CHAPTER IX FAITH AS AN ACT OF WILL In my last lecture I considered the proper place of authority in matters of Faith, and came to the conclusion that no authority can claim to be primary except the clear affirmations of Faith itself—those spontaneous assertions of the basal personality which religion calls the voice of God within us, and which philosophy, in more cumbrous phrase, might describe as the self-revelation of the objective in our subjectivity. This voice, as I have said, speaks through, rather than to, the human heart and conscience and intellect, nor is it possible to separate the divine and human elements in any act of Faith. To-day I pass to another branch of our subject, one of great interest and importance. We have resisted the temptation to arrest and fix the development of Faith in the region of undifferentiated feeling. We have found that reliance on external authority, of whatever kind, is at best only a makeshift, a substitute for a full and manly Faith. We have decided that Faith must operate through our natural faculties. But which of our faculties is the chosen organ of Faith? Is it the will, or the intellect, or that specialised feeling which creates æsthetic judgments? We must consider the claims of these faculties in turn. And first, What is the relation of Faith to the will? Is Faith simply and solely a moral postulate, an act of choice? Is the ground of Faith our moral decision to believe? The proverb that the wish is father to the thought assuredly calls attention to a fact which we cannot afford to forget. People do, as a matter of fact, believe things because they wish to believe them. Hobbes declared that ' even the axioms of geometry would be disputed if men's passions were concerned in them'; and we have only to contrast a page of Euclid with a political or theological harangue, in order to realise how differently we reason when we are dealing, not with mathematical symbols having a fixed connotation, but with living ideas and disputable values. People believe what they wish to be true, both voluntarily and involuntarily. They will say without shame, 'I like to think so and so,' as a reason why they do think so. And they will not change their opinions because they are beaten in argument. He that complies against his will Is of the same opinion still. Moreover, without intending it, we often listen to the flattering tale which hope tells. Charlatans of all kinds trade on this weakness of human nature. Without it, a great many popular follies, such as betting on horse-races, and gambling at Monte Carlo or on the Stock Exchange, would come to an end. The dry light of reason would generally convince the gambler that he stands to lose; but he throws his desires into the scale, and vaguely hopes that 'luck will be on his side.' In matters of practice, when any end is being pursued, the advantages of a sanguine temperament are so obvious that men look very indulgently on the self-deceptions which it produces. If you do not hope,' said Heraclitus, you will never find that which is beyond your hopes.' In many cases, a strong will has the power to bring about the realisation of that which it desires, and the refusal to limit hopes by the evidence of probability brings its own reward and justification. None without hope e'er loved the brightest fair, We encourage the wilful optimist, the dogged struggler who cannot see when he is beaten, because this temper so often achieves great things. How far are we to approve of the same temper when it is applied to our religious beliefs? There is no doubt at all that by determining to believe a doctrine, by deliberately refusing to dwell on arguments on the other side, by refusing to listen to objections or read books by opponents, above all, by making, so to speak, a personal wager by acting as if it were true, and incurring loss should it be false-by these methods we can make ourselves believe many things against the weight of evidence. As Clough puts it : Action will furnish belief,-but will that belief be the true one? That is the point, you know. However, it doesn't much matter. What one wants, I suppose, is to predetermine the action So as to make it entail, not a chance belief, but the true one. There is no doubt that this is an effective and practicable method of determining and fixing our beliefs. The will to believe is, as Professor William James and his friends maintain, a real and actual ground of belief, whether such a belief deserves the name of Faith or not. However, the question is (and I do not agree with Clough that it doesn't much matter), not whether men do form their beliefs in this way, but whether they ought to do so. This question is the subject of my lecture to-day. One fact is indisputable. Wherever we find great emphasis laid on the practical support given by Faith as a reason for believing, there we find also intellectual scepti 1 Lord Lyttelton, 1709-1773. cism. The argument would never be advanced by any one who (to use a phrase of Renan)' believes heavily.' At the same time, it does not imply such complete distrust in human faculties as is implied by reliance on external revelation. Writers like Mansel are complete sceptics,1 whose choice of orthodoxy instead of agnosticism seems to be almost a matter of chance. Herbert Spencer was able to accept all Mansel's arguments, while rejecting his conclusion. The school which we are now to consider ? base their religious Faith not on external authority but on the affirmations of the 'practical reason,' which is at any rate part of our endowment as human beings. They are intellectual sceptics, but moral believers. Periods of ambitious construction in philosophy are regularly followed by periods of doubt and discouragement. The imposing thought-palace, which was to incorporate in its fabric every kind of truth, betrays unsoundness in its foundations. The invulnerable Achilles is discovered to have an unprotected heel; and forthwith scepticism threatens to engulf everything. But scepticism can always be turned against itself; and unwilling scepticism welcomes its own discomfiture. Faith, we will suppose, finds itself menaced by natural science. But on what grounds, men soon begin to ask, is science made a judge and ruler over us? Is not science, as well as theology, the product of human thought and of human instincts? Her conclusions are not infallible, her fundamental assumptions are still disputable and disputed. Her chief dogma, the uniformity of nature, is admitted to be a matter of Faith. Why is Faith to be allowed an entrance at this one point and here only? Why may we not have Faith in the practical reason as well as in the speculative? Might it not even be plausibly maintained that the theoretical reason is more 1 So far, at least, as any philosopher can be a complete sceptic. The absolute sceptic does not construct a philosophy out of scepticism-he does not philosophise at all. James fallible than the practical? Almost every paradox has been plausibly maintained by philosophers. Παντὶ λόγῳ λóyos ávтíKEITα, as Aristotle said; and the greater the intellect, the greater may be the blunder. "There are errors which lie out of the reach of an ordinary mind':1 magna magnorum deliramenta doctorum, says St. Augustine. Further, psychology has proved that desires and emotions do influence belief. Pure reasoning is a pure figment; no man was ever guided by pure reason. Again, what is the test of truth to which the rationalist or intellectualist refers us? Has he any ultimate criterion of knowledge? If not, may not what he calls superstition be as respectable as what he calls truth? If the so-called superstitions work, they justify and verify themselves. They may claim to be 'protective organs,' or something of the kind; and what more are the rationalist's reasons? Lastly, these new apologists tell us that the bases of our intellectual constructions are not axioms but postulates; i.e. we reject the alternative propositions, not because they are, on the face of them, ridiculous, but because we have 'no use for them.' The will and the understanding are both instruments of living, and the will is the more efficient of the two. If we still desiderate some proof that the claims of our will are ontologically true, we may be reminded (as a concession to our weak-minded and benighted 'absolutism') that even though the ground of our belief in certain theories lies in the fact that we need them, we did not create the circumstance that we need them. Either the nature of things, which is responsible for the fact that we need them, is irrational, which is absurd,' or our needs must be founded on the real constitution of the world. 6 The school which we are now considering deliberately amalgamates will and feeling-thus getting a broader basis for its constructions, though discursive thought is excluded as a sort of pariah. This fusion of will and feeling seems to 1 Balmez, quoted by Rickaby, First Principles, p. 116. |