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

It is only our already dead hypotheses that our willing
nature is unable to bring to life again But what has made
them dead for us is for the most part a previous action of
our willing nature of an antagonistic kind. When I say
'willing nature,' I do not mean only such deliberate
volitions as may have set up habits of belief that we cannot
now escape from, I mean all such factors of belief as fear
and hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship,
the circumpressure of our caste and set. As a matter of fact
we find ourselves believing, we hardly know how or why. Mr.
Balfour gives the name of authority' to all those
influences, born of the intellectual climate, that make
hypotheses possible or impossible for us, alive or dead.
Here in this room, we all of us believe in molecules and the
conservation of energy, in democracy and necessary progress,
in Protestant Christianity and the duty of fighting for 'the
doctrine of the immortal Monroe,' all for no reasons worthy
of the name. We see into these matters with no more inner
clearness,. and probably with much less, than any
disbeliever in them might possess. His unconventionality
would probably have some grounds to show for its
conclusions; but for us, not insight, but the of
the opinions, is what makes the spark shoot from them and
light up our sleeping magazines of faith. Our reason is

quite satisfied, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out
of every thousand of us, if it can find a few arguments that
will do to recite in case our credulity is criticized by
some one else. Our faith is faith in some one else's faith,
and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our
belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth,
and that our minds and it are made for each other, -- what
is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our
social system backs us up? We want to have a truth; we want
to believe that our experiments and studies and discussions
must put us in a continually better and better position
towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our
thinking lives. But if a pyrrhonistic skeptic asks us we know> all this, can our logic find a reply? No! certainly
it cannot. It is just one volition against another, -- we
willing to go in for life upon a trust or assumption which
he, for his part, does not care to make.[3 ] As a rule we
disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use.
Clifford's cosmic emotions find no use for Christian
feelings. Huxley belabors the bishops because there is no
use for sacerdotalism in his scheme of life. Newman, on the
contrary, goes over to Romanism, and finds all sorts of
reasons good for staying there, because a priestly system is
for him an organic need and delight. Why do so few
"scientists" even look at the evidence for telepathy, so-

1234567891011121314151617181920