said to me) few cases are worth spending much time over: the
great thing is to have them decided on any acceptable
principle, and got out of the way. But in our dealings with
objective nature we obviously are recorders, not makers, of
the truth; and decisions for the mere sake of deciding
promptly and getting on to the next business would be wholly
out of place. Throughout the breadth of physical nature
facts are what they are quite independently of us, and
seldom is there any such hurry about them that the risks of
being duped by believing a premature theory need be faced.
The questions here are always trivial options, the
hypotheses are hardly living (at any rate not living for us
spectators), the choice between believing truth or falsehood
is seldom forced. The attitude of skeptical balance is
therefore the absolutely wise one if we would escape
mistakes. What difference, indeed, does it make to most of
us whether we have or have not a theory of the Rontgen rays,
whether we believe or not in mind-stuff, or have a
conviction about the causality of conscious states? It makes
no difference. Such options are not forced on us. On every
account it is better not to make them, but still keep
weighing reasons Pro  with an indifferent hand.

     I speak, of course, here of the purely judging mind.
For purposes of discovery such indifference is to be less
highly recommended, and science would be far less advanced
than she is if the passionate desires of individuals to get
their own faiths confirmed had been kept out of the game.
See for example the sagacity which Spencer and Weismann now
display. On the other hand, if you want an absolute duffer
in an investigation, you must, after all, take the man who
has no interest whatever in its results: he is the warranted
incapable, the positive fool. The most useful investigator,
because the most sensitive observer, is always he whose
eager interest in one side of the question is balanced by an
equally keen nervousness lest he become deceived.[4 ]
Science has organized this nervousness into a regular
, her so-called method of verification; and she
has fallen so deeply in love with the method that one may
even say she has ceased to care for truth by itself at all.
It is only truth as technically verified that interests her.
The truth of truths might come in merely affirmative form,
and she would decline to touch it. Such truth as that, she
might repeat with Clifford, would be stolen in defiance of
her duty to mankind. Human passions, however, are stronger
than technical rules. " Le coeur a ses raisons," as Pascal
says, " que la raison ne connait pas;" and however
indifferent to all but the bare rules of the game the
umpire, the abstract intellect, may be, the concrete players
who furnish him the materials to judge of are usually, each
one of them, in love with some pet 'live hypothesis' of his
own. Let us agree, however, that wherever there is no forced
option, the dispassionately judicial intellect with no pet
hypothesis, saving us, as it does, from dupery at any rate,
ought to be our ideal.

     The question next arises: Are there not somewhere
forced options in our speculative questions, and can we (as
men who may be interested at least as much in positively
gaining truth as in merely escaping dupery) always wait with
impunity till the coercive evidence shall have arrived? It
seems  improbable that the truth should be so
nicely adjusted to our needs and powers as that. In the
great boarding-house of nature, the cakes and the butter and
the syrup seldom come out so even and leave the plates so
clean. Indeed, we should view them with scientific suspicion
if they did.

     9. Faith May Bring Forth its Own Verification. <Moral
questions> immediately present themselves as questions whose
solution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is
a question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good,
or would be good if it did exist. Science can tell us what
exists; but to compare the , both of what exists and
of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but
what Pascal calls our heart. Science herself consults her
heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment
of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme goods
for man. Challenge the statement, and science can only
repeat it oracularly, or else prove it by showing that such
ascertainment and correction bring man all sorts of other
goods which man's heart in turn declares. The question of
having moral beliefs at all or not having them is decided by
our will. Are our moral preferences true or false, or are
they only odd biological phenomena, making things good or
bad for , but in themselves indifferent? How can your
pure intellect decide? If your heart does not  a world
of moral reality, your head will assuredly never make you
believe in one. Mephistophelian skepticism, indeed, will
satisfy the head's play-instincts much better than any
rigorous idealism can. Some men (even at the student age)
are so naturally cool-hearted that the moralistic hypothesis
never has for them any pungent life, and in their
supercilious presence the hot young moralist always feels
strangely ill at ease. The appearance of knowingness is on
their side, of  and gullibility on his. Yet, in the
inarticulate heart of him, he clings to it that he is not a
dupe, and that there is a realm in which (as Emerson says)
all their wit and intellectual superiority is no better than
the cunning of a fox. Moral skepticism can no more be