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.
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 {9} 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 _prestige_ 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
criticised 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 {10} 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 sceptic asks us _how 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.[2]
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 called?
Because they think, as a leading biologist, now dead, once said to me,
that even if such a thing were true, scientists ought to band together
to keep it suppressed and concealed. It would undo the uniformity of
Nature and all sorts of other things without which scientists cannot
carry on their pursuits. But if this very man had been shown something
which as a scientist he might _do_ with telepathy, he might not only
have examined the evidence, but even have found it good enough. This
very law which the logicians would impose upon us--if I may give the
name of logicians to those who would rule out our willing nature
here--is based on nothing but their own natural wish to exclude all
elements for {11} which they, in their professional quality of
logicians, can find no use.
Evidently, then, our non-intellectual nature does influence our
convictions. There are passional tendencies and volitions which run
before and others which come after belief, and it is only the latter
that are too late for the fair; and they are not too late when the
previous passional work has been already in their own direction.
Pascal's argument, instead of being powerless, then seems a regular
clincher, and is the last stroke needed to make our faith in masses and
holy water complete. The state of things is evidently far from simple;
and pure insight and logic, whatever they might do ideally, are not the
only things that really do produce our creeds.