one ('identical'). And we should realize that this postulate is of our
making, and involves a risk. It may be that experience refuses to
confirm it, and convicts us instead of a 'mistaken identity.' In short,
_every identity we reason from is made by our postulating an irrelevance
of differences_.

There is thus, perhaps, no fundamental procedure of thought in which we
cannot trace some deliberately adopted attitude. We distinguish between
'ourselves' and the 'external' world, perhaps because we have more
control over our thoughts and limbs, and less, or none, over sticks and
stones and mountains; fundamental as it is, it is a distinction _within_
experience, and is not given ready-made, but elaborated in the course of
our dealings with it. Similarly, in accordance with its varying degrees
of vividness, continuity, and value, experience itself gets sorted into
'realities,' 'dreams,' and 'hallucinations.' In short, when the
processes of discriminating between 'dreams' and 'reality' are
considered, all these distinctions will ultimately be found to be
judgments of value.

Nor is it only in the realm of scientific knowing that postulation
reveals itself as a practicable and successful method of anticipating
experience and consolidating fact. The same method has always been
employed by man in reaching out towards the final syntheses which (in
imagination) complete his vision of reality. The 'truths' of all
religions originate in postulates. 'Gods' and 'devils,' 'heavens' and
'hells,' are essentially demands for a moral order in experience which
transcend the given. The value of the actual world is supplemented and
enhanced by being conceived as projected and continued into a greater,
and our postulates are verified by the salutary influence they exercise
on our earthly life. Both postulation and verification, then, are
applicable to the problems of religion as of science. This is the
meaning of the Will to Believe. When James first defined and defended
it, it provoked abundant protest, on the ground that it allowed everyone
to believe whatever he pleased and to call it 'true.' The critics had
simply failed to see that verification by experience is just as integral
a part of voluntaristic procedure as experimental postulation, and that
James himself had from the first asserted this. Indeed, that he had
first given a theological illustration of the function of volition in
knowing was merely an accident. But that the will to