William James: The Will to Believe

Five dialogues on belief, and what it has the right to do

A course on the thought of William James.

Psychology

What you will learn

State the feeling-theory of belief: belief is the sense of reality, kin to emotion and consent, not a purely intellectual operation.
State the default doctrine — any object uncontradicted is ipso facto believed — and use it on a concrete case (the fiction that grips; the rumor half-doubted).
Connect reality to interest: 'whatever excites and stimulates our interest is real' — and see the bridge from tier 1's attention doctrine to this tier's belief doctrine.
State Clifford's rule at its strongest, and my reply: refusing to decide a genuine option is itself a passional decision, attended with the same risk of losing truth.
Define the three conditions — live, forced, momentous — and apply them to sort cases where the doctrine licenses passional decision from the many where it does not.
Explain precursive faith (the fact that cannot come unless faith in it comes first) and use 'Is Life Worth Living?' as its deepest application — 'Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.'
Tell the coves case honestly — my verdict of 'unmitigated squalor', the mountaineer's answer, and the reversal — and state the general blindness it exposes.
State the doctrine's two faces: an epistemology (no single observer holds the whole of truth) and an ethics (hands off — the tolerance owed to lives whose inner flame we cannot see).

The Sense of Reality — Before belief is a doctrine it is a feeling: the sense of reality. What we attend to and what stirs us is real for us; every idea is believed unless something contradicts it; and the root of all…
Is Life Worth Living? The Right to Believe — The most misread essay in American philosophy, taught with its scaffolding intact: against Clifford's evidentialism, the passional nature may — and must — decide an option that is live, forced…
On a Certain Blindness — The lecture I called the perception on which my whole individualistic philosophy is based: our congenital blindness to the inner significance of lives unlike our own — learned in the mountains of…
The Sick Soul — The Varieties opened honestly: religion studied in its documents; the healthy-minded temperament and the sick soul; the panic-fear case read in full and claimed; and conversion — the divided self…
Mysticism and the MORE — The Varieties' summit and its honest edge: the four marks of the mystical state; the reality-feeling detached and total; and the furthest thing the documents license — a wider self, continuous…

The Will to Believe (1897) — my essays in popular philosophy — the title essay on the right of the passional nature to decide genuine options, with 'Is Life Worth Living?' beside it.
Talks to Teachers on Psychology (1899) — the teacher lectures, with the Talks to Students appended — 'On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings' and 'What Makes a Life Significant' are there.
The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) — my Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh — religion studied in its documents, the personal experience of the divided and the devout, from the healthy-minded through conversion to mysticism.
The Principles of Psychology (1890) — the psychology this tier builds on — the perception of reality chapter is its hinge into belief.
The Letters of William James (1920) — my correspondence and diaries — the crisis of 1870 and the faith experiments are recorded there in my own hand.

genuine option, the sick soul, the MORE

Part of the Simposeum course library.