488 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



am only trying to illustrate vicious abstractionism by the conduct of 

 some of the doctrine's assailants. The moments of bifurcation, as the 

 indeterminist seems to himself to experience them, are moments both 

 of direction and of continuation. But because the direction of growth 

 is not unequivocal, and because in the " either — or " we hesitate, the 

 determinist abstracts this little element of discontinuity from the super- 

 abundant continuities of the experience, and cancels in its behalf all 

 the continuously connective characters with which the latter is filled. 

 Choice, for him, means henceforward cZtsconnection pure and simple, 

 and a life of choices undetermined to advance in any respect whatever, 

 must be a raving chaos, at no two moments of which could we be 

 treated as one and the same man. If Nero were " free " at the moment 

 of ordering his mother's murder, Mr, McTaggart* assures us that no 

 one would have the right at any other moment to call him a bad man. 



A polemic author ought not merely to destroy his victim. He 

 ought to try a bit to make him feel his error — perhaps not enough to 

 convert him, but enough to give him a bad conscience and to weaken 

 the energy of his defense. These violent caricatures of men's serious 

 beliefs arouse only contempt for the incapacity of their authors to 

 see the concrete situations out of which the problems grow. To treat 

 the negative character of one abstracted element as annulling all the 

 positive features with which it coexists, is not the way to change any 

 actual indeterminist's way of looking on the matter, though it may 

 easily make a prejudiced gallery applaud. 



Turn now to some criticisms of the " Will to believe," as another 

 example of the vicious way in which abstraction is currently employed. 

 The right to believe in things for the truth of which complete object- 

 ive proof is yet lacking is defended by those who apprehend certain 

 human situations in their concreteness. In those situations the mind 

 has alternatives before it, so vast that the full evidence for either 

 brand is missing, and yet so significant that simply to wait for proof, 

 and to doubt while waiting, might often in practical respects be the 

 same thing as weighing down the negative side. Is life worth while 

 at all? Is there any general meaning in all this cosmic weather? Is 

 anything being permanently bought by all this suffering? Is there 

 perhaps a transmundane experience, something in Being correspond- 

 ing to a " fourth dimension," which, if we had access to it, might patch 

 up some of this world's zerrissenheit and make things look more 

 rational than they at first appear? Is there a superhuman conscious- 

 ness of which our minds are parts, and from which inspiration and 

 help may come? Such are the questions in which the right to take 

 sides for yes or no is affirmed by some of us, while others hold that this 

 is methodologically inadmissible, and summon us to die professing 

 ignorance and proclaiming the duty of every one to refuse to believe. 



*"Some Dogmas of Religion," p. 179. 



