BELIEF SUPPOSES INTERMEDIATE ACTIONS. 375 3. Belief is a growth or development of the Will, under the pursuit of intermediate ends. When a voluntary action at once brings a pleasure or dismisses a pain, as in masticating food in the mouth, we experience the primitive course of the will; there is an absence alike of deliberation, of resolution, of desire, and of belief. By a fiction, one might maintain that we are believing that the mouthful of food is pleasant, just as one might say that we choose, desire, and resolve to masticate and swallow the bolus; but in point of fact, such designations would never have come into existence had all volition been of this primordial type. It is the occurrence of a middle or intermediate state between the motive and the felt gratification that makes these various phases to appear. Belief is shown when we are performing intermediate or associated actions. When we put forth the hand to seize an orange, peel it, and bring it to the mouth, we perform a number of actions, in themselves barren and unprofitable, and stimulated by a pleasure to follow, which pleasure at present exists as the ideal motive. In this situation, there is a fact or phenomenon, not expressed by any of the other names for what fills the void of a suspended volition; there may be present deliberation, resolution, and desire; yet something still remains. For example, in taking these steps to enjoy the sweetness of the orange juices, we may have passed through the phase of Desire; previous experience of the pleasure has given us an idea of it, accompanied by longing for perfect fruition. We may also have passed through a Deliberation and a Resolution. But what is not yet expressed, is our assuming that the actions now entered on will bring the state desired, and our maintaining a degree of voluntary exertion as energetic as if the pleasure were actually tasted. When we act for an intermediate end, as strongly as we should for the actual end, we are in a very peculiar situation, not implied in desire, however strong, nor in deliberation, nor in resolution, and deserving to be signalized by a name. The principal designation is Belief; the synonymes are faith, trust, credit, credence, confidence, assurance, security, reliance, certainty, dependence, anticipation, expectation. The state is known to vary in degree. Having formed a desire, and having, if need be, deliberated and resolved, we may pursue the intermediate ends, either with all the energy that the ultimate consciousness would prompt, or, what is very common, with less than that energy; perhaps with threefourths, with one-half, or with one-fourth the amount. This difference need have no connexion with the intensity of desire, or with the processes of deliberation or of resolution; it relates to a fact that has a separate standing in the mind; and the circumstances affecting it call for a special investigation. 4. Belief always contains an intellectual element; there being, in its least developed form, an Association of Means and End. The very fact of working for an intermediate end, with the view to some remote or final end, implies an intellectual conception of both, and the association of the one with the other. The lamb running to its ewe mother for milk and warmth, has an intellectual train fixed in its mind-an idea of warmth and repletion associated with the idea or characteristic picture of its mother. All the actions of human beings for remote ends are based on the mental trains connecting the intermediate with the final. We may properly describe these trains as a knowledge of natural facts, or of the order of the world, which all creatures that can do one thing for the sake of another, must possess to some degree. Every animal with a home, and able to leave it and to return, knows a little geography. The more extensive this knowledge, the greater the power of gaining ends. The stag knowing ten different pools to drink from, is so much better provided than when it knew but one. Experience of nature, therefore, laid up in the memory, must enter into every situation where we exert belief. Nay, more. Such experience is, properly speaking, the just ground of believing, the condition in whose absence there ought to be no belief; and the greater the experience, the greater should be the believing energy. But if we find, in point of fact, that belief does not accord with experience, we must admit that there is some other spring of confidence than the natural conjunctions or successions, repeated before the view, and fixed in the mind by the force of contiguous association. 5. The mental foundations of Belief are to be sought (1) in our Activity, (2) in the Intellectual Associations of our Experience, and (3) in the Feelings. It is here affirmed, not only that Belief in its essence is an active state, but that its foremost generating cause is the Activity of the system, to which are added influences Intellectual and Emotional. ACTION CARRIES BELIEF TILL WE ARE CHECKED. 377 (1) The Spontaneity of the moving organs is a source of action, the system being fresh, and there being no hindrance. Secondly, the additional Pleasure of Exercise is a farther prompting to activity. Thirdly, the Memory of this pleasure is a motive to begin acting with a view to the fruition of it; the operation of the will being enlarged by an intellectual bond. These three facts sum up the active tendency of volition; the two first are impulses of pure activity; the third is supported by the retentive function of the intellect. Under these forces, one or more, we commence action, and, so long as there is no check, we continue till overtaken by exhaustion. We have no hesitation, doubt, or uncertainty; while yet ignorant of what belief means, we act precisely like a person in the highest state of confidence. Belief can do no more than produce unhesitating action, and we are already placed at this point. Suppose now that we experience a check, as when our activity brings us pain. This is an arrest upon our present movements; and the memory of it has also a certain deterring effect. We do not again proceed in that track with the full force of our spontaneous and volitional urgencies; there is an element of repugnance that weakens, if it does not destroy, the active tendency. The young animal at first roams everywhere; in some one track it falls into a snare, and with difficulty escapes; it avoids that route in future; but as regards all others, it goes on as before. The primitive tendency to move freely in every direction is here broken in upon by a hostile experience; with respect to which there is in future an anticipation of danger, a state of belief in coming evil. Repeated experiences would confirm this deviation from the rule of immunity; but before any experience, the rule was proceeded on. We can now understand what there is instinctive in the act of believing, and can account for the natural or primitive credulity of the mind. The mere disposition to act, growing out of our active endowments, carries belief with it; experience enlightening the intellect, does not create this active disposition, but merely causes it to be increased by the memory of attained fruition. A stronger natural spontaneity would make a stronger belief, experience remaining the same. Whatever course is entered on is believed in, until a check arise; a repeated check neutralizes the spontaneous and voluntary agency, destroying alike action and belief. The phenomena of credulity and mistaken beliefs are in accordance with the active origin of the state. We strongly believe that whatever has been in the past will always be in the future, exactly as we have found it in an unbroken experience, however small; that is, we are disposed to act in any direction where we have never been checked. It does not need a long-continued iteration, amounting to indissoluble association, to generate a belief: a single instance under a motive to act is enough. The infant soon shows a belief in the mother's breasts; and if it could speculate on the future, it would believe in being fed in that manner to all eternity. The belief begins to be broken through when it gets spoon meat; and the anticipation is now partitioned, but still energetic in holding that the future will resemble the past in the precise manner already experienced. There is thus generated, from the department of our Activity, a tendency, so wide as to be an important law of the mind, to proceed upon any unbroken experience with the whole energy of our active nature, and, accordingly, to believe, with a vigour corresponding to our natural activity, that what is uncontradicted is universal and eternal. Experience adds the force of habit to the inborn energy, and hence the tenacity of all early beliefs. Human nature everywhere believes that its own experience is the measure of all men's experience everywhere and in every time. Each one of us believes at first that every other person is made, and feels, like ourselves; and it takes a long education to abate the sweeping generalization, which in no one is ever entirely overcome. If belief were generated by the growth of an intellectual bond of experienced conjunctions, we should not form any judgment as to other men's feelings, until old enough to perform a difficult scientific operation of analogical reasoning; we should say absolutely nothing about the distant, the past, and the future, where our experience is null: we might believe that the water from a known well slakes our thirst, but we should not believe that the same water would slake the thirst of other persons who had not tried it, nor that any other water would slake our own thirst. It is the active energy of the mind that makes the 'anticipation of nature' so severely commented on by Bacon, as the parent of all error. This anticipation, corrected and reduced to the standard of experience, is the belief in the uniformity of nature. We labour under a natural inability or disqualification to BELIEF PASSES BEYOND EXPERIENCE. 379 conceive anything different from our most limited experience; but there is no necessity that we should still persist in assuming that what is absolutely unknown is exactly like what we know. Such intrinsic forwardness is not a quality of the intellect, it is the incontinence of our active nature. As we act first and feel afterwards; so we believe first and prove afterwards; not to be contradicted is to us sufficient proof. The impetus to generalize is born of our activity, and we are fortunate if we ever learn to apply to it the corrections of subsequent experience. An ordinary person, by no means unintelligent or uncultivated, happening to know one Frenchman, would unhesitatingly attribute to the whole French nation the mental peculiarities of that one individual. As regards many of our convictions, the strength is in the inverse ratio of the believer's experience. 6. (2) The second source of Belief is Intellectual Association. The frequent experience of a succession leaves a firm association of the several steps, and the one suggests readily all the rest. This enters into belief, and augments in some degree the active tendency to proceed in a certain course. The successive acts of plucking an apple, putting it in the mouth, and chewing it, are followed by an agreeable sensation and the whole train is by repetition firmly fixed in the mind. The main source of the energy shown in these intermediate acts is still the activity-partly spontaneous, partly volitional under the ideal motive of the sweetness. Yet the facility of passing intellectually from one step to another, through the strength of the association, counts as an addition to the strength of the impetus that carries us along through the series of acts. On a principle already expounded, the idea of an act has a certain efficacy in realizing it; and a secure association, bringing on the ideas, would help to bring on the actions. It may be safely maintained, however, that no mere association of ideas would set the activity in motion, or constitute the active disposition, called belief. A very strong association between 'apple' and 'sweetness,' generated by hearing the words often joined together (as from the 'dulce pomum' of the Latin Grammar), would make the one word suggest the other, and the corresponding ideas likewise suggest each other; but the taking action upon them still requires an active bent of the organs, growing out of the causes of our activity-spontaneity and a motive; and, until |