at upon this order; and to show you
that we at Harvard have not lost all interest in these vital subjects,
I have brought with me to-night something like a sermon on
justification by faith to read to you,--I mean an essay in
justification _of_ faith, a defence of our right to adopt a believing
attitude in religious matters, in spite of the fact that our merely
logical {2} intellect may not have been coerced. 'The Will to
Believe,' accordingly, is the title of my paper.

I have long defended to my own students the lawfulness of voluntarily
adopted faith; but as soon as they have got well imbued with the
logical spirit, they have as a rule refused to admit my contention to
be lawful philosophically, even though in point of fact they were
personally all the time chock-full of some faith or other themselves.
I am all the while, however, so profoundly convinced that my own
position is correct, that your invitation has seemed to me a good
occasion to make my statements more clear. Perhaps your minds will be
more open than those with which I have hitherto had to deal. I will be
as little technical as I can, though I must begin by setting up some
technical distinctions that will help us in the end.

I.

Let us give the name of _hypothesis_ to anything that may be proposed
to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead
wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either _live_ or _dead_. A
live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to
whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion
makes no electric connection with your nature,--it refuses to
scintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is
completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the
Mahdi's followers), the hypothesis is among the mind's possibilities:
it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis
are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the {3} individual
thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. The maximum of
liveness in an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably.
Practically, that means belief; but there is some believing tendency
wherever there is willingness to act at all.

Next, let us call the decision between two hypotheses an _option_.
Options may be of several kinds. They may be--1, _living_ or _dead_;
2, _forced_ or _avoidable_; 3, _momentous_ or _trivial_; and for our
purposes we may call an option a _ge