of fact we find
ourselves believing, we hardly know how or why. Mr. Balfour gives the
name of 'authority' to all those influences, born of the intellectual
climate, that make hypotheses possible or impossible for us, alive or
dead. Here in this room, we all of us believe in molecules and the
conservation of energy, in democracy and necessary progress, in
Protestant Christianity and the duty of fighting for 'the doctrine of
the immortal Monroe,' all for no reasons worthy of the name. We see
into these matters with no more inner clearness, and probably with much
less, than any disbeliever in them might possess. His
unconventionality would probably have some grounds to show for its
conclusions; but for us, not insight, but the _prestige_ of the
opinions, is what makes the spark shoot from them and light up our
sleeping magazines of faith. Our reason is quite satisfied, in nine
hundred and ninety-nine cases out of every thousand of us, if it can
find a few arguments that will do to recite in case our credulity is
criticised by some one else. Our faith is faith in some one else's
faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief
in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our
minds and it are made for each other,--what is it but a passionate
affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? We want
to have a truth; we want to believe that our {10} experiments and
studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better
position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our
thinking lives. But if a pyrrhonistic sceptic asks us _how we know_
all this, can our logic find a reply? No! certainly it cannot. It is
just one volition against another,--we willing to go in for life upon a
trust or assumption which he, for his part, does not care to make.[2]

As a rule we disbelieve all facts and theories for which we have no
use. Clifford's cosmic emotions find no use for Christian feelings.
Huxley belabors the bishops because there is no use for sacerdotalism
in his scheme of life. Newman, on the contrary, goes over to Romanism,
and finds all sorts of reasons good for staying there, because a
priestly system is for him an organic need and delight. Why do so few
'scientists' even look at the evidence for telepathy, so called?
Because they think, as a leading biologist, now dead, once said to me,
that even if such a thing were true, scientists ought