BOOKS.

A PSYCHOLOGICAL DEFENCE OF THEISM.* ANT one who has met with either of Professor James's treatises upon psychology is not likely to let the grass grow under his feet before making acquaintance with any other obtainable writings from the same witty pen. All students of philosophy will know that they must make their account with this freest of all free-lances, and will anticipate not a little excitement in the process. But the general public, that part of it which is interested in the religious questions of the day without going so far as to read formal treatises, must be advertised that in the collection of essays here offered }them, the Harvard Professor of Psychology, one of the most acute and versatile of American men of science, has come

• The Witt to Believe, and other Essays in Popular Philosophy. By William James. London: Longman and Co.

forward into the lists as a champion of religions faith against agnosticism. He has called his book "Essays in Popular Philosophy" because he has written without technicalities so as to appeal to a wide audience. We could wish that he had said " psychology " instead of " philosophy," even though philosophy be the more applicable word, because we desire for the book a great vogue ; and to ordinary people philosophy means building on the sand, whereas psychology seems at any rate to have its foundations upon the solid facts of human nature. A public that bought in hundreds of thousands the late Mr. Drammond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World needs its trap baiting with the toasted cheese of science.

It is in the contributions they bring from psychology that the main value of these essays undoubtedly lies. The problems dealt with concern the nature and relations of our will and reason. " What is the sentiment of rationality ? "—i.e.," What is it that, as a matter of fact, convinces us that a belief is reasonable ? "—" What is the practical cure for pessimism P" or, as Professor James puts it, "Row may we reconcile with life one bent on suicide ?" " Are great men produced by their environment, or only preserved by it ? " " What so far has been the accomplishment of the Society for Psychical Research ? "—these are among the questions discussed. In this review we can but call attention to one out of many dis- cussions, and that must be the one that seems to us the most original, and at the same time the one likely to be of the most permanent value, the :essay entitled " Reflex Action and Theism."

Professor James starts from the theory held by modern physiologists, that every action, even the most deliberate, follows the reflex type ; that is to say, is an outward discharge from the nervous centres, resulting from an external im- pression. "There is no impression of sense which, unless inhibited by some other stronger one, does not immediately or remotely express itself in action of some kind; and there is no one of those complicated performances in the convolutions of the brain to which our trains of thought correspond, which is not a mere middle term interposed between an incoming sensation that arouses it, and an outgoing discharge of some sort, inhibitory if not exciting, to which itself gives rise." This being the modern theory, the peculiar tilt that Professor James gives to it is to insist that the mind is in consequence " an essentially teleological mechanism," in which the sensory impression exists only for the sake of awaking reflection, and reflection exists only for the sake of the final act. "The middle stage of consideration, or contemplation, or thinking is only a place of transit, the bottom of a loop, both whose ends have their point of application in the outer world The current of life which runs in at our eyes or ears is meant

to run out at our hands, feet or lips . The willing depart- ment of our nature, in short, dominates both the conceiving

department and the feeling department ; or, in plainer English, perception and thinking are only there for behaviour's sake." If, then, the purpose of the thinking de- partment of our mind is only so to shape the confused medley of sense that we may react upon it, why should this cease to be the case when it frames a hypothesis about the Universe as a whole ? Our cosmical theories, like all others, mast find their justification in their fruits. And so it is not enough that our hypothesis should blink none of the data of sense, and be without inherent contradictions. It is more important still that it should be such as to allow freesplay to our active and emotional powers, the will and affections ; and Theism alone does this. The alternatives to Theism Professor James classes as infra-theistic and super-theistic theories. To the former class belong materialism and agnosticism. They are pro- nounced irrational because they supply inadequate stimuli to man's practical nature :—

" Each comes out of the second or theoretic stage of mental functioning, with its definition of the essential nature of things, its formula of formulas prepared. The whole array of active forces of our nature stands waiting, impatient for the word which shall tell them how to discharge themselves most deeply and worthily upon life. Well,' cry they, what shall we do?'

Ignoramus, ignorabimus !' says agnosticism. React upon atoms and their concussions !' says materialism. What a collapse ! The mental train misses fire, the middle fails to ignite the end, the cycle breaks down half way to its conclusions ; and the active powers left alone, with no proper object on which to vent their energy, must either atrophy, sicken, and die, or else by their pent-up convulsions and excitement keep the whole machinery in a fever until some less incommensurable solution, some more practically rational formula, shall provide a normal issue for the currents of the soul. Now theism always stands ready with the most practically rational solution it is possible to conceive. Not an energy of our active nature to which it does not authoritatively appeal, not one emotion of which it does not normally and naturally release the springs. At a single stroke it changes the dead blank of the world into a living thou, with whom the whole man may have dealings."

On the other side of Theism lie those theories which regard the World-Spirit not as it or as thou, but as in some sense me,

—" gnostic " theories which attempt to override in the name of reason the final Duality between God and the believer. Professor James's pages on the religious consciousness, with

its feeling of self-surrender and practical union with its divine object—and how entirely different a thing this is, even at the height of mysticism, from any sort of substantial identity between the soul and God—are exceedingly valuable, especially at a time when young philosophical divines are apt to gloss over this most vital of all distinctions and resolve it in a Pantheism :—

" I confess that I myself have always had a great mistrust of the pretensions of the gnostic faith Accordingly it is with no small pleasure that, as a student of physiology and psychology, I find the only lesson I can learn from these sciences to be one that corroborates these convictions. From its first dawn to its highest actual attainment, we find that the cognitive faculty, where it appears to exist at all, appears but as one element in an organic mental whole, and as a minister to higher mental powers,

—the powers of will Arising as a part, in a mental and objective world which are both larger than itself, it must, what- ever its powers of growth may be (and I am far from wishing to

disparage them), remain a part to the end It is more than probable that to the end of time our power of moral and volitional response to the nature of things will be the deepest organ of communication therewith we shall ever possess. In every being that is real there is something external to, and sacred from, the grasp of every other. God's being is sacred from ours. To co-operate with his creation by the best and most righteous response seems all he wants of us. In such co-operation with his purposes, not in any chimerical speculative conquest of him, not in any theoretical drinking of him up, must lie the real meaning of our destiny."

The argument as to the validity of the claims made by the third or volitional department of the mind to have a vote in determining what is true or false is elaborated in the essay upon " The Will to Believe," which gives its title to the volume. Not a few people have at some time in their lives been in the position expressed so forcibly in these verses of "In Memoriam " :—

" If e'er when faith had fall'n asleep, I heard a voice believe no more,' And heard an ever-breaking shore That tumbled in the Godless deep ; A warmth within the breast would melt

The freezing reason's colder part, And like a man in wrath the heart Stood up and answer'd I have felt.."'

It in gratifying, then, to find a Professor of Psychology laying it down, not only that it is the heart's reaction upon the world which is the end for which the man's reason exists, but that the contribution made by the pure reason to all the important decisions of life is, and is rightly, so much less than agnostic critics would have us suppose. The intellect may have the last word in cases where the election to be made is not pressing or momentous, and where there is no grave risk in a prolonged suspense of judgment,—e.g., in all questions of natural science ; but in cases where the desires are deeply , interested, and a choice must be made, people do not refuse to act because the " objective " evidence is inconclusive; and not seldom their thus acting upon some hypothesis to which the heart prompts them brings a verification that could never have been given, if they had not acted in faith. Even natural

science does not disdain experiment; and ordinary human intercourse teaches us to meet people half-way, to assume that

they like us. Why, then, should not the heart's demand for a world of moral reality, for a Personal Spirit behind the phenomena of sense, be allowed, if that too may find a verifi- cation which it can neverfind until the heart makes its venture? "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." Such in

barest outline is Professor James's argument, and we com- mend it to the careful attention of any who have been misled by the Clifford and Huxley dogma that " it is sinful to accept any belief on insufficient evidence."