Between the necessary and universal beliefs on the one hand, and the practical necessity which coerces our beliefs on the other hand, there lies a wide field of beliefs, the validity of which depends on our ability to sift, examine, and criticise tliem. The process of sifting and criticism is coextensive with experience. Man is ever sifting his beliefs, is ever criticising them, and is, more or less, suc- cessfully active in the endeavour to make them correspond with reality as he is able to apprehend and conceive reality. He ventures in the belief that there is a correspondence between his inward nature and the world in which he lives; he believes that there is a constancy in things, that the quali- ties of things will remain constant. He makes the venture, and the venture is justified, and his faith increases as his expectation is verified. Beginning
186
BELIEF
BELIEF
with the need to live and to make himself at Iiome in the world, going on to satisfy ids dominant and controlling need to obtain some masteiy of the world, he reaches the time when he pursues know- ledge for its own sake, and, in a disinterested manner, seeks to obtain a consistent and complete view of the scheme of things. So the sciences, the philosophies, the poesies of the world arise, and all the manifold works of the human spirit.
Tlie beliefs of man can, as we see, be looked at as movements of the human spirit arising out of his intercourse with the world in which he lives. Our accoimt of the matter would be most imperfect were we to confine our attention to man considered only as an individual. Belief is largely a social product. The working belief.s of the ci^-ilized man are largely due to inheritance. Without entering on the mysterious question of heredity, and without inquiry into the amount or quality of our organic inheritance, there is no doubt that a large propor- tion of our working beliefs arise out of our social environment, and out of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual atmosphere of the society around us. The language we learu to speak is the registration of the beliefs of tho.se who made and used it ; it tells the meaning which men found in the world and in their own life. It throbs with the life of all the past, i.': directive of the life of the present and the future. We learn the meanings as we learn to speak, and the meanings of those who speak to us become our meanings. Our beliefs and our meanings belong together. And ere we know it, we are furnished with a working body of beliefs which mainly represent the experience of our ancestors. As we speak with the accent of the family and the district, as our voices repeat tlie s^^'ing and cadence of the sentence, so we take over also the beliefs which sway the minds of those with whom we live. It is a mixed inheritance which we receive and actively appropriate. Beliefs unsifted, uncriticized, results of prejudice often, often of superstition, form part of the inherit- ance we receive. And the mind assents readily enough to the strange amalgam, f'or beliind the beliefs are the trust which the young have in the old, and the natural homage which they yield to experience.
The persistence of beliefs from age to age is itself a proof that they have a certain correspond- ence with reality. As all belief is a venture and a risk, failure to realize an expectation is a question- ing of its validity, and gives occasion for inquiry. Thus belief is always under the criticism of reality, and the stress of circumstance and the strain of living compel us to revise our beliefs and strive to make them correspond with tlie facts. It is a process that never ends ; and as experience widens and knowledge grows, the circle of our beliefs may contract in one direction and expanil in another. Beliefs may take the rank of universal and necessary convictions, or they may be classed as merely probable, or may sink to the level of bare possibility. Our postulates may pass into the region of certainty, or may have to be abandoned as mere possibilities.
Looking at the matter from a historical point of view, perliaps tlie most striking factor in the genesis and growth of belief is that of trust hi a person. Into this state of mind many elements enter. The earliest manifestation of belief among human beings is that which we call Animism, or the belief that all things have an inward life, and have their own nature and activity. A spirit dwells in all objects, whether it is in them origin- ally, or has been put into them by some process or act. Crude as this belief is, it yet has in it the germs of growth, and by refinement of its terms and by the removal of its grosser elements it has
become the spirit and the meaning of the higher philosophy of to-day. What is the Hegelian con- ception of the final correspondence of thought and reality, but a higher form of the original belief of man that the world around him, and the objects with which he came into contact, had a thought and meaning in them akin to those which he found in himself? It were an easy task to extend this observation to other philosophies, but space forbids.