And now, after all this introduction, let us go straight at our
question. I have said, and now repeat it, that not only as a matter of
fact do we find our passional nature influencing us in our opinions,
but that there are some options between opinions in which this
influence must be regarded both as an inevitable and as a lawful
determinant of our choice.
I fear here that some of you my hearers will begin to scent danger, and
lend an inhospitable ear. Two first steps of passion you have indeed
had to admit as necessary,--we must think so as to avoid dupery, and we
must think so as to gain truth; but the surest path to those ideal
consummations, you will probably consider, is from now onwards to take
no further passional step.
Well, of course, I agree as far as the facts will allow. Wherever the
option between losing truth and gaining it is not momentous, we can
throw the {20} chance of _gaining truth_ away, and at any rate save
ourselves from any chance of _believing falsehood_, by not making up
our minds at all till objective evidence has come. In scientific
questions, this is almost always the case; and even in human affairs in
general, the need of acting is seldom so urgent that a false belief to
act on is better than no belief at all. Law courts, indeed, have to
decide on the best evidence attainable for the moment, because a
judge's duty is to make law as well as to ascertain it, and (as a
learned judge once said to me) few cases are worth spending much time
over: the great thing is to have them decided on _any_ acceptable
principle, and got out of the way. But in our dealings with objective
nature we obviously are recorders, not makers, of the truth; and
decisions for the mere sake of deciding promptly and getting on to the
next business would be wholly out of place. Throughout the breadth of
physical nature facts are what they are quite independently of us, and
seldom is there any such hurry about them that the risks of being duped
by believing a premature theory need be faced. The questions here are
always trivial options, the hypotheses are hardly living (at any rate
not living for us spectators), the choice between believing truth or
falsehood is seldom forced. The attitude of sceptical balance is
therefore the absolutely wise one if we would escape mistakes. What
difference, indeed, does it make to most of us whether we have or have
not a theory of the Röntgen rays, whether we believe or not in
mind-stuff, or have a conviction about the causality of conscious
states? It makes no difference. Such options are not forced on us.
On every account it is better not to make them, but still keep weighing
reasons _pro et contra_ with an indifferent hand.
{21}
I speak, of course, here of the purely judging mind. For purposes of
discovery such indifference is to be less highly recommended, and
science would be far less advanced than she is if the passionate
desires of individuals to get their own faiths confirmed had been kept
out of the game. See for example the sagacity which Spencer and
Weismann now display. On the other hand, if you want an absolute
duffer in an investigation, you must, after all, take the man who has
no interest whatever in its results: he is the warranted incapable, the
positive fool. The most useful investigator, because the most
sensitive observer, is always he whose eager interest in one side of
the question is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest he become
deceived.[3] Science has organized this nervousness into a regular
_technique_, her so-called method of verification; and she has fallen
so deeply in love with the method that one may even say she has ceased
to care for truth by itself at all. It is only truth as technically
verified that interests her. The truth of truths might come in merely
affirmative form, and she would decline to touch it. Such truth as
that, she might repeat with Clifford, would be stolen in defiance of
her duty to mankind. Human passions, however, are stronger than
technical rules. "Le coeur a ses raisons," as Pascal says, "que la
raison ne connaît pas;" and however indifferent to all but the bare
rules of the game the umpire, the abstract intellect, may be, the
concrete players who furnish him the materials to judge of are usually,
each one of them, in love with some pet 'live hypothesis' of his own.
Let us agree, however, that wherever there is no forced option, the
{22} dispassionately judicial intellect with no pet hypothesis, saving
us, as it does, from dupery at any rate, ought to be our ideal.
The question next arises: Are there not somewhere forced options in our
speculative questions, and can we (as men who may be interested at
least as much in positively gaining truth as in merely escaping dupery)
always wait with impunity till the coercive evidence shall have
arrived? It seems _a priori_ improbable that the truth should be so
nicely adjusted to our needs and powers as that. In the great
boarding-house of nature, the cakes and the butter and the syrup seldom
come out so even and leave the plates so clean. Indeed, we should view
them with scientific suspicion if they did.