refuted or proved by logic than intellectual skepticism can.
When we stick to it that there  truth (be it of either
kind), we do so with our whole nature, and resolve to stand
or fall by the results. The skeptic with his whole nature
adopts the doubting attitude; but which of us is the wiser,
Omniscience only knows.

     Turn now from these wide questions of good to a certain
class of questions of fact, questions concerning personal
relations, states of mind between one man and another. <Do
you like me or not?> -- for example. Whether you do or not
depends, in countless instances, on whether I meet you half-
way, am willing to assume that you must like me, and show
you trust and expectation. The previous faith on my part in
your liking's existence is in such cases what makes your
liking come. But if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an
inch until I have objective evidence, until you shall have
done something apt, as the absolutists say, <ad extorquendum
assensum meum>, ten to one your liking never comes. How many
women's hearts are vanquished by the mere sanguine
insistence of some man that they  love him! he will
not consent to the hypothesis that they cannot. The desire
for a certain kind of truth here brings about that special
truth's existence; and so it is in innumerable cases of
other sorts. Who gains promotions, boons, appointments, but
the man in whose life they are seen to play the part of live
hypotheses, who discounts them, sacrifices other things for
their sake before they have come, and takes risks for them
in advance? His faith acts on the powers above him as a
claim, and creates its own verification.

     A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small,
is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty
with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do
theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-
operation of many independent persons, its existence as a
fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one
another of those immediately concerned. A government, an
army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic
team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is
nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted. A whole
train of passengers (individually brave enough) will be
looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter can
count on one another, while each passenger fears that if he
makes a movement of resistance, he will be shot before any
one else backs him up. If we believed that the whole car-
full would rise at once with us, we should each severally
rise, and train-robbing would never even be attempted. There
are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a
preliminary faith exists in its coming. <And where faith in
a fact can help create the fact>, that would be an insane
logic which should say that faith running ahead of
scientific evidence is the 'lowest kind of immorality' into
which a thinking being can fall. Yet such is the logic by
which our scientific absolutists pretend to regulate our
lives!

     10. Logical Conditions of Religious Belief. In truths
dependent on our personal action, then, faith based on
desire is certainly a lawful and possibly an indispensable
thing.

     But now, it will be said, these are all childish human
cases, and have nothing to do with great cosmical matters,
like the question of religious faith. Let us then pass on to
that. Religions differ so much in their accidents that in
discussing the religious question we must make it very
generic and broad. What then do we now mean by the religious
hypothesis? Science says things are; morality says some
things are better than other things; and religion says
essentially two things.

     First, she says that the best things are the more
eternal things, the overlapping things, the things in the
universe that throw the last stone, so to speak, and say the
final word. " Perfection is eternal," this phrase of Charles
Secretan seems a good way of putting this first affirmation
of religion, an affirmation which obviously cannot yet be
verified scientifically at all.

     The second affirmation of religion is that we are
better off even now if we believe her first affirmation to
be true.

     Now, let us consider what the logical elements of this
situation are <in case the religious hypothesis in both its
branches be really true>. (Of course, we must admit that
possibility at the outset. If we are to discuss the question
at all, it must involve a living option. If for any of you
religion be a hypothesis that cannot, by any living
possibility be true, then you need go no farther. I speak to
the 'saving remnant' alone.) So proceeding, we see, first,
that religion offers itself as a  option. We are
supposed to gain, even now, by our belief, and to lose by
our nonbelief, a certain vital good. Secondly, religion is a
 option, so far as that good goes. We cannot escape
the issue by remaining skeptical and waiting for more light,
because, although we do avoid error in that way <if religion
be untrue>, we lose the good, <if it be true>, just as
certainly as if we positively chose to disbelieve. It is as