eliefs,
finally, will, with most people, take a still lower place, since the
opposite beliefs of others can hardly fail to induce doubt. Belief,
therefore, is a matter of degree. To speak of belief, disbelief,
doubt, and suspense of judgment as the only possibilities is as if,
from the writing on the thermometer, we were to suppose that blood
heat, summer heat, temperate, and freezing were the only
temperatures." Beliefs which require to be confirmed by future
experience, or which actually refer to it, are evidently only
presumptions; it is merely the truth of presumptions that empirical
logic applies to, and only so long as they remain presumptions.
Presumptions may be held with very different degrees of assurance, and
yet be acted upon, in the absence of any strong counter-suggestion; as
the confidence of lovers or of religious enthusiasts may be at blood
heat at one moment and freezing at the next, without a change in
anything save in the will to believe. The truth of such presumptions,
whatever may be the ground of them, depends in fact on whether they
are to lead (or, rather, whether the general course of events is to
lead) to the further things presumed; for these things are what
presumptions refer to explicitly.

It sometimes happens, however, that presumptions (being based on
voluminous blind instinct rather than on distinct repeated
observations) are expressed in consciousness by some symbol or myth,
as when a man says he believes in his luck; the presumption really
regards particular future chances and throws of the dice, but the
emotional and verbal mist in which the presumption is wrapped, veils
the pragmatic burden of it; and a metaphysical entity arises, called
luck, in which a man may think he believes rather than in a particular
career that may be awaiting him. Now since this entity, luck, is a
mere word, confidence in it, to be justified at all, must be
transferred to the concrete facts it stands for. Faith in one's luck
must be pragmatic, but simply because faith in such an entity is not
needful nor philosophical at all. The case is the same with working
hypotheses, when that is all they are; for on this point there is some
confusion. Whether an idea is a working hypothesis merely or an
anticipation of matters open to eventual inspection may not always be
clear. Thus the atomic theory, in the sense in which most philosophers
entertain it to-day, seems to be a working hypothesis only; for they
do not