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 believe was capable of being generalized into a voluntarist theory of all knowledge was soon shown in Dr. Schiller’s Axioms as Postulates.

CHAPTER IV

THE DILEMMAS OF DOGMATISM

Every man, probably, is by instinct a dogmatist.  He feels perfectly sure that he knows some things, and is right about them against the world.  Whatever he believes in he does not doubt, but holds to be self-evidently or indisputably true.  His naive dogmatism, moreover, spontaneously assumes that his truth is universal and shared by all others.

If now he could live like a fakir, wholly wrapped in a cloud of his own imaginings, and nothing ever happened to disappoint his expectations, to jar upon his prejudices, and to convict him of error; if he never held converse with anyone who took a different view and controverted him, his dogmatism would be lifelong and incurable.  But as he lives socially, he has in practice to outgrow it, and this lands him in a serious theoretical dilemma.  He has to learn to live with others who differ from him in their dogmatizing.  Social life plainly would become impossible if all rigidly insisted on the absolute rightness of their own beliefs and the absolute wrongness of all others.