第100章

Why do we thus so markedly select the tangible to be the real? Our motives are not far to seek.The tangible qualities are the least fluctuating.

When we get them at all we get them the same.The other qualities fluctuate enormously as our relative position to the object changes.Then, more decisive still, the tactile properties are those most intimately connected with our weal or woe.A dagger hurts us only when in contact with our skin, a poison only when we take it into our mouths, and we can only use an object for our advantage when we have it in our muscular control.It is as tangibles, then, that things concern us most; and the other senses, so far as their practical use goes, do but warn us of what tangible things to expect.They are but organs of anticipatory touch, as Berkeley has with perfect clearness explained.

Among all sensations, the most belief-compelling are those productive of pleasure or of pain.Locke expressly makes the pleasure - or pain -

giving quality to be the ultimate human criterion of anything's reality.

Discussing (with supposed Berkeleyan before Berkeley) the notion that all our perceptions may be but a dream, he says:

" He may please to dream that I make him this answer.I believe he will allow a very manifest difference between dreaming of being in the fire and being actually in it.But yet if he be resolved to appear so skeptical as to maintain that what I call being actually in the fire is nothing but a dream, and that we cannot thereby certainly know that any such thing as fire actually exists without us, I answer that we, certainly finding that pleasure or pain follows upon the application of certain objects to us, whose existence we perceive, or dream that we perceive by our senses, this certainly is as great as our happiness or misery , beyond which we have no concernment to know or to be.

THE INFLUENCE OF EMOTION AND ACTIVE IMPULSE ON BELIEF.

The quality of arousing emotion, of shaking, moving us or inciting us to action, has as much to do with our belief in an object's reality as the quality of giving pleasure or pain.In Chapter XXIV I shall seek to show that our emotions probably owe their pungent quality to the bodily sensations which they involve.Our tendency to believe in emotionally exciting objects (objects of fear, desire, etc.) is thus explained without resorting to any fundamentally new principle of choice.Speaking generally, the more a conceived object excites us, the more reality it has.The same object excites us differently at different times.Moral and religious truths come 'home' to us far more on some occasions than on others.As Emerson says, "There is a difference between one and another hour of life in their authority and subsequent effect.Our faith comes in moments,...yet there is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences." The 'depth' is partly, no doubt, the insight into wider systems of unified relation, but far more often than that it is the emotional thrill.Thus, to descend to more trivial examples, a man who has no belief in ghosts by daylight will temporarily believe in them when, alone at midnight, he feels his blood curdle at a, mysterious sound or vision, his heart thumping, and his legs impelled to flee.The thought of falling when we walk along a curbs one awakens no emotion of dread; so no sense of reality attaches to it, and we are sure me shall not fall.On a precipice's edge, however, the sickening emotion which the notion of a possible fall engenders makes ns believe in the latter's imminent reality, and quite unfits us to proceed.

The greatest proof that a man is sui compos is his ability to suspend belief in presence of an emotionally exciting idea.To give this power is the highest result of education.In untutored minds the power does not exist.Ever exciting thought in the natural man carries credence with it.To conceive with passion is ipso facto affirm.As Bagehot says:

"The Caliph Omar burnt the Alexandrian Library, saying: 'All books which contain what is not in the Koran are dangerous.All which contain what is in it are useless! ' Probably no one ever had an intenser belief in anything than Omar had in this.Yet it is impossible to imagine it preceded by an argument.His belief in Mahomet, in the Koran, and in the sufficiency of the Koran, probably came to him in spontaneous rushes of emotion; there may have been little vestiges of argument donating here and there, but they did not justify the strength of the emotion, stillness did they create it, and they hardly even excused it....Probably, when the subject is thoroughly examined, conviction will be found to be one of the intensest of human emotions, and one most closely connected with the bodily state,...accompanied or preceded by the sensation that Scott makes his seer describe as the prelude of a prophecy At length the fatal answer came, In characters of living flame--

Not spoke in words, nor blazed in scroll, But borne and branded on my soul.' A hot hash seems to burn across the brain.Men in these intense states of mind have altered all history, changed for better or worse the creed of myriads, and desolated or redeemed provinces or ages.Nor is this intensity a sign of truth, for it is precisely strongest in those points in which men differ most from each other.John Knox felt it in his anti-Catholicism;

Ignatius Loyola in his anti-Protestantism; and both, I suppose, felt it as much as it is possible to feel it."

The reason of the belief is undoubtedly the bodily commotion which the exciting idea sets up.'Nothing which I can feel like that can be false.'

All our religious and supernatural beliefs are of this order.The surest warrant for immortality is the yearning of our bowels for our dear ones;