In other words, "our obligation to seek truth is part of our general obligation to do what pays."
In a chapter on pragmatism and religion he reaps the harvest. "We cannot reject any hypothesis if
consequences useful to life flow from it." "If the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the
widest sense of the word, it is true." "We may well believe, on the proofs that religious experience
affords, that higher powers exist and are at work to save the world on ideal lines similar to our
own."
I find great intellectual difficulties in this doctrine. It assumes that a belief is "true" when its
effects are good. If this definition is to be useful--and if not it is condemned by the pragmatist's
test--we must know (a) what is good, (b) what are the effects of this or that belief, and we must
know these things before we can know that anything is "true," since it is only after we have
decided that the effects of a belief are good that we have a right to call it "true." The result is an
incredible complication. Suppose you want to know whether Columbus crossed the Atlantic in
- You must not, as other people do, look it up in a book. You must first inquire what are the
effects of this belief, and how they differ from the effects of believing that he sailed in 1491 or - This is difficult enough, but it is still more difficult to weigh the effects from an ethical
point of view. You may say that obviously 1492 has the best effects, since it gives you higher
grades in examinations. But your competitors, who would surpass you if you said 1491 or 1493,
may consider your success instead of theirs ethically regrettable. Apart from examinations, I
cannot think of any practical effects of the belief except in the case of a historian.
But this is not the end of the trouble. You must hold that your estimate of the consequences of a
belief, both ethical and factual, is true, for if it is false your argument for the truth of your belief is
mistaken. But to say that your belief as to consequences is true is, according to James, to say that
it has good consequences, and this in turn is only true if it has good consequences, and so on ad
infinitum. Obviously this won't do.
There is another difficulty. Suppose I say there was such a person as Columbus, every one will
agree that what I say is true. But why is it true? Because of a certain man of flesh and blood who
lived 450 years ago--in short, because of the causes of my belief, not because of its effects. With
James's definition, it might happen that "A exists"