able unless it finds a free vent. In proportion
to the amount and excitability of his energy, restraint, obstruction,
delay is irksome, and soon becomes a positive and intolerable pain.
Any bar or impediment that gives us pause is hateful even to think of:
the mere prospect annoys and worries.

Hence it arises that belief, a feeling of being prepared for action,
a conviction that the way is clear before us for the free exercise of
our activities, is a very powerful and exhilarating feeling, as much
a necessity of happy existence as action itself. We see this when we
consider how depressing and uncomfortable a condition is the opposite
state to belief, namely, doubt, perplexity, hesitation, uncertainty as
to our course. And realising this, we see how strong a bias we have in
this fact of our nature, this imperious inward necessity for action;
how it urges us to act without regard to consequences, and to jump at
beliefs without inquiry. For, unless inquiry itself is our business, a
self-sufficient occupation, it means delay and obstruction.

This ultimate fact of our nature, this natural inbred constitutional
impatience, explains more than half of the wrong beliefs that we form
and persist in. We must have a belief of some kind: we cannot be happy
till we get it, and we take up with the first that seems to show the
way clear. It may be right or it may be wrong: it is not, of course,
necessarily always wrong: but that, so far as we are concerned, is a
matter of accident. The pressing need for a belief of some sort, upon
which our energies may proceed in anticipation at least, will not
allow us to stop and inquire. Any course that offers a relief from
doubt and hesitation, any conviction that lets the will go free, is
eagerly embraced.

It may be thought that this can apply only to beliefs concerning
the consequences of our own personal actions, affairs in which we
individually play a part. It is from them, no doubt, that our nature
takes this set: but the habit once formed is extended to all sorts
of matters in which we have no personal interest. Tell an ordinary
Englishman, it has been wittily said, that it is a question whether
the planets are inhabited, and he feels bound at once to have a
confident opinion on the point. The strength of the conviction bears
no proportion to the amount of reason spent in reaching it, unless it
may be said that as a general rule the less a belief is reasoned the
more confidently it is