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, {5} 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 say 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 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 {6} infinite gain. Go, then, and take holy water, and
have masses said; belief will come and stupefy your scruples,--_Cela
vous fera croire et vous abêtira_. 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 gaming-table, 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 wilfully 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.
{7}
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 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 {8} lowest depth of immorality." And that delicious
_enfant terrible_ 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."