contemptible seems every little sentimentalist who comes
blowing his voluntary smoke-wreaths, and pretending to
decide things from out of his private dream! Can we wonder
if those bred in the rugged and manly school of science
should feel like spewing such subjectivism out of their
mouths? The whole system of loyalties which grow up in the
schools of science go dead against its toleration; so that
it is only natural that those who have caught the scientific
fever should pass over to the opposite extreme, and write
sometimes as if the incorruptibly truthful intellect ought
positively to prefer bitterness and unacceptableness to the
heart in its cup.

     It fortifies my soul to know
     That, though I perish, Truth is so --

sings Clough, while Huxley exclaims: "My only consolation
lies in the reflection that, however bad our posterity may
become, so far as they hold by the plain rule of not
pretending to believe what they have no reason to believe,
because it may be to their advantage so to pretend [the word
' pretend' is surely here redundant], they will not have
reached the lowest depth of immorality." And that delicious
<enfant terrible> Clifford writes: " Belief is desecrated
when given to unproved and unquestioned statements for the
solace and private pleasure of the believer. . . . Whoso
would deserve well of his fellows in this matter will guard
the purity of his belief with a very fanaticism of jealous
care, lest at any time it should rest on an unworthy object,
and catch a stain which can never be wiped away. . . . If
[a] belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence [even
though the belief be true, as Clifford on the same page
explains] the pleasure is a stolen one. . . . It is sinful
because it is stolen in defiance of our duty to mankind.
That duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefs as from a
pestilence which may shortly master our own body and then
spread to the rest of the town. . . . It is ,wrong always,
everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon
insufficient evidence."

     3. Clifford's Veto, Psychological Causes of Belief. All
this strikes one as healthy, even when expressed, as by
Clifford, with somewhat too much of robustious pathos in the
voice.,; Free-will and simple wishing do seem, in the matter
of our credences, to be only fifth wheels to the coach. Yet
if any one should thereupon assume that intellectual insight
is what remains after wish and will and sentimental
preference have taken wing, or that pure reason is what then
settles our opinions, he would fly quite as directly in the
teeth of the facts.

     It is only our already dead hypotheses that our willing
nature is unable to bring to life again But what has made
them dead for us is for the most part a previous action of
our willing nature of an antagonistic kind. When I say
'willing nature,' I do not mean only such deliberate
volitions as may have set up habits of belief that we cannot
now escape from, I mean all such factors of belief as fear
and hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship,
the circumpressure of our caste and set. As a matter of fact
we find ourselves believing, we hardly know how or why. Mr.
Balfour gives the name of authority' to all those
influences, born of the intellectual climate, that make
hypotheses possible or impossible for us, alive or dead.
Here in this room, we all of us believe in molecules and the
conservation of energy, in democracy and necessary progress,
in Protestant Christianity and the duty of fighting for 'the
doctrine of the immortal Monroe,' all for no reasons worthy
of the name. We see into these matters with no more inner
clearness,. and probably with much less, than any
disbeliever in them might possess. His unconventionality
would probably have some grounds to show for its
conclusions; but for us, not insight, but the  of
the opinions, is what makes the spark shoot from them and
light up our sleeping magazines of faith. Our reason is
quite satisfied, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out
of every thousand of us, if it can find a few arguments that
will do to recite in case our credulity is criticized by
some one else. Our faith is faith in some one else's faith,
and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our
belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth,
and that our minds and it are made for each other, -- what
is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our
social system backs us up? We want to have a truth; we want
to believe that our experiments and studies and discussions
must put us in a continually better and better position
towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our
thinking lives. But if a pyrrhonistic skeptic asks us <how
we know> all this, can our logic find a reply? No! certainly
it cannot. It is just one volition against another, -- we
willing to go in for life upon a trust or assumption which
he, for his part, does not care to make.[3 ] As a rule we
disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no use.
Clifford's cosmic emotions find no use for Christian
feelings. Huxley belabors the bishops because there is no
use for sacerdotalism in his scheme of life. Newman, on the
contrary, goes over to Romanism, and finds all sorts of
reasons good for staying there, because a priestly system is
for him an organic need and delight. Why do so few
"scientists" even look at the evidence for telepathy, so-