Page:Educational Review Volume 23.djvu/40

 diversifies, deepens and becomes more complex, an ever-enlarging circle of human interests and concerns comes to be of this indirectly practical kind. Precept and practice, instead of being connected by a short and straight, stout cord, are no less effectively brought into mutual bondage by a complicated network of strands, many of them delicate in texture, elaborate in weave, and difficult to trace. For present-day purposes we may consider belief as characteristically of this type—complex in structure, subject to endlessly varying influences, modifiable by diverse factors and circumstances, responsive to social, hereditary, educational, and transitory as well as to more permanent, natural, and logical influences.

A prominent result and indeed a purpose of belief is the concordant settlement of opinion. Yet this result may be brought about—has often been brought about—by other than logical processes; or, speaking with reference to the experience of history, it may be said that it proceeds by methods which are condemned by the most approved logical (and ethical) sanctions of more advanced stages of knowledge, tho it receives the indorsement of the cruder and less enlightened logic of the period. For every work of science—and something analogous is true of reformatory movements in other directions—“great enough to be remembered for a few generations, affords some exemplification of the defective state of the art of reasoning of the time when it was written; and each chief step in science has been a lesson in logic” (Peirce). Of distinctive methods of fixing belief Mr. Peirce describes four: the method of tenacity, of authority, of inclination, of scientific verifiability. The first, when stated baldly, seems devoid of all merit; yet it expresses in extreme form a tendency which the student of belief is certain to encounter. The man of tenacity proceeds upon a faith that the opinion which he holds is the truth, that it is his duty to affirm this conviction, to reiterate it and to cherish it, to refrain from entertaining any considerations which may tend to shake the belief, and to seek all the influences that may strengthen it. Naturally this does not remain a coldly intellectual process, but becomes suffused with an emotional intensity which leads the devotee to look with pity or