William James
                    The Will To Believe.
                            1897

Copyright 1995, James Fieser (jfieser@utm.edu). See end note
for details on copyright and editing conventions. This e-
text is based on the 1897 edition of <The Will to Believe>
published by Longmans, Green & Co. This is a working draft;
please report errors.[1]

                          * * * *

                  The Will To Believe.[2]

     In the recently published Life by Leslie Stephen of I
his brother, Fitz-James, there is an account of a school to
which the latter went when he was a boy. The teacher, a
certain Mr. Guest, used to converse with his pupils in this
wise: "Gurney, what is the difference between justification
and sanctification? Stephen, prove the omnipotence of God!"
etc. In the midst of our Harvard freethinking and
indifference we are prone to imagine that here at your good
old orthodox College conversation continues to be somewhat
upon this order; and to show you that we at Harvard have not
lost all interest in these vital subjects, I have brought
with me to-night something like a sermon on justification by
faith to read to you, -- I mean an essay in justification of
faith, a defense of our right to adopt a believing attitude
in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely
logical intellect may not have been coerced. I The Will to
Believe,' accordingly, is the title of my paper.

     I have long defended to my own students the lawfulness
of voluntarily adopted faith; but as soon as they have got
well imbued with the logical spirit, they have as a rule
refused to admit my contention I to be lawful
philosophically, even though in point of fact they were
personally all the time chock-full of some faith or other
themselves. I am all the while, however, so profoundly
convinced that my own position is correct, that your
invitation has seemed to me a good occasion to make my
statements more clear. Perhaps your minds will be more open
than those with which I have hitherto had to deal, I will be
as little technical as I can, though I must begin by setting
up some technical distinctions that will help us in the end.

     1. Hypotheses and Options. Let us give the name of
 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  or . A live hypothesis is one which
appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed.
If I asked 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.

     Next, let us call the decision between two hypotheses
an . Options may be of several kinds. They may be --
1.  or ; 2.  or ; 3,
 or ; and for our purposes we may call
an option a genuine option when it is of the forced, living,
and momentous kind.

     1. A living option is one in which both hypotheses are
live ones. If I say to you: "Be a theosophist or be a
Mohammedan," it is probably a dead option, because for you
neither hypothesis is likely to be alive. But if I say: " Be
an agnostic or be a Christian," it is otherwise: trained as
you are, each hypothesis makes some appeal, however small,
to your belief.

     2. Next, if I say to you: "Choose between going out
with your umbrella or without it," I do not offer you a
genuine option, for it is not forced. You can easily avoid
it by not going out at all. Similarly, if I say, "Either
love me or hate me," "Either call my theory true or call it
false," your option is avoidable. You may remain indifferent
to me, neither loving nor hating, and you may decline to
offer any judgment as to my theory. But if I say, "Either
accept this truth or go without it," I put on you a forced
option, for there is no standing place outside of the
alternative. Every dilemma based on a complete logical
disjunction, with no possibility of not choosing, is an
option of this forced kind.

     3. Finally, if I were Dr. Nansen and proposed to you to
join my North Pole expedition, your option would be
momentous; for this would probably be your only similar
opportunity, and your choice now would either exclude you
from the North Pole sort of immortality altogether or put at
least the chance of it into your hands. He who refuses to