The Will to Believe and Human Immortality, by William James.#

These essays are primarily about philosophical justification of faith and free-will, as opposed to "science" and determinism. In the preface, James writes:#

To some rationalizing readers such advocacy will seem a sad misuse of one's professional position. Mankind, they will say, is only too prone to follow faith unreasoningly, and needs no preaching nor encouragement in that direction. I quite agree that what mankind at large most lacks is criticism and caution, not faith. [...] But academic audiences, fed already on science, have a very different need. Paralysis of their native capacity for faith and timorous abulia in the religious field are their special forms of mental weakness, brought about be the notion, carefully instilled, that there is something called scientific evidence by waiting upon which they shall escape all danger of shipwreck in regard to truth. [p. x-xi]

Faith:#

He who refuses to embrace a unique opportunity loses the prize as surely as if he tried and failed. [p. 4]

When the Cliffords tell us how sinful it is to be Christians on such 'insufficient evidence', insufficiency is really the last thing they have in mind. For them the evidence is absolutely sufficient, only it makes the other way. They believe so completely in an anti-christian order of the universe that there is no living option: Christianity is a dead hypothesis from the start. [p. 14]

Scepticism, then, is not avoidance of option; it is option of a certain particular kind of risk. Better risk loss of truth than chance of error, --- that is your faith-vetoer's exact position. [p. 26]

On scepticism has a principle of thought:

[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. [p. 28]

The universe being larger than we recognize:

My terrier bites a teasing boy, for example, and the father demands damages. The dog may be present at every step of the negotiations, and see the money paid, without an inkling of what it all means, without a suspicion that it has anything to do with him; and he never can know in his natural dog's life. [p. 57-58]

This is practically from the Book of Mormon:

Faith means belief in something concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible; and as the test of belief is willingness to act, one may say that faith is the readiness to act in a cause the prosperous issue of which is not certified to us in advance. It is in fact the same moral quality which we call courage in practical affairs; [p. 90]

We cannot live or think at all without some degree of faith. Faith is synonymous with working hypothesis. [p. 95]

There are then cases where faith creates its own verification. Believe, and you shall be right, for you shall save yourself; doubt, and you shall again be right, for you shall perish. The only difference is that to believe is greatly to your advantage. [p. 97 --- he uses the example making a jump from a cliff.]

Morality:#

A moral question is a question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it did exists. Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exists, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart. [p. 22]

There is a compelling refutation of evolution as a morality around page 99.

Hardship:#

Are we not bound to take some suffering upon ourselves, to do some self-denying service with our lives, in return for all those lives upon which ours are built? [p. 50]

Determinism:#

James says that the essence of determinism is that possibility is a false idea. Anything that is, is the only way it could be, so possibilities do not exist. There are only a priori uncertainties. (p. 151)

He also writes that science cannot decide determinism, because it is only concerned with things that happen, and can say nothing about things that do not happen. (p. 152) This has implications for regret and "ought", because if there is only one possibility how can we rationally regret or hope for anything? (p. 175-176)

In this particular essay, he mentions the intriguing idea that the purpose of the universe is not to produce good ends, but rather to learn what good and evil are. "Life is one long eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge." (p. 165)

James writes about how indeterminism does not prevent God from being all-powerful, because he could have an infinite number of contingency plans to meet his ends, each depending on some particular set of indeterminate outcomes. He compares God to an expert chess player who is facing a novice. (p. 181)

Historicism and Great Men:#

In these essays, James argues that ignoring individuals and focusing on environments and trends, is like ignoring gravity and focusing on air turbulence, the position of Saturn, and Western Civilization when asking what will happen to a falling bowling-ball. Those are certainly components of a complete explanation, but their effect is miniscule compared to gravity and our finite brains cannot consider them all. (p. 216)