The Will to Believe

Abstract This chapter is about the need to believe and the risk of believing, in relation to modern-day doubts and dispersals. In the words of James’s student and first biographer, Ralph Perry, it involves the struggle ‘To believe by an act of will in the efficacy of the will’. At their own risk, human beings have a right not to be vetoed as to what they need, and a right to believe in trying for it. To want to believe is closer to belief than we normally suppose. This desire and need and search are illustrated through the author’s first experience of reading James as well as other reader case-histories. The stories show individuals as fighters for ends which without their lonely fight would not exist at all. Theirs are efforts to add to the world what they find lacking in it — but without the certainty of guarantees. ‘I find myself willing to take the universe to be really dangerous and adventurous,’ writes James, ‘I am willing that there should be real losses and real losers, and no preservation of all that is.’ In the human adventure so much has to depend upon a ‘maybe’.