296 PSYCHOLOGY. 



Or as Prof. Bain puts it : *' In its essontial character, 

 belief is a phase of our active nature — otherwise called the 

 WilL" * 



The object of belief, then, reality or real existence, is 

 something quite difierent from all the other predicates which 

 a subject may j)ossess. Those are properties intellectually 

 or sensibly intuited. When we add any one of them to the 

 subject, we increase the intrinsic content of the latter, we 

 enrich its picture in our mind. But adding reality does 

 not enrich the picture in any such inward way ; it leaves it 

 inwardly as it finds it, and only fixes it and stamps it in to 



•MS. 



" The real," as Kant says, " contains no more than the possible. A 

 hundred real dollars do not contain a penny more than a hundred pos- 

 sible dollars. ... By whatever, and by however many, predicates I 

 may think a thing, nothing is added to it if I add that the thing exists. 

 . . . Whatever, therefore, our concept of an object may contain, we 

 must always step outside of it in order to attribute to it existence. " t 



The ' steppiDg outside ' of it is the establishment either 

 of immediate practical relations between it and ourselves, 

 or of relations between it and other objects wdth Avhich we 

 have immediate practical relations. Relations of this sort, 

 which are as yet not transcended or superseded by others, 

 are ipso facto real relations, and confer reality upon their 

 objective term. The f onset origo of all reality, whether from 



* Note to Jas. Mill's Analysis, i. 394. 



f Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Miiller, ii. 515-17. Hume also : 

 "When, after the simple conception of anything, we would conceive it as 

 existent, we in reality make no addition to, or alteration of, our first idea. 

 Thus, when we affirm that God is existent, we simply form the idea of 

 such a being as He is represented to us ; nor is the existence which we at- 

 tribute to Him conceived by a particular idea, which we join to His other 

 qualities, and can again separate and distinguish from them. . . . The be- 

 lief of the existence joins no new idea to those which compose the ideas of 

 the object. When I think of God, when I think of Him as existent, and 

 when I believe Him to be existent, my idea of Him neither increases nor 

 diminishes. But as 'tis certain there is a great difference betwixt the sim- 

 ple conception of the existence of an object and the belief of it, and as this 

 difference lies not in the facts or compositions of the idea which we con- 

 ceive, it follows that it must lie in the manner in which we conceive it." 

 (Treatise of Human Nature, pt. in. sec. 7.) 



