e,
revolting against his environment and adopting a religious belief
absolutely at variance with the established {135} belief of his
society--I do not contend that such new religious ideas are always due
to unobserved and unanalysed processes of reasoning. That in most
cases, when a person adopts a new creed, he would himself give some
reason for his change of faith is obvious, though the reason which he
would allege would not in all cases be the one which really caused the
change of religion. There may be other psychological influences which
cause belief besides the influence of environment: in some cases the
psychological causes of such beliefs are altogether beyond analysis.
But, though I do not think M. Auguste Sabatier justified in assuming
that a belief is true, and must come directly from God, simply because
we cannot easily explain its genesis by the individual's environment
and psychological antecedents, it is of extreme importance to insist
that it is not proved to be false because it was not adopted primarily,
or at all, on adequate theoretical grounds. A belief which arose at
first entirely without logical justification, or it may be on
intellectual grounds subsequently discovered to be inadequate or false,
may nevertheless be one which can and does justify itself to the
reflective intellect of the person himself or of other persons. And
many new, true, and valuable beliefs have undoubtedly arisen in this
way. Even in physical Science we all know that there is no Logic of
discovery. It {136} is a familiar criticism upon the Logic of Bacon
that he ignored or under-estimated the part that is played in
scientific thinking by hypothesis, and the consequent need of
scientific imagination. Very often the new scientific idea comes into
the discoverer's mind, he knows not how or why. Some great man of
Science--I think, Helmholtz--said of a brilliant discovery of his, 'It
was given to me.' But it was not true because it came to Helmholtz in
this way, but because it was subsequently verified and proved. Now,
undoubtedly, religious beliefs, new and old, often do present
themselves to the minds of individuals in an intuitive and
unaccountable way. They may subsequently be justified at the bar of
Reason: and yet Reason might never have discovered them for itself.
They would never have come into the world unless they had presented
themselves at first to some mind or other as intuitions, inspirations,
immediate