the
appeal of religion to us were made to our own active good-will, as if
evidence might be forever withheld from us unless we met the hypothesis
half-way. To take a trivial illustration: just as a man who in a
company of gentlemen made no advances, asked a warrant for every
concession, and believed no one's word without proof, would cut himself
off by such churlishness from all the social rewards that a more
trusting spirit would earn,--so here, one who should shut himself up in
snarling logicality and try to make the gods extort his recognition
willy-nilly, or not get it at all, might cut himself off forever from
his only opportunity of making the gods' acquaintance. This feeling,
forced on us we know not whence, that by obstinately believing that
there are gods (although not to do so would be so easy both for our
logic and our life) we are doing the universe the deepest service we
can, seems part of the living essence of the religious hypothesis. If
the hypothesis _were_ true in all its parts, including this one, then
pure intellectualism, with its veto on our making willing advances,
would be an absurdity; and some participation of our sympathetic nature
would be logically required. I, therefore, for one cannot see my way
to accepting the agnostic rules for truth-seeking, or wilfully agree to
keep my willing nature out of the game. I cannot do so for this plain
reason, that _a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from
acknowledging certain kinds of truth if those kinds of truth were
really there, would be an irrational rule_. That for me {29} is the
long and short of the formal logic of the situation, no matter what the
kinds of truth might materially be.

I confess I do not see how this logic can be escaped. But sad
experience makes me fear that some of you may still shrink from
radically saying with me, _in abstracto_, that we have the right to
believe at our own risk any hypothesis that is live enough to tempt our
will. I suspect, however, that if this is so, it is because you have
got away from the abstract logical point of view altogether, and are
thinking (perhaps without realizing it) of some particular religious
hypothesis which for you is dead. The freedom to 'believe what we
will' you apply to the case of some patent superstition; and the faith
you think of is the faith defined by the schoolboy when he said, "Faith
is when you believe something that you know ain't true." I can on