7<;2 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



We may now turn to the third question we set ourselves: 

 What makes us believe ? In general and roughly, the answer 

 to this question is the vital impulse. We believe because we 

 want to, because we have a constitutional trend toward belief. 

 This follows from the fact that belief is a form of action, and we 

 are driven by a passion to act. I have said this is constitutional ; 

 it is the very inwards of our vitals; there is nothing that so sums 

 up the meaning and essence of life as the passion to do. A living 

 organism is more than a tense spring ; it is a spring growing con- 

 stantly tenser and fretting to unleash its own forces. This vital 

 tension makes all consciousness motor, and makes every idea a 

 discharging force with inevitable consequences in overt act or 

 intraorganic disturbance. To apply a suggestion to an active 

 mind is like applying anything to a baby's mouth. Both alike 

 show an instinctive tendency to close on whatever offers, be it 

 sealing-wax or sweetmeat. We see this plainly in the workings 

 of a savage mind. For a savage to conceive anything vividly is 

 to believe it. Some such indiscriminate appetency of belief offers 

 the only sufficient explanation for the vast higgledy-piggledy 

 mass of superstition that belongs to primitive peoples. 



This is, I take it, what Bain meant when he said that the chief 

 fact of belief was primitive credulity. We are all naturally and 

 primarily credulous ; skepticism is a later development and comes 

 from the sort of experience that makes sadder but wiser men of 

 us. It is in life itself, in its appetency, its passion to act, that we 

 find the prime cause of belief, which is, in fact, merely a gratifica- 

 tion of this vital desire. As the sponge needs no other justifica- 

 tion for absorbing nitrogen from the sea water than its own 

 nutritive instinct, we need no other excuse for believing than the 

 instinct of activity. 



Yet this is but one side of the matter, and plainly enough the 

 rougher, more general side of it. I eat because I want to, is but 

 an imperfect answer to the question why I eat, and even the 

 addition that I eat because the vital processes demand satisfac- 

 tion that can be provided only by food, still leaves the matter 

 much beclouded. In putting down belief as the gratification of a 

 vital desire, we have only found the big, crass motive for be- 

 lieving. To answer fully the question, why we believe, demands 

 that we go further. We must be prepared to find here, too, that 

 the ground is an organic, constitutional one. The first reason for 

 believing at all is because we are alive, not dead, and crave 

 action, not torpor. The reason why we believe as we do, and the 

 sort of things we do believe, is because we have the sort of con- 

 stitution we have. We have seen already that, of the myriad 

 sights the sun makes, only a slight proportion affect our retina ; 

 we have learned that of all the thousandfold possible excitants 



