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AUTHOR: 
 
 LEWIS, THOMAS ALBERT 
 
 TITLE: 
 
 JUDGEMENT AS BELIEF 
 
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 BALTIMORE 
 
 DA TE : 
 
 1910 
 
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 Lewis, Thomas Albert, 1878- 
 
 Judgment as belief ... Baltimore, 1910. 
 
 70 p. 23i"". 
 
 Thesis (ph. d.)— Johns Hopkins university. 
 Biographical sketch. 
 Bibliographical foot-notes. 
 
 1. Judgment (Logic) 2. Belief and doubt 
 
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JUDGMENT AS BELIEF 
 
 ■ \ 
 
 BY 
 
 Thomas Albert Lewis 
 
 A DISSERTATION 
 
 SUBMITTED TO THE BOARD OF UNIVERSITY STUDIES OF 
 
 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY IN CONFORMITY 
 
 WITH THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE 
 
 OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 BALTIMORE 
 June, 1910 
 
JUDGMENT AS BELIEF 
 
 BT 
 
 Thomas Albert Lewis 
 
 A DISSERTATION 
 
 SUBMITTED TO THE BOARD OF UNIVERSITY STUDIES OF 
 
 THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY IN CONFORMITY 
 
 WITH THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE 
 
 OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY. 
 
 BALTIMORE 
 June, 1910 
 
5 
 .5 
 
 lb 
 
 CONTENTS. 
 Chapter. page. 
 
 I. Introductory : The Problem and Method 5-7 
 
 II. Past Psychological Theory 7-20 
 
 Section i : Belief as vivacity of idea 8-ii 
 
 Section ii : Belief as inseparable association 12-14 
 
 Section iii : Belief as ultimate assent 14-1? 
 
 Section iv : Belief as action 17-20 
 
 III. Present Psychological Theory 20-42 
 
 Section i : Descriptive 20-34 
 
 A. Belief with feeling paramount 20-24 
 
 B. Belief with cognition indispensable 24-34 
 
 Section ii : Pathological 34-37 
 
 Section iii : Experimental 37-42 
 
 IV. Criticism 42-45 
 
 V. Reality- Feeling and Presumption 45-47 
 
 VI. Quasi-Belief and Presumption 48-54 
 
 VII. Belief and Judgment 54-68 
 
 Section i : Direct Evidence 56-64 
 
 A. Objective 56-62 
 
 B. Subjective 62-64 
 
 Section ii : Indirect Evidence 64-68 
 
 A. Interpretation of the Negative 64-65 
 
 B. Argument from Pragmatism 65-68 
 
 Conclusion 68-69 
 
 Biographical Sketch 70 
 
 1 
 
 1 
 
 1 
 
 \ 
 
 
 1 
 
V 
 
 I 
 
 
 JUDGMENT AS BELIEF 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 Introductory — The Problem and Method. 
 In a rather uncritical fashion, it may be said that present 
 theories of judgment fall into three classes. First, there are 
 those theories that put judgment safely beyond the change of 
 experience, beyond the power of growth and readjustment to 
 disturb ; secondly, there are those theories that are emphatically 
 averse to this exaltation of judgment upon a throne where it 
 shall forever rule over experience willy-nilly, but are rather in 
 favor of putting experience itself on the throne; and, thirdly, 
 there are those theories that strike a middle ground, that want 
 to keep reason on the throne so that experience will not run away 
 with itself into anarchy, but desire reason to be responsive to 
 
 evolving life. 
 
 The first sort of judgments are found in formal logic. It can 
 be said, with more or less truth, that this logic transcends actual, 
 growing experience, individual and social, and forms a closed 
 system of thought that sustains itself on a priori principles. It at- 
 tempts by the use of the syllogism to weave a fabric of truth out 
 of propositions that are not real fibers of existence, drawn from 
 this sphere or that, from the world of fact or fiction, or some 
 other. This logic, certain critics say, represents an endeavor to 
 think at large, to gain knowledge through sheer reasoning 
 with propositions as propositions, and not with propositions as 
 they openly assert or tacitly presuppose some world to which the 
 knowledge can refer. 
 
 The second kind of logical theory, which is the antipode of the 
 theory just considered, belongs to the pragmatists. This doc- 
 trine exactly reverses things— that is, it gives stumbling, striving 
 experience the place of honor and appoints judgment to serve. 
 The pragmatist withdraws allegiance from all logic that claims 
 to know more about guiding human happenings and events, as 
 together or in succession they join in creating a life of progress 
 and well-being, than the thought that is born of the travail of 
 
Y 
 
 those very events and happenings which it guides ; he cuts loose 
 from all the moorings of universal and necessary thought and 
 floats away on the "flux of things" with no fixed point, to the 
 right or to the left, behind or before, with no sun or stars in 
 the sky except when present experience is in danger of going 
 upon the rocks, and then it has to be a particular kind of sun or 
 star — one made to order for this very experience, no universal 
 sun or star being of the right uniqueness. To the pragmatist 
 judgment is a projected plan that has no virtue in harmony of 
 parts, but only in the way it works out in practice, the way it 
 mends experience. 
 
 The third style of theory, that held by theorists who aim to 
 strike a balance between the universalist and the particularist, 
 criticize the former for pretending to be universal and necessary 
 without being universal and necessary anywhere, and the latter 
 for not generalizing the facts sufficiently to be able to corral 
 them anywhere. To state this criticism in terms of present-day 
 politics, the universalist is a "stand-patter," who believes in tariflf 
 from its very innate reasonableness, and the particularist is a 
 "free-trader," who believes in letting each individual case settle its 
 own affairs, as the occasion gives wisdom. One group of theorists 
 over-emphasizes the authority of abstract thinking, and under- 
 emphasizes the authority of concrete, active life, while the other, 
 reversing the emphasis, commits the opposite error ; the one wor- 
 ships the certain past, the other worships the uncertain future. 
 The universality and necessity of formal logic are not false 
 categories in their nature, but only in their use, i. e., in being 
 lifted out of experience and deified; neither, on the other hand, is 
 changing experience (fluctuating phenomena) false per se, but 
 only when it refuses to take its place in some realm of existence. 
 It is a selective union of the two contrasting theories that is the 
 desideratum — experience must not be allowed to divorce itself 
 from relations, or relations from experience ; thinking and action 
 must join to satisfy all the facts of life. 
 
 The problem of bridging the abyss between abstract thought 
 and concrete fact and event has furnished the motive for the 
 investigation undertaken in this paper. Belief more than any- 
 thing else seems to give promise of accomplishing the feat of sat- 
 isfying conservative intellect and radical action, and that was 
 
 y 
 
 consequently the direction the investigation took. In this study my 
 presentation is largely re-presentation ; any originality it may have 
 will be found mainly in the sifting and correlating of earlier 
 thoughts on the subject. The paper is, indeed, a sort of census 
 of those minds that have originated the chief ideas on belief. The 
 census form consists of but two questions, first : "What is belief ?" 
 This was put to historical and present writers on psychology ; then 
 second, "Is judgment the same as belief?" and this was put to 
 writers on worth theory, epistomology, and logic. The answers 
 received to these questions, and the criticism and interpretation 
 of those answers will, accordingly, be found to constitute the 
 body of this investigation. 
 
 As to the results of the census : The first question which was 
 asked of Hume, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Bain, and as 
 many modern psychologists, met with replies which strongly 
 indicated that belief— whatever other attributes it might have- 
 has these two : namely, an objective reference to reality, and a 
 subjective reference to self. The second question, which was 
 asked of Baldwin, Meinong, Bradley, Brentano, Urban, the Prag- 
 matist, and others, received answers that tended to show that 
 judgment has the very characteristics found to be the character- 
 istics of belief— the subjective and objective characters. Bald- 
 win's Genetic Logic has the genesis of judgment and the genesis 
 of belief coinciding; Brentano, looking at judgment from the 
 psychological as Baldwin does from the epistomological, sees 
 judgment to be belief ; both these men and others hold that judg- 
 ment has existential reference ; and Urban, through his worth 
 theory, and the pragmatist, through his theory of logic, vie with 
 each other in giving emphasis to the subjective control in life 
 and judgment. Further support of the idea that judgment 
 embodies in overt expression the dual nature of belief appears in 
 a short criticism made of bare negation, the emptiness of 
 which is easily explained upon the theory that identifies beHef 
 and judgment, and in a longer criticism of pragmatism, which 
 aims to show that pragmatism supports the view of this paper— 
 for in failing to reach belief, the pragmatist likewise fails to reach 
 judgment, thus stopping at what Meinong, Baldwin and Urban 
 call assumption. 
 
y 
 
 8 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 Past Psychological Theory. 
 Section I: Belief As Vivacity of Idea. 
 
 What is meant by Hume's theory, that "belief is a lively idea 
 related to or associated with a present impression," will be most 
 quickly, as well as most clearly brought out if we begin by setting 
 forth the author's point of view. Perhaps the leading character- 
 istic of Hume's philosophy is his skepticism; at any rate, we 
 may be certain that in his treatment of belief, this motive leads. 
 Reason is declared to be impotent as soon as it presumes upon its 
 reputed authority ; it is then no longer able to produce conviction. 
 Outside of demonstrative and intuitive propositions, there is no 
 such thing as certain knowledge. As soon as we attempt to gain 
 truth inductively we land in the bog of '^matter of fact," where 
 knowledge can find no footing, and belief goes down in doubt.* 
 Reason is chained to skepticism, and in spite of herself, she must 
 give aid to her rival. The relation between belief and reason, as 
 Hume regarded it, is well put in the following passage : "When 
 I reflect on the natural fallibility of my judgment, I have less con- 
 fidence in my opinions than when I only consider the objects 
 concerning which I reason; and when I proceed still further 
 to turn the scrutiny against every successive estimate I make of 
 my faculties, all the rules of logic require a continual diminution, 
 and at last, a total extinction of belief and evidence." * 
 
 This brief consideration of the fundamental assumption of 
 Hume's system of philosophy brings us without surprise — in fact, 
 pretty much as a matter of course — to the statement that belief is 
 not demonstrable, is not a state of mind "grounded in evidence." 
 The more thought strives after judgments that give conviction of 
 truth, the less the conviction grows. For abstruse and tortuous 
 thinking serves only to drain away assurance. "It is not in the 
 peculiar nature of our ideas or in their order that we find 
 belief." The imagination with all its resources is not able so to 
 join ideas that the mind will be moved to assert the reality they 
 pretend. Nothing but artificial emptiness can ever result from 
 the vain abstractions of the dogmatist. If we have conviction 
 about matters of fact, thev are to be credited to the natural 
 
 * Hume : A Treatise on Human Nature ; p. 477. 
 
 * Ibid.; p. 474. 
 
 \ / 
 
 V 
 
 working of experience ; to habit. The author is quite explicit on 
 this point. "All reasonings concerning causes and effects," he 
 asserts, "are derived from nothing but custom, and belief is more 
 an act of the sensitive than of the cognitive part of our nature." ' 
 And again: "If belief were a simple act of thought, without any 
 peculiar manner of conception or the addition of a force and 
 vivacity, it must infallibly destroy itself, and in every case termi- 
 nate in a total suspense of judgment." ' The feeling of conviction 
 is, accordingly, "a sort of automatic governor," with which 
 nature has provided the human mind to save it from the despair 
 of utter doubt. The natural flow of life's happenings breeds in 
 us unavoidably the lively concept of an unquestioning judgment. 
 
 We have thus far found the pioneer student of the "nature of 
 that act of mind which persuades of the truth of what we con- 
 ceive" to be quite consistent in his conclusions. Belief is simple 
 and spontaneous like sensation, and it is no more to be had by 
 a quest into the land of abstract thinking than is sensation. It is 
 the "superior force of vivacity or soHdity or firmness or steadi- 
 ness" an idea has from being connected with the present impres- 
 sion ; in fine, belief is for Hume a precipitate of custom. 
 
 When, however, Hume undertakes to discover the causes of 
 belief, he seems forced to enlarge on his earlier conception of it. 
 In this connection, Carveth Read observes that "Hume's next 
 remark takes us deeper ; an impression of the senses communicates 
 its vivacity and force to all the ideas related to it. Hence, mem- 
 ory is distinguished from imagination by its greater vivacity and 
 also by the fixity and order of its ideas, derived from the order 
 of the original impressions. Further, the vigor and vivacity 
 of mental processes, and therefore, of belief, is favored by the 
 attention; by the associative principles of resemblance and con- 
 tiguity ; and more especially, by causation and by repetition and 
 custom. Even an idea of which we have forgotten the corres- 
 pondent impression may itself become the ground of belief and 
 inference ; because whatever firmness or vivacity it has it must be 
 able to bestow on whatever is related to it. 'Of these impressions 
 or ideas of memory, we form a kind of system, comprehending 
 whatever we remember to have been present, either to our internal 
 
 A Treatise on Human Nature; p. 475- 
 
 * Hume 
 ' Ibid. 
 
•/ 
 
 10 
 
 perception or senses ; and every particular of that system, joined 
 to the present impressions, we are pleased to call reality. But 
 the mind stops not here. For, finding that with this system of 
 perceptions, there is another connected by custom, or if you will, 
 by the relation of cause and effect, it proceeds to the consideration 
 of their ideas ; and as it feels that it is in a manner necessarily 
 determined to view these particular ideas, and that the custom 
 or relation by which it is determined, admits not of the least 
 change, it forms them into a new system, which it likewise digni- 
 fies with the title of realities. The first of the systems is the 
 object of memory and the senses ; the second, of the judgment. 
 Tis the latter principle which peoples the world, and brings us 
 acquainted with such existences as, by their removal in time and 
 place, lie beyond the reach of senses and memory. Hence, al- 
 though the passions and excitement of poetry and oratory, by 
 increasing the force and vivacity of ideas, influence our beliefs, 
 yet, by reflection and general rules, the understanding corrects 
 the appearances of the senses,' and determines the judgment 
 'even contrary to present observation and experience.' Thus, 
 in reviewing the causes of belief, Hume, starting from sensation 
 as its origin, has effected a transition to science as still more 
 
 coercive." * 
 
 That Carveth Read is justified in this criticism of Hume, is 
 quite manifest. Hume could not give a full exposition of belief 
 without incorporating in it an element of cognition. And, more- 
 over, there is yet further evidence that belief functions only in 
 cognitive situations. We have reference to the way Hume ac- 
 counts for the belief in the physical world. By a propensity of 
 the imagination, he explains, perceptions that are constant and 
 perceptions that are coherent are made a sufficient excuse for 
 setting up extra-mental existence. We may turn our backs upon a 
 tree or a house or the sun, but that does not destroy these objects, 
 for, turning about, we find them still. They are constant. Or 
 again, if our experience has to do with objects that suffer change 
 in a short lapse of time, we find that such objects vary as we 
 come back to them, as in the case of a fire burning in the grate ; 
 but that the change is coherent. From the constancy of the per- 
 ceptions of the sun, and the coherence in the perceptions of the 
 
 * Carveth Read : Metaphysics of Nature ; pp. 9 f • 
 
 II 
 
 fire, it is but a step to the positing of independent existence ; and 
 the imagination takes that step — the unauthorized step which 
 gains a "soul, and self, and substance." ' But this imagination, 
 this galley which after the oars of constancy and coherence have 
 ceased to ply, carries on its course without any new impulse — 
 what is it but reason, making inference beyond what is directly 
 experienced ; and what is the result but belief that is a conviction 
 of active thought, and not of passive sensation? T. H. Green 
 at this point criticises Hume as follows: "What then is the 
 impression and what the associated idea? *As the propensity 
 to feign the continued existence of sensible objects arises from 
 some lively impressions of the memory, it bestows a vivacity on 
 that fiction ; or, in other words, makes us believe a continued ex- 
 istence of body.' Well and good, but this only answers the first 
 part of our question ; it tells us what are the impressions in the 
 supposed cause of belief, but not what is the associated idea to 
 which their liveliness is communicated. To say that it arises 
 from a propensity to feign, strong in proportion to the liveliness 
 of the supposed impressions of memory, does not tell us of what 
 impression it is a copy. Such a propensity indeed would be an 
 impression of reflection, but the fiction itself is neither the pro- 
 pensity nor a copy of it. The only possible supposition left for 
 Hume would be that it is a 'compound idea ;' but what combina- 
 tion of 'perceptions' can amount to the existence of perceptions 
 when they are not perceived?"' 
 
 In explaining the cause of our belief in independent existence, 
 Hume plainly resorts to mental processes that are more than 
 mere sensations or feelings ; the "propensity of the imagination" 
 is not a passive inference, but an active one. Two "perceptions" 
 in memory may resemble each other so closely that the second 
 "fits with ease into the mold of the first ;" or again, two percep- 
 tions may rest upon each other in a dependence that makes the 
 second seem a continuation of the first; but nothing short of 
 thinking can relate the single perceptions, and by processes of 
 discrimination, comparison and associative integration, identify 
 them as being of one object. When taken objectively, not as 
 merely psychological process, belief is found really to have meant 
 
 * Hume: Human Nature; p. 484. 
 
 * T. H. Green : General Introduction to Hume's Treatise ; p. 262. 
 
12 
 
 for Hume, not simply a sentiment, but what Carveth Read calb 
 ''the subjective acceptance of reality."" 
 
 Section 11 : Belief as an Inseparable Association of Ideas. 
 
 Association, which in Hume modestly suggested itself as merely 
 one of the factors of belief, proclaims itself in James Mill the 
 sole cause of all human convictions. Belief is reduced to mere 
 mechanism, is ultra-rational, and besides, lacking attention, which 
 alone gives an outlet for psychic control, is barren of all spon- 
 taneity of feeling, of emotion, or of action. This theory in the 
 hands of Mill is made to explain with ease and admirable sim- 
 plicity all cases of belief from that in sensation to that in judg- 
 ment. For these phenomena are each a combination of parts. A 
 sensation, indeed, is somewhere and for someone. A present 
 sensation, of its very nature, makes the mind which has it say, "1 
 have it ; it's there ; and it's one." Within this complex of elements 
 (the ideas of position, of unity, and of myself) there obtain indis- 
 soluble relations, and therefore, ex hypothesi, belief. Thus, the 
 author remarks, "when I say, 'I have a sensation,' and say, *I 
 believe that I have it,' I do not express two states of conscious- 
 ness, but one and the same state." * 
 
 So much for simple cases, "where belief consists of sensation 
 alone or ideas alone," but what of belief in the more complicated' 
 cases, where "sensations, ideas, and associations are combined?" 
 How, for example, is our belief in the existence of objects present 
 to the senses, accounted for by the irresistible connection of ideas? 
 Here, as we shall find, the theory of inseparable association 
 completely expands itself. In going from belief in the isolated 
 sensation or idea to belief in the object of this sensation or idea, 
 consciousness finds the way long. But the distance is made 
 less difficult by being broken up into parts. The first part of this 
 course through experience serves to bring the different sense- 
 activities together, and thus to make possible that coalescence 
 which incorporates into one sensation (usually, that of sight) the 
 consequence of the rest ; and with the concrete result that in sub- 
 sequent time, when the eye catches sight of a "rose," it is not 
 merely a sensation of color that is had in consciousness, but also 
 
 ' James Mill: Analysis of the Human Mind; vol. i, p. 342. 
 ' Ibid ; p. 377' 
 
 r. 
 
 13 
 
 an anticipation, by instantaneous inference, of the feel of the 
 rose, of its distance away, of its smell or taste, etc., all these 
 correlated experiences springing up with the color experience by 
 association. In the language of the author, "we believe we should 
 have these (other) sensations. That is, we have the idea of 
 these sensations inseparably united one with the other, and insep- 
 arably united with ourselves as having them."* 
 
 At the end of our first advance toward the realization of a 
 belief in the "existence of external objects present to the senses," 
 we have the "conviction that, in such and such circumstances, we 
 should have such and such sensations." But the mind does not 
 stop here. The sensation that, under certain conditions, I believe 
 I may have, is an effect that owes its existence to a still more 
 fundamental existence acting as its cause. And by association 
 which obtains irresistibly between cause and effect, we are carried 
 beyond the sensations that fuse to make the rose of our ideas, to 
 the corresponding qualities that cause these sensations, and that 
 inhere in a single object or substratum which unites them as the 
 mind did the several sensations, but with the result that we have 
 a real objective rose. That this is the genesis and essence of a 
 sense object, and a sufficient apology for our ardent belief in it, 
 Mill stands ready to prove with the best of illustrations. 
 
 Belief in memory or testimony, in future events, and in a propo- 
 sition. Mill bases likewise on a mechanical linking together of 
 ideas.' And it may be said both of these phenomena and of those 
 of the external sense, that the conviction they elicit is explained 
 by this theory, not erroneously, but rather insufficiently. Mus- 
 cular resistance and uncontroUableness are of course the chief 
 factors in our belief in external reality. But Hume's "lively idea 
 related to or associated with a present impression" explains bet- 
 ter our belief in memory. Mill, in fact, begs the question, as 
 Adamson charges, when he states that the idea of a past experi- 
 ence and of myself as having had the experience, gives memory 
 its certainty ; for that contains in itself the very element which is 
 supposed to be got out of their conjunction. Of expectation, 
 Adamson remarks that ideas irresistibly suggested by present 
 experiences are not necessarily believed, and that many of our 
 
 * Mill : Analysis of the Human Mind ; p. 349- 
 
 * Analysis of the Human Mind; pp. 382-9. 
 
14 
 
 beliefs do not arise from such association/ Again, belief in 
 testimony is in reality belief in an event which is inseparably 
 associated as consequent to the testimony as antecedent. J. S. 
 Mill takes issue with his father at this point, touching both testi- 
 mony and proposition, the latter being for James Mill but the 
 automatic coupHng of two clusters of ideas that stand for the 
 same thing ; as for example, *'man and rational animal." "Every 
 assertion concerning things, whether in concrete or in abstract 
 language," runs the criticism, "is an assertion that some fact, or 
 group of facts, has been, is, or may be expected to be, found 
 wherever a certain other fact, or group of facts, is found." ' 
 
 In conclusion, it suffices to repeat that the "association theory" 
 is too narrow for the facts; that belief in physical objects would 
 scarcely come if there were only the intimate conjunction of 
 ideas "in our heads," and no stubborn, involuntary, obstructing 
 nature to bring it; that belief in past or future events scarcely 
 derives its feeling-force from such a mechanical operation; and 
 that to consider belief in an assertion as belief that two names are 
 names of the same thing, is, as J. S. Mill protests, to give an 
 inadequate explanation of the import of any assertion except those 
 that are classed as merely verbal.' Though belief is, as we are 
 endeavoring to establish, always cognitive, it is not to be con- 
 sidered as only cognitive; association is barren unless rooted in 
 apperception or a causal activity on the part of the psychological 
 subject. 
 
 Section III: Belief as Ultimate Assent. 
 
 What is John Stuart Mill's conception of the nature and cause 
 of belief, is revealed in the following short bit of criticism which 
 is substantially his: "We do not believe whatever comes into 
 our heads." * The associationahsts had laid down such principles 
 as the following : "All cases of belief are simply cases of indis- 
 soluble association. There is no generic diflference, but only a 
 difference in the strength of the association, between a case of 
 belief and a case of mere imagination. To believe a succession 
 
 
 15 
 
 or co-existence between two facts is only to have the ideas of the 
 two facts so strongly and closely associated, that we cannot help 
 having the one idea when we have the other." And it was these 
 claims of the "association psychology" which John Stuart Mill 
 had to face when he came to consider the subject of belief, and 
 to them it was that he opposed the pointed objection that we do 
 not attach reality-significance to whatever ideas tend to stick 
 together in our heads. "Assuredly, an association, however close, 
 between two ideas, is not a sufficient ground of behef ; is not 
 evidence that the corresponding facts are united in external na- 
 ture. The theory seems to annihilate all distinction between the 
 belief of the wise, . . . and the belief of fools." "" 
 
 In sense-experience "inseparable associations do not always 
 generate belief, nor does belief always require as one of its 
 conditions, an inseparable association; we can believe that to be 
 true which we are capable of conceiving or representing to our- 
 selves as false ; and false, what we are capable of representing to 
 ourselves as true." ' To explain and at the same time to enforce 
 this argument, the writer calls attention to the common observa- 
 tion, that when one railway train in motion is passing another at 
 rest, we are able, by withholding our vision from any third object, 
 to imagine the motion in either train. That of two contradictory 
 associations, we may believe either, is also attested. Mill thinks, 
 by the fact that astronomers and educated persons, though con- 
 vinced that the earth moves about the sun, are able to see "sunset 
 either as the earth tilting above ths sun, or the sun dipping below 
 the earth." Again, men who have studied Berkeley do not 
 believe they see the magnitude of an object.* 
 
 If association fails to prove its claim as being the source of our 
 sense assurance, it is next a question of how it vindicates itself in 
 memory and in judgment. That consciousness distinguishes be- 
 tween ideas of memory and the ideas of imagination, James Mill 
 thinks to be explicable on two grounds. In the first place, he 
 says it may be justly supposed that the distinction which is 
 originally made between the sensation and the idea would carry 
 
 * Encyclopedia Britannica; Qth edition; article on "Belief." 
 
 « J. S. Mill ; Critical notes to James Mill's Analysis ; vol. i, p. 4I7- 
 
 * Ibid.; vol. i, p. 417. 
 
 * Ibid.; p. 407- 
 
 * Critical Notes to James Mill's Analysis ; vol. I, p. 402. 
 ' Ibid; p. 407. 
 
 * Ibid; p. 418. 
 
 * Ibid.; pp. 407-11. 
 
1 
 
 i6 
 
 on into memory ; and in the second place, the idea of self, which in 
 all memory forms part of the complex idea, sets in contrast the 
 memory of sensation and the memory of a mere idea by entering 
 into the former as a "sentient self ;" and into the latter as a "con- 
 ceptive self ;" and "myself percipient and myself imagining or con- 
 ceiving, are two very different states of consciousness." * J. S. Mill 
 takes exception to this, and protests that he can form, by force of 
 creative thought, as vivid an idea of himself on the field of Shrews- 
 bury, listening to Falstaff in his characteristic soliloquy over the 
 body of Hotspur, as he can of himself in the presence of General 
 LaFayette, whom he once met. And as to memory and imagina- 
 tion being distinguished, so to speak, before they are born, i. p., 
 in their prototypal sensations and ideas, such a procedure but 
 passes the difficulty to the other hand; there is no solution to be 
 found in the distinction between the original sensation and the 
 idea (mere fiction of the mind) unless it be that the distinction 
 between memory and imagination is also primordial.* But such 
 an explanation reduces association to a work of supererogation. 
 
 In the case of the judgment of belief in the validity of 
 evidence, the younger Mill comes into close quarters with the 
 elder by conveying his criticism of association through the very 
 example which his father used to corroborate association; the 
 example, namely, of the sailors shipwrecked on a remote island, 
 trying to decide whether the footstep in the sand were that of a 
 man or a monkey. Their decision would be made, said James 
 Mill, only when the evidence was strong enough one way or the 
 other to resist all contradictory evidence, and to clinch its complex 
 of ideas in an indissoluble union. But this irresistible coalescence 
 of ideas is not absolutely essential for a judgment, says J. S. 
 Mill in reply, because, even after gaining conclusive evidence that 
 the footprint was that of a monkey, it would be possible for the 
 sailors to associate it with a man as having made it.* Accordingly, 
 the question still remains, What is belief ? "What is the difference 
 to our minds between thinking of reality, and representing to 
 ourselves an imaginary picture?" And this question John Stuart 
 Mill does not attempt to answer, if to answer means to explain 
 
 * Critical Notes to James Mill's Analysis; p. 420. 
 
 * Ibid. ; pp. 422 f. 
 " Ibid.; p. 434- 
 
 . ^ 
 
 17 
 
 in terms of something else. He simply says : "I confess that I 
 can perceive no escape from the opinion that the distinction is 
 ultimate and primordial." * 
 
 Of John Stuart Mill we may conclude, as we began, by saying 
 that belief (at least, of the educated) is not "baited" by every 
 accidental union of ideas in the mind, however close that union 
 may be. Not that we are never influenced in making up our con- 
 victions and giving our assent, by the mechanical linkings of our 
 thought, but that the power of these associations is not absolute ; 
 belief is larger than association. We pin our faith, not to insep- 
 arable association, he would say, for it is not inseparable ; but to 
 the "underlying uniformity of nature;"* and to it we risk our 
 all, believing that consequent will invariably follow antecedent. 
 
 Section IV: Belief as Action. 
 
 Whether it is that new facts are always coming above the 
 horizon of human experience, and indeed, of reality, and con- 
 founding old theories ; or simply that the facts existing are of too 
 vast a number (even the representative ones) to be brought within 
 the ken of a single life, is a question that is again in mind as 
 we come to the study of Alexander Bain. Phenomena that ought 
 to be classed under belief were running wild beyond the confines 
 of "sentiment or feeling," or of "inseparable association," or even 
 of "ultimate assent." It was Bain's ambition to project a theory 
 that would be thoroughly comprehensive. He accordingly de- 
 clared that at bottom, belief is action; "action is the basis and 
 ultimate criterion of reality." ' 
 
 To say with James Mill that conviction is an association of 
 ideas is to reduce belief. Bain argued, to a mental state that is 
 ultra-rational and static ; it is to forget that belief is a motor phe- 
 nomenon, and that it expresses itself in attitude or movement; it 
 is to make the mistake of thinking to find a true resultant when 
 one component, and that the main one, is left out. The correct 
 view of the question is to be had from the side, not of antecedent, 
 but of consequent. We have the clue to the real character of 
 belief in the connection between faith and works. "The practical 
 
 * Critical Notes to James Mill's Analysis, p. 412. 
 ' Ibid.; p. 436. 
 
 • Bain : The Emotions and the Will ; 4th edition, p. 506. 
 
 \ 
 
i8 
 
 19 
 
 test applied to a man's belief in a certain matter is his acting upon 
 it." ' This conception of the nature and origin of human assur- 
 ance, explained as it is by the working of our own experience, 
 had likewise no need for an a priori principle, whether that prin- 
 ciple be a lively idea or an ultimate assent. 
 
 Bain's position means more than that a conviction tends to — 
 or does — manifest itself in an outward action, if the exciting sit- 
 uation permits; it is no such tempered view as that; it means 
 that there is no conviction but has its essence in an accompanying 
 thought of possible or immediate action, however remote or in- 
 direct the latter may be. '*If I am thirsty, I may say that T 
 believe myself to be thirsty, because I act accordingly; I cannot 
 assure myself or any other person that I am not under a dream, 
 an imagination, or a hallucination, in any other way than by a 
 course of voluntary exertion corresponding to the supposed sen- 
 sation."* The author's determination to prove action indispen- 
 sable to belief appears still more boldly in a second case. He be- 
 lieves that he yesterday ran up against a wall to keep out of the 
 way of a carriage. There is no disposition to do anything in 
 consequence of this memory, yet, it is a conviction. And this 
 because, says Bain, "I feel that if there were any likelihood of 
 being jammed up in that spot again, I should not go that way 
 if I could help it."' It is a readiness to act that makes belief 
 "something more than fancy." Even the conviction that obtains 
 in the highest theoretical knowledge is amenable to the action- 
 theory. The reason that such knowledge is seldom reduced to 
 action is "not want of faith, but want of opportunity." * 
 
 Such stress as we have found Bain laying upon the action 
 element in belief is almost enough to eclipse from view any other 
 element (or elements) it may have; assurance attaches to volun- 
 tary activity; it attaches also to spontaneous activity. "Our 
 natural state of mind; our primitive start, is tantamount to full 
 confidence ;" "in its essential character, belief is a phase of 
 our active nature." ' But we are luckily saved from such a mis- 
 
 • Bain 
 
 • Ibid. 
 
 • Ibid. 
 
 4 
 
 Emotions and the Will ; 4th edition, p. 508. 
 p. 508. 
 
 Ibid.; p. 507. 
 • Notes to Mill's Analysis: pp. 394 ff. 
 
 understanding of the author by coming upon statements that 
 definitely disclaim place for experience in a primordial impulse ; 
 mere persistence in action that is bringing pleasure or alleviating 
 pain, has no accompanying state of confidence. Activity that is 
 itself its own end, gives no basis for the expectation of attaining 
 something remote, by a certain means ; and for Bain the only kind 
 of confidence possible is confidence in means to an end.* It is "a 
 fiction or a figure to speak of belief in a present reality." ' The 
 author accordingly remarks that "while, therefore, action is the 
 basis and ultimate criterion of belief, there enters into it as a 
 necessary element some cognizance of the order of nature, of the 
 course of the world.' 
 
 By the cognitive constituents necessarily present in all belief 
 is not meant, however, a reasoning state of mind ; i. e., not this 
 alone. We do not wait for the reflections of experience and the 
 consequent inseparable association before we launch our trust; 
 "belief follows the absence of contradiction." "The natural mind 
 has a predetermined bias to action," but let thought open ever 
 so small an outlet, action breaks forth into belief ! Belief at its 
 maximum, too, for larger experience but sets up checks and 
 indicates the direction of safe travel. Thus, although convictions 
 function only where there is some knowledge, the amount re- 
 quired at the beginning is remarkably meager — just a mere obser- 
 vation of some sequence in nature, such as seen, for example, by a 
 young child which, given sweetmeats at one time, expects the 
 same again upon the second appearance of the donor. This nice 
 balance for action, for motor response, seen in its simplicity in 
 animals, children and savages, Bain considers the leading fact in 
 belief; a fact which he terms "Primitive Credulity," or "an im- 
 potence of thought;" the latter, because, "without some positive 
 interference from without, there is no other way of doing or 
 thinking." * 
 
 There is no need for words concerning the importance of the 
 "action theory." Its value is attested by the place it occupies, 
 more or less modified, in the theories of today. This conception 
 
 * Emotions and Will; pp. 505 f. 
 
 ' Notes to Mill's Analysis; p. 342. 
 ' Emotions and Will; p. 506. 
 
 * Ibid.; p. 537. 
 
 if 
 
20 
 
 of belief gives a just and needed emphasis to the practical aspect 
 of human experience. It suggests. the "passional nature" of 
 James, and the "motor attitude or accommodation" of Baldwin. 
 Moreover, the cognitive element which attaches to belief justifies 
 the statement that for Bain belief was of reality. To have belief 
 in water as being of a certain compound means, he says, that I 
 believe I should, if I analyzed water, find those elements. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 , Present Psychological Theory. 
 
 In this division, we shall pursue the same method as in the 
 preceding one ; the different writers to be treated will be presented 
 both constructively and critically. But whereas in the foregoing 
 chapter, we have been considering theory as attaching to a partic- 
 ular individual, we shall now consider the various theories of 
 belief as represented by a number of individuals. This has its 
 advantages, and can really be done in a general way ; for present 
 theories of belief can scarcely resist classification under feeling, 
 intellection, or will. A second variation on the procedure of the 
 first division will be the supplementing of the more general psy- 
 chological treatment of belief with brief reports of the limited 
 data which have been gathered in pathological and experimental 
 investigations. 
 
 Section I: Descriptive. 
 (A) Belief with Feeling Paramount. 
 
 Walter Bagehot and Professor William James may be looked 
 upon as continuing in a modified and developed form the theory 
 of Hume, with the important difference, however, that they as- 
 sign to the intellect and the active nature a share in the deter- 
 mination of belief, while giving the leading role to feeling. 
 
 Belief is recognized by Bagehot as having an intellectual as 
 well as an emotional element ; * but not having such a preponderat- 
 ing intellectual element as the "quiet, careful people who have 
 written our treatises" give it. And it is to bring forward the 
 emotional side of the subject that the writer expresses himself 
 so emphatically in defining belief as "emotional conviction. 
 
 * Bagehot: The Emotion of Conviction; Literary Studies. 
 
 >» 
 
 ■^ 
 
 I 
 
 21 
 
 "Probably," he forecasts, "when the subject is thoroughly exam- 
 ined, 'conviction' will be proved to be one of the intensest of 
 human emotions." Indeed, some such view of assurance seems 
 necessary to explain the tenacity or burning certainty of those 
 convictions that assert themselves after the intellectual incentive 
 has gone, or that transcend that incentive. Only thus could the 
 author himself account for the fact that he still remained suscepti- 
 ble to the conviction that he should be "member for Bridge- 
 water," when years had passed since his defeat. And only thus 
 can we account for such conduct as that of Calif Omar, who 
 burnt the Alexandrian library upon the flimsy pretext that, "All 
 books which contained what is not in the Koran are dangerous; 
 all those which contain what is in the Koran are useless." 
 
 The writer thinks his position, that belief is not a "purely in- 
 tellectual matter," further established by our experience in 
 dreams "where we are always believing, but scarcely ever argu- 
 ing;" and by the abnormal belief that the insane suffer as fixed 
 illusions, a belief that has a degree of intensity never realized by 
 the sane. But the argument he makes the most of in this connec- 
 tion is that by which he endeavors to show that certain ideas 
 possess of themselves the power to generate assurance without 
 the exercise of the intellectual process ; the ideas, namely, that are 
 clear, or intense, or constant, or interesting. These ideas are 
 designated as tendencies to irrational conviction and adhesive 
 states of consciousness. 
 
 These four groups of ideas, moreover, give Bagehot a basis 
 of attack on Bain's sweeping assertion that belief is identical with 
 our "activity or active disposition," and support his assumption 
 that children are born believing, and become skeptical only with 
 the checks and disappointments of hard, non-acquiescing exper- 
 ience. Doubt is defined as "hesitation in these ideas, produced by 
 collision." This collision, however, never puts us fully on our 
 guard against these insidious ideas, and thus, we retain even in 
 our adult, hesitating stage, "vestiges of our primitive, all-believing 
 state." 
 
 Miss Ettie Stettheimer, in a critical study entitled "The Will 
 to Believe as a Basis for a Defense of Religious Faith," * quoting 
 
 * Archives of Philosophy; edited by Frederick J. E. Woodbridge; 
 No. 2, December, 1907; p. 64. 
 
II 
 
 22 
 
 from Hans Cornelius, says : 'There are two possible methods for 
 a research into the conditions of belief. One may start with a 
 fixed definition of the real, and then deduce from it what marks 
 our ideas must show in order to be characterized as real; or, 
 one may proceed inductively, and search for the common qualities 
 of those ideas which are generally believed, and thus determine 
 the nature of reality." She then goes on to say that James at- 
 tempts to carry through the second of these methods. And her 
 observation is as serviceable as it is true. For to gain any com- 
 prehension of Professor James' treatment of belief without first 
 placing one's self on the side of the Ego (the common-sense Ego), 
 so one can see what ideas it chooses as real, would be a thing 
 as impossible as undertaking to make the cart pull the horse; 
 because the force that decides reality is not external, but internal. 
 But even with this suggestion to guide the reader through the 
 chapter on the "Perception of Reality,"* he yet meets with diffi- 
 culties. One such perplexity is as to the way the experience of 
 doubt could ever arise to vex the Ego, if the Ego decided the 
 truth of things wholly by the postulate of its own inner nature. 
 It is quite natural for the new-born mind to turn the hallucina- 
 tory candle into a reality, since there is no other object present 
 in consciousness to protest. But it is quite different when the 
 world has grown hard and stern, and squarely contradicts the 
 child in his natural conceit ; the tables are then turned. And it is 
 in such and only such a situation that the congenital tendency to 
 accept without question anything and everything, becomes tem- 
 pered with curbing doubts. Having found the danger of a pas- 
 sive acquiescence in the lead of the emotions or active nature, 
 the child no longer trusts everything ; about some things he takes 
 a second thought. Without recognizing stubborn controlling facts 
 over against us, it is a mystery why the boy with his winged 
 horse should ever meet with contradicting conditions. Indeed, 
 Professor James, as Miss Stettheimer asserts, does seem almost 
 forced to declare for space-reality, a world extra mentem, simply 
 to have something for belief to go out upon. She refers to the 
 passage in the Principles of Psychology where he speaks of the 
 candle existing "over there in space, related to our reals."" 
 
 * James: Principles of Psychology; vol ii, p. 318. 
 
 • Archives of Philosophy; edited by Frederick J. E. Woodbridge; 
 No. 2, December, 1907; p. 69. 
 
 ' 
 
 23 
 
 And following this out logically, one could say of the illusory 
 candle that it became unreal for the experience having it, only 
 when it was found not to exist in real space alongside of other 
 
 reals. 
 
 If, however, there are times when the author's presentation of 
 behef as the "mental state, or function of reality."' tries com- 
 prehension even beyond its capacity, there are other times, many 
 of them, when the understanding moves along with facility. The 
 consideration of belief as an emotion furnishes an example of 
 the latter. In this, James agrees with Bagehot, and says that 
 "in its inner nature, belief, or the sense of reality, is a sort of 
 feeling allied to the emotions more than to anything else." ' But 
 it is concerning the circumstances "in which we think things real," 
 that Professor James carries on most of his investigation; for 
 about all that can be said of belief as the "sense of reality," is that 
 it is a state of consciousness sui generis, a feeling that feels like 
 itself. How important a part is accorded the emotions in the 
 matter of conviction may be seen from two or three quotations. 
 "Every exciting thought in the natural man carries credence with 
 it." ' "The whole history of witchcraft and medicine is a com- 
 mentary on the facility with which anything which chances to be 
 conceived is believed the moment the belief chimes in with the 
 emotional mood." "Behef consists in the emotional reaction of 
 the entire man upon an object." Mere appearance, bare appeal 
 to the intellect, is not enough to "sting" us with assurance. In 
 order to move us to belief, an object must be interesting and im- 
 portant ; it must come to the mind, as Hume said, as a lively and 
 active idea. This is attested by our "everlasting partiality to the 
 sense-world, or the world of our practical life." * How, at their 
 height, emotions lead us to believe the first thing that comes to 
 mind, is instanced by the unreasoned conviction of the mob. 
 
 In the first paragraph of this brief review of James' theory of 
 belief, it was said that the only way to compass the author's 
 meaning is by the way of the Ego. Let us then adopt that course. 
 
 * James: Principles of Psychology; vol. ii, p. 283. 
 ' Ibid. 
 
 » Ibid. ; pp. 286 ff. 
 
 * Ibid.; p. 294 f. 
 
24 
 
 We are immediately met with the asserXion that the "fons et origo 
 of all reality is the Self." W hile Stout and Baldwin posit two 
 controls, inner activity and outer limitation, James would place 
 the whole matter in the hands of one control— the Self. He 
 might be considered as saying in Shakesperian style, "It is not 
 in our objects but in ourselves that we are believers." "Certam 
 postulates are given in our nature ; and whatever satisfies those 
 postulates is treated as if real." ' This prerogative of the Ego 
 reaches its climax at the end of the chapter on 'Terception ot 
 Reality," and belief and will are said to be exactly the same states 
 of mind. ''Will and Belief, in short, meaning a certain relation 
 between objects and the Self, are two names for one and the 
 same psychological phenomenon." ' The only difference between 
 them is physiological ; which seems to mean that in both these 
 phenomena there is a "consent" to the existence of the object, a 
 turning to it in an interested, active, emotional way, but that m 
 W^ill there is added a new physiological element, that of effort. 
 
 Professor James summarizes his whole position in one short 
 sentence, as f olllows : "The most compendious possible formula, 
 perhaps, would be that our belief and attention are the same 
 fact." • He offers this definition with the hope of incorporating 
 into a single view all the earlier views that persist each by virtue 
 of a certain truth, but a partial truth ; the view of James Mill, 
 of Bain, and of Sully. "For the moment, what we attend to is 
 reality; attention is a motor reaction, and we are so made that 
 sensations force attention from us." 
 
 (B) Belief with Cognition as an Indispensable Element. . 
 As representative of those who consider that belief can exist 
 only on some kind of cognitive basis, we shall examine the views 
 of Sully, Stout, and Baldwin. These writers, coming at the 
 problem from two dift'erent directions, bringing evidence from 
 both the analytic and the genetic sources, and finding in it all a 
 unit-signification, are able to present argument of double weight 
 And for them, belief has emphatically a reference to an extra^ 
 mental reality, to a reality beyond the mere ideas that are in 
 
 * Principles of Psychology; vol. II, p. 317- 
 " Ibid.; p. 321. 
 
 • Ibid. ; p. 322. 
 
 f ' 
 
 *■ • 
 
 25 
 
 consciousness; belief for them has its roots, at least its main 
 roots, in the representativeness of knowledge. They do not say, 
 however, that belief is knowledge and nothing else; that it has 
 no intrinsic nature of its own, but is merely a shadow or reflec- 
 tion ; they contend only that belief and cognition operate always 
 in conjunction. This view does not underrate conviction in its 
 inner active nature; its impulse, its propelling spontaneity, its 
 character as the focal expression of all that is creative in con- 
 scious life; it simply gives ground upon which conviction can 
 support itself. If belief spun its object out of its own nature, 
 then there would be neither object nor belief, for all would be 
 an objectless immediacy. 
 
 Sully's point of view toward belief is best set forth in his 
 work, "Sensation and Intuition." in the chapter, "Belief: Its 
 Variations and Its Conditions." In this chapter he takes up the 
 subject in an acute and exhaustive manner, working out, perhaps, 
 the most complete psychological research yet made in this field. 
 His primary assumption is that "every idea involves a mental 
 impulse to realize the corresponding sensation," and that this 
 psychic fact is the last "inaccessible stage" in the history of 
 belief.* By notable skill in choosing pertinent illustrations, he is 
 able to marshal an array of evidence sufficient to turn his assump- 
 tion into a very credible theory. The experience of certainty has 
 thus, even in its germ form, an objective mark or condition. As- 
 surance when in its embryo state gives promise of that objective 
 development expressed by the writer in these words : "To believe 
 means to believe in something ; and in order to do this, a definite 
 idea of the thing believed in is necessary." ' Or, again, by saying 
 that "the reference of thought beyond itself to a real object is a 
 part, and a very important part, of what is meant by belief." * 
 That the exercise of cognition is a prerequisite condition of any 
 and every experience of conviction, becomes more and more mani- 
 fest as belief, rising out of mere objective tendency, i. c, unwitting 
 acceptance, develops from simple expectation and reflective antici- 
 pation to logical conviction. As experience unfolds in growth, it 
 defines, differentiates and magnifies itself ; features that were at 
 
 * Sully: Sensation and Intuition; p. 81. 
 ' Sensation and Intuition; p. 81. 
 
 • Human Mind, p. 87. 
 
26 
 
 27 
 
 first vague and indistinct become mapked and positive. If we 
 trace briefly the genetic investigation Sully makes of belief in the 
 chapter referred to, we shall meet results that show the relation 
 between knowing and believing to be very intimate. 
 
 We remember an earlier statement of the author's assumption 
 with respect to the origin of human certainty and confidence: 
 ''Every idea involves a mental impulse to realize the corresponding 
 sensation." But it may be well to emphasize another: ''Belief 
 arises," we read, "from the inherent tendency of the idea to 
 approximate in character and intensity to the sensation of which 
 it is the offspring.'" "In the instinctive transitions of mind 
 from a recurring idea to the actual sensation typified by it, there 
 seem to present themselves the first awkward, but necessary, trials 
 of human faith.'" A simple and unique mental force is here 
 posited, but it is attached to the idea as a sort of craving for the 
 "real" which the idea knows about, but confesses not to have. 
 And that this is not a fancy but a fact is strikingly attested, as 
 Sully points out, by the conduct of higher animals, of children, of 
 uncultured men and of savage races. The young mind easily 
 yields to illusion ; it is constantly taking vivid ideas for impres- 
 sions. And the savage cannot resist attributing personal life to 
 stumps and rocks and logs of human form. Conditions of mind 
 that in the mature life can be brought about only by artificial 
 means, by some drug, such as an opiate, occur in early life quite 
 naturally, and for the reason that sensation and idea are not far 
 from each other in intensity. At this immature stage, we are 
 told, consciousness has not yet really objectified its experiences, 
 not divided space and time into segments or points of reference ; 
 not even made the grand divisions of known and unknown ; past 
 and present ; actual and possible. 
 
 To this first level of belief, Bain objected, and criticised Sully 
 for not takmg account of the order and sequence in nature— facts 
 which the former thinks essentials, and correlates of all assur- 
 It is true that to think of an experience having none of 
 
 ance. 
 
 those large orienting categories, is to think of an experience set 
 afloat, so to speak, without any bearings. But that may be for 
 the reason that we are looking back from the high ground of 
 
 * Human Mind ; p. 484* 
 ' Ibid. ; p. 83. 
 
 logical organization. At any rate. Sully maintained that these 
 ''bearings" take on definite character only with the further de- 
 velopment of experience ; only, that is, with the arrival of antici- 
 pation and its consequent disappointment. And certainly that 
 argument is difficult of refutation which holds that disappointed 
 expectation precedes and provokes reflection upon the past, upon 
 the relation of antecedent to consequent. As long as the child is 
 not deceived in his expectations, but always finds an orange the 
 thing his idea pictured, just so long is he going to be ignorant 
 of sequence in nature, and happy in his ignorance. It is only 
 when the orange proves to be, not an orange, but a painted ball, 
 which is not constituted of juicy bites that the child begins to 
 scrutinize its shape, color, texture and other attributes. Nothing 
 but the thwarting of credulous expectation will drive the young 
 mind to consider the basis of his definite anticipation, and give 
 him incentive to look into the deeper significance of antecedent 
 and consequent, which Bain calls the correlate of assurance. * It 
 alone will awaken this "conceptive faculty or imagination," which 
 is the other grand influence (besides disappointment) in trans- 
 forming our first overweening trust into deliberate conclusions of 
 reason, and which transforms an indeterminate, formless world 
 into a world having all the form and meaning given by the 
 great categories of co-existence, sequence, and permanent exist- 
 ence. 
 
 Our study of James Sully thus far may be summarized by say- 
 ing that belief demands as the necessary condition of its advent 
 into life, some rudimentary experience, "more especially some 
 sensation," ' and that this meager experience becomes in mat'.tre 
 belief, definite, objective fact, existing for presentation as per- 
 manent, independent objects. This in psychological belief is the 
 sa^ne as in logical. "Belief in a proposition," he says, "is a belief 
 in its truth ; that is, in its correspondence with the actual relation 
 of things." ' But the question we want to raise now is, What of 
 inseparable associations, emotion, action — does Sully count them 
 as conditions of belief. The answer is short — he does, but not 
 as indispensable conditions. He accepts J. S. Mill's criticism of 
 
 * Human Mind; p. 93. 
 
 • Ibid. ; p. 81. 
 
 ■ Outlines of Psychology; p. 398. 
 
28 
 
 inseparable association (it does not account for our choosing be- 
 tween memory and imagination) against identifying belief with 
 emotion. He reasons thus: "The mode of its (belief's) origin, 
 the impartial range of its objects, and the fact that it holds com- 
 mon relation to all the emotions properly so called, renders it 
 very desirable to classify them together." ' With respect to the 
 claim of the action-theory to account for all human conviction, 
 he remonstrates that there are in our experience beliefs that 
 cannot possibly be explained on the basis of action; as for ex- 
 ample, the case when the expectation of coming harm becomes 
 paralyzing terror. The raw material of belief is not to be 
 found in feeling, emotion, or action; belief is ultimate. Feeling 
 and action, however, have an effect on assurances, but not di- 
 rectly ; only mediately, through ideas, which alone have a direct 
 bearing upon conviction. Comprehensively and compactly put, 
 belief at its full includes for this author intellectual representation, 
 feeling and active impulse, and if it be of the ideal kind, also a 
 certain amount of restraining will. 
 
 Stout undertakes an explanation of belief from an analytical 
 point of view, and works out a theory of much breadth. This 
 theory is sufficiently comprehensive to include both the action- 
 theory of Bain and the association theory of James Mill. Bain 
 held that the "relation of belief to activity is expressed by saying 
 that what we believe, we act upon." This Stout approves. There 
 is no question that a confident state of mind tends to express 
 itself in action; conviction and activity are really correlated to 
 each other. Bain's mistake was not that he made his theory too 
 sweeping, but that he did not make it sweeping enough. Limiting 
 action to phenomena extrinsic to the mind was where he made his 
 mistake. "He considers only trains of muscular movements, pro- 
 ducing a corresponding train of effects in the material environ- 
 ment. But even where such trains exist, the mental action with 
 which belief is connected, does not consist in these evert move- 
 ments, but in the prior process of framing a plan. But there is 
 no essential difference between this inward process and that by 
 which we work out a theoretical result without reference to ex- 
 ternal action." ' And so, whether the experience be theoretical or 
 
 { 
 
 Sensation and Intuition; p. loa 
 * Stout; Analytical Psychology; vol II, p. 237. 
 
 29 
 
 practical, it makes no difference; the same principle applies in 
 one case as well as in the other ; confidence and action are cor- 
 relates. In either case, we act only because we are thus trusting 
 the means to the end. The action-theory, made thus thorough- 
 going, becomes immune to a large part of the criticism that 
 proved the position of Bain vulnerable; such criticism, for ex- 
 ample, as that "psychical activity seems physiologically to con- 
 sist in muscular activity," and "that it will rain tomorrow seems 
 almost the same as buying an umbrella today."' In the opinion 
 of Stout, "it is needless to say that the theoretical series must 
 be through and through constituted by beliefs ; and that our con- 
 fidence in the result depends on our confidence in the antecedent 
 steps. . . .The whole body of beliefs forms a system of 
 interdependent parts; it is the coherence of the system which 
 constitutes the possibility of its component elements." ' 
 
 It is, of course, plainly to be seen that this active aspect of 
 belief is in intimate relation with the author's "Conative and 
 Cognitive Synthesis." We see it in the following statements: 
 **A practical need is one which demands for its ultimate satis- 
 faction an actual change produced in the environment, or in the 
 relation of the organism to the environment ; or at least, in the con- 
 sciousness of the power to produce such change. Theoretical 
 needs, on the contrary, require for their ultimate satisfaction only 
 an extension of knowledge and removal of doubt without altera- 
 tion in the things known." And again: "In the beginning of 
 mental life, practical needs are paramount. Purely intellectual 
 curiosity disengages itself from these by a process of gradual 
 evolution." ' The fact that "the growth of our intellectual nature 
 consists in the growing definiteness and determinateness of our 
 'active' nature," ' is a presupposition of all belief, is quite manifest 
 from the criticism which Stout prefers against Bain when he, 
 perhaps in an attempt to take account of positive convictions, 
 modifies his original theory of the nature of belief, and declares 
 the correct view to be "that belief is a primitive disposition to 
 f ollow out any sequence that has once been experienced, and to 
 
 * Bradley: Logic; pp. 18 ff. 
 
 ' Stout: Analytical Psychology; vol II, p. 237. 
 
 * Analytical Psychology; vol. II, pp. 93 f. 
 
 * Ibid.; p. 237. 
 
30 
 
 expect results." ' Stout's objection is that "this statement im- 
 plies a theoretical interest which has no existence in the rudimen- 
 tary stages of mental life." The basic fact that we have to 
 remember as we cross over to the "passive aspect" of the theory 
 in hand, is that both the practical and theoretical activity is di- 
 rected to an end. and depends upon the condition of confidence in 
 the intervening steps or means ; that as practical conation is solely 
 directed to the effecting of an unobstructed course for trains 
 of extrinsic changes, mediating a desired object, just so theoretical 
 conation is solely directed to the attainment of an unobstructed 
 course for trains of thought, likewise mediating a desired end. 
 
 Belief as limitation of activity, and belief as a condition of 
 activity, are maintained by Stout to be co-extensive and inter- 
 dependent. They are the two sides of the same shield. Indeed, 
 confidence would be an impossibility but for the restraining cir- 
 cumstances set up by nature, requiring definite means to reach a 
 definite end. It is as much a truth that we cannot experience 
 conviction without the force of limiting conditions as it is that we 
 cannot walk without walking upon something. 'The steps of a 
 process, issuing in a given result, are fixed independently of us. 
 In devising means to an end, therefore, we are not free to make 
 what mental combinations we will." * 
 
 Limitation of subjective activity, then, as we are distinctly told, 
 is an indispensable factor in assurance. But what does this 
 imply? How belief leads to action, we know, but here the situ- 
 ation is reversed, and belief follows action. The answer, how- 
 ever, is not difficult. By the limitative, or passive aspect of 
 truth, is meant simply the recognition of an objective control. 
 The control by which we lay hold of the means, and bring our- 
 selves to a desired end is an inner control ; but the control which 
 makes us consider means, bringing us up with a tug when we 
 neglect such consideration, and which early convinces credulous 
 natures that "wishing is not having," that control is outer. Bin 
 outer does not mean something that is foreign to our subje-tive 
 experience; on the contrary, it is a very present fact which as- 
 serts its rights both in presentation and representation, directly, 
 as sense objects, or indirectly as determining ideas. 
 
 * Analytical Psychology ; vol. II, p. 238. 
 ' Ibid.; p. 239. 
 
 31 
 
 "The limitation of subjective activity," the author writes, "may 
 take two distinct forms. We find ourselves forced to think in 
 a given manner, in spite of an attempt to think otherwise. In this 
 case, the limitation is an actual opposition or obstruction. This 
 happens whenever the mind entertains the possibility of an alter- 
 native which it is ultimately driven to reject. On the other hand, 
 there may be no attempt to think otherwise.' As a typical ex- 
 ample of the latter, we may think of a man feeling the noon-day 
 sun beating upon his head. The mind here entertains no possi- 
 bility of an alternative. "There is no question that the Sun is 
 shining." The former type of limitation — that of opposition or 
 obstruction to subjective activity, is instanced by the child sucking 
 at an empty bottle, or by the inability of the schoolboy to "think 
 *5 plus 6 equals 12' if he separates the '6' into its units and 
 adds them one by one to '5'." ' In broad outline the fields repre- 
 sented by these three illustrations (which show the significance 
 of the passive side of belief) are as follows: "Impressional 
 Experience," "Physical Resistance," "Inseparable Association," 
 and indirectly, "Desire" and "Imagination." 
 
 A striking feature of Baldwin's treatment of belief, is his 
 endeavor to give the phenomenon full cognitive standing by elim- 
 inating its undeveloped or germ-forms, and segregating them 
 under a separate name: "Reality-Feeling." This represents a 
 distinction in belief phenomena that for a long time has been 
 coming. And the distinction is an important one. For, as long as 
 the term Belief was allowed to continue its old significance, and 
 to include a range and diversity of meaning that no single word 
 could compass, there was no hope of keeping any fences in the 
 field ; destructive criticism had too much license. 
 
 Definite treatment of the "Reality-Feeling" is deferred to a 
 later chapter, where it will be taken up more specifically. The 
 treatment here will be general, only so much as it required to 
 make the author's theory clear in its other parts. There is a 
 similarity between the import of reality-feeling and the import 
 of an earlier expression we came upon in Bain— that of "Primi- 
 tive Credulity." Jn Sully, also, we found belief-phenomena of a 
 nature resembling this; it is the phenomena that appear in the 
 
 * Analytical Psychology; vol. II, p. 239. 
 ' Ibid. ; p. 243. 
 
1. 
 
 32 
 
 mental life of the child before he has become, through disap- 
 pointed anticipations, skeptical and reflective; it might be called 
 the phenomena of the pre-belief period; the stage of natural 
 trust and of unthinking confidence. But reality-feeling, though it 
 has prototypes, is not without variation upon these prototypes. 
 The phrases, ''primitive start," ''over-weening confidence," "pris- 
 tine assurance," used as synonyms for "primitive credulity," are 
 scarcely synonymous with the sense of the following: "The 
 phrase, reality-feeling, denotes the fundamental modification of 
 consciousness which attaches to the presentative side of sensa- 
 tional states; the feeling which means, as the child afterwards 
 learns, that an object is really there. . . .the idea which has 
 the reality feeling may be said to have its own guarantee of its 
 reality ; it is a 'given' and my feeling of it is direct acquaintance 
 with it."' There is here something besides Bain's restless im- 
 pulse toward the real ; there is also a passive consciousness of the 
 real. "Reality-feeling at this early stage is simply the fact of feel- 
 ing. . . Existence is simply Presence; but Presence is Exist- 
 ence, and whatever is in consciousness is real." ' Physiologically 
 explained, reality-feeling (and also, unreality-feeling, or absence- 
 feeling, which is the negative pole) means that "any sensory pro- 
 cess has its feeling of reality element ; and any tendency to move- 
 ment has its unreality-feeling in the sensory process which satis- 
 fies it." • 
 
 A second salient characteristic, perhaps the most fundamental in 
 Baldwin's system, is his "Co-efiicient of Reality." The meaning, 
 taken in its general significance, denotes any objective stimulus, 
 in whatever realm, that, coming in conjunction with some impulse 
 or desire or expectation, gives to consciousness a feeling of satis- 
 faction and conviction of reality ; while, in particular application, 
 it means a real, sensory object, and not a phantom ; an honest act, 
 and not a hypocritical one ; a picture that proves to be beautiful, as 
 anticipated, and not unattractive ; or, it means that mark by which 
 I recognize an image as representing a former state of conscious- 
 ness, or belief, in a thought which has "consistency, or the ab- 
 sence of pr esentational or conceptional contradiction." 
 
 * Baldwin: Feeling and Will; p. 149. 
 
 * Ibid.; p. 150. 
 
 * Ibid.; p. 153. 
 
 ■ 
 
 41 
 
 33 
 
 Through the memory co-efficient of reality (also, that of 
 thought, as we shall see later), Baldwin has been able to free 
 himself from the sense-world, which has always lorded it over 
 those who would not forsake the particular. Contrary to Stout, 
 he holds that it is through memory, and not through the direct 
 impression of the senses, that we obtain our knowledge of more 
 than the mere resistance of an object ; that is to say, of its inde- 
 pendent persistence. "To a creature without memory, reality 
 would be simply successive resistances; but with memory as 
 recognition, comes also persistence." " Baldwin would include in 
 his "co-efficient of externality," more than Stout's sensational 
 test, and more also than the possibility (memory) test of J. S. 
 Mill. Either of these positions taken alone is inadequate. He 
 writes : "An adequate formula, to do justice to both, would have 
 to run something like this : belief in external reality is a feeling of 
 the necessary character of sensations of resistance, and of my 
 ability to get such sensations again at any time."' Baldwin thus 
 obtains two kinds of present reality: "Present external reality, 
 guaranteed by its independence of my will ; and present memory 
 reality, guaranteed by subjection to my will." ' 
 
 For the theory now before us, belief properly so called, is 
 preceded by disappointment and doubt. It corresponds to those 
 "later modes of conviction" which Sully found to come into con- 
 sciousness only with chagrined expectation, and with the develop- 
 ment of the conceptive faculty or imagination. To say that belief 
 follows doubt — follows, that is, upon its resolution — is to say that 
 the "feeling of belief is a feeling that attaches to the representa- 
 tive faculty primarily."* The naive faith that once trusted 
 everything and everybody, having been deceived once too often, 
 has turned skeptical, and mere impressions and ideas are no longer 
 straightway accepted as having sufficient credentials in their own 
 immediate presence ; they must support their claim by a reliable 
 escort, or by directly convincing the senses. And if they can sat- 
 isfy the requirements, consciousness at once consents, and the 
 new candidate enters the world of reality. To represent exactly 
 
 * Feeling and Will; p. 166. 
 ' Mind. O. S., vol. XVI. 
 
 * Feeling and Will; p. 165. 
 
 * Ibid.; p. 155. 
 
34 
 
 what goes on in experience in the interval between the arising 
 of doubt and its solution, this figure would have to be extended. 
 We should have to consider consciousness, not only as passing 
 upon the eligibility of impressions and ideas, but as being in want 
 of just such "real" as these gave promise of supplying. How near 
 such a figure comes to giving the meaning of Dr. Baldwin's 
 theory may be seen by comparison with his most complete defini- 
 tion of belief: "Belief in anything. . . .is the conscious- 
 ness of the prescience of that thing as fit to satisfy a need." ' 
 
 Section II: Pathological. 
 
 It seems fair to say of the pathological investigation of belief 
 or of the "feeling of reality," that it has not advanced far enough 
 in experiment and observation to find a basis sufficiently broad to 
 support a theory. The acquisition of facts has not reached that 
 degree of accumulation where the chief demand is for a theory 
 to interpret their significance. For this reason, Janet is found 
 urging that most stress be laid, not on hypotheses, but on the 
 observation of facts." But though the results arrived at in patho- 
 logical study of the nature and cause of human certainty fall 
 short of the amount necessary to justify more than tentative con- 
 clusions, these conclusions are, nevertheless, not to be disregarded ; 
 and for the old reason that a mental function which resists com- 
 prehension when in normal condition, may when in an abnormal 
 state become amenable to the understanding. 
 
 To the question as to what new fact the pathological investiga- 
 tion has discovered, the only safe reply would seem to be that 
 pathology has discovered no new fact, 'but only emphasized an 
 old one; namely, that belief is intimately connected with the 
 activity-sources in our nature. The feeling of certainty, as also 
 the feeling of reality, has no a priori guarantee to fall back upon, 
 but like health or disease, must depend upon biological condftions. 
 Confidence springs from all parts of the self. It is not something 
 which has its origin in a corner of our nature ; say, the intellectual 
 corner. As Professor James says, "the mere fact of appearing as 
 an object at all is not enough to constitute reality." ' 
 
 * Feeling and Will; p. 171. 
 
 * From Dr. Hoch's paper, cited below. 
 
 " James : Principles of Psychology ; vol. II, p. 293. 
 
 35 
 
 What those who have studied the pathology of belief, or of the 
 feeling of reality, think about the two subjects, is briefly but 
 representatively given in two articles: one, a review, and the 
 other, a carefully argued theory. The former is by Dr. August 
 Hoch ("A review of some recent papers upon the loss of the 
 feeling of reality, and kindred symptoms").' The latter is by C. 
 Bos ("Pathologie de la Croyance")." Dr. Hoch reports that the 
 loss of the feeling of reality is commonly found in one or another 
 of three spheres of existence; that relating to the individual's 
 own activities or thoughts or that relating to the outside world or 
 to the body. A patient will say that vision is cut oflf; that the 
 eyes do not reach out ; that food has no taste ; that hearing is not 
 clear; or complain of inability to feel the various parts of the 
 body ; or say that he has "no thoughts," asserting that the mind 
 is without content, except as it comes from the conversation of an- 
 other. In attempting an explanation of the loss of the sense of 
 value or appreciation of the facts of experience it has been found 
 that these symptoms are present when it is impossible to demon- 
 strate objectively any sensory disorders, except, perhaps, fleeting 
 changes which may obtain in "grave cases, where the somato- 
 psychic alterations are most marked." Dr. Hoch thinks more 
 studies are needed to decide this point. Janet is inclined to op- 
 pose the idea that the loss of the feeling of reality has any connec- 
 tion with disorders of organic sensation, and to regard the 
 common factors in these cases as being a peculiar sense of incom- 
 pleteness in regard to perceptions, emotions and actions. "The 
 mind does not carry out its processes to their normal completion." 
 He therefore ventures to relate the "unreality" experience to a 
 "lowering of cerebral activity.",' Storch and his followers, how- 
 ever, hold to a theory of explanation which contrasts with that of 
 Janet. It is based upon the claim that the "feeling of the reality 
 of external objects, and the projection into space, depend upon 
 the association of muscle sensations with space perceptions."* 
 This view asserts that the change which causes the feeling of un- 
 reality is to be found "primarily in a disorder of the conscious- 
 
 * Psychological Bulletin, 1905. 
 Revue Philosophie, Ixviii. 
 
 ' Loc. cit; p. 237. 
 
 * Psychological Bulletin, 1905; p. 237. 
 
36 
 
 ness of the body, and insufficient valuation of organic sensations ; 
 and secondarily, in a disorder of the consciousness of the external 
 world." The question as to the unreality of ideas is explained by 
 the fact that they consist of memories of sense-impressions and 
 organic sensations. This theory agrees with that of Janet in 
 not making unreality-feeling depend upon disorders of organic 
 sensations ; its changes may be regarded like the agnosis, as asso- 
 ciation-disorders, and not as anaesthesia.' But it is also to be 
 noted that in his review Dr. Hoch mentions the fact that the 
 symptoms attending the loss of the feeling of reality present a 
 close relation to emotional changes, w^iich may both succeed and 
 precede them. And the fact that these changes are of the depres- 
 sive kind, suggests the fact that even in the "association-explana- 
 tion," mental weakness may have a part. 
 
 C. Bos in his paper, 'Tathologie de la Croyance," traces every 
 irregularity of belief to a common cause. W hether, he says, the 
 alteration be hallucination, credulity, incredulity or doubt, the 
 cause is the same: a powerlessness or weakness of the mental 
 activity. Hallucination, "the simplest kind of illusory behef," is 
 for Bos a case where the weakness of the mind is over-run by 
 the image. And credulity, which parallels hallucination, differs 
 from it only in the fact that the illusion is brought about, not by 
 an image, but by an idea; the credulous welcome an idea as 
 the one suffering hallucination welcomes an image. These two 
 illusory states of consciousness, however, fall prey to deception 
 from the same incapacity; they lack what the writer calls "the 
 second moment." When the image or idea first comes into the 
 range of attention ("the first moment") the attitude toward it is 
 the same in the mind subject to hallucination or credulity, as 
 in the normal or mature mind; at this stage, the presentation is 
 before the mind simply as a certain content. But this period of 
 agreement is of short duration. The "second moment" comes 
 quickly, and in that the sane and tempered individual considers 
 (unconsciously, most often) the escort of the presented image 
 or idea — the time and place associates, etc., and later, comes to a 
 conclusion. But into the mind open to hallucination or credulity, 
 this scrutinizing, saving, "second moment" does not enter. It is 
 this inability to overhaul his ideas that makes the credulous per- 
 son believe such unreasonable things as that the President (of 
 
 * Psychological Bulletin, 1905; p. 238. 
 
 37 
 
 France) is to be present at a village fete, or that a certain neighbor 
 is four hundred years old. The mind of such an individual is 
 able only to suggest the bare idea ; for the rest, all is passiveness 
 and psychic poverty. There is no energy left from the "first 
 moment" to give to the "second moment." 
 
 With the incredulous or negative-minded, there is the same 
 falling off of mental activity ; the same lack or insufficient buoy- 
 ancy of thought. In the case of the "negator," there is, though, 
 more effort required than in the case of the credulous, for only 
 in the second moment can there be denial. But this denial is 
 forced by fixed ideas that play the role of Cerebus, and repulse 
 before examination any ideas not like themselves. This fact ex- 
 plains such conduct as that displayed by a person who refuses to 
 go to bed because there is no night, or by the sick person who 
 refuses to believe that there is cannonading in the city, because 
 he thinks it a pretext to keep him shut up. Incredibility, or neg- 
 ativity of mind, is plainly an obstinacy, a contradiction, an arrest 
 from cramp or immobility. 
 
 Doubt is also a result of diminished mental activity. The 
 illusions of hallucination and credulity are traced only indirectly 
 to mental weakness, but doubt is traced directly. Though there 
 is a blind automatism in credulity, and in doubt great intellectual 
 development, yet there is ultimately no difference in the two forms 
 of illusion. The doubter cannot triumph over his distrust and 
 inhibit the impulse to disbelieve, any more than the individual at 
 the play of credulity or hallucination can master his overweening 
 trust, and inhibit the impulse to believe. Belief and will are both 
 troubled by doubt. This fact is seen in cases where hesitation 
 reaches the stage of delirium, as for example in the case that 
 would not eat, for trying to decide whether one "eats to live," 
 and who died with the question unsolved. The will cannot cut 
 the Gordian knot. Since, therefore, will and belief are identified 
 even in doubt, C. Bos is permitted to draw the general conclusion 
 that all alterations of belief have a common character, "which is 
 a powerlessness or weakness of the mental activity under its 
 higher form." 
 
 Section III: Experimental. 
 
 Professor Titchener, in his recent book of lectures on "Experi- 
 mental Psychology of the Thought Processes," remarks that 
 "the experimental technique for the study of judgment in particu- 
 
38 
 
 39 
 
 lar, has not yet been perfected." * And of the feeling of reality, 
 he says that he has *'not yet carried the question into the labora- 
 tory." * Nor does he in his criticism of the different explana- 
 tions of this feeling mention anyone who has made any labora- 
 tory investigation directly bearing on the subject. Indeed, this 
 field of research seems to await the coming of the experimental- 
 ist; and accordingly, any insight into the nature or origin of 
 belief or kindred phenomena that comes from this source may be 
 expected to come only indirectly, that is to say, by a study of the 
 laboratory work on judgment, which is at present being carried 
 on by the "method of examination" (Ausfrage-experimente), 
 and particularly that done by the experimentalists of the Wurz- 
 burg school. 
 
 The question for the psychofogi'sts to decide in the 
 tter of belief is what particular mental content the 
 individual has at the time he is experiencing the feeling of cer- 
 tainty. Or, to state the same thing from a point of view strictly 
 judgmental, the question is as to the nature of "Bewusstseinlage," 
 which Professor Titchener translates as "meaning something like 
 posture, or attitude of consciousness." * The latter question is the 
 one dealt with in the experimentation on the thought-processes. 
 To find what interpretation the experimentalists give the "atti- 
 tude" (Bewusstseinlage) shall accordingly be the object of this 
 section. But before we turn ourselves to that question, it will be 
 necessary to give attention to another which naturally takes pre- 
 cedence : the question of the problem or Aufgabe. 
 
 By Aufgabe is meant an influence that determines the course 
 of conscious experience. Titchener is speaking of the Aufgabe 
 (in its general signification) when he says that "this notion of the 
 external and precedent determination of consciousness, comes into 
 experimental psychology by hints and partial recognitions in the 
 late '8o's of the last century.")* And also, when he says that 
 "experimental results in general are seen to be functions of the 
 
 * Titchener: Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes; 
 p. 51. 
 
 * Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes; p. 255. 
 
 * Ibid.; p. 100. 
 
 * Ibid.; p. 163. 
 
 »l 4 
 
 instructions given." * The employment of hypnotism in the psy- 
 chological laboratory is a case of the "problem" at its maximum.* 
 On this subject Watt is quoted as follows: "What transforms 
 into judgments the mere sequence of experiences that we discover 
 when we analyze the processes of judgment, and what distin- 
 guishes a judgment from a mere sequence of experiences, is the 
 problem." ' It is a further opinion of Watt that the problem need 
 not always be in consciousness, but may sometimes have what 
 Messer calls "the character of the obvious." The adjustments of 
 the body to a stimulus, though at first consciously made, may, as 
 the reacting mind becomes more accustomed to the conditions, 
 lapse into an unconscious procedure ; paralleling in the sphere of 
 thought what we find in the sphere of action, in the case of the 
 skilled pianist who plays automatically notes that he once played 
 calculatingly. A problem of this kind is that of the "cognition of 
 real things — that is, of giving such a form to our perception, 
 thought, and speech that they are adequate to real things, whether 
 we are concerned with the persistence, properties, states, changes, 
 relations or value of the real.* With this last remark in expla- 
 nation of the Aufgabe, we come naturally to the question of the 
 attitude (Bewusstseinlage) and the feeing of realness, or belief. 
 
 The "problem" may be considered the drive-wheel, which starts 
 consciousness off, and the attitude or postures, the accompanying 
 phenomena or meaning. In Messer's thought, as Titchener states 
 him, "the observer is given a certain problem. The problem finds 
 representation in consciousness, verbal or other; the observer 
 understands it, has the attitude or Bewusstseinlage, of meaning; 
 and has the good will to follow instructions."' It will save 
 going into useless detail if we quote again at this point from 
 Titchener. He says that "Messer's intellectual attitudes corre- 
 spond to Ach's awareness of meaning; and Messer's emotional 
 attitudes, to Ach's awareness of relation ; and thus, to the original 
 Bewusstseinlagen of Marbe and Orth."' Now, Messer's intel- 
 lectual attitudes and Ach's awareness of meaning are "matters 
 
 * Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes; p. 162. 
 
 * Ibid.; p. 120. 
 » Ibid. 
 
 * Ibid.; p. 124 
 
 * Ibid.; p. 140. 
 
 * Ibid.; p. 109. 
 
/ 
 
 .40 
 
 of the understanding, pure and simple," ' and so, need not detain 
 us. It is the others with which we are concerned. They bring 
 into experience affective and volitional elements which are re- 
 ported by the subjects most frequently as surprise, perplexity, 
 hesitation, uncertainty, doubt ; or their opposites, satisfaction, cer- 
 tainty, relief, assent, conviction. It is significant that the 
 Bewusstseinlage is found by Titchener to resemble James' 
 "fringes," Hoffding's ''quality of familiarity," and many of 
 Wundt's feelings, especially, that "feeling which is the pioneer of 
 knowledge." ' This takes us back to belief as we saw it in James, 
 who said that the "real" is a "fringe." We remember the criticism 
 against this position ; it was declared to lack the objective factor 
 of outer control; to have the active principle of belief, but not 
 its counterpart ; and to be incomprehensible, how the fringe could 
 be the objective meaning of the psychic object of which it is the 
 fringe. 
 
 The question of attitude (Bewusstseinlage) thus narrowing it- 
 self down to a matter of how one idea (fringe) can be the mean- 
 ing of another, presents us our problem in bold simplicity. Titch- 
 ener, limiting the mental elements to two — sensation and feel- 
 ing — finds that one idea (like James' fringe) may give meaning to 
 another idea; the former idea being the context of the latter. 
 Of the context he writes: "I understand by context simply the 
 mental process or complex, or mental processes, which accrues to 
 the original idea through the situation in which the organism finds 
 itself."" And by "situation" he means "any form of Aufgabe 
 that is normal to the particular organism" and not "a task or 
 problem which may be set to any organism prepared or unpre- 
 pared." We may now comprehend the cause and meaning of his 
 opinion on the subject of belief, or the feeling of certainty: "The 
 feelings of reality seem to be always of an emotive character, 
 implying affective process in connection with kinaesthetic or other 
 organic sensations, and running their course under the influence 
 of an Aufgabe, or Einstellung (predisposition)."* We have these 
 feelings of reality, Titchener indicates, "when we find that the 
 
 * Experimental Psychclogy of the Thought Processes; p. io8. 
 ' Ibid. ; pp. 102 f. 
 
 " Ibid.; p. 175. 
 
 * Ibid.; p. 255. 
 
 il 
 
 • • 
 
 » 4 
 
 « • 
 
 • • 
 
 41 
 
 brooch we have picked up is real gold, and that the table we have 
 spied in the second-hand store, real mahogany; or when, after 
 plowing through the introductory pages, we come to the real point 
 in a scientific paper." ' Likewise, an unexpected meeting with a 
 friend is said to give us the same feeling. That the feeling of 
 reality does come into our experience just as Titchener portrays it, 
 our "flesh and blood" stand ready to witness ; we are having just 
 such feelings every day. It is a question, however, whether his 
 conception of the nature of belief is sufficiently comprehensive; 
 whether his feelings of reality, though having marks of belief, 
 have all the marks. For Miss Calkins, Belief is "an idea distin- 
 guished both by the feeling of realness and by the 'relational' feel- 
 ing of congruence." ' The Wurbzurg school (as we have already 
 seen) mean more by their Bewusstseinlage (attitudes, including 
 certainty and conviction) than just sensation and feeling. Messer, 
 in fact, goes the length of maintaining for judgment (belief) 
 the "objective reference of the Austrian school." "In the every- 
 day life of mind," he asserts, "our experience is intentional, di- 
 rected upon objects." And "the psychologist who should sup- 
 pose that perception and thought may be adequately characterized 
 by the simple ascertainment of the sensations and ideas present 
 in consciousness would be like a man who should seek to appre- 
 hend the real nature of money, by simply investigating the 
 materials out of which money is made." ' 
 
 Without further review of the matter, it is clear that the center 
 round which discussion gathers is that of deciding what are the 
 component parts of the meaning that constitutes a belief-situ- 
 ation. Is this meaning exhausted by reading off an "emotive 
 character," "affective processes," "kinaesthetic and other organic 
 sensations," and an "Aufgabe" to give direction and motive ? * Or 
 will it be found that belief is represented in consciousness primar- 
 ily by a relational character; the relation between idea and ob- 
 ject?" With these questions holding the field, there is not much 
 chance for positive conclusions. This much, however, may be 
 
 * Experimental Psychology of the Thought Process; p. 254. 
 
 * Calkins : Introduction to Psychology ; p. 124. 
 
 ' Titchener: Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes; 
 p. 133. 
 ' Ibid.; p. 255. 
 ' Ibid.; p. 253. 
 
. 42 
 
 said: the experimentalists consider the existence of feehngs of 
 reality, or belief, to be beyond question ; and also consider it a 
 possibility that they may "include some unanalyzable core or 
 residuum, a non-sensational and non-affective elementary process; 
 and that this core or residuum may be their essential as reality- 
 feelings." ' Finally, we may say that, though undecided about the 
 nature of belief, experimental psychology is not without cues for 
 an epistemological study of the subject, jind may be found to 
 give support to the view maintained later in this paper. 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 Criticism. 
 Looking back upon the sinuous path we have made in trying to 
 find a way through the diverse interpretations of belief, we cannot 
 doubt that interpretation often misled us ; that it was frequently 
 misinterpretation. And yet, the light of theory which we chose as 
 guide in our search for the meaning of belief was not a will-o'-the 
 wisp ; it always brought us— in time— to some fruitful end. Of 
 the theories of belief that have passed before us in review, none 
 was wholly without significance; each of them had at least one 
 of those features we have seen standing out boldly and recurring 
 in following theories. That is to say, we found no theory but 
 related belief to feeling, or to cognition (with reference to 
 reality), or to action; and sometimes belief was related to all 
 three phenomena. 
 
 Belief seems both to be and to be influenced by feeling ; it ap- 
 pears to be dependent continually upon the cognition of reality ; 
 and it has intimate relation to our active disposition. The earliest 
 explanation of belief was, as has been emphasized, an attempt to 
 identify conviction with feeling; with the vivacity of ideas. Hume 
 considered that, in the last analysis, the only quality of mind 
 essentially necessary to constitute human confidence, is feeling; 
 just that feeling which is intrinsic to belief, and not any ex- 
 traneous feeling. Bain later identified belief with the active phase 
 of our nature, and Sully, with the cognitive. Baldwin and Stout 
 have so far corroborated Sully as to assert that belief necessarily 
 implies the cognition of reality ; and pathology has taken its stand 
 with Bain, holding that belief has its roots in the activity-sources 
 * Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes; p. 256. 
 
 -^-J 
 
 43 
 
 of our being. Hume at the same time has his supporters. Bage- 
 hot and James have strongly advocated the view that conviction is 
 a feeling or emotion. Belief, they say, is more like a feeling than 
 anything else. Finally, we have the witness of experimental 
 psychology as given in the thought processes. The evidence here 
 is rather incomplete, but what there is favors the view that 
 belief requires over and above its inherent feeling-nature a cer- 
 tain attitude or relation, perhaps including that between idea and 
 its object. 
 
 Manifestly, belief as thus defined has meaning to confusion; 
 it means everything; it includes in some way the whole of con- 
 sciousness. But how can belief be feeling, cognition and action, 
 all three? This question presents an insurmountable difficulty 
 if we turn the way of the psychology which reduces all to content. 
 For, considered mainly as content, how represented in conscious- 
 ness, whether with a quality that is simple, or one that is complex, 
 belief refuses to comprehend the entire mind; it prefers to be 
 thought of as a feeling that feels like itself; that must be felt 
 to be known; or as a feeling that combines two qualities; that 
 of realness and that of congruity, or yet, as a feeling having an 
 emotive character, and implying affective processes in connection 
 with certain organic sensations. If, however, we approach belief 
 by another way, looking upon it as the mental state or function of 
 cognizing reality; or as being the consciousness of the personal 
 indorsement of reality ; that is, looking upon it as a phenomenon 
 arising out of the accommodation of the Self to its environment, 
 then the difficulty is no longer insurmountable. For from this 
 point of view, belief is not embarrassed by its manifold interpre- 
 tation; feeling, cognition of reality, action— all may be considered 
 as influences in bringing belief about; they furnish, indeed, the 
 necessary and only conditions of its generation. 
 
 In speaking of feeling and cognition (or representative knowl- 
 edge) and action as the only factors that will produce human 
 confidence, it was not said that each factor was indispensable to 
 the product. The majority of the leading theories of belief re- 
 gard it as inseparably related to representative knowledge; cer- 
 tainty is certainty only with regard to the truth of some object 
 or event that has been, is, or may be in experience as a fact. It 
 was held against Hume that he was unable to carry his theory 
 
1 
 
 44 
 
 through until he had set up (by a "propensity of the imagination" 
 —that is, by reflection) an objective world for belief to beUeve 
 in. Bagehot and James as successors of Hume, in advocating 
 the view that conviction is of the feelings (emotions) enlarge 
 upon Hume at this point. Bagehot is positively of the opinion 
 that primitive, naive trust is transformed by the hardships of 
 experience into a trust that waits upon deliberation, and that is 
 anchored in objective reality. Professor James is less positive, 
 but he does seem to say, certainly at times, that assurance is of an 
 object that exists as ''real" and that is represented to us as an 
 idea. That conviction depends upon thought to bring it to its 
 object, and thus, for its being, is so manifestly the view of James 
 Mill, his son J. S. Mill, Sully, Stout and Baldwin that merely to 
 mention the fact is enough. And as for Bain, we remember that 
 he declared belief to be an incident of cognition. With this array 
 of evidence we can scarcely restrain ourselves from joining Sully 
 in his statement that the ''primal source of belief lies in the rela- 
 tion of representative ideation to actual presentation." 
 
 We may now turn to the question whether feeling or action 
 is a necessary condition for the experience of conviction. It has 
 been said already that belief in itself is perhaps of the essence of 
 feeling, but to the other sorts of feeling— such as emotional 
 excitement, it is generally agreed to have no vital relevance. When 
 Bain advanced the idea that action is the basis and ultimate cri- 
 terion of belief, it was argued against him that in many cases, as, 
 for example, that of the highest theoretical knowledge, there is no 
 active disposition aroused. But Stout disarms this criticism by 
 counting action in thought as a condition of belief in theoretical 
 ends. That there is activity of some kind, physical or mental, 
 present in appreciation of reality or of truth, is attested by the 
 pathologists when they talk of mental weakness causing halluci- 
 nation, credulity, incredulity and doubt ; and of the loss of reality- 
 feeling depending upon the lowering of cerebral activity. We 
 find the same meaning expressed by Royce: "Definite belief in 
 external reality is possible," he writes, "only through this active, 
 modifying, and constructing addition of something of our own to 
 the impressions that are actually given to us." * There is no ques- 
 tion that within us is an activity, a sort of motor-consciousness. 
 
 45 
 
 that takes a hand in shaping the world of experience, and by 
 virtue of that act feels that world to be real. This fact will re- 
 ceive emphasis in the chapter on Assumption. 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 Reality-Feeling and Presumption. 
 It was noted on page 35 that the meaning implied by the term 
 reality-feeling has more or less prevalence in most theories of 
 belief. The references given there were few, and they were 
 given with the promise of more when we should come to this 
 chapter. This promise we shall now endeavor to fulfill, and for 
 a double reason : namely, to impress the fact that this embryo 
 type of belief is recognized by authorities, and to explain its 
 
 meaning. 
 
 From Bain, who blazed the way into this new territory, we 
 have the following: "The belief in testimony is derived from the 
 primary credulity of the mind in certain instances left intact under 
 the wear and tear of adverse experience. . . .It never oc^ 
 curs to the child to question any statement made to it until some 
 positive force on the side of skepticism has been developed." 
 This statement by Bain is followed up by Bagehot, who gives it 
 yet more emphatic form. He writes: "But though it is certain 
 that a child believes all assertions made to it, it is not certam that 
 the child so believes in consequence of a special intuitive disposi- 
 tion, restricted to such assertions ; it may be that this indiscrim- 
 inate belief in all sayings is but a relic of an omnivorous acqui- 
 escence in all states of consciousness, which is only just extinct 
 when childhood is plain enough to be understood, or old enough 
 to be remembered." Bagehot in another place in his essay 
 expresses the view that we are born believing and would continue 
 responding to the "strong rush of confidence" (his emotional 
 belief) just as we do in dreams, if we were not thereby brought 
 into contention with the world. Sully does not say that we are 
 born believing ; in fact, he says we are not ; and that a certain 
 amount of experience must precede confidence ; but he reckons 
 low the length of time that elapses before a sufficient experience 
 has come to set up the earliest form of belief : "the transition from 
 sensation to idea." ^ Of this early confidence he speaks as 
 
 * Royce: Religious Aspects of Philosophy, p. 321. 
 
 Sully : Sensation and Intuition ; p. 82. 
 
.46 
 
 follows: "When the infant mind, in dream-like thought, had 
 not yet learned to mark off the present and the past, it might not 
 improbably even then have vaguely felt the strange likeness and 
 unlikeness between the faint fugitive idea and the intense absorb- 
 ing sensation. Now, in this curious mental event, the partial 
 reproduction of the past sensation by the medium of a present 
 idea felt to be one like it, one seems to find the origin of the 
 oldest and most simple form of belief."' "If the infant could 
 fully describe to us its state of mind, it would do so by saying, 
 'there is something in my mind that carries thought away to an- 
 other thing brighter and better than itself, which thing is not ex- 
 actly in my mind now, but seems ready to enter it.' " As to this 
 early or germ-form of belief or reality-feeling, James expresses 
 himself through the illustration of the child and the hallucinatory 
 candle. To the onlooking psychologist, this candle exists only in 
 the individual mind ; has no status among other facts, etc. But the 
 new-born mind, entirely blank, and waiting for experience to be- 
 gin, reacts differently to it. "It can spin no such consideration as 
 these (the above) about it; for of other facts actual or possible it 
 has no inkling whatever. The candle is its all — its Absolute. Its 
 entire faculty of attention is absorbed by it; it is; it is that; 
 it is there. No other possible candle or quality of this candle ; no 
 other place or possible object in this place; no alternative, in 
 short, suggests itself as even conceivable; so, how can the mind 
 help believing the candle real?" Professor James has the 
 feeling of reality excited by the very first object that enters the 
 mind, while Sully considers that a sensation and its idea must 
 have passed through the mind often enough to be noticeably dis- 
 tinguished before there can be any reality-feeling. This con- 
 tradiction, however, is but a question of when primitive trusts 
 starts; each writer equally corroborating such an embryo faith, 
 or undifferentiated substance of belief. As further evidence for 
 this unreasoning natural confidence, we may turn to Stout, who 
 speaks of it in these words : "A pre-formed anticipation may be 
 destroyed by collision with facts. It is through such experiences 
 that the unquestioning credence of primitive belief gradually gives 
 place to a comparatively tentative and skeptical habit of mind." 
 
 This series of quotations, though representing a variety of 
 points of view, reveals a marked unity of signification. They are 
 
 * Sully : Sensation and Intuition ; p. 82. 
 
 
 47 
 
 all of one accord in recognizing that childhood begins without 
 skepticism, and with utmost confidence; without doubt, and with 
 perfect certainty ; without distrust, and with simple reliance. The 
 first feeling is not of unreality, but of reality. We have by instinct 
 enough confidence in things to start us off on the long road of 
 accommodation to the environment, without the least uncertainty 
 or misgiving. This wholesale way the young life has of con- 
 ferring reality upon everything that touches it, has suggested a 
 motor explanation. Baldwin relates the reality- feeling to gross 
 attention ; the attention with the large open maw ready to devour 
 whatever comes in reach. According to this conception, we ap- 
 preciate as real whatever, either by force of external conditions 
 or by force of inner organic wants, we take into our experience 
 by accommodation. It is not a case of recognitive belief, but of 
 assimilative incorporation; we live here by faith, and not by 
 sight. 
 
 Reality- feeling may be further designated as that stage in the 
 genetic progression of consciousness that precedes disappoint- 
 ment and doubt; it is the stage of presumption or the taking of 
 things as being what they first appear to be. It is well repre- 
 sented by dreams, for in them we go along, accepting one thing 
 after another, in whatever order the things come and however 
 disparate and disconnected they are, and never experience a single 
 lapse in our sense that all is real. This undisturbed flow of simple 
 credulity that runs through our dreams with never a rift in its 
 course, does so, doubtless, because neither external facts nor in- 
 ternal associations are there to contradict. We presume on the 
 reality of what we dream, just as the child presumes upon what 
 it experiences. In both cases there is the primary, undisturbed 
 presumption of reality that Urban speaks of as giving a reality in 
 which the more specific existence-meaning * has not yet been 
 differentiated, and as meaning the mere act of acceptance, taking 
 for granted, prior to the explicit taking up of the object into a 
 predetermined sphere of reality through the existence predicate. 
 "In contrast with any meaning of reality later to arise and attach 
 to an object," writes Baldwin, "we may saw that it is here simply 
 presumed, taken for granted, that the object is real. There is a 
 presumption of the dependableness of the thing.' 
 
 if 3 
 
 * Urban : Valuation ; Its Nature and Laws ; 
 ' Baldwin: Genetic Logic; vol. II, p. 22. 
 
 P- 43. 
 
48 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 Quasi-Belief and Assumption. 
 
 In that period of childhood which we have designated by the 
 term ''reality-feeling," consciousness proceeds on its way of cer- 
 tainty and confidence with an ever tenor. "Pure experience," or 
 immediacy of feeling or simple expectation, had not as yet been 
 so seriously disturbed that it sought support in memory, and thus 
 transformed itself into reflective anticipation. "Collision with 
 fact" (collision with the physical and social tables that for Bage- 
 hot gives doubt) had not occurred, or at least had not produced 
 a jar sufficient to awaken childhood out of its comatose condition 
 of immediate assurance. But disturbing circumstances were 
 destined sooner or later to break down this original equilibrium, 
 and to provoke unwary confidence into doubt and alert inquiry. 
 That this second stage in the progression of beHef-consciousness 
 does arise, and is a real fact in the growth of experience, is clearly 
 the opinion of many writers. Bagehot refers to this period as a 
 time in which "born-beliefs" crosses over to the belief of delibera- 
 tion and evidence. * Bain is evidently speaking of it when he 
 says that "many of our primitive expectations suffer shipwreck in 
 the contradictions that they encounter." ^ Sully refers to this 
 period in the life of consciousness as that in which the mind 
 looks back upon the past before it acts ; that is, looks into mem- 
 ory to see what basis anticipation has. It is distinctly the subject 
 of the following passage from Stout: "A pre- formed anticipa- 
 tion may be destroyed by collison with facts. It is through such 
 experience that the unquestioned credence of primitive belief 
 gradually gives place to a comparatively tentative and skeptical 
 habit of mind." ' Baldwin recognizes such a stage and accounts 
 for it by the failure of the "co-efficients of reality" to satisfy. "I 
 doubt an image, a statement, a law, because it does not meet the 
 demand that I have a right to make of it, if its claim be true." * 
 
 Further references are not needed to show that there is strong 
 support for the view that the naive faith of earliest experience 
 
 * Emotion and Will; p. 516. 
 
 ' Analytical Psychology; vol. II, p. 240. 
 
 * Stout : Analytical Psychology ; vol. II, p. 240. 
 
 * Feeling and Will. p. 156. 
 
 n 
 
 4 
 
 > 
 
 * 
 
 » 
 
 49 
 
 is turned to disappointment and doubt. The problem that chiefly 
 concerns us is not whether the individual comes into this stage 
 of embarrassment and skepticism, but rather as to the way he gets 
 out of it; it being admitted that he does— if of normal energy, 
 somehow get out of his particular doubts, and does not accept his 
 lot in careless unconcern. This problem leads us into epistemol- 
 ogy_into a study of the "development of knowledge as controlled 
 by facts." ' Having lost its first grasp on reality, how now does 
 the mind regain its hold? This is the question which most of 
 all lay claim to our attention. But it has a solution, suggested 
 by the term Assumption, as that term is employed in current dis- 
 cussion of the theory of knowledge and belief. 
 
 Assumption denotes active disposition, participation, on the part 
 of the inner; it denotes subjective control; by assumption the 
 psychic experience functions as a selective agency, and, equally 
 with objective fact, sets up certain requirements for the accept- 
 ance of the new materials into experience. The individual, what- 
 ever interest impels him, whether practical, theoretical or aesthetic, 
 is ever striving to enlarge upon the present; at one time he is 
 unknotting a practical predicament ; at another time, in a sort of 
 spontaneous striving, he is making conquest of the future by 
 weaving images of fancy or by action in play or art ; and at yet 
 another time, he is striving to encompass external fact, to find 
 the truth that Is hidden in things ; to penetrate into objective exist- 
 ence as a seeker for the worthful, the fulfilling, the real. 
 
 Baldwin's own view of assumption is given in the statement that 
 by assumption, "an established recognitive context, accepted for 
 what it is, is also read for zvhat it may become." ' Assumption 
 is for him the only way the mind has of making any advance upon 
 its present status, of gaining any new truth, of enlarging the 
 world of reality. This schematism furnishes the moving prin- 
 ciple that enables cognition to go in and possess the land.' It is 
 this principle that gives unity to the whole of his genetic logic. 
 Urban corroborates the position of Baldwin, and says "in the 
 making of assumption, the act is determined by a subjective 
 
 * Genetic Logic; vol. II, p. 381. 
 ' Ibid.; p. II. 
 ' Ibid.; p. 44 
 
50 
 
 factor, a demand arising from already existing dispositions and 
 interests." ' Royce also regards assumption as the inner asserting 
 its rights as a joint owner in the world of experience. That the 
 mind thus actively takes a hand in the weaving of life and its 
 objects, is strongly argued in his book, 'The Religious Aspects of 
 Philosophy." In the chapter on "Postulates" (which, as we 
 shall see later, are a species of assumption) Professor Royce says 
 that "Postulates are voluntary assumptions of a risk, for the sake 
 of a higher end. . . .They are deliberate and courageous 
 volitions." "The postulate says: *I dare be responsible for as- 
 suming'." We all postulate that our lives are worth the trouble, 
 yet we all know perfectly well that many just such postulates 
 must in the nature of things be blunders, but they imply not blind 
 faith, but active faith. Blind faith is the ostrich behind the bush ; 
 the postulate stands like the lion against the hunters. The wise 
 shall live by postulates." ' The pragmatists, likewise, emphasize 
 (indeed, over-emphasize) the fact that assumption is a subjective 
 demand. In F. C. S. Schiller's essay on "Axioms as Postulates," 
 there are many passages like the following: "Theoretic truths 
 are the children of postulates. . . .Without purposive activity 
 there would be no knowledge, no order, no rational experience, 
 nothing to explain, and no means of explaining anything." "For, 
 ever before the eyes of him whose wisdom dares to postulate, 
 will float in clearer or obscurer outline the beatific vision of that 
 perfect harmony of all experience which he in all his strenuous 
 struggles is striving to attain. And instead of immolating his 
 whole life to the enervating sophism that it is all an 'appearance 
 to be transcended by an unattainable reality,' let him hold rather 
 that there can be for him no reality but that to which he wins 
 his way through and by means of the appearances which are 
 its presage." " The same aggressiveness of spirit is seen in James' 
 essay on "The Will to Believe." It is here said that "the intel- 
 lect, even with truth directly in its gr^sp, may have no infallible 
 signal for knowing whether it be truth or no."* And so he 
 brings in the "willing nature"— by which is meant not only such 
 
 » cf. C. H. Williams: The Schematism in Baldwin's Logic; Philo- 
 sophical Review, Jan, 1910. 
 
 • Royce: The Religious Aspect of Philosophy; p. 298. 
 
 • Schiller, F. C. S. : Personal Idealism; p. 121. 
 
 • James : The Will to Believe, etc. ; p. 16. 
 
 51 
 
 deliberate volitions as may have set up habits of belief that we 
 cannot now escape. . . .but all such factors of belief as fear 
 and hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the 
 circumstances of our caste and set." ' Then in natural sequence to 
 these statements we have the following one : "It matters not to an 
 empiricist from what quarter a hypothesis may come to him ; he 
 may have acquired it by fair means or by foul ; passion may have 
 whispered, or accident suggested it; but if the total drift of 
 thinking continues to confirm it, that is what he means by its being 
 true."' Plainly the pragmatist is ready to agree that the sub- 
 jective is a potent factor in deciding what things shall be true. 
 But there is yet further evidence for a positive, aggressive, inner 
 control, which demands satisfaction for our interests, whether 
 those interests be the undifferentiated interests of the pre-logical 
 stage, when the individual is trying to find some ground that is 
 safe from the flood of doubt, or whether they be the individual 
 interests (the practical, intellectual or aesthetic) of the logical 
 mode. This further evidence is found in Meinong. In his two 
 books on assumption ("Annahmen" and "Ueber Annahmen"), 
 and in Bertrand Russell's review and interpretation of them, there 
 are passages that support the view that assumption mediates a 
 goal in behalf of the subjective. Take for example the following 
 (a translation by Russell from the 3d chapter of "Ueber An- 
 nahmen" — a chapter enumerating the most familiar instances of 
 assumption) : "The hypothesis of mathematical propositions, lit- 
 erary works of art, children's pretenses, lies, and the theories of 
 philosophers, can none of them be understood without assump- 
 tions. When an argument begins with 'Let a right-angled tri- 
 angle be given, having one of its sides double the other,' we have 
 to do with the proposition which is not asserted ; hence, we have 
 an assumption, and not a judgment. Scientific hypotheses again, 
 at least in their inception, are unasserted, and afford instances of 
 assumption. When children pretend, it is quite plain that they 
 are not taken in by their own fancies; these fancies constitute 
 assumptions; and the same applies to reading a novel. A liar 
 wishes to produce in another belief in a proposition which he 
 himself does not believe ; if he is to be successful, he will have to 
 
 The Will to Believe, etc. 
 Ibid.; p. 17. 
 
 p. 9. 
 

 • 52 
 
 entertain the assumption of the proposition in question. And this 
 is why liars tend to beheve their £>\\n Hes .... A question ex- 
 presses, if the answer to it is yes or no, the desire to have an 
 assumption turned into the corresponding judgment or its op- 
 posite. And in all desire, since the opposition of yes and no oc- 
 curs in the object of desire, we are necessarily concerned with an 
 assumption ; for mere presentation is inadequate, and the truth 
 of what is desired is obviously no part of desire." ' Again, in the 
 fifth chapter, which treats of the psychic and its nature, as having 
 objects (Gegenstandlichkeit). assumption appears with the same 
 peculiar power to project objects and withhold belief ; with the 
 same privilege of transcending presentation ; of transcending the 
 thing of present knowledge. This chapter focuses on the question 
 as to how presentation that is pure, and judgment that is negative, 
 can have an object. A judgment that is true provokes no question 
 as to its object; because the very fact that it is a true judgment 
 settles the matter ; it has an object, either an existing or a subsist- 
 ing object. But whether the judgment is a true negative or a false 
 affirmative, we come upon a difficulty. These judgments cannot 
 have the objects they would have if true and affirmative. Such 
 judgments, it would seem, must then fall back upon presentation 
 for their objects. But presentation usually does not have an 
 object; in fact, pure presentation has only the capacity for an 
 object, as in the case of the memory of a melody, one does not 
 have the melody. ''When, therefore, we seem to perceive direc- 
 tion to an object, this arises through the presence of an affirmative 
 assumption; the object is presented *as if it were real'." Still 
 again, this same interpretation of assumption is implied by Mei- 
 nong in his "Annahmen," where he considers the difference be- 
 tween assumption and judgment to be a matter only of attitude to- 
 ward the "objective." In this connection Russell translates Mei- 
 nong as pointing out that ''Ju^g^^^^t has two elements: (a) con- 
 viction and (b) affirmation, or denial ; and that in a large class of 
 common facts, which are called assumptions, the second occurs 
 without the first.' We find this same thought in "Ueber Annah- 
 men," it being there argued that assumption is more than mere 
 
 -< 
 
 ' Mind: New Series; vol. XIII, p. 340. 
 ' Loc. cit. above; p. 206. 
 
 53 
 
 presentation and less than judgment ; that it holds a sort of middle 
 ground between judgment and presentation." ' 
 
 In the light of the foregoing views, assumption may be sum- 
 marized somewhat as follows: It is the intrinsic power the 
 mind has of leading experience into larger fields of meaning, 
 by expanding the "is" into the "may-be ;" of discounting the future 
 to meet present wants and interests. But it is important to go yet 
 farther into the subject of assumption, to take account indeed of 
 distinctions made within the meaning itself — distinctions discov- 
 ered by the application of the genetic method to consciousness. 
 In recent psychological literature on the cognitive consciousness, 
 one is frequently meeting with such terms as "pre-discursive" 
 and "post-discursive;" "pre-judgmental" and "post-judgmental;" 
 "pre-logical" and "post-" or "hyper-logical." It is upon this 
 division as a basis that the distinction in assumption rests. We 
 have seen the credulous reality- feeling and unthinking presump- 
 tion were saved from destroying doubt and led away toward the 
 high ground of logical conviction and judgment. But 
 with judgment reached, all doubt does not cease. Consciousness 
 never attains such a degree of present sufficiency that it has no 
 need of assumption to bridge it over some intercepting doubt or 
 want. According to this view, which is the one maintained by 
 Baldwin in his Genetic Logic, and by W. M. Urban in his book 
 on Valuation, there are two kinds of assumption, named in order 
 of appearance, lower assumption and higher assumption ; or, just 
 assumption and postulation. Baldwin explains the two meanings 
 as follows: "Over against this (presumption), also in the prelog- 
 ical modes, there is, however, the contrasted attitude toward what 
 is not presumed but assumed — made schematic for further deter- 
 mination. The 'assumption' is the use of a meaning in a control 
 or with a reference that is not yet established, not yet presump- 
 tion. When a child, for example, cries for an object in the 
 next room, he 'presumes' its existence and availabilitly in the 
 world of his practical interests; but when he goes through the 
 process of 'feeding his toy dog,' he 'assumes' a sphere that he 
 does not regularly 'presume.' " "In the logical mode, the exist- 
 ence-marks harden into a dualism of spheres (mind and body), 
 and the intent of existence or control becomes itself a separable 
 
 * Meinong: Ueber Annahmen; p. 61. 
 
54 
 
 or predicable meaning. And this existence, or reality-meaning, 
 may be again entertained in two ways: it may be specifically 
 asserted in a judgment of existence, or taken for granted as 
 something capable of such assertion; or it may be set up hypo- 
 thetically and schematically. These two attitudes are for the 
 logical mode what the 'presumption* and the 'assumption' are 
 for the pre-logical." * Urban writes, corroborating Baldwin, as 
 follows : "Assumption as a cognitive attitude has two meanings. 
 According to its first meaning it is an acceptance, a taking as 
 existent of an object when there is an underlying sense of the 
 possibility of its being non-existent. In this sense, it is a half-way 
 stage between the primitive presumption of reality, and the 
 existential judgment. In this sense also it is a secondary move- 
 ment or act of cognition, within a developing sphere of reality, 
 bounded by the primitive presumption of reality, and the exist- 
 ential judgment, affirmative or negative. From the point of view 
 of conation, it is an act determined by the momentum of the 
 subjective disposition or interest. In its second meaning, it is not 
 pre-judgmental, but post- judgmental ; it presupposed dispositions 
 created by acts of judgment, and is derived from the judgment- 
 attitude." " 
 
 Such a distinction within assumption makes it all the more 
 evident that this activity is the moving principle in mental develop- 
 ment and in the growth of experience; it is the function of 
 growth in all modes of cognition. Assumption is the active 
 nature or inner control which belief must satisfy when it comes. 
 Until then, assumption remains quasi-belief — i. e., it acts towards 
 the object as if it were real. 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 Belief and Judgment. 
 In the historical and psychological divisions of this discussion 
 it was found that belief is in intimate and essential relation to 
 the cognition of reality, and to the active disposition. That is to 
 say, belief, whether considered from a philosophical or a psycho- 
 logical point of view, always appears to be rooted in a reference 
 to reality, and at the same time to take its life from the inner 
 
 * Baldwin: Genetic Logic; vol. II, p. 12. 
 
 * Urban : Valuation : Its Nature and Laws ; p. 48. 
 
 55 
 
 accommodating and asserting powers of our nature. Thus at the 
 end of Chapters I and II our investigation brought us to this 
 conclusion : objectively taken, belief means belief in something- 
 something that is real ; subjectively taken, it means an activity that 
 expresses and satisfies the whole self. And now, since in the 
 genetic study we have returned to this subject, we must enter 
 again upon its consideration. It is a question this time of find- 
 ing whether belief, when regarded from a genetic and epistemo- 
 logical point of view, has the same character as when regarded 
 from a psychological point of view ; whether, that is, we shall con- 
 tinue to find belief in essential conjunction with the cognitive and 
 the active phases of our nature. 
 
 Assumption is, as we have seen, a vital factor in the growth 
 of consciousness; in fact, it is a question whether, without it, 
 life would not be static and stagnant. It seems that without as- 
 sumption thought would be shut in by an impassable wall— the 
 wall of habit ; with it, thought can push out into new experience, 
 and thus satisfy the demands of positive interests— interests 
 that of their own nature seek satisfaction in objects or ends. 
 Assumption is the genetic interpretation of Professor Royce's 
 statement that "at every moment, we are not merely receiving, 
 attending, recognizing, but we are constructing. * Assumption is 
 the individual in action ; productive, cognitive action ; the individ- 
 ual, seeking a clearer insight into nature, climbing to a higher 
 ground of outlook, infusing new meaning into life. Assumption 
 is the spontaneous, initiative energy of conscious life, expressing 
 itself through cognition. But in addition to this, it should be 
 noted that its object is tentative. When making an assumption, 
 the individual is well aware that the assumed object may fail to 
 fit the conditions that test its reality ; that he may have chosen 
 the wrong alternative. There is no taking for granted here as 
 there was in "presumption." Belief is suspended. But suspended 
 for what reason ? For the reason simply that it has not found a 
 co-efficient that will satisfy the demands of reality. And when- 
 ever, through the creative function of assumption, consciousness 
 succeeds in setting up an object that gains objective sanction, 
 all will be well, and belief will no longer hold back, but go forth 
 in unreserved and final indorsement of that object as real ; the two 
 
 ~*^Royce: Religious Aspects of Philosophy; p. 321- 
 
• 56 
 
 controls— that of the inner antl that of the outer, will be satisfied 
 in a mutual ownership. 
 
 But what is meant by saying that quasi-belief passes into be- 
 lief proper when the schematic object of assumption wins the 
 approval of the objective? Does it mean that assumption has 
 become judgment?' If judgment lias reference to existence or 
 reality, and is not mere ideas that have their truth in a sort of 
 a priori consistency, and if it is a construction that mediates the 
 Self, then the coming of belief does mean the coming of judg- 
 ment, and from this conclusion it follows that, if all judgment is 
 existential, and at the same time incorporates our evaluating 
 personal nature, then judgment is belief, which is our thesis. 
 
 Section I: Direct Evidence. 
 (A) From objective point of view. 
 
 l^>om a genetic and epistemological point of view, Baldwin 
 finds that judgment in every instance takes cognizance, explicitly 
 or implicitly, of existence; and Urban in his book, "Valuation: 
 Its Nature and Laws," accepts and utilizes Baldwin's general 
 conclusions. Meinong, by a semi-genetic and epistemological in- 
 vestigation of experience, comes likewise to the conclusion that 
 •'judgment is transcendent." Bradley, although approaching the 
 subject from a yet different side— the logical— comes to maintain 
 that all judgment is in the end existential. And again, from the 
 psychological point of view, we have Brentano strongly affirming 
 the same fact. 
 
 To appreciate fully the force of Baldwin's argument (Genetic 
 Logic, Vols. I and II) for the existential nature of judgment, it 
 is necessary to take account of assumption at its two different 
 levels of cognitive progression ; to take account both of assump- 
 tion and postulation (these terms being understood as meaning, 
 respectively, lower and higher assumption). Schematism is the 
 general term which includes both meanings. Assumption as se- 
 rious experimentation with psychic objects— that is, as instru- 
 mental knowledge, grows out of the semblant or play conscious- 
 ness. "In experimentation, play merges into earnest, and through 
 its demand for control, issues in adjustment and discovery."* 
 
 * Genetic Logic; vol. II, pp. 119 ff. 
 
 57 
 
 Play, or semblance (or rather, earliest semblance, for art too is 
 semblance) is described as a "mode of reconciliation and merg- 
 ing of two sorts of control." It is neither inner nor outer control 
 exclusively ; that is, the play object is neither-a sense-object nor a 
 fancy-object, but an object swinging between and partaking of 
 the nature of both. It is in this power of the mind to semble— 
 to construct an object partly free from the old controls of sense 
 and fancy — that Baldwin finds the first movements of that process 
 which is to prove of such "wide-reaching importance" to the 
 mind in its career ; the process, namely, of experimentation. Ex- 
 perimentation at this stage, however, does not issue in anything 
 that the individual can indorse and believe; it here reaches no 
 final conclusion. The semblant object when tested simply be- 
 comes either a sense-object or a fancy-object; with the result, 
 though, that "the great distinction between the inner and the 
 outer realms is extended and made more definite." But conscious- 
 ness has a long course to run before reaching that stage in cogni- 
 tive development in which experimentation eventuates in the 
 experience of an ordered system of objects individuated as par- 
 ticulars under a general, and given meanings "necessary" and 
 "without exception." 
 
 To attain such experience or objective content, semblance oper- 
 ates in yet another way than by actual experimentation ; that is, 
 by the process called "sembling;" what Lipp calls "Einfuhlung." 
 This character of the semblant object, which is implicated in the 
 inner nature of the entire construction, is especially germinal to re- 
 flection. By this "innocent looking process," an object has a 
 greater or less degree of subjective control attributed to it. This 
 "process implies that all the objects so treated are already mate- 
 rials of the inner life as such. . .It implies that any material 
 of the inner life may be so treated . . .It means finally that any 
 such bit of 'sembled,' of 'semblable, psychic stuff has its own op- 
 posed meanings; on the one hand, that of the object pure and 
 simple, existing under the co-efficient reinstated by the semblance ; 
 and on the other, that of a self-determined whole, free from these 
 co-efficients so long as it itself does not terminate its freedom, 
 and fulfilling its role simply by being in this vibrating semblant 
 mode. . . This mode of construction, moreover, constitutes any 
 content in turn, either subject or object, . .In so far as it (the 
 
I I B 
 
 58 
 
 content) is itself held in control by 'outer' co-efficients of this 
 sort or that, in so far it is set up as- a psychic object; but whenever 
 in turn it is used as inner means of control to other contents, 
 it has a sembled inner life of its own and becomes subject. This is 
 the rudiment, or first suggestion, of that higher mode — Reflec- 
 tion/' * Thus we see the importance of sembling. In reflection 
 the inner life of the different contents that are their own sub- 
 jects is pooled in one inner control — the Subject, or Ego. And 
 that part of the content which was held in control by outer co- 
 efficients of "this sort or that" is still under co-efficients of con- 
 trol, now existence-control, as psychic objects. But all these 
 objects are of inner experience — are objects of thought — in short, 
 are ideas. 
 
 This examination of the outer (experimental) and inner 
 (sembling) nature of the play-mode reveals clearly the character 
 and significance of assumption, and at the same time opens the 
 way for a rapid advance to the judgment-mode. Play experiment- 
 ation, developing into serious experimentation (under the mo- 
 tive furnished by the problems set by the body in taking an am- 
 biguous position in experience and refusing to be permanently 
 either inner or outer, either internal or external), comes soon 
 through the pressure of negative experience — though unreality- 
 feeling which is the "genetic impulse" to further determination — 
 to the stage of disjunctive or alternative meanings — this or that.* 
 The early distinction of the hypothetical or assumptive meaning 
 thus approaches the true general, for the alternative meaning is a 
 stage in the passing of a semblant schema into a general concept. 
 "The alternative expectation has so determined experience that the 
 issue will be one of the two." The negative meaning has thus 
 passed from the privation of all other to the experimental inclu- 
 sion of this other. With the next movement of cognitive growth, 
 the object ceases to be a mere make-up that only subsists;' it 
 becomes instead a real, self-sufficient object. By individuation, the 
 object is transferred from the group that says other cases might 
 have done, to the class that says what other cases might have done ;* 
 
 * Genetic Logic; vol. II, p. I24» 
 " Ibid. ; p. 217. 
 
 " Genetic Logic; vol. II, p. 167. 
 
 * Baldwin: Genetic Logic; vol II, p. 221. 
 
 : 
 
 59 
 
 the semblant object, in short, hardens into a meaning that is nec- 
 essary and without exception, and is "passed back into the sphere 
 of existence of the co-efficients of actual fact and external con- 
 trol." Of this outcome of assumption Baldwin writes as follows : 
 "The uncertainty which made its (the assumptive object's) mean- 
 ing hypothetical, now disappears, therefore, and a positive con- 
 struction stands firm, no longer open to question. The meaning 
 of definiteness and relation attaches to the finished, made-up 
 thing, of which there is no further event. The control, now ex- 
 ternal, has issued once for all in this meaning and no other. The 
 note has been converted into the gold coin of existence, which is 
 to be circulated with a value that is once for all established." * 
 
 With the discovery of existence and judgment, the growing 
 world of experience seems to end in a fixed and final reality ; but 
 this is only in seeming, for the schematic development of exist- 
 ence (now of more existence) still goes on. With the coming 
 of judgment, assumption did not disappear by being extinguished, 
 but by being transformed into a process of a higher nature ; that 
 is, into postulation. In postulation, theoretical interest finds it- 
 self, and consciously seeks satisfaction by enlarging the bound- 
 aries of experience. As it was the function of assumption to bring 
 determination into an indeterminate world, so it is the function 
 of postulation, using the chart thus defined by assumption, to 
 make definite, foreplanned prospecting trips beyond the bounds of 
 known experience. Postulation that proves true, ends in presup- 
 posed existence — existence which may then be made explicit in an 
 existential judgment. That postulation thus eventuates if it 
 enters the sphere of judgment is shown by the following example: 
 "When Columbus sailed westward, he postulated a world in which 
 certain astronomical and geographical relations held. Luckily, he 
 found a patron willing to postulate it with him. Since he dis- 
 covered it, however, all sailors presuppose the world he postu- 
 lated." * 
 
 Meinong's system of epistemology, while very difficult of com- 
 prehension in detail, does stand out in some of its larger features 
 rather clearly. Judgment, he evidently holds, means more than 
 the mere idea of which it is composed ; it has not simply an object 
 
 * Baldwin: Genetic Logic; vol. II, p. 224. 
 ' Ibid.; p. no. 
 
6o 
 
 (using the author's terminology) ; it includes also an "objective;" 
 that is, a transcendental reference to something which is known — 
 this, of course, provided the judgment be true. In Chapter VI. 
 Section 34, which treats of the "thetic and synthetic" function 
 of judgment and assumption, Meinong criticises Brentano's effort 
 to reduce all judgment to the existential, and argues that besides 
 the ''thetic" judgment there is also a "synthetic" judgment. But 
 in this criticism he does not deny the existential import of judg- 
 ment. On the contrary, he refers transcendence to both types; 
 the transcendence of the former he calls absolute transcendence; 
 and that of the latter, relative transcendence, meaning by the ad- 
 jective relative, that through such a recognition neither term of a 
 synthetic judgment is taken for itself alone, but each only relative 
 to the other. "That sorrow is a feeling" has as much the objective 
 reference (Gerichetsein) as does "there is sorrow."' 
 
 That Meinong holds to the existence-import of judgment 
 seems to be the opinion also of Bertrand Russell (in the articles 
 already mentioned) and of Urban (Valuation). Russell inter- 
 prets Meinong as follows : "In fact, relations, attributes and all 
 complexes require objectives, which occur everywhere except in 
 the simple, or speaking not quite precisely, in cases of complete 
 intuitiveness and mere presentation. It is always Objectives — i. e., 
 that something should exist or should not exist, that we desire, 
 and to which we attach value." "" Urban's interpretation is, of 
 course, from the side of worth, but it is especially in point on 
 account of the fact that he finds Meinong standing on about the 
 same judgmental basis with himself ; which is, as was indicated 
 above, an existential basis. Worth for both rests upon some 
 universe of reality, which is presupposed in all judgments that 
 assert existence, either categorically, hypothetically, or disjunc- 
 tively." ' 
 
 The positions of Bradley and Brentano with regard to the exist- 
 ence-import of judgment, are too well known to need more than 
 mere mention. For Bradley, the coming of ideas that exist only 
 as they mean something else, marks rather a decline in experience 
 
 * Meinong : Ueber Annahmen ; p. 146. 
 ' Urban : Valuation ; p. 352. 
 " Ibid.; p. 42. 
 
 61 
 
 than a rise. Those ideas, in fact, signify that consciousness has 
 fallen from its first estate of immediate intuition of reality, and is 
 attempting to gain what it lost. Ideas, Bradley declares, are 
 themselves no part of reality ; but they qualify, mean, symbolize, 
 reality ; and to expect to find reality in them or through them is 
 to meet the same disappointment that Tantalus met in the ancient 
 fable, for reality recedes before our ideas, just as the water from 
 his touch. The subject of every judgment is reahty, which is 
 individual and timeless, and which, accordingly, no judgment ever 
 expresses, but only qualifies. 
 
 This notion, that judgment cannot get down to true being, that 
 it is neither image nor fact, but mutilated content, receives 
 further emphasis from his treatment of those peculiar ideas, the 
 *'real" and the "this." "The idea of reality, like the reality of 
 'this' is not," Bradley states, "an ordinary symbolic content, to be 
 used without any regard to its existence." * These ideas are of 
 facts immediately present to sense; they are elements in actual 
 existence, which we encounter directly, and cannot in judgment 
 be removed from this and transferred to another reality. In these 
 instances the "particular" is present in fact, and it is idle to have 
 an idea of it. This "particular" of presentation — the "real," 
 judgment, being discursive, cannot contain, and it must therefore 
 look beyond itself for the existence it asserts. 
 
 Brentano declares for the existential reference of judgment on 
 the grounds of a fundamental distinction between presentation 
 and judgment. They are, he says, intrinsically diflferent classes 
 of psychic phenomena. "Nothing, indeed, is judged, which is not 
 presented, but we maintain that, while the object of a presenta- 
 tion becomes object of an acknowledging or rejecting judgment, 
 consciousness steps into a completely new kind of relation to it. 
 It is then doubly taken up in consciousness as presented and as 
 held for true or as denied." ^ 
 
 This new relation that consciousness takes to the object of pre- 
 sentation when it becomes the object of judgment, Brentano ex- 
 plains as being a matter of the existence or non-existence of an 
 object. All judgment has just this difference from presentation. 
 
 * Bradley: Logic; p. 80. 
 
 * Brentano : Psychologic ; p. 266. 
 
■<■ 
 
 62 
 
 for in no other respect — neither in intensity nor kind of object, 
 is there any difference in these two phenomena. Judgment is 
 not distinguished from presentation by a relational character ; it is/' 
 an assertion or denial of existence. In agreement with Bradley, 
 he says that judgment is a single idea. This position argued 
 through for the existential proposition, holds in natural course for 
 the categorical and hypothetical propositions, for the latter are 
 reducible to the former. 
 
 (B) From the subjective point of view. 
 
 From the objective side there is growing evidence that belief 
 expresses itself as judgment. But what of the evidence from the 
 subjective side? Does it also show that judgment is more than 
 content; that it is also control? That there is no "that" which 
 is not also a "what;" that "is" always means "exists?" If a 
 thing, to exist, must exist somewhere, necessarily it must exist for 
 » somebody. Existence implies an inner control. But the question 
 here is whether there is direct evidence that judgment contains 
 that inner force which seems to be one of the essential conditions 
 of being. 
 
 That the inner active nature of the individual must not be 
 counted a zero, but a real factor, in the production of reality, has 
 become in recent literature a most patent fact. To dissuade the 
 mind of its old-time bias for abstract, changeless reality, and to 
 implant instead a conception of reality that is concrete, living, 
 growing; that includes the purposes, interests and activities of 
 persons, is the central motive in the pragmatic regime. Reality, 
 the pragmatists say, is in us, and we are in it, and all is a flux 
 of experience. "Things are surcharged valuations, and conscious- 
 ness is ways and ends of believing and disbelieving." * Brute 
 fact could not be real without consciousness, any more than 
 consciousness could be real without brute fact. "The world has 
 meaning only as somebody's, just as a cake is had only by the 
 eating of it." Reality is not something in a ready-made, fixed 
 and finished form, which mind must keep "hands off" and judge 
 only at a distance; but reality is a flux, and "specific conscious 
 beings exercise influence upon its character and existence. 
 
 V 
 
 >> 
 
 * Dewey: Beliefs and Realities: Presidential Address, 1895; p. 114. 
 ' Ibid. 
 
 63 
 
 The flux has an inner life with which concepts quite fail to 
 connect us.* 
 
 Worth-theory vies with pragmatism in putting emphasis upon 
 the potency of the conative in determining reality. Consider for 
 a moment what Urban says in his chapter on "Valuation and 
 Evaluation" in comparing the meanings of truth and value, or of 
 existence and reality. These meanings, he concludes, have a 
 "relative indifference" to each other; there is "merely a partial 
 identity of normative with factual and truth objectivity." Truth 
 and value seem to be not identical ; value judgments do not 
 throughout have presuppositions that can be expressed in retro- 
 spective and logical terms. Just as on the plane of scientific 
 thought the principle of psycho-physical parallelism forbids the 
 reduction of the psychical to the physical or the physical to the 
 psychical, so also on the plane of the axiological, the principle 
 of relative indifference forbids our reducing all values to factual 
 and truth objectivity; all worth experiences to mere effects of 
 social processes or means to social ends.* 
 
 The insufficiency of the concept of existence and truth to 
 exhaust all worth experience, indicates an intrinsic nature that 
 will not be mastered by thought as content, but masters thought 
 as control. In this nature originate the ever-widening circles of 
 growth that expand into increased experience and reality; and 
 though it cannot incorporate this objective expanse into itself, 
 yet it is not lost in the expanse, but remains the source of the 
 creative interests that make impossible a stagnant world; it is 
 the "alogical," the "center of activity," and the source of experi- 
 mentation. This is the principle that even in the most abstract 
 and formal reasoning, sustains reflection as its presupposition.' 
 
 Whether, then, we approach judgment from the objective side 
 or the subjective, it is found to be more than mere content — it 
 has controls in reality to which it is anchored as a mediating 
 context. Judgment mediates the real both as objective reference 
 and as personal satisfaction. But these are the marks we found 
 attaching to belief as its accepted criteria. If, therefore, we cor- 
 rectly interpret the different writers to whom we refer, and make 
 
 * James: Pluralistic Universe; p. 246. 
 
 ' Urban: Valuation, etc.; p. 424. 
 
 ' Baldwin: Genetic Logic; vol. II, p. 328. 
 
 \ 
 
64 
 
 correct deductions from these different interpretations, then, it 
 must be concluded as a matter of course, that judgment, whatever 
 else it may mean, means belief. But there are two facts that have a 
 special signification in substantiating this view of judgment. 
 There is, first, the question of bare denial, and secondly, there is 
 the question of whether pragmatism, denying retrospective 
 thought, and allowing only prospective or instrumental thought, 
 ever obtains real belief. 
 
 Section II: Indirect Evidence. 
 (A) Interpretation of Negative. 
 Bradley declares that a judgment which is merely a negation of 
 an affirmative, is a judgment without a quality; it in no way 
 qualifies reality. But Keynes and Sigwart take an opposite view, 
 and maintain the utility of such a judgment. A judgment of bare 
 negation is, according to their explanation, a judgment that has 
 its ground of denial, not in opposition, but in a deficiency. But 
 how can there be denial except through the contrary? This is 
 an old question, with a big history. Our interest, however, is 
 simply to contrast in a brief way the nature of denial that is 
 based upon judgment-belief with bare denial, which is based upon 
 formal judgment. Several examples of a negative judgment 
 of efficiency are offered by these writers. It suffices to criticise 
 but one of them, that of Keynes, where he imagines a search for 
 a man supposed to be on a certain train to have ended finally with 
 the discovery that he was not there. "I have arrived at the 
 conclusion that a man did not start by a given train, because I 
 searched the train through before its departure," he says, "and did 
 not find him there." *T have gained no positive knowledge of the 
 whereabouts of the man in question (by the case of bare denial), 
 but it certainly cannot be seriously maintained that the denial is 
 meaningless or useless, say to a detective." ' But would not a 
 detective, it may be asked, in searching for a man, set up some 
 bounds to his search? He surely would not search without some 
 alternative or alternatives in mind, which would profit by the 
 denial. If the man is not on that train, he has taken to the woods, 
 is being harbored by some friend, etc. This is about what would 
 be the thoughts of a real detective in such circumstances. He 
 
 * Keynes: Formal Logic; p. 123. 
 
 65 
 
 would, in other words, presuppose a larger sphere of belief, and 
 the negative would issue only as it took impulse from a positive 
 ambition to find which of the possible alternatives in the sphere 
 which they altogether exhaust, is true. With judgment, meaning 
 the active espousal of reality, i. e., belief, the bare negative would 
 be meaningless, and that because such judgment would refer to 
 universes of reality that are real existence spheres, and would be 
 necessarily an expression of some interest. H. W. B. Joseph, in 
 "an introduction to Logis (p. 161)," maintaining the existential 
 view of judgment, states that there is always a positive character 
 as the ground of negation. 
 
 (B) Argument from Pragmatism. 
 
 To come now to the problem whether pragmatism is equally 
 immature in belief and judgment. It is a fact of common knowl- 
 edge that the pragmatists do not limit the belief-function to ac- 
 quiescence. Take for example James in his "Will to Believe," 
 and Dewey in his Presidential address (1905), "Beliefs and 
 Realities." In the first, we read that there are "passional ten- 
 dencies and volitions which run before, and others which come 
 after belief; and it is only the latter that are too late for the 
 fair ; and they are not too late when the previous passional work 
 has been already in their own direction." An hypothesis that is 
 living, forced and momentous, we read again, means "willingness 
 to act," and this James declares to mean belief, for "there is 
 always believing tendency where there is willingness to act." Be- 
 lief is, in fact, but the backing of an hypothesis against the 
 field," because "no bell in us tolls to tell us for certain what truths 
 are in our grasp." Dewey is in agreement with these expressions 
 of James, and says that "beliefs are willful ;" are "adventurous ;" 
 are "working hypotheses." 
 
 If we turn to the pragmatic theory of judgment, do we not find 
 this same hypothetical character? Judgment is prospective; in- 
 strumental. It is inquiry. Thought as logical process has truth 
 and validity only as a mediating function; only, that is, as it 
 stretches forward to some goal. And this means that truth and 
 validity never are, but are to be, realized. Indeed, what place 
 for the "will to believe" is there in thought unless the thought be 
 schematic and experimental ; unless, that is, it has its object still 
 
66 
 
 amenable to further manipulation by subjective choice? If 
 thought should pass from the plastic state of ''tentative, pros- 
 pective plan into the crystallized state of objective, retrospective 
 fact," it would be with the result, certainly, of making the will to 
 believe a ''fifth wheel to the coach," for in that event behef would 
 be no longer a matter of taste and privative choice, but of ac- 
 quiescing in what has been found to hold finally in the nature 
 of things, and what has taken a set beyond the power of will or 
 wish to change. The pragmatist will concede no world of objec- 
 tive existence that is mediated in a context of thought, and that 
 forms a dualism with the subjective which is mediated in the same 
 context. Thought for him never means a finished experience; 
 it comes to no end after is own kind, but only a practical end. 
 That is to say, thought is always instrumental and never acts for 
 itself. He denies that it ever exercises itself within a sphere of 
 established and universalized meaning, by making new arrange- 
 ments in co-ordination, subordination, etc., as it is said to do in 
 higher mathematics and in logic. He denies that by the use of 
 the syllogism we gain insight into experience yet unknown, by 
 taking stock of what we have, and by weighing its significance. 
 The pragmatist will not permit thought to be its own guarantee. 
 "Truth" must apply to "good" for its credentials; the only worth 
 is practical worth. 
 
 Further, if all thought is only inquiry, instrumental to an end 
 it never reaches as thought, then, it is but assumption. It has 
 not yet come to maturity in the logical mode, where, as judgment. 
 it reduces, by a redistribution of all earlier meanings, a world of 
 experience that is undifferentiated and uncertain, to a world that 
 is systematized and held under definite controls. It is not thought 
 that by an intent of belief has referred its objects to existence- 
 spheres in which objects once universalized and classified are held 
 secure against impulse and desire, and in which change is allowed 
 only when new facts arise that demand a resetting of old con- 
 cepts — a readjustment of extension and intension — in order 
 to incorporate them. * The pragmatist, in his attempt to escape 
 the dualism of judgment and its object, stops thought before it 
 gets to judgment, and disperses it in the feeling of practical satis- 
 faction that comes with a redintegration of experience. 
 
 * Baldwin: Genetic Logic; vol. II, p. 194. Hibben : The Philosophical 
 Aspects of Evolution; Philosophical Review; March, 1910. 
 
 ) 
 
 i» 4 
 
 67 
 
 That the pragmatic theory thus dwarfs thought in its growth 
 is evident from the illustration which such theory holds to be 
 typical of all thought, and which is intended to show how judg- 
 ment is instrumental to life— the illustration, namely, of the 
 man lost in the woods and trying to find his way home. The 
 problem is to determine the nature of the cognitive processes 
 that get the man home, and to determine also how these processes 
 terminate, i. e., what makes them true. The pragmatist's solu- 
 tion is as follows: Thought, if it is to mean more than "facts 
 qua presentation or existences," must look forward — never back- 
 ward. For the lost man, thought has but one reference — the 
 forward reference ; it is a "plan," a working hypothesis. Thus far 
 the solution is quite acceptable, for until the man finds his way out 
 of the woods, thought is certainly schematic — that is to say, it is 
 an assumption. But what of the solution given the second phase 
 of the problem — the truth of the plan ? How do the facts that are 
 now "doubtful qua meaning" later secure position and relation- 
 ship in experience? In answering this question, pragmatism goes 
 awry; for it holds that it is the practical reorganization of dis- 
 rupted experience that gives truth to thought, and not that it is 
 the truth of thought (plan) that makes such reorganization pos- 
 sible. When the man finds his way home, the ideas that meant — 
 that mediated — something, have found that something, declares 
 the pragmatist, in a mended and enriched whole of experience. 
 But thought cannot live to enjoy its own fruits, for the redin- 
 tegrated experience is an immediacy — a whole of experience that 
 knows no dualism ; "thought must lose its life to find it." * Just 
 as thought would pass over into the logical mode and come to full 
 realization in an object that is no longer schematic, but universal, 
 the pragmatist springs a trap, and thought drops into an im- 
 mediacy of feeling. Of such judgment, it must be said that it 
 can never have more than a tentative meaning, and that belief 
 remains always in suspense. In such judgments the individual 
 would never reach the point where personal satisfaction goes 
 out upon an object as having found admission into objective ex- 
 perience as a real, existing fact — a fact that has within its very 
 make-up the categories of identity and non-contradiction. 
 
 That pragmatism stops short of judgment, and also, of belief, is 
 given further emphasis by making a turn upon the above illustra- 
 
 ' Moore: Psychological Bulletin; vol. — , p. 4iS- 
 
68 
 
 tion. Let us suppose that the person lost in the woods is a 
 child, and not a man, and that it is too cloudy to see the sun. 
 After repeated failure to get'his bearings, he happens to notice 
 that the trees have moss on one side, and tentatively concludes 
 that this side of the trees is opposite the sun. He proceeds upon 
 this assumption and reaches home. It certainly cannot be said 
 that his reaching home made it true that moss grows on the north 
 side of trees, but on the other hand, it certainly can be said that 
 the schematic judgment, "Moss grows on the north side of trees," 
 though held only as an assumption— a tentative belief— was even 
 then true in the sense that it was destined not to contradict, but to 
 agree with, and at the same time, extend earlier objectified, 
 established experience or reality, by being classifiable as univer- 
 salized meaning, and referable by belief-intent to an existence- 
 sphere. 
 
 A further argument showing that thought, which is instru- 
 mental, has not reached its culmination, is furnished by science. 
 It is a far-fetched conclusion that holds the problems in the 
 laboratory to be set for science wholly by practical exigency. 
 Such a conclusion is too much like saying that the mind cannot 
 think until it has first set for itself practical alternatives. Evi- 
 dently there is in science a theoretical interest. The end and 
 aim of science— unless it is an experimental station— is the object 
 itself— the building up of an objective sphere of truth. 
 
 I I 
 
 69 
 
 the evidence for agreement between judgment and belief is as 
 follows: (a) The increasing investigation of the ''existential the- 
 ory'* directly indicates that judgment, like belief, refers to objec- 
 tive reality, (b) Pragmatism and certain worth-theories show 
 that both judgment and belief have the inner control of an 
 appraising and evaluating self, (c) Such a belief-view of judg- 
 ment gives significance to the negative, (d) Pragmatism in limit- 
 ing judgment to the instrumental and schematic, to a mere inquiry, 
 unavoidably limits belief to assumption. 
 
 
 1 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 The aim of this essay, as indicated in the introduction, has been 
 to investigate the phenomena of belief and judgment, with the 
 intention of finding whether the relation between these two 
 series of psychic facts is so intimate as really to reduce them to a 
 single series. Should judgment be found thus coinciding with 
 belief (in its most generally accepted sense, as meaning objective 
 reference to reality and subjective reference to person), it would 
 establish the view that judgment operates in and for experience, 
 and not beyond experience as a play of empty and irresponsible 
 forms. 
 
 Whether this investigation has contributed to such a view is not 
 for me to decide, but I may state my case as it stands. Briefly put. 
 
 X 
 
 •■r 
 
II 
 
 70 
 
 N 
 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. 
 
 The writer of this dissertation, Thomas Albert Lewis, was 
 born March 17, 1878, in Livingston County, in the State of Mis- 
 souri. He received his prehminary education in the pubHc schools 
 of his native county and in a private normal school. After a 
 year's teaching in district schools, he matriculated at William 
 Jewell College, Liberty, Missouri, in 1899, where he graduated 
 with the degree of Bachelor of Arts in 1905. 
 
 At the conclusion of his college course the author resumed 
 teaching as principal of the public school at Polo, Missouri. He 
 resigned this position at the close of the first year in order to 
 take up work in the Johns Hopkins University as a graduate 
 student. He chose Philosophy as his principal, and Experimental 
 Psychology and Biology as his subordinate, subjects. He held the 
 Fellowship in Philosophy and Psychology during the year 1909-10, 
 and was admitted to the degree of Doctor of Philosophy June 
 14, 1910. 
 
 The writer has attended the lectures of Professors Baldwin, 
 Stratton, Griffin, Buchner and Andrews, and Doctors Dunlap and 
 Furry, to all of whom he is deeply indebted for the inspiration 
 of their teaching and for their helpful interest. He would 
 express an especial indebtedness to Professor Buchner and Dr. 
 Furry for the encouragement and sympathetic criticism they have 
 given him in the writing of this dissertation. 
 
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