The Will to BelieveWilliam James

The Will to Believe is the title essay of a volume James published in 1897. The essay defends the right to adopt a believing attitude in religious and other momentous questions when the evidence is inconclusive and when the option is forced, living, and momentous. Against W. K. Clifford's rule that it is always wrong to believe anything on insufficient evidence, James argues that our passional nature lawfully may, and sometimes must, decide. In questions where waiting for proof would itself decide against a hypothesis (as in friendship, moral commitment, or faith), a purely skeptical rule is not neutrality. It is a policy that loses truth as surely as it avoids error.

James does not license wishful thinking in science, where options are usually not forced and where the cost of error is high. He restricts the will to believe to cases that intellect alone cannot settle and that matter to the conduct of life. The essay stands with The Varieties of Religious Experience as James's contribution to the philosophy of faith: a defense of religious hypothesis as a live option for modern people, offered without scholastic proofs and without surrender to positivist prohibition. Later philosophy of religion still argues over whether James described a genuine epistemic right or only a practical necessity dressed as one.