第101章

for God, the sinking sense it gives us to imagine no such Providence or help.So of our political or pecuniary hopes and fears, and things and persons dreaded and desired "A grocer has a full creed as to foreign policy, young lady a complete theory of the sacraments, as to which neither has any doubt....A girl in a country parsonage will be sure that Paris never can be taken, or that Bismarck is a wretch" -- all because they have either conceived these things at some moment with passion, or associated them with other things which they have conceived with passion.

Renouvier calls this belief of a thing for no other reason than that we conceive it with passion, by the name of mental vertigo.

Other objects whisper doubt or disbelief; but the object of passion makes us deaf to all but itself, and we affirm it unhesitatingly.Such objects are the delusions of insanity, which the insane person can tit odd moments steady himself against, but which again return to sweep him off his feet.

Such are the revelations of mysticism.Such, particularly, are the sudden beliefs which animate mobs of men when frenzied impulse to action is involved.

Whatever be the action in point -- whether the stoning of a prophet, the bailing of a conqueror, the burning of a, witch, the baiting of a heretic or Jew, the starting of a forlorn hope, or the flying from a foe -- the fact that to believe a certain object will cause that action to explode is a sufficient reason for that belief to come.The motor impulse sweeps it unresisting in its train.

The whole history of witchcraft and early medicine is a commentary on the facility with which anything which chances to be conceived is believed the moment the belief chimes in with an emotional mood.'The cause of sickness?'

When a savage asks the cause of anything he means to ask exclusively 'What is to blame?' The theoretic curiosity starts from the practical life's demands.Let some one then accuse a necromancer, suggest a charm or spell which has been cast, and no more 'evidence' is asked for.What evidence is required beyond this intimate sense of the culprit's responsibility, to which our very viscera and limbs reply?

Human credulity in the way of therapeutics has similar psychological roots.If there is anything intolerable (especially to the heart of a woman), it is to do nothing when a loved one is sick or in pain.To do anything is a relief.Accordingly, whatever remedy may be suggested is a spark on inflammable soil.The mind makes its spring towards action on that cue, sends for that remedy, and for a day at least believes the danger past.Blame, dread, and hope are thus the great belief inspiring passions, and cover among them the future, the present, and the past.

These remarks illustrate the earlier heads of the list on page 292.

Whichever represented objects give us sensations, especially interesting ones, or incite our motor impulses, or arouse our hate, desire, or fear, are real enough for us.Our requirements in the way of reality terminate in our own acts and emotions, our own pleasures and pains.These are the ultimate fixities from which, as we formerly observed, the whole chain of our beliefs depends, object hanging to object, as the bees, in swarming, hang to each other until, de proche en proche , the supporting branch, the Self, is reached and held.BELIEF IN OBJECTS OF THEORY.

Now the merely conceived or imagined objects which our mind represents as hanging to the sensations (causing them, etc.), filling the gaps between them, and weaving their interrupted chaos into order are innumerable.Whole systems of them conflict with other systems, and our choice of

which system shall carry our belief is governed by principles which are simple enough, however subtle and difficult may be their application to details.The conceived system, to pass for true, must at least include the reality of the sensible objects in it, by explaining them as effects on us, if nothing more.The system which includes the most of them, and definitely explains or pretends to explain the rest of them, will, ceteris paribus, prevail.It is needless to say how far mankind still is from having excogitated such a system.But the various materialisms, idealisms, and hylozoisms show with what industry the attempt is forever made.It is conceivable that several rival theories should equally well include the actual order of our sensations in their scheme, much as the one-fluid and two-fluid theories of electricity formulated all the common electrical phenomena equally well.The sciences are full of these alternatives.Which theory is then to be believed? That theory will be most generally believed which, besides bring us objects able to account satisfactorily for our sensible experience, also offers those which are most interesting, those which apiaeal most urgently to our æsthetic, emotional, and active needs.So here, in the higher intellectual life, the same selection among general conceptions goes on which went on among the sensations themselves.

First, a word of their relation to our emotional and active needs -- and here I can do no better than quote from an article published some years ago:

"A philosophy may be unimpeachable in other respects, but either of two defects will be fatal to its universal acceptance.First, its ultimate principle must not be one that essentially baffles and disappoints our dearest desires and most cherished powers.A pessimistic principle like Schopenhauer's incurably vicious Will-substance, or Hartmann's wicked jack-at-all-trades, the Unconscious, will perpetually call forth essays at other philosophies.

Incompatibility of the future with their desires and active tendencies is, in fact, to most men a source of more fixed disquietude than uncertainty itself.Witness the attempts to overcome the 'problem of evil,' the 'mystery of pain.' There is no problem of 'good.'