Excerpts from The Will to Believe1 by William James I Let us give the name of hypothesis to anything that may be proposed to our belief and just as the electricians speak of live and dead wires let us speak of any hypothesis as either live or dead A live hypothesis is one that appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi the expected messiah of the Muslims the notion makes no electric connection with your nature it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all As an hypothesis it is completely dead To an Arab however even if he be not one of the Mahdi s followers the hypothesis is among the mind s possibilities it is alive This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties but relations to the individual thinker They are measured by his willingness to act The maximum of liveness in an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably Practically that means belief but there is some believing tendency wherever there is willingness to act at all Next let us call the decision between two hypotheses an option Options may be of several kinds They may be a living or dead b forced or avoidable c momentous or trivial and for our purposes we may call an option a genuine option when it is of the forced living and momentous kind An Address to the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities Published in the New World June 1896 This work is in the public domain 1 1 a A living option is one in which both hypotheses are live ones If I say to you Be a theosophist or a Mohammedan it is probably a dead option because for you neither hypothesis is likely to be alive But if I say Be an agnostic or a Christian it is otherwise trained as you are each hypothesis makes some appeal however small to your belief b Next if I say to you Choose between going out with your umbrella or without it I do not offer you a genuine option for it is not forced You can easily avoid it by not going out at all Similarly if I say Either love me or hate me Either call my theory true or call it false your option is avoidable You may remain indifferent to me neither loving or hating and you may decline to offer any judgment as to my theory But if I say Either accept this truth or go without it I put on you a forced option for there is no standing place outside of the alternative Every logical dilemma with no possibility of not choosing is an option of this forced kind c Finally if I were Dr Nansen a Norwegian explorer and statesman and proposed to you to join my North Pole expedition your option would be momentous for this would probably be your only similar opportunity and your choice now would either exclude you from the North Pole sort of immortality altogether or put at least the chance of it in your hands He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried and failed Per contra on the contrary the option is trivial when the opportunity is not unique when the stake is insignificant or when the decision is reversible if it later proved unwise Such trivial options abound in the scientific life A chemist finds an hypothesis live enough to spend a year in its verification he believes in it to that extent But if his experiments proved inconclusive either way he is quit for his loss of time no vital harm being done It will facilitate our discussion if we keep these distinctions well in mind IV The thesis I defend is briefly stated this Our passional nature must and lawfully may decide an option between propositions whenever it is a genuine option that cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds for to say under such circumstances Do not decide but leave the question open is itself a passional decision just like deciding yes or no and is attended with the same risk of losing the truth The thesis thus abstractly expressed will I trust soon become quite clear But I must first indulge in a bit more of preliminary work 2 VII There are two ways of looking at our duty in the matter of opinion ways entirely different and yet ways about whose difference the theory of knowledge seems hitherto to have shown very little concern We must know the truth and we must avoid error these are our first and great commandments as would be knowers but they are not two ways of stating an identical commandment they are two separable laws Although it may indeed happen that when we believe a truth A we escape as an incidental consequence from believing the falsehood B it hardly ever happens that by merely disbelieving the falsehood B we incidentally must needs believe the truth A We may in escaping B fall into believing other falsehoods C or D just as bad as B or we may escape B by not believing anything at all not even A Believe truth Shun error these we see are two materially different laws and by choosing between them we may color differently our whole intellectual life We may regard the chase for truth as paramount and the avoidance of error as secondary or we may on the other hand treat the avoidance of error as more imperative and let truth take its chance W K Clifford tells us keep your mind in suspense forever rather than by closing it on insufficient evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies You on the other hand may think that the risk of being in error is a very small matter when compared with the blessings of real knowledge and be ready to be duped many times in your investigation rather than postpone indefinitely the chance of guessing true I myself find it impossible to go with Clifford We must remember that these feelings of our duty about either truth or error are in any case only expressions of our passional life Biologically considered our minds are as ready to grind out falsehood as veracity and he who says Better go without belief forever than believe a lie merely shows his own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe He may be critical of many of his desires and fears but this fear he slavishly obeys He cannot detach himself from it even hypothetically or imagine any one questioning its binding force For my own part I have also a horror of being duped But I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a man in this world so Clifford s exhortation has to my ears a thoroughly fantastic sound It is like a general informing his soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound Not so are victories either over enemies …