THE PERCEPTION OF REALITY. 307 



THE INFLUENCE OF EMOTION AND ACTIVE IMPULSE ON 



BELIEF. 



Tlie quality of arousing emotion, of shaking, moving us 

 or inciting us to action, has as much to do with our belief in 

 an object's reality as the quality of giving pleasure or pain. 

 In Chapter XXIV I shall seek to show that our emotions 

 probably owe their pungent quality to the bodily sensations 

 which they involve. Our tendency to believe in emotionally 

 exciting objects (objects of fear, desire, etc.) is thus ex- 

 plained without resorting to any fundamentally new prin- 

 ciple of choice. Speaking generally, the more a conceived 

 object excites us, the more reality it has. The same object 

 excites us differently at different times. Moral and religious 

 truths come ' home ' to us far more on some occasions than 

 on others. As Emerson says, " There is a difference between 

 one and another hour of life in their authority and subse- 

 quent effect. Our faith comes in moments, . . . yet there 

 is a depth in those brief moments which constrains us to 

 ascribe more reality to them than to all other ex]3eriences." 

 The * depth ' is partly, no doubt, the insight into wider sys- 

 tems of unified relation, but far more often than that it is 

 the emotional thrilL Thus, to descend to more trivial ex- 

 amples, a man who has no belief in ghosts by daylight will 

 temporarily believe in them when, alone at midnight, he 

 feels his blood curdle at a mysterious sound or vision, his 

 heart thumping, and his legs impelled to flee. The thought 

 of falling when we Avalk along a curbstone awakens no emo- 

 tion of dread ; so no sense of reality attaches to it, and we 

 are sure we shall not fall. On a precipice's edge, however, 

 the sickening emotion which the notion of a possible fall 

 engenders makes us believe in the latter's imminent reality, 

 and quite unfits us to proceed. 



he could wish, that it is something more than bare imagination. So that 

 the evidence is as great as we can desire, being as certain to us as our pleas- 

 ure or pain, i.e. happiness or misery; beyond which we have no concern- 

 ment, either of knowledge or being. Such an assurance of the existence 

 of things without us is sufficient to direct us in the attaining the good and 

 avoiding the evil which is caused by them, which is the important con- 

 cernment we have of being made acquainted with them. " {Ibid, bk. iv. 

 chap. 11, § 8.) 



