Let us give the name of _hypothesis_ 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 as either _live_ or _dead_. A
live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to
whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion
makes no electric connection with your nature,--it refuses to
scintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is
completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the
Mahdi's followers), the hypothesis is among the mind's possibilities:
it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis
are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the {3} individual
thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. The maximum of
liveness in an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably.
Practically, that means belief; but there is some believing tendency
wherever there is willingness to act at all.
Next, let us call the decision between two hypotheses an _option_.
Options may be of several kinds. They may be--1, _living_ or _dead_;
2, _forced_ or _avoidable_; 3, _momentous_ or _trivial_; and for our
purposes we may call an option a _genuine_ option when it is of the
forced, living, and momentous kind.
1. A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones. If
I say to you: "Be a theosophist or be a Mohammedan," it is probably a
dead option, because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive.
But if I say: "Be an agnostic or be a Christian," it is otherwise:
trained as you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small,
to your belief.
2. Next, if I say to you: "Choose between going out with your umbrella
or without it," I do not offer you a genuine option, for it is not
forced. You can easily avoid it by not going out at all. Similarly,
if I say, "Either love me or hate me," "Either call my theory true or
call it false," your option is avoidable. You may remain indifferent
to me, neither loving nor hating, and you may decline to offer any
judgment as to my theory. But if I say, "Either accept this truth or
go without it," I put on you a forced option, for there is no standing
place outside of the alternative. Every dilemma based on a complete
logical disjunction, with no possibility of not choosing, is an option
of this forced kind.
{4}
3. Finally, if I were Dr. Nansen and proposed to you to join my North
Pole expedition, your option would be momentous; for this would
probably be your only similar opportunity, and your choice now would
either exclude you from the North Pole sort of immortality altogether
or put at least the chance of it into your hands. He who refuses to
embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried
and failed. _Per contra_, 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.