They illustrate what I once wrote of as the 'will to
believe.' In some of my lectures at Harvard I have spoken of what
I call the 'faith-ladder,' as something quite different from the
_sorites_ of the logic-books, yet seeming to have an analogous form. I
think you will quickly recognize in yourselves, as I describe it, the
mental process to which I give this name.

A conception of the world arises in you somehow, no matter how. Is it
true or not? you ask.

It _might_ be true somewhere, you say, for it is not
self-contradictory.

It _may_ be true, you continue, even here and now.

It is _fit_ to be true, it would be _well if it were true_, it _ought_
to be true, you presently feel.

It _must_ be true, something persuasive in you whispers next; and
then--as a final result--

It shall be _held for true_, you decide; it _shall be_ as if true, for
_you_.

And your acting thus may in certain special cases be a means of making
it securely true in the end.

Not one step in this process is logical, yet it is the way in which
monists and pluralists alike espouse and hold fast to their visions.
It is life exceeding logic, it is the practical reason for which the
theoretic reason finds arguments after the conclusion is once there.
In just this way do some of us hold to the unfinished pluralistic
universe; in just this way do others hold to the timeless universe
eternally complete.

Meanwhile the incompleteness of the pluralistic universe, thus assumed
and held to as the most probable hypothesis, is also represented by
the pluralistic philosophy as being self-reparative through us, as
getting its disconnections remedied in part by our behavior. 'We use
what we are and have, to know; and what we know, to be and have still
more.'[1] Thus do philosophy and reality, theory and action, work in
the same circle indefinitely.

I have now finished these poor lectures, and as you look back on them,
they doubtless seem rambling and inconclusive enough. My only hope is
that they may possibly have proved suggestive; and if indeed they have
been suggestive of one point of method, I am almost willing to let
all other suggestions go. That point is that _it is high time for the
basis of discussion in these questions to be broadened and thickened
up_. It is for that that I have brought in Fechner and Bergson, and
descriptive psychology and religious experiences, and have ventured
even to hint at psychical research and other wild beas