Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 6.djvu/569

WILLIAM JAMES, The Will to Believe. 553 -and another ; but what little there is, is very important " (p. 256). The volume closes with an essay on the work of the Society for Psychical Research, which not only forms a chivalrous defence of a much and maliciously maligned subject, but also gives what is probably the best brief account of the achievements and aims of the little band of dauntless workers who have not feared the de- filement of their academic robes by the pitch of superstition, if perchance they might extract coal-tar products of value from the uninviting waste of vagrant fancy. It seems possible that eventu- ally let us say towards the latter end of the twentieth century they will have their reward, and be numbered among the heroes and martyrs of a more catholic science, as the pioneers of truths that have a more direct bearing on human welfare than any other; but at present it is probably more profitable to emphasise Prof. James' ingenious suggestion that the believers in the occult of all sorts are in reality instinctive rebels against the abstraction from personality which science commits in its anxiety to arrive at universal laws. Such persons take a personal and romantic view of life, and believe that events are respecters of persons. And, curiously enough, experience to some extent bears them out, as to a large extent it bears out the scientific disregard of par- ticularity. And they may be right, wholly or in part, for philo- sophically "personality is the only complete category of our thinking ". Prof. James' explanation is so ingenious that one hesitates to criticise it as rather far-fetched ; no doubt the abstraction from personality renders science more and more unsatisfactory the higher it rises, no doubt also belief and disbelief in the personal significance of events may to some extent construct their own verification after the fashion indicated in Prof. James' earlier essays ; yet it would seem to be confidence in their real or imaginary personal experience rather than in the authority of science, and not any more recondite considerations, that actuates believers in the supernormal. Moreover if they and Prof. James happened to be right in their diagnosis, the outlook for psychical research would be even gloomier than it is. For the Society for Psychical Eesearch was founded for the purpose of treating these experiences in accordance with the recognised procedure of the other sciences. If then their character were essentially personal, they would baffle the methods of science as such. Still we have to thank Prof. James for the idea, which suggests the further corollary that the real reason why ordinarily the ' universal law ' operates so successfully, why the natural order seems to be no respecter of persons, is that personality is not yet sufficiently -developed and that persons are not yet sufficiently differentiated to render it unprofitable to group them together. In drawing attention to the manifold suggestiveness of Prof. James' work I have not gone out of my way to quote his numerous