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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



gorerned by their beliefs and emotions ; but 

 when we attempt an accurate analysis of motives, 

 we are met by the difficulty of allowing for the 

 complex reactions between the reasoning, feeliug, 

 and active parts of our nature. What we call 

 beliefs may be really dreams ; and, in early stages 

 of thought, the element due to genuine obser- 

 vation and that contributed by the imaginative 

 faculty are inseparably blended. The alteration 

 of a genuine belief may alter conduct as the al- 

 teration of the external facts would have done. 

 The facts, it may be said, are changed for the 

 observer; and, therefore, his mode of behaving 

 will change. But the alteration of a dream can- 

 not be taken as the ultimate, though, of course, 

 it may be the proximate, cause of such a change, 

 for it must be itself due to some change in the 

 character or surroundings of the dreamer. The 

 dream represents men's desires ; it shows what 

 it is which they hope or fear, or what is for any 

 reason impressive to their imaginations ; a change 

 in it must be taken to imply some change in 

 those hopes and fears produced by an indepen- 

 dent process. 



Thus a changed belief as to a future world 

 may greatly modify our conduct, so far as that 

 belief was a real attempt to interpret experience. 

 If, as Paley maintained, virtue meant simply ac- 

 tion regulated by prospects of a future life, the 

 destruction of that belief would destroy virtue. 

 It would not directly alter character, but it would 

 close one channel for the display of selfish im- 

 pulses, and might indirectly come to modify char- 

 acter also. ' The doctrine of the unbeliever must 

 be different. On his showing, the belief in an- 

 other life was probably due, in the first instance, 

 to an attempt to interpret experience. So far as 

 we now interpret it differently, our conduct may 

 be altered. But it is plain that all that colors 

 the belief, all that makes the future life an object 

 of hope and fear, must be differently explained. 

 Since heaven and nell were not revealed from 

 without, they must have been suggested from 

 within. A given person may, of course, have 

 believed in hell on the authority of his Bible, and 

 have been guided by his fears as he would by any 

 other fears. But since the whole phenomenon — 

 the belief of a race or society in a " future state 

 of rewards and punishments" — can rest upon 

 no ground of outward experience, its genealogy 

 is clear. It proves what men hoped and feared, 

 not what they inferred from external facts. There 

 is no presumption, then, that by destroying it you 

 destroy the desires on which it existed. You 

 simply force them to take a different form. De- 



: stroy the belief in the pagan gods, and you de- 

 stroy the old poetic machinery, but you do noi 

 therefore destroy the poetic impulse. 



The believer may, therefore, hold consistently 

 that men are kept in order by external threats, 

 and that the virtuous impulses, if they exist in 

 the natural man, would droop and die without 

 such support. To the unbeliever, this explana- 

 tion is not open. Fetters framed by men for 

 themselves cannot be the ultimate cause of the 

 restraint. It would be as unphilosophical to 

 suppose that a man can lift the platform which 

 supports him. We cannot look outside the 

 world to explain the maintenance of a certain 

 moral standard, any more than we need look be- 

 yond the solar system to explain why the earth 

 does not fall into space. The existence of these 

 imaginary worlds becomes with the unbeliever a 

 conclusive proof of two things : first, that men, 

 or the leading minds among mankind, must have 

 ! hated vice, for the thought of its punishment was 

 agreeable ; secondly, that they aspired to a better 

 state of things, for they constructed an ideal 

 world where justice should be perfectly adminis- 

 tered. If a man works because he believes that 

 he is to be paid, the work may be done against 

 the grain. If he believes that he is to be paid 

 because he likes to work, the work must have 

 some independent charms. 



Is it possible, then, that the closing of this 

 outlet for the imagination will cause the atrophy 

 of the instincts which prompted its construction ? 

 The unbeliever hopes and believes better things. 

 He thinks that men's hopes and aspirations will 

 not fail, though directed to definite reality, in- 

 stead of the boundless imaginary world. He re- 

 gards it as a fact capable of strict scientific proof 

 that altruistic instincts exist ; that men have 

 desires which can only be explained when man 

 is regarded as a fraction of the social integer ; 

 and that those desires, depending upon condi- 

 tions other than dreams, will survive the disap- 

 pearance or modification of the dreams. The 

 ! existence of such instincts may appear a paradox 

 j to some reasoners. A belief in them is the mys- 

 ! tery of the unbeliever's creed, against which the 

 1 pride of reason is apt to revolt. It is not my 

 present purpose to justify the doctrine, or to 

 show (as I hold that it may be conclusively 

 shown) that it involves no real offense to reason. 

 It is enough to say that, so far as it is an essen- 

 tial part of the unbeliever's theory, whereas it 

 may be rejected by his antagonist, the believer 

 may most fitly be called skeptical. He declares 

 a fact to be contradictory because it will not fit 



