Note 383 — Chapter VIII · PRAGMATISM AND ANGLO-HEGELIAN RATIONALISM

By belief I have understood throughout this book simply man’s working sense for reality, and I am inclined to think that this is almost the best definition that could be given of it—our working sense for reality. It is at least, despite its apparent evasiveness, most in harmony with the pragmatist-humanist inclusion of will elements and feeling elements in our knowledge and in our apprehension of reality. It is also in harmony with the conception of reality which may, in my opinion, be extracted from both Pragmatism and Idealism—that reality is what it proves itself to be in the daily transformation of our experience. By the retention of the term “working” in this attempted definition I express my agreement with the idea that action, and the willingness to act, is an essential element in belief. The outstanding positions in the definitions of belief that are generally given in philosophical dictionaries are, firstly, that belief is a conviction or subjective apprehension of truth or reality in distinction from demonstrable knowledge or direct evidence; and, secondly, that feeling elements and action elements enter into it. I am inclined to think that the sharp antithesis between belief and knowledge, or the tendency of philosophical books to emphasise the difference between belief and knowledge, is a characteristic, or consequence, of our modern way of looking at things, of our break with the unfortunate, medieval conception of faith and of the higher reason. The study of the facts either of the history of religion or of the history of science, will convince us, I think, that it is always belief, and that it still is belief (as the working sense for reality), that is man’s measure of reality, our knowledge about the universe being at all times but a more or less perfect working out of our beliefs and of their implications—of our sense of the different ways in which the world affects us, and of the ways in which we are affected towards it. Nor do I think, as I have indicated in different places, that “reality” can be defined apart from belief, reality being that in which we believe for all purposes, theoretical and practical and emotional. In the conception of reality as a world of intersubjective intercourse in which beings, or persons at different stages of development, share in a common spiritual life, we have attained so far (and only so far) to the truth that is common to an idealism of the type of Dr. Bosanquet’s, and to pragmatist-humanism when properly developed and interpreted. There are, I find, upon thinking of the matter, any number of philosophers and thinkers who interpret belief, in the larger sense of the term, as our complete and final estimate of reality, and as therefore not exclusive of, but inclusive of knowledge in the ordinary sense of the term.