heats for
being right in {94} advance of their slow aid, by guesswork or by hook
or crook, what shall we say of them? Were all of Clifford's works,
except the Ethics of Belief, forgotten, he might well figure in future
treatises on psychology in place of the somewhat threadbare instance of
the miser who has been led by the association of ideas to prefer his
gold to all the goods he might buy therewith.

In short, if I am born with such a superior general reaction to
evidence that I can guess right and act accordingly, and gain all that
comes of right action, while my less gifted neighbor (paralyzed by his
scruples and waiting for more evidence which he dares not anticipate,
much as he longs to) still stands shivering on the brink, by what law
shall I be forbidden to reap the advantages of my superior native
sensitiveness? Of course I yield to my belief in such a case as this
or distrust it, alike at my peril, just as I do in any of the great
practical decisions of life. If my inborn faculties are good, I am a
prophet; if poor, I am a failure: nature spews me out of her mouth, and
there is an end of me. In the total game of life we stake our persons
all the while; and if in its theoretic part our persons will help us to
a conclusion, surely we should also stake them there, however
inarticulate they may be.[2]

{95}

But in being myself so very articulate in proving what to all readers
with a sense for reality will seem a platitude, am I not wasting words?
We cannot live or think at all without some degree of faith. Faith is
synonymous with working hypothesis. The only difference is that while
some hypotheses can be refuted in five minutes, others may defy ages.
A chemist who conjectures that a certain wall-paper contains arsenic,
and has faith enough to lead him to take the trouble to put some of it
into a hydrogen bottle, finds out by the results of his action whether
he was right or wrong. But theories like that of Darwin, or that of
the kinetic constitution of matter, may exhaust the labors of
generations in their corroboration, each tester of their truth
proceeding in this simple way,--that he acts as if it were true, and
expects the result to disappoint him if his assumption is false. The
longer disappointment is delayed, the stronger grows his faith in his
theory.

Now, in such questions as God, immortality, absolute morality, and
free-will, no non-papal believer at the present day pretends his faith