Barnes Rel 103. 
Ch. 11

William James, 
[old  "Happy Face"]

A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant-ship. He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and and refitted, even though this should put him at great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms that it was idle to suppose she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance-money when she went down in mid-ocean and told no tales.

What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in no wise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts. And although in the end he may have felt so sure about it that he could not think otherwise, yet inasmuch as he had knowingly and willingly worked himself into that frame of mind, he must be held responsible for it.¹

The Will to Believe is James’ response to Clifford’s argument.  The key to James' argument is that religious beliefs may not be susceptible to the kind of empirical verification that would apply to judging how seaworthy a ship might be.  Religious beliefs (and the practices associated with them therefore) cannot be examined the way one examines the hull and structure of a ship.  So it is necessary to treat religion in a different way when deciding on whether to accept it or not.

Take careful note of how James defines "religion." The religious belief or commitment he is defending here may be different from how you would define religion. Keep in mind when reading James that the benefit he here says is to be derived from religion is not a life after death, not personal immortality. He is mainly concerned with what effect religion has on life "even now," not after death. A challenge in reading him is to figure out what "the more eternal" things might be here and now, if he is not talking about life after death. Perhaps they are things like justice, mercy, integrity, compassion, which to James are all “more eternal”

Note also the famous three conditions that surround the religious option: it must be a live option; it is a momentous option; and it is forced, in the sense that even a decision not to decide is a decision, and one with consequences, James claims.

Most students find this difficult to read. It is early 20th century writing. It presupposes knowledge of events of the 19th century, like the Mahdi, a Muslim leader in the Sudan (south of Egypt) who led an Islamic uprising and defeated the British. Give it your best try; I will understand if a lot of it is unclear.

WILLIAM JAMES "THE WILL TO BELIEVE."

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 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.

1. Ques: what does it mean to call a hypothesis “live”?

* * * *
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 loss is reasonable, if there is but the possibility of 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 abetira [roughly: you will come to believe and stop arguing] Why should you not? At bottom, what have you to lose.

2.  According to Pascal, why should a person place a bet that God does exist?

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 harness of the unbelieving heart. We feel that a faith in masses and holy water adopted willfully 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 rewards.

3. Ques: How does James think God would respond to someone who follows Pascal’s idea?

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 exist in us to any degree. . . .

What then do we now mean by the religious hypothesis? Science says things are; morality says some things are better than others; and religion says essentially two things.

First she says that the best things are the more eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the final word "Perfection is eternal,"--this phrase of Charles Scretan seems a good way of putting this first affirmation of religion, an affirmation which obviously cannot yet be verified scientifically at all.

4. Ques: name the first part of “the religious hypothesis.”  [See the intro here, about what "more eternal things" might be.]

The second affirmation of religion is that we are better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to be true.

5. Ques: name the second part of “the religious hypothesis.”

Now, let us consider what the logical elements of this situation are in case the religious hypothesis in both its branches be really true. (Of course, we must admit that possibility at the outset. If we are to discuss the question at all, it must involve a living option. If for any of you religion be a hypothesis that cannot, by any living possibility be true, then you need go no father. I speak to the 'saving remnant' alone.) So proceeding, we see, first, that religion offers itself as a momentous option. We are supposed to gain, even now, by our belief, and to lose by our non-belief, a certain vital good.

6. Why is the religious hypothesis “a momentous option” according to James.

Secondly, religion is a forced option, so far as that good goes. We cannot escape the issue by remaining skeptical and waiting for more light, because, although we do avoid error in that way if religion be untrue, we lose the good, if it be true, just as certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve. It is as if a man should hesitate indefinitely to ask a certain woman to marry him because he was not perfectly sure that she would prove an angel after he brought her home. Would he not cut himself off from the particular angel-possibility as decisively as if he went and married some one else?

7. Why is religion a “forced” option? [See the intro above also on this.]

Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of options; it is option of a particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error — that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. He is actively playing his stake as much as the believer is; he is backing the field against the religious hypothesis, just as the believer is backing the religious hypothesis against the field. To preach scepticism to us as a duty until 'sufficient evidence' for religion be found, is tantamount therefore to telling us, when in presence of the religious hypothesis, that to yield to our fear of it being error is wiser and better than to yield to our hope that it may be true.

8.  Name the risk that skepticism wishes most to avoid.   [Answer:  the risk of error, of being wrong]

It is not intellect against all passions, then; it is only intellect with one passion laying down its law. And by what, forsooth, is the supreme wisdom of this passion warranted? Dupery for dupery, what proof is there dupery through hope is so much worse than dupery through fear? I, for one, can see no proof; and I simply refuse obedience to the scientist's command to imitate his kind of option, in a case where my own stake is important enough to give me the right to choose my own form of risk. If religion be true and the evidence for it be still insufficient, I do not wish, by putting your extinguisher upon my nature (which feels to me as if it had after all some business in this matter), to forfeit my sole chance in life of getting upon the winning side,--that chance depending, of course, on my willingness to run the risk of acting as if my passional need of taking the world religiously might be prophetic and right.

All this is on the supposition that it [religion] really may be prophetic and right, and that, even to us who are discussing the matter, religion is a live hypothesis which may be true. Now, to most of us religion comes in a still further way that makes a veto on our active faith even more illogical. The more perfect and more eternal aspect of the universe is represented in our religions as having personal form. The universe is no longer a mere It to us, but a Thou, if we are religious; and any relation that may be possible from person to person might be possible here.

9.  In your own words express what James is saying when he claims that for most of his audience the universe "is no longer a mere It to us, but a Thou . . . ."  [Answer:  the universe represents a personal God, not just an impersonal Ultimate.]

For instance, although in one sense we are passive portions of the universe, in another we show a curious autonomy, as if we were small active centers on our own account. We feel, too, as if the appeal of religion to us were made on our own active good-will, as if evidence might be forever withheld from us unless we met the hypothesis half-way.  To take a trivial illustration: just as a man who in a company of gentlemen made no advances [commitments], asked a warrant for every concession, and believed no one's word without proof, would cut himself off by such churlishness from all the social rewards that a more trusting spirit would earn -- so here, one who should shut himself up in snarling logicality and try to make the gods extort from his only opportunity of making the gods' acquaintance. This feeling, forced on us we know not whence, that by obstinately believing that there are gods (although not to do so would be so easy both for our logic and our life) we are doing the universe the deepest service we can, seems part of the living essence of the religious hypothesis. If the hypothesis were true in all its parts, including this one, then pure intellectualism, with its veto on our making willing advances [i.e. freely chosen commitments], would be an absurdity, and some participation of our sympathetic nature would be logically required.

10. According to James, what does pure intellectualism lead us to do?

This page last changed Nov 2, 2011