First, then, belief is a state of mind. Second, this state of mind is outward-pointing: it has a reference beyond itself, a reference to the order of things outside us. In believing, we hold that the world as it is, has been, or will be, corresponds to our conceptions of it. Third, belief is the guide of action: it is in accordance with what we believe that we direct our activities. If we want to know what a man really believes, we look at his action. This at least is the clue to what he believes at the moment. "I cannot," a great orator once said, "read the minds of men." This was received with ironical cheers. "No," he retorted, "but I can construe their acts." Promoters of companies are expected to invest their own money as a guarantee of good faith. If a man says he believes the world is coming to an end in a year, and takes a lease of a house for fifteen years, we conclude that his belief is not of the highest degree of strength.
The close connexion of belief with our activities, enables us to understand how illusions, false conceptions of reality, arise. The illusions of Feeling and the illusions of Custom are well understood, but other sources of illusion, which may be designated Impatient Impulse and Happy Exercise, are less generally recognised. An example or two will show what is meant. We cannot understand the strength of these perverting influences till we realise them in our own case. We detect them quickly enough in others. Seeing that in common speech the word illusion implies a degree of error amounting almost to insanity, and the illusions we speak of are such as no man is ever quite free from, it is perhaps less startling to use the word bias.
The Bias of Impatient Impulse.
As a being formed for action, not only does healthy man take a pleasure in action, physical and mental, for its own sake, irrespective of consequences, but he is so charged with energy that he cannot be comfortable unless it finds a free vent. In proportion to the amount and excitability of his energy, restraint, obstruction, delay is irksome, and soon becomes a positive and intolerable pain. Any bar or impediment that gives us pause is hateful even to think of: the mere prospect annoys and worries.
Hence it arises that belief, a feeling of being prepared for action, a conviction that the way is clear before us for the free exercise of our activities, is a very powerful and exhilarating feeling, as much a necessity of happy existence as action itself. We see this when we consider how depressing and uncomfortable a condition is the opposite state to belief, namely, doubt, perplexity, hesitation, uncertainty as to our course. And realising this, we see how strong a bias we have in this fact of our nature, this imperious inward necessity for action; how it urges us to act without regard to consequences, and to jump at beliefs without inquiry. For, unless inquiry itself is our business, a self-sufficient occupation, it means delay and obstruction.
This ultimate fact of our nature, this natural inbred constitutional impatience, explains more than half of the wrong beliefs that we form and persist in. We must have a belief of some kind: we cannot be happy till we get it, and we take up with the first that seems to show the way clear. It may be right or it may be wrong: it is not, of course, necessarily always wrong: but that, so far as we are concerned, is a matter of accident. The pressing need for a belief of some sort, upon which our energies may proceed in anticipation at least, will not allow us to stop and inquire. Any course that offers a relief from doubt and hesitation, any conviction that lets the will go free, is eagerly embraced.
It may be thought that this can apply only to beliefs concerning the consequences of our own personal actions, affairs in which we individually play a part. It is from them, no doubt, that our nature takes this set: but the habit once formed is extended to all sorts of matters in which we have no personal interest. Tell an ordinary Englishman, it has been wittily said, that it is a question whether the planets are inhabited, and he feels bound at once to have a confident opinion on the point. The strength of the conviction bears no proportion to the amount of reason spent in reaching it, unless it may be said that as a general rule the less a belief is reasoned the more confidently it is held.
"A grocer," writes Mr. Bagehot in an acute essay on "The Emotion of Conviction,"2 "has a full creed as to foreign policy, a young lady a complete theory of the Sacraments, as to which neither has any doubt. A girl in a country parsonage will be sure that Paris never can be taken, or that Bismarck is a wretch." An attitude of philosophic doubt, of suspended judgment, is repugnant to the natural man. Belief is an independent joy to him.
This bias works in all men. While there is life, there is pressure from within on belief, tending to push reason aside. The force of the pressure, of course, varies with individual temperament, age, and other circumstances. The young are more credulous than the old, as having greater energy: they are apt, as Bacon puts it, to be "carried away by the sanguine element in their temperament". Shakespeare's Laertes is a study of the impulsive temperament, boldly contrasted with Hamlet, who has more discourse of reason. When Laertes hears that his father has been killed, he hurries home, collects a body of armed sympathisers, bursts into the presence of the king, and threatens with his vengeance—the wrong man. He never pauses to make inquiry: like Hotspur he is "a wasp-stung and impatient fool"; he must wreak his revenge on somebody, and at once. Hamlet's father also has been murdered, but his reason must be satisfied before he proceeds to his revenge, and when doubtful proof is offered, he waits for proof more relative.
Bacon's Idola Tribus and Dr. Bain's illustrations of incontinent energy, are mostly examples of unreasoning intellectual activity, hurried generalisations, unsound and superficial analogies, rash hypotheses. Bacon quotes the case of the sceptic in the temple of Poseidon, who, when shown the offerings of those who had made vows in danger and been delivered, and asked whether he did not now acknowledge the power of the god, replied: "But where are they who made vows and yet perished?" This man answered rightly, says Bacon. In dreams, omens, retributions, and such like, we are apt to remember when they come true and to forget the cases when they fail. If we have seen but one man of a nation, we are apt to conclude that all his countrymen are like him; we cannot suspend our judgment till we have seen more. Confident belief, as Dr. Bain remarks, is the primitive attitude of the human mind: it is only by slow degrees that this is corrected by experience. The old adage, "Experience teaches fools," has a meaning of its own, but in one sense it is the reverse of the truth. The mark of a fool is that he is not taught by experience, and we are all more or less intractable pupils, till our energies begin to fail.
The Bias of Happy Exercise.
If an occupation is pleasant in itself, if it fully satisfies our inner craving for action, we are liable to be blinded thereby to its consequences. Happy exercise is the fool's Paradise. The fallacy lies not in being content with what provides a field for the full activity of our powers: to be content in such a case may be the height of wisdom: but the fallacy lies in claiming for our occupation results, benefits, utilities that do not really attend upon it. Thus we see subjects of study, originally taken up for some purpose, practical, artistic, or religious, pursued into elaborate detail far beyond their original purpose, and the highest value, intellectual, spiritual, moral, claimed for them by their votaries, when in truth they merely serve to consume so much vacant energy, and may be a sheer waste of time that ought to be otherwise employed.
But as I am in danger of myself furnishing an illustration of this bias—it is nowhere more prevalent than in philosophy—I will pass to our next head.
The Bias of the Feelings.
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