Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/493

Rh I say nothing of the personal inconsistency of some of these critics whose printed works furnish exquisite illustrations of the will to believe, in spite of their denunciations of it as a phrase and as a recommended thing. Mr. McTaggart, whom I will once more take as an example, is sure that "reality is rational and righteous" and "destined sub specie temporis to become perfectly good"; and his calling this belief a result of necessary logic has surely never deceived any reader as to its real genesis in the gifted author's mind. Mankind is made on too uniform a pattern for any of us to escape successfully from acts of faith. We have a lively vision of what a certain view of the universe would mean for us. We kindle or we shudder at the thought, and our feeling runs through our whole logical nature and animates its workings. It can't be that, we feel, it must be this. It must be what it ought to be, and it ought to be this; and then we seek for every reason, good or bad, to make this which so deeply ought to be, seem objectively the probable thing. We show the arguments against it to be insufficient, so that it may be true; we represent its appeal to be to our whole nature's loyalty and not to any emaciated faculty of syllogistic proof. We reinforce it by remembering the enlargement of our world by music, by thinking of the promises of sunsets and the impulses from vernal woods. And the essence of the whole experience, when the individual swept through it says finally "I believe," is the intense concreteness of his vision, the individuality of the hypothesis before him, and the complexity of the various motives and perceptions that issue in his final state.

But see now how the abstractionist treats this rich and intricate vision that a certain state of things must be true. He accuses the believer of reasoning by the following syllogism:

All good desires must be fulfilled;

The desire to believe this proposition is a good desire;

Ergo, this proposition must be believed.

He substitutes this abstraction for the concrete state of mind of the believer, pins the naked absurdity of it upon him, and easily proves that any one who defends him must be the greatest fool on earth. As if any real believer ever thought in this preposterous way, or as if any defender of the legitimacy of men's concrete ways of concluding ever used the general premise "All desires must be fulfilled"! Nevertheless Mr. McTaggart solemnly and laboriously refutes the syllogism in sections 47 to 57 of his very readable book. He shows that there is no fixed rational link, no link in the dictionary, between the abstract concepts "desire," "goodness" and "reality"; and he ignores all the singular links which in the concrete case the believer feels and perceives. He says:

When the reality of a thing is uncertain, the argument encourages us to suppose that our approval of a thing can determine its reality. And when