The Will to Believe
William James, 1896
Is a reasonable person entitled to believe what cannot be proved? William James answers: sometimes not only entitled but compelled, because refusing to decide is a decision too. A collection of lectures on where belief helps to create a fact, and where its limits lie.
Who it is for
For people who make important decisions without guarantees, and who want to understand when belief is justified and when it is more honest to wait and check.
Do not be afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
Almost a sermon for sceptics
One day Harvard professor William James came to Yale, to a students' philosophy club, and at once warned them that he had brought something like a sermon. It was not about belief in any church, but about the right to believe. Is a thinking person entitled to accept a conviction that his logic cannot yet prove?
The question was not idle. The English mathematician William Clifford had formulated a strict rule: it is always, everywhere and for everyone wrong to believe anything on insufficient grounds. James's students, having barely mastered logic, repeated the same thing, although, as he points out, they were themselves full of some belief or other.
This is a collection. The book The Will to Believe consists of ten lectures, most of which James read over the years to student clubs and in 1896 gathered under one cover. Two of them are at the centre: the title lecture on the right to believe, and “Is Life Worth Living?”. Two further essays, on the feeling of rationality and on the quarrel between freedom and predestination, fill in the missing links of the argument.
James's thought sounds bold, but it has strict limits. There are questions that cannot be settled either by proof or by waiting, and in them our hopes lawfully take part in the choice. And sometimes belief in a fact helps that fact to come about. This is not permission to believe anything at all, nor a promise that belief will bring about everything. If you know decisions that can be neither proved nor postponed, this book is written about them, and the wish to sort them out honestly is itself rare.
A live question that cannot be avoided
James begins with distinctions without which his thought is easily distorted. Everything that we are offered to accept he calls a hypothesis. He takes an image from electricians: a wire may be live or dead. So a hypothesis may be live or dead.
A live hypothesis seems to you a real possibility. Offer listeners belief in the Mahdi, the promised saviour of Islamic tradition, and nothing stirs in them. For a person raised in the Muslim tradition the same idea may be live. So liveness is not a property of the idea itself but of its link with a particular person. It is measured by readiness to act, and the highest degree of liveness, readiness to act without turning back, is belief itself.
Next James introduces the word “option”: this is his name for a choice between two hypotheses. Options differ in three ways.
• Living or dead. “Become an agnostic or a Christian” was a live choice for his listeners, since both sides touched them at least a little. “Become a theosophist or a Muslim” was rather a dead one.
• Forced or avoidable. “Go for a walk with an umbrella or without one” forces nothing: you can simply not go out at all. A choice becomes forced where there is no room outside the alternatives.
• Important or trivial. If the polar explorer Nansen invited you on an expedition to the North Pole, refusing would close that chance for ever. A chemist who for a year tests a hypothesis and finds nothing loses only time.
James calls genuine the option that is live, forced and important all at once. Why the first condition matters can be seen in the wager that Pascal devised. Bet that God exists, he said: you win an infinite amount and lose little, so perform the rites, and faith will come. James notes that such a calculation converts nobody if belief was never a live possibility for the person. Belief accepted through mechanical reckoning lacks, in his words, any inner soul.
About the author
William James (1842–1910) was an American psychologist and philosopher who taught for many years at Harvard. He is counted among the founders of pragmatism, and his The Principles of Psychology became a classic.
All books by this author: William James
Terms from the book
- Yale
- Lincoln
- Harvard
- rheumatism
- Pascal
- Clifford
- hypothesis
- option
- dogma
- scepticism
- pessimism
- determinism
- Mahdi: In Islamic tradition, the expected saviour who will appear before the end of time. In the late nineteenth century various people declared themselves the Mahdi, the best known of them living in Sudan.
- agnostic: A person who holds that the existence of God can be neither proved nor disproved, and so refrains from giving an answer.
- theosophist: A follower of theosophy, a religious and mystical doctrine that spread through Europe and America at the end of the nineteenth century.
- Nansen: Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930), a Norwegian polar explorer. In 1893–1896 he led an expedition on the ship Fram, which tried to reach the North Pole.
- X-rays: Invisible radiation discovered by Wilhelm Röntgen at the end of 1895. When James gave his lecture, it was one of the freshest scientific discoveries.
- mountaineer: A person who climbs mountains by difficult routes.
- Whitman: Walt Whitman (1819–1892), an American poet who celebrated the joy of life, author of the collection Leaves of Grass.
- Thomson: James Thomson (1834–1882), a Scottish poet, author of the gloomy poem The City of Dreadful Night (1874).
- terrier: A small breed of dog originally bred for hunting burrowing animals.
All terms
Similar books
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche
- Unraveling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool, and Making the World’s Ugliest Sweater, Peggy Orenstein
- Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, Luke Burgis
- Why Buddhism Is True, Robert Wright
- The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, Patanjali, commentary by Swami Satchidananda
- A Confession, Leo Tolstoy
- The Willpower Instinct, Kelly McGonigal
- Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill
Read in Livria
