Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/163

 BELIEF 145

lated into action is to that mind the &quot;true&quot;; and is be lieved. That which the mind suspects can not be acted upon safely is doubted. The body of beliefs which one holds is his correlation with the environment. By translating them into conduct as occasions arise he effects his adjustments to environment from moment to moment. There would seem, then, to be no line of absolute demarcation between knowledge and belief. They overlap and shade into one another. Our knowledge consists of the body of beliefs that have been thoroughly tested and found by actual results to be sure and safe guides to action. Our belief, which is not also knowledge, consists of the body of judgments which have been incorporated in our mental systems but which have not as yet been sufficiently tested to stand within that narrow circle. Knowledge is thoroughly tested belief ; and within this limit knowledge and belief are designations of the same mental content viewed from different angles.

We have spoken of doubt as a state or attitude resulting from the arrest of the process of believing, and this exactly indicates its true character. It has been said truly that it is doubt which demands explanation, not belief. 1 It is nat ural, normal to believe. It is the primary function of the mind to receive impressions from the environment and translate them into adjustments. In other words, it is its function to believe and govern action accordingly. Doubt arises in the arrest of this primary function through a con flict between the practical tendencies of these impressions. Out of this state of things issues the secondary function of mind, thinking, i.e., comparison, deliberation, the effort to bring these conflicting tendencies into harmony, to correlate them in a higher unity ; and as the environment to which ad justment must be made by the highly developed person be comes exceedingly complex and changeful, this function comes to be so important that we ordinarily think of it as primary rather than secondary.

2. Doubt, then, in its very nature is a temporary func-

1 Pillsbury s &quot; Psychology of Reasoning,&quot; p. 25.

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