44 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXIV. No. 863 



the interests of all sorts and conditions of 

 men, still a hero worshiper, but one whose 

 heroes could be found in the obscurest 

 lovers of the ideal as easily as in the most 

 renowned historical characters; let this 

 transformed Carlyle preach the doctrine of 

 the resolute spirit triumphant through cre- 

 ative action, defiant of every degree of 

 mortal suffering. Let him proclaim ' ' The 

 Everlasting Yea" in the face of all the 

 doubts of erring human opinion : and here- 

 with you gain some general impression of 

 the relations that exist between "Sartor 

 Resartus" and "The Will to Believe." 



The ethical maxims which are scattered 

 through these pages voluntarily share much 

 of the vagueness of our age of tentative 

 ethical effort. But they certainly are not 

 the maxims of an impressionist, of a 

 romanticist, or of a partisan of merely 

 worldly efficiency. They win their way 

 through all such attitudes to something 

 beyond — to a resolute interpretation of 

 human life as an opportunity to cooperate 

 with the superhuman and the divine. And 

 they do this, in the author's opinion, not 

 by destroying, but by fulfilling the pur- 

 poses and methods of the sciences of ex- 

 perience themselves. Is not every scien- 

 tific theory a conceptual reinterpretation 

 of our fragmentary perceptions, an active 

 reconstruction, to be tried in the service of 

 a larger life? Is not our trust in a scien- 

 tific theory itself an act of faith? More- 

 over, these ethical maxims are here gov- 

 erned, in James's exposition, by the 

 repeated recognition of certain essentially 

 absolute truths, truths that, despite his 

 natural horror of absolutism, he here ex- 

 pounds with a finished dialectic skill that 

 he himself, especially in his later polemic 

 period, never seemed to prize at its full 

 value. The need of active faith in the un- 

 seen and the superhuman he founds upon 

 these simple and yet absolutely true prin- 



ciples, principles of the true dialectics of 

 life: First, every great decision of prac- 

 tical life requires faith, and has irrevocable 

 consequences, consequences that belong to 

 the whole great world, and that therefore 

 have endless possible importance. Sec- 

 ondly, since action and belief are thus in- 

 separably bound together, our right to 

 believe depends upon our right, as active 

 beings, to make decisions. Thirdly, our 

 duty to decide life's greater issues is de- 

 termined by the absolute truth that, in 

 critical cases, the will to be doubtful and 

 not to decide, is itself a decision, and is 

 hence no escape from our responsible 

 moral position. And this our responsible 

 position is a position that gives us our 

 place in and for all future life. The world 

 needs our deeds. We need to interpret the 

 world in order to act. We have a right to 

 interpret the universe so as to enable us to 

 act at once decisively, courageously and 

 with the sense of the inestimable precious- 

 ness and responsibility of the power to act. 

 In consequence of all these features of 

 his ethical doctrine a wonderful sense of 

 the deep seriousness and of the possibly 

 divine significance of every deed is felt in 

 James's every' ethical counsel. Thus it is 

 that while fully comprehending the Amer- 

 ican spirit which we have sketched, he at 

 once expresses it and transforms it. He 

 never loved Fichte; but there is much of 

 the best of the ethical idealism of Fichte 

 in "The Will to Believe." Many of you 

 have enjoyed James's delightfully skilful 

 polemic against Hegel, and against the ex- 

 ternal forms, phrases and appearances of 

 the later constructive idealists. I have no 

 wish here to attempt to comment upon that 

 polemic; but I can assure you that I my- 

 self learned a great part of my own form 

 of absolute idealism from the earliest ex- 

 pressions that James gave to the thoughts 

 contained in "The Will to Believe." As 



