The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy

All this is what I should instantly say, were I called on to plead for gnosticism; and its real friends, of whom you will presently perceive I am not one, would say without diff...

Believe truth! Shun error!--these, we see, are two materially different laws; and by choosing between them we may end by coloring differently our whole intellectual life. We may...

When Mr. Mallock's book with this title appeared some fifteen years ago, the jocose answer that "it depends on the _liver_" had great currency in the newspapers. The answer whic...

If we survey the field of history and ask what feature all great periods of revival, of expansion of the human mind, display in common, we shall find, I think, simply this: that...

It means that the acts we perform are always the result of outward discharges from the nervous centres, and that these outward discharges are themselves the result of impression...

This is nothing new. All men know it at those rare moments when the soul sobers herself, and leaves off her chattering and protesting and insisting about this formula or that. I...

Here, then, on this stage of mere emancipation from monistic superstition, the would-be suicide may already get encouraging answers to his question about the worth of life. Ther...

And can we not ourselves sympathize with his mood in some degree? The old receipts of squeezing the thistle and taking the bull by the horns have many applications. An evil fran...

And yet if he be a true philosopher he must see that there is nothing final in any actually given equilibrium of human ideals, but that, as our present laws and customs have fou...

Now, it appears to me that the question whether life is worth living is subject to conditions logically {60} much like these. It does, indeed, depend on you _the liver_. If you...

The future history of philosophy is the only {128} authority capable of answering that question. I, at all events, must not enter into it to-day, as that would be to abandon the...

Nevertheless, many persons talk as if the minutest {155} dose of disconnectedness of one part with another, the smallest modicum of independence, the faintest tremor of ambiguit...

There are, in short, _different cycles of operation_ in nature; different departments, so to speak, relatively independent of one another, so that what goes on at any moment in...

Take as an example the question of optimism or pessimism, which makes so much noise just now in Germany. Every human being must sometime decide for himself whether life is worth...

[3] "The whole history of popular beliefs about Nature refutes the notion that the thought of a universal physical order can possibly have arisen from the purely passive recepti...

The zone of the individual differences, and of the social 'twists' which by common confession they initiate, is the zone of formative processes, the dynamic belt of quivering un...

Does it not seem preposterous on the very face of it to talk of our opinions being modifiable at will? Can our will either help or hinder our intellect in its perceptions of tru...

At most of our American Colleges there are Clubs formed by the students devoted to particular branches of learning; and these clubs have the laudable custom of inviting once or...

Apparitions, on this 'telepathic' theory, may be called 'objective' facts, although they are not 'material' facts. In order to test the likelihood of such veridical hallucinatio...

To Professor Jevons is due the great credit of having emphatically pointed out[16] how the genius of discovery depends altogether on the number of these random notions and guess...

Such is the attitude of ordinary men in their theism, God's fiat being in physics and morals such an {74} uttermost datum. Such also is the attitude of all hard-minded analysts...

In our first essays at answering this question, there is an inevitable tendency to slip into an assumption which ordinary men follow when they are disputing with one another abo...

Assuredly if you had been hearing of a land flowing with milk and honey, and had gone there with unlimited expectations of the rivers the milk would fill; and if you found there...

To believe that the cause of everything is to be found in its antecedents is the starting-point, the initial postulate, not the goal and consummation, of science. If she is simp...

"The great field for new discoveries," said a scientific friend to me the other day, "is always the unclassified residuum." Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every...

Now, of course, we must all admit that the excesses to which the romantic and personal view of nature may lead, if wholly unchecked by impersonal rationalism, are direful. Centr...