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 WILLIAM JAMES, The Will to Believe. 551 facts, may make all the difference. Certainly this suggestion will go some way towards explaining the strange divergence of the estimates of the world which are come to by different persons and in different sciences. For it is not the least factor in the relief held out to us by Prof. James' doctrine that it emancipates us from the superstition that our sciences set forth a rigid, unbending and unhuman order of fact which our volitions and emotions fret against in vain. The sciences appear simply as methods of transmuting the given- ness of facts into shapes subservient to our various purposes, and their ' principles ' are adopted ad hoc. They may be as various as those purposes and as numerous as the sciences, though there is a natural tendency for the methods and assumptions of the pre- dominant science to infect the rest. As Prof. James says, they are " chapters in the great jugglery which our conceiving faculty is for ever playing with the order of being as it presents itself " (p. 129), and it is a poor juggler that is taken in by his own tricks. There is no abstract sacrosanctity about the rules of science, and it may vell be that " to the end of time our power of moral and volitional response to the nature of things will be the deepest organ of communication therewith ve shall ever possess " (p. 141). Such sayings should not be taken as derogatory to the majesty of science, but they contain a much-needed vindication of the rights of man, the maker of all sciences. This doctrine of the function of faith, so far considered, per- vades not only the essay on " The Will to Believe," but also those entitled "The Sentiment of Eationality," " Eeflex Action and Theism," "Is Life worth Living?" and "The Dilemma of Deter- minism ". The last of these also defends the interesting position that the alternative to determinism, viz., the reality of chance, in the end amounts only to an assertion of pluralism. It implies that the universe is not a rigidly and unalterably connected whole in which everything is fore-ordained and no windfall can cause an agreeable surprise, but rather "a joint stock society in which the sharers have both limited liabilities and limited powers " (p. 154), and "no part can claim to control absolutely the destinies of the whole " (p. 159). And inasmuch as after the event the universe with chance in it appears to the determinist eye as quite as rational as that which admitted of no contingency (p. 156), the question is theoretically insoluble (p. 159). No wonder then that as a matter of personal taste Prof. James prefers " a world with a chance in it of being altogether good " (p. 178) to a thoroughly determined world " of which either sin or error forms a necessary part " (p. 164). In reality, however, Prof. James would seem to understate his case. Once more the solution of the antinomy lies in observing the methodological character of the determinist assumption. The assumption is made for certain purposes of ours in order to render events calculable, but it would be absurd on that account to attribute to it an absolute validity and to