erness
and unacceptableness to the heart in its cup.

It fortifies my soul to know
That, though I perish, Truth is so--

sings Clough, while Huxley exclaims: "My only consolation lies in the
reflection that, however bad our posterity may become, so far as they
hold by the plain rule of not pretending to believe what they have no
reason to believe, because it may be to their advantage so to pretend
[the word 'pretend' is surely here redundant], they will not have
reached the {8} lowest depth of immorality." And that delicious
_enfant terrible_ Clifford writes; "Belief is desecrated when given to
unproved and unquestioned statements for the solace and private
pleasure of the believer,... Whoso would deserve well of his fellows
in this matter will guard the purity of his belief with a very
fanaticism of jealous care, lest at any time it should rest on an
unworthy object, and catch a stain which can never be wiped away....
If [a] belief has been accepted on insufficient evidence [even though
the belief be true, as Clifford on the same page explains] the pleasure
is a stolen one.... It is sinful because it is stolen in defiance of
our duty to mankind. That duty is to guard ourselves from such beliefs
as from a pestilence which may shortly master our own body and then
spread to the rest of the town.... It is wrong always, everywhere, and
for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence."

III.

All this strikes one as healthy, even when expressed, as by Clifford,
with somewhat too much of robustious pathos in the voice. Free-will
and simple wishing do seem, in the matter of our credences, to be only
fifth wheels to the coach. Yet if any one should thereupon assume that
intellectual insight is what remains after wish and will and
sentimental preference have taken wing, or that pure reason is what
then settles our opinions, he would fly quite as directly in the teeth
of the facts.

It is only our already dead hypotheses that our willing nature is
unable to bring to life again But what has made them dead for us is
for the most part {9} a previous action of our willing nature of an
antagonistic kind. When I say 'willing nature,' I do not mean only
such deliberate volitions as may have set up habits of belief that we
cannot now escape from,--I mean all such factors of belief as fear and
hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the
circumpressure of our caste and set. As a matter