embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if
he tried and failed. , the option is trivial
when the opportunity is not unique, when the stake is
insignificant, or when the decision is reversible if it
later prove unwise. Such trivial options abound in the
scientific life. A chemist finds an hypothesis live enough
to spend a year in its verification: he believes in it to
that extent. But if his experiments prove inconclusive
either way, he is quit for his loss of time, no vital harm
being done.

     It will facilitate our discussion if we keep all these
distinctions well in mind.

     2. Pascal's Wager. The next matter to consider is the
actual psychology of human opinion. When we look at certain
facts, it seems as if our passional and volitional nature
lay at the root of all our convictions. When we look at
others, it seems as if they could do nothing when the
intellect had once said its say. Let us take the latter
facts up first

     Does it not seem preposterous on the very face of it to
talk of our opinions being modifiable at will? Can our will
either help or hinder our 'intellect in its perceptions of
truth? Can we, by just willing it, believe that Abraham
Lincoln's existence is a myth, and that the portraits of him
in McClure's Magazine are all of some one else? Can we, by
any effort of our will, or by any strength of wish that it
were true, believe ourselves well and about when we are
roaring with rheumatism in bed, or feel certain that the sum
of the two one-dollar bills in our pocket must be a hundred
dollars? We can  any of these things, but we are
absolutely impotent to believe them; and of just such things
is the whole fabric of the truths that we do believe in made
up, -- matters of fact, immediate or remote, as Hume said,
and relations between ideas, which are either there or not
there for us if we see them so, and which if not there
cannot be put there by any action of our own.

     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 one 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
abltira>. Why should you not? At bottom, what have you to
lose?

     You probably feel that when religious faith expresses
itself thus, in the language of the gamingtable, 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 hardness 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 reward. 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 exists in us to any degree.

     The talk of believing by our volition seems, then, from
one point of view, simply silly. From another point of view
it is worse than silly, it is vile. When one turns to the
magnificent edifice of the physical sciences, and sees how
it was reared; what thousands of disinterested moral lives
of men lie buried in its mere foundations; what patience and
postponement, what choking down of preference, what
submission to the icy laws of outer fact are wrought into
its very stones and mortar; how absolutely impersonal it
stands in its vast augustness, -- then how besotted and