure is a stolen one. . . . It is sinful
because it is stolen in defiance of our duty to mankind.
That duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefs as from a
pestilence which may shortly master our own body and then
spread to the rest of the town. . . . It is ,wrong always,
everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon
insufficient evidence."

3. Clifford's Veto, Psychological Causes of Belief. All
this strikes one as healthy, even when expressed, as by
Clifford, with somewhat too much of robustious pathos in the
voice.,; Free-will and simple wishing do seem, in the matter
of our credences, to be only fifth wheels to the coach. Yet
if any one should thereupon assume that intellectual insight
is what remains after wish and will and sentimental
preference have taken wing, or that pure reason is what then
settles our opinions, he would fly quite as directly in the
teeth of the facts.

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