The Will to Believe by William James: Free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB Download
The Will to Believe
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Live hypotheses and genuine options
Let us give the name of hypothesis to anything that may be proposed to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either live or dead. A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature,—it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the Mahdi’s followers), the hypothesis is among the mind’s possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. The maximum of liveness in an hypothesis means willingness to act irrevocably. Practically, that means belief; but there is some believing tendency wherever there is willingness to act at all.
Next, let us call the decision between two hypotheses an option. Options may be of several kinds. They may be—1, living or dead; 2, forced or avoidable; 3, momentous or trivial; and for our purposes we may call an option a genuine option when it is of the forced, living, and momentous kind.
The excerpt below comes from the first essay, where James sets out the vocabulary the rest of the volume uses. A hypothesis is anything proposed to belief, and it is live or dead according to whether it appeals as a real possibility to the person considering it; liveness is measured by willingness to act. A decision between two hypotheses he calls an option, and options may be living or dead, forced or avoidable, momentous or trivial. The genuine option is the one that is forced, living and momentous at once.
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Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the 1890s, and the American college halls where the addresses were first given; the essays were printed in reviews before James gathered them into a book.
Ten essays in ten parts
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Project Gutenberg #26659
The Will to Believe collects ten essays in which William James argues that the case for religious faith cannot be settled by evidence alone. The first essay defines a genuine option, one that is forced, living and momentous, and claims that where the intellect cannot decide such an option, our passional nature may rightly decide it. The other essays carry the same temper into pessimism, the sentiment of rationality, theism, determinism, ethics, the power of great men, Hegelian idealism and psychical research. James writes for general audiences, in a plain style, and defends a plural, unfinished universe in which individual action and belief make a difference.
The ten essays were written for different occasions and print here in the order James collected them, from The Will to Believe to What Psychical Research Has Accomplished. They share a method rather than a single argument: each asks what a belief does in a life, and what experience can show. The Wikipedia article on The Will to Believe places the title essay in the wider debate about faith and evidence. The text is available via Project Gutenberg #26659.
The Will to Believe by William James: Summary, Ideas & Arguments
This page offers a summary and analysis of The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, with each of the ten essays summarized in its printed order, the distinctions it turns on explained, and the arguments placed beside the positions they answer. William James published the collection in 1897, gathering addresses given to college clubs and societies and afterwards printed in reviews; the preface says the pieces shed light on one another and express a philosophic attitude in an untechnical way. The title essay gives the book its name and its problem, the relation between belief and evidence. The volume belongs with the Philosophy Classics on this site.
James begins with a set of distinctions. A hypothesis is anything proposed to belief, and it is live or dead according to whether it appeals as a real possibility to the person considering it; liveness is a relation to the thinker, measured by willingness to act. An option is a decision between hypotheses, and it may be living or dead, forced or avoidable, momentous or trivial; a genuine option is forced, living and momentous at once. From this he argues that where a genuine option cannot by its nature be settled on intellectual grounds, our passional nature may lawfully decide it, since refusing to decide is itself a decision. He answers the charge of credulity by keeping the claim inside those limits, and he quotes Clifford’s rule that it is wrong always, everywhere and for everyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence, only to ask what sort of rule that is. The essay ends by asking for tolerance between those who believe and those who wait. He distinguishes the question whether a belief is true from the question whether a man may adopt it before proof, and insists that the second is a practical question.
Is Life Worth Living? treats pessimism as a religious disease and follows the would-be suicide through two stages of recovery: rebellion against the God of nature, which frees the instincts of curiosity, pugnacity and honor, and trust in an unseen order. The Sentiment of Rationality asks what makes a conception feel rational, and finds the answer in fluency, relief and practical need rather than in proof. Reflex Action and Theism argues from the reflex arc, impression, reflection and response, that thinking exists for the sake of action, and that theism completes the mind’s movement towards a power that can be met in practice. Each essay keeps the address it was written for. The theism essay adds that God must be the deepest power in the universe and must be conceived as a mental personality.
The Dilemma of Determinism presses the question whether real possibilities exist: determinism, James says, leaves no room for the judgment that something ought not to have been. The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life denies that ethics can be fixed in advance, since goods arise from demands and obligations from claims. Great Men and Their Environment and The Importance of Individuals defend the individual against sociological fatalism, and On Some Hegelisms attacks a block universe in which nothing could be other than it is. For the ancient contrast, Meditations and The Enchiridion show the stoic discipline of judgment that James sets beside the religious hypothesis. James treats the moral life as a series of claims that meet and conflict, and he refuses to settle the conflict by a formula. The Hegel essay is a skirmish rather than a treatise, and it shows the pluralist case at its most polemical. The moral essay separates the psychological question, what goods men actually desire, from the metaphysical question, what good means, and from the casuistic question, how goods are to be ranked when they conflict.
What Psychical Research Has Accomplished closes the volume with an account of the Society for Psychical Research, its Proceedings and the phenomena it records. The text is the Project Gutenberg transcription of the 1897 collection, with the dedication to Charles Sanders Peirce, the preface, the ten essays, the notes and the index: Project Gutenberg #26659. Nothing is abridged. The footnotes keep the occasions of the addresses and the reviews in which they appeared, so the reader can see how a lecture to students became a chapter of a book. James treats the Society’s records as a test of scientific temper, and asks his hearers to keep an open mind without surrendering their critical sense.
Historical Context
The book appeared in 1897, and its preface explains the occasion of the volume: at most American colleges there were clubs devoted to particular branches of learning, and these clubs invited a maturer scholar to address them once or twice a year. James accepted such invitations, had the discourses printed in reviews, and now collected them because they seemed to him to shed explanatory light on one another. The collection is therefore a record of how one philosopher spoke to the educated public of his day, and of the questions that public was willing to hear debated.
The essays answer positions rather than each other. The title essay takes up the ethics of belief argued by W. K. Clifford, who held that it is wrong always and everywhere to believe anything upon insufficient evidence, and the debate over faith and science that ran through the reviews of the day. The essays on determinism, ethics and great men engage the evolutionary sociology of Herbert Spencer and his school, while On Some Hegelisms answers the idealist movement that had become powerful in British and American universities, where it stood as a movement of reaction against traditional British empiricism.
The last essay belongs to a different institutional world. The Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 by a group of scholars, among them Henry Sidgwick, W. F. Barrett, Balfour Stewart, Edmund Gurney and F. W. H. Myers, to experiment with hypnotic subjects and mediums and to collect reports of apparitions. James describes its Proceedings as the one place where such reports were weighed rather than merely repeated, and he treats the Society as a test case for the question the whole volume raises: what a scientific temper owes to evidence it cannot yet explain. James had followed the Society’s work for years, and he writes as a sympathizer who keeps the evidential question open.
Key Ideas & Arguments
- Live and dead hypotheses: A hypothesis is anything proposed to belief. It is live when it appeals as a real possibility to the person considering it, and dead when it makes no connection with his nature. Liveness is not a property of the hypothesis but a relation to the thinker, and it is measured by willingness to act.
- The genuine option: A decision between two hypotheses is an option, which may be living or dead, forced or avoidable, momentous or trivial. A genuine option is forced, living and momentous at once. James claims the right to believe only inside these limits, where the intellect cannot settle the question and refusal is itself a choice.
- The passional nature: The name James gives to the whole of our interested, emotional and volitional life. It cannot be kept out of belief, he argues, because doubting is expressed in conduct and inaction counts as action. In a genuine option the passional nature may lawfully decide, at our own risk, and the risk is part of what makes the decision ours.
- The unseen order: The religious hypothesis, as James states it, is that the visible order is only part of a larger spiritual universe with which our lives are connected. Faith in that order is not a proof but a working trust, and he argues that such trust can help make a life worth living by giving courage and patience a field.
- Chance and real possibility: Against determinism James defends a world with genuine alternatives. Chance, in his sense, is not blind caprice but the name for possibilities not yet settled; only such a world allows regret, obligation and moral effort to mean anything, and leaves room for a creator whose plan is not finished in every detail.
- The strenuous mood: James contrasts the easy-going temper, which shrinks from present ill, with the strenuous temper, which accepts present ill for the sake of a greater ideal. Religion awakens the strenuous mood, he argues, by presenting an infinite claimant and an infinite demand; without that perspective the appeal to our moral energy falls short.
Core Arguments & Influence
- Belief, evidence and risk: The volume’s central argument is that belief is an act, not a passive registration of fact. Clifford’s rule forbids believing without sufficient evidence, but James replies that in a genuine option the evidence cannot be had until someone acts, and that waiting is a wager too. The claim is narrow by design: it covers only living options that the individual intellect cannot resolve, and it is offered as a defense of the right to run risks, not as a license for credulity. The distinction between the two is the hinge on which the essay turns. Clifford’s rule and James’s answer are still the terms in which the ethics of belief is discussed.
- Faith that verifies itself: James is interested in beliefs that help bring about their own confirmation. The mountain climber who trusts that he can make the leap is more likely to make it; a man who believes his life worth living gives it a worth it would not otherwise have. He extends the figure to the religious hypothesis, which he thinks may be true partly through the response men make to it, and he keeps the outcome open, since the verification he describes belongs to the whole human race and not to a single life. The examples are deliberately homely and physical: a leap, a climb, a wager.
- A plural and unfinished universe: Determinism, for James, is not only a doctrine about causes but a picture of a closed world. Against it he sets a universe with real alternatives, real losses and a real future, and he uses the figure of a chess player who knows the end he intends without deciding every move in advance. The same pluralism underlies his ethics: where everything is necessary there can be neither good nor bad, and moral judgment requires that something else might have been. On Some Hegelisms applies the argument to idealism, whose absolute leaves no loose play in things.
- The individual against the environment: The two essays on great men argue that social change is carried by persons. James compares the genius to a spontaneous variation, and the environment to the selective agency that adopts or refuses what variation offers; the environment without the individual has nothing new to adopt. He answers the sociological school not by denying its averages but by denying that size decides importance. The differences that count are the ones still unsettled, in the zone where the future is being made, and that is why hero-worship has a philosophical justification. The argument is also a defense of biography against statistics. He adds that the environment may adopt or reject a variation, but it cannot supply the initiative that produced it.
- Philosophy as practice and temperament: The later essays turn philosophy towards life. Rationality, James argues, is a sentiment produced by fluent thought rather than a certificate of truth; ethics has no system fixed in advance, since goods are created by demands; and psychical research is a test of whether a scientific temper can attend to facts it cannot yet classify. The style matches the argument: addresses to students and clubs, examples drawn from climbing, chess and the ordinary conduct of life, and a refusal of technical jargon. What the volume offers is less a doctrine than a way of holding beliefs. The volume’s influence has been as much in its manner of argument as in its theses.
Why Download Our Custom E-Reader Edition of The Will to Believe?
The download is the whole book, not a selection. The preface and the dedication to Charles Sanders Peirce are here, then all ten essays in the order the 1897 volume prints them, with the notes and the index that belong to it. Nothing is summarized in place of itself, so an argument can be followed from the definitions it starts from to the conclusion it reaches, and a passage quoted in the essays can be checked against the essay that quotes it.
The page is arranged to be read beside the text. Ten groups follow the essays one by one and stop where each essay stops; six notes explain the ideas the volume turns on, from the live hypothesis to the strenuous mood; and five themes trace the arguments across the essays that share them. A short historical section names the positions James is answering, so the collection is not mistaken for a single continuous treatise.
The files come in three formats with the same text and the same divisions. The EPUB opens in Apple Books, Calibre and most Android readers; the AZW3 is the file for a Kindle; the KEPUB is the one Kobo devices read best. No account is needed for any of them, and nothing in the downloads is locked, watermarked or time limited, so the essays can be read offline and kept for as long as the reader wants them.
- Project Gutenberg transcription, via Project Gutenberg #26659 — the complete text, unabridged, with the preface, the ten essays, the notes and the index.
- Ten essays in the printed order Every essay has its own summary, from The Will to Believe to What Psychical Research Has Accomplished, and each summary stops where the essay it covers stops.
- The 1897 text, unabridged The dedication, the preface, the footnotes that record the occasions of the addresses and the index are printed as the volume gives them, with no essay cut or rearranged.
- EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB files The same text in three formats, for Apple Books, Kindle and Kobo, with the essay divisions intact and nothing to install beyond the reading app already on the device.
- Spinoza’s Ethics, the system that James’s pluralism answers: one substance, one necessity, and no room for the real alternatives his essays defend. Read it beside On Some Hegelisms and The Dilemma of Determinism to see what a closed universe looks like when it is built with genius. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- Hume’s Enquiry, the empiricist account of belief and causation that stands behind James’s talk of live hypotheses. Hume asks what experience can support; James asks what a man should do when experience has not yet spoken, and the two questions meet in the essay on the sentiment of rationality. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
- The shelf where this edition sits, with the rest of the free philosophy on the site in EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB, from the stoics and Plato to Hume, Kant and Nietzsche. The essays here answer books on that shelf, from Spinoza’s Ethics to Hume’s Enquiry, and the shelf keeps growing. — free EPUB, AZW3 & KEPUB
Chapter summaries
The ten groups below follow the volume’s own contents in the order it prints them: the ten essays, one group for each, from The Will to Believe to What Psychical Research Has Accomplished. Nothing has been merged or renamed, and no group covers an essay that is not in the book. Each summary states the step the essay takes and stops where the essay stops.
- Essay 1 — The Will to Believe: James begins by distinguishing live hypotheses from dead ones and forced, momentous options from trivial ones. He then argues that where a genuine option cannot be settled by evidence, our passional nature may decide it, at our own risk, and he limits the claim to living options so that it is not a license for credulity.
- Essay 2 — Is Life Worth Living?: Pessimism, James says, is a religious disease, born of a demand for meaning that the visible world does not answer. He follows two stages of recovery: rebellion against the God of nature, which frees the instincts of curiosity and honor, and trust in an unseen order. The essay ends with the advice not to be afraid of life.
- Essay 3 — The Sentiment of Rationality: What makes a conception feel rational? James answers with the sentiment of rationality, the relief that comes when thought runs fluently. Unity and distinctness pull against each other, and no classification explains the whole. Practical needs, especially the need to face the future, decide more than proof does, and faith is readiness to act on an uncertified issue.
- Essay 4 — Reflex Action and Theism: James takes the reflex arc, impression, reflection and response, as the model of mind, so that thinking exists for the sake of action. On that basis he argues that theism, which offers a power to be met in practice, completes the mind’s movement, while a criticism that would keep us waiting for evidence mistakes what cognition is for.
- Essay 5 — The Dilemma of Determinism: Determinism says nothing else could have happened; indeterminism says real alternatives exist. If determinism were true, James argues, regret would be irrational, since the judgment that something ought not to have been assumes it might have been otherwise. Chance is his name for real possibility, and he pictures a creator who leaves the plan open yet secures the end.
- Essay 6 — The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life: Ethics, James argues, cannot be fixed in advance, because goods are created by demands and obligations by claims. The psychological, metaphysical and casuistic questions must be kept apart. No system can decide which ideal wins when ideals conflict; the difference between the easy-going and the strenuous mood marks the depth of the moral life, and religion opens an infinite perspective.
- Essay 7 — Great Men and Their Environment: James draws a parallel between social and biological evolution. Changes in communities come from the accumulated influence of individuals, their examples and decisions; the environment adopts or refuses what genius proposes. Against Spencer’s school, which explains history by circumstance alone, he defends the great man as a variation whose initiative the environment must take up before it becomes social fact.
- Essay 8 — The Importance of Individuals: A short rejoinder to Grant Allen’s essay on the genesis of genius. Allen had argued that great men are small deviations from the average and so negligible for sociology. James replies that the size of a difference does not settle its importance: what matters is its place, in the unsettled zone where the future is still being formed. Hence hero-worship.
- Essay 9 — On Some Hegelisms: Hegel’s philosophy, James says, mixes mountain-loads of corruption with its scanty merits. He attacks its block universe, its triads and its treatment of negation, and argues that where everything is necessary there can be neither good nor bad. A world with real contingency is the only one in which moral judgments have a claim to be.
- Essay 10 — What Psychical Research Has Accomplished: The unclassified residuum, the exceptional reports that a settled science ignores, is where discoveries begin. James describes the Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1882, its critical Proceedings, and the work on trance mediums, crystal vision and apparitions. He does not conclude that the phenomena prove survival; he argues that they deserve patient, exact recording.
The Will to Believe: Frequently Asked Questions
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