William James’ attempt to defend religious faith leads him to several conclusions regarding morality and reason that are contrary to Ayn Rand’s life-centered view of morality. This, in turn, causes James to attempt to confine the methods of observation and logic to science, while saying it is inapplicable in the realm of morality. James makes this distinction between science and morality by saying both are ultimately expressions of nothing but “will”. James’ view has consequences in the areas of human social relations and politics.
This paper will compare and contrast Rand’s philosophy with that of James by looking at some of his essays from his book, The Will to Believe And Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, Copyright 1896) (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26659/26659-h/26659-h.htm.)
For Starters: William James Wants to Defend Religion
I was surprised when I discovered that much of William James’ work seemed aimed at defending religious belief. In the preface to his book, James says:
“The first four essays are largely concerned with defending the legitimacy of religious faith.” (Preface)
“…academic audiences, fed already on science, have a very different need. Paralysis of their native capacity for faith and timorous abulia in the religious field are their special forms of mental weakness, brought about by the notion, carefully instilled, that there is something called scientific evidence by waiting upon which they shall escape all danger of shipwreck in regard to truth. But there is really no scientific or other method by which men can steer safely between the opposite dangers of believing too little or of believing too much.” (Preface, emphasis added.)
“I do not think that any one can accuse me of preaching reckless faith. I have preached the right of the individual to indulge his personal faith at his personal risk. I have discussed the kinds of risk; I have contended that none of us escape all of them; and I have only pleaded that it is better to face them open-eyed than to act as if we did not know them to be there.” (Preface)
How Does William James Go About Defending Religion?
James’ defense of religious belief rests in his premise that certain things we hold to be true are based in our “passional and volitional nature”:
“The next matter to consider is the actual psychology of human opinion. When we look at certain facts, it seems as if our passional and volitional nature lay at the root of all our convictions. When we look at others, it seems as if they could do nothing when the intellect had once said its say. Let us take the latter facts up first.” (THE WILL TO BELIEVE, William James)
In other words, there are certain things, according to James, that we want to be true, and there is no further basis for the belief than that. The desire to be scientific is just a manifestation of an “inner need”:
“Hardly a law has been established in science, hardly a fact ascertained, which was not first sought after, often with sweat and blood, to gratify an inner need.” (IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?, William James, emphasis added.)
He makes no distinction between the “inner need” that some feel to be scientific, and the “inner need” that others feel to be religious. Both such “inner needs” cannot be analyzed any further:
“Whence such needs come from we do not know; we find them in us, and biological psychology so far only classes them with Darwin’s ‘accidental variations.’ But the inner need of believing that this world of nature is a sign of something more spiritual and eternal than itself is just as strong and authoritative in those who feel it, as the inner need of uniform laws of causation ever can be in a professionally scientific head. The toil of many generations has proved the latter need prophetic. Why may not the former one be prophetic, too?” (IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?, William James, emphasis added.)
The fact that science is based on observed facts, and religion is not, doesn’t matter to James. What matters is the satisfaction of these ineffable “inner needs”:
“And if needs of ours outrun the visible universe, why may not that be a sign that an invisible universe is there? What, in short, has authority to debar us from trusting our religious demands?” (IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?, William James, emphasis added.)
The desire to be scientific is no better or worse than the desire to believe on the basis of faith:
“Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not; and the agnostic ‘thou shalt not believe without coercive sensible evidence’ is simply an expression (free to any one to make) of private personal appetite for evidence of a certain peculiar kind.” (IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?, William James, emphasis added.)
What James Calls “Matters of Fact”
Does William James want to throw out all facts and science? No. He just wants to “carve out” a subset of ideas that will be immune from facts and science. To accomplish this, he starts by agreeing that there are certain “matters of fact” that no one can deny, no matter how much they want them to be otherwise:
“Does it not seem preposterous on the very face of it to talk of our opinions being modifiable at will? Can our will either help or hinder our intellect in its perceptions of truth? Can we, by just willing it, believe that Abraham Lincoln’s existence is a myth, {5} and that the portraits of him in McClure’s Magazine are all of some one else? Can we, by any effort of our will, or by any strength of wish that it were true, believe ourselves well and about when we are roaring with rheumatism in bed, or feel certain that the sum of the two one-dollar bills in our pocket must be a hundred dollars? We can say any of these things, but we are absolutely impotent to believe them; and of just such things is the whole fabric of the truths that we do believe in made up,—matters of fact, immediate or remote, as Hume said, and relations between ideas, which are either there or not there for us if we see them so, and which if not there cannot be put there by any action of our own.” (THE WILL TO BELIEVE, William James, emphasis added.)
To James, Knowledge is Conditioned By Our Acceptance Of What Others Tell Us, So It is Not Solely Based in Logic or Even Experience -Knowledge Contains An Element of “Will” or “Simple Wishing”
There are, for James, other areas of human belief where our knowledge is conditioned by an “act of will”, and not by mere observation of facts and the application of logic. James calls this “simple wishing”:
“Free-will and simple wishing do seem, in the matter of our credences, to be only fifth wheels to the coach. Yet if any one should thereupon assume that intellectual insight is what remains after wish and will and sentimental preference have taken wing, or that pure reason is what then settles our opinions, he would fly quite as directly in the teeth of the facts.” (THE WILL TO BELIEVE, William James, emphasis added.)
For James, the method of logic, and the scientific method seem to be things that are just “socially accepted”, and have no further justification:
“Our faith is faith in some one else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other,—what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? We want to have a truth; we want to believe that our experiments and studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our thinking lives. But if a pyrrhonistic sceptic asks us how we know all this, can our logic find a reply? No! certainly it cannot. It is just one volition against another,—we willing to go in for life upon a trust or assumption which he, for his part, does not care to make.” (THE WILL TO BELIEVE, William James, emphasis added.)
James concludes that our “non-intellectual nature” influences our convictions. We have “passional tendencies and volitions” which are unavoidable in coming to conclusions:
“Evidently, then, our non-intellectual nature does influence our convictions. There are passional tendencies and volitions which run before and others which come after belief, and it is only the latter that are too late for the fair; and they are not too late when the previous passional work has been already in their own direction.” (THE WILL TO BELIEVE, William James, emphasis added.)
In a certain context, I think this is true. Many of our needs as living organisms come from the time we are born, and can be said, in that sense, to be “pre-conceptual”. A young child starts out as a perceptual being, similar to an animal, that learns to use his mind to promote his life. You could call that “our non-intellectual nature”, but, William James isn’t talking about this. In the previous quote, he is talking about our convictions based in the authority of what others have told us.
In reality, we don’t look for food because our parents told us to. We look for food because even the most simple-minded person, with a functioning brain, recognizes it is necessary -if one desires to live. (Although that desire may be implicit rather than explicit.) Feeling that you are hungry, “simply wishing” to satiate it, and using your reason to satisfy that “simple wish” by hunting for food, or growing food, by following observed cause and effect relationships, is one thing. It is not the same as having a “simple wish” that what your elders tell you, or your preacher tells you, is right without your own investigation of the facts. The feeling of hunger is based in observed facts regarding your body’s need for food. The feeling of the existence of an afterlife is not based on any such observed facts.
Of course, I think James will say that the desire to operate in accordance with observed facts is, itself, nothing but a “feeling” with no basis in anything observed. But, if I “simply wish” to live, then adopting the method of observation of facts and the use of logic is necessary. All reason is based in the “simple wish” to live. Reason isn’t necessary for those who do not desire to live, according to Ayn Rand. But, if you “simply wish” to live, then you must reject ideas that would be contrary to that “simple wish” because reality is what it is, and your body is what it is.
To Ayn Rand, anything in the bible that runs contrary to the dictates of reality must be discarded, if you want to live. The idea of god must be held as an arbitrary assertion, without basis in observed facts, and discarded -if you want to live.
Rand’s atheism is based in the “simple wish” -by which I mean, a realistically obtainable desire- to live, combined with the observation that existence exists.
James Starts With the Cartesian “Prior-Certainty of Consciousness”
For James, on the other hand, there is no acknowledgement that existence exists. He starts from what Rand calls “the prior certainty of consciousness”:
“There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing,—the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.” (THE WILL TO BELIEVE, William James, emphasis added.)
There is no objectivity because he will not acknowledge “the primacy of existence”:
“No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon. Some make the criterion external to the moment of perception, putting it either in revelation, the consensus gentium, the instincts of the heart, or the systematized experience of the race.” (THE WILL TO BELIEVE, William James.)
Rand starts from the standpoint of looking outward, and then recognizing that consciousness is that which perceives reality:
“The primacy of existence (of reality) is the axiom that existence exists, i.e., that the universe exists independent of consciousness (of any consciousness), that things are what they are, that they possess a specific nature, an identity. The epistemological corollary is the axiom that consciousness is the faculty of perceiving that which exists—and that man gains knowledge of reality by looking outward. The rejection of these axioms represents a reversal: the primacy of consciousness—the notion that the universe has no independent existence, that it is the product of a consciousness (either human or divine or both). The epistemological corollary is the notion that man gains knowledge of reality by looking inward (either at his own consciousness or at the revelations it receives from another, superior consciousness).” (Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It, “The Metaphysical Versus The Man-Made”)
Now it is apparent why William James regards the “need” to be scientific and the “need” to be religious as two unanalyzable facts. All that is truly real for him is consciousness. Our senses cannot be trusted, and therefore we cannot be certain there is any reality. There can be no observation of facts that, combined with our desire to live, make rationality and science necessary. His previously quoted discussion of science and religion as serving “inner needs” now makes perfect sense, given William James’ philosophic starting points:
“Whence such needs come from we do not know; we find them in us, and biological psychology so far only classes them with Darwin’s ‘accidental variations.’ But the inner need of believing that this world of nature is a sign of something more spiritual and eternal than itself is just as strong and authoritative in those who feel it, as the inner need of uniform laws of causation ever can be in a professionally scientific head. The toil of many generations has proved the latter need prophetic. Why may not the former one be prophetic, too? And if needs of ours outrun the visible universe, why may not that be a sign that an invisible universe is there? What, in short, has authority to debar us from trusting our religious demands? Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not; and the agnostic ‘thou shalt not believe without coercive sensible evidence’ is simply an expression (free to any one to make) of private personal appetite for evidence of a certain peculiar kind.” (IS LIFE WORTH LIVING?, William James, emphasis added.)
William James Thinks “Belief In Something”, Even If Wrong, Is Better Than, What He Views, As “Constant Uncertainty”
James believes that “belief in something” is better than the “constant uncertainty” that he thinks philosophy, and a reality-oriented approach leads to:
“Believe truth! Shun error!—these, we see, are two materially different laws; and by choosing between them we may end by coloring differently our whole intellectual life.” (THE WILL TO BELIEVE, William James.)
“We may regard the chase for truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may, on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and let truth take its chance. Clifford, in the instructive passage which I have quoted, exhorts us to the latter course. Believe nothing, he tells us, keep your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing it on insufficient evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies.” (THE WILL TO BELIEVE, William James.)
If you still doubt him, James reminds you that our desire for truth over error is nothing but an “expression of passional life”, so it is no better or worse than the “passion” of those who choose to believe the bible, despite evidence to the contrary:
“I myself find it impossible to go with Clifford. We must remember that these feelings of our duty about either truth or error are in any case only expressions of our passional life. Biologically considered, our minds are as ready to grind out falsehood as veracity…” (THE WILL TO BELIEVE, William James, emphasis added.)
The above quote draws out a sharp distinction between Ayn Rand and William James. He sees no connection between truth and the choice to live. (Which, for Rand, is a choice, not a commandment.) He views the search for truth, and the avoiding of error as a “duty”, which is an expression of “our passional life”.
Rand, on the other hand, says that if you want to live, then you must recognize that reality is what it is, and operate in accordance with immutable cause and effect. Only the “man-made” is “contingent” for Ayn Rand. Nature, apart from human action, is “necessary’ and “had to be”. According to Rand, you judge the man-made, and accept the “metaphysically given”. (Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It, “The Metaphysical Versus The Man-Made”)
Placed in a certain context of knowledge, I think Rand would believe it is true that reason does depend on our “passional life”, if by that expression, one means the desire to live. It’s only the choice to live that makes observing the facts, and drawing inferences and conclusions from them, necessary. William James doesn’t mean that, however.
When James speaks of our “passional life”, he means things we want to believe because they satisfy some emotional whim that may or may not enhance one’s life and well-being. His expressed goal is to justify belief in the supernatural. In practice, this means belief in what your mother, father, and minister told you as a child, based on nothing but their authority in your mind. Even more fundamentally, this represents a desire to continue to believe anything despite the fact that it is: (a) contrary to the facts, and (b) therefore contrary to your needs as a living being (and anti-life).
For instance, imagine you are dating an abusive romantic partner who beats you up. Your emotions tell you that you want to stay with them because of some neurotic need. (The origins of that need may depend on the particular individual, and are for mental health professionals to determine.) For James, this desire, or “expression of our passional life”, is no different than the desire to live, and the consequent need to observe facts and act according to them.
Another example: You have an extreme “passion” for doing heroin. (Once again, the origins of that desire may vary between people, and are for a medical professional/scientist to diagnose.) Your feelings tell you that you need to shoot up. Your rational mind tells you that if you keep this up, it will adversely affect your health, and will likely cause your untimely death. To William James, the “passion” to shoot up heroin is the same as the “passion” to follow the laws of logic or mathematics. This is because, at root, for him, reason has no connection to the “passion to live”.
In stark contrast Rand says:
“My morality, the morality of reason, is contained in a single axiom: existence exists—and in a single choice: to live. The rest proceeds from these.” (Ayn Rand, For The New Intellectual, Galt’s Speech. )
Ayn Rand’s “passion” is the desire to live, and this desire, combined with the immutable laws of nature, creates the need for a moral code based in reason.
William James’ Methodological Distinction in Natural Sciences versus In The Realm of Morality
James doesn’t want to throw science out entirely. So, he distinguishes between committing to a particular belief, versus remaining uncommitted, because you don’t have enough evidence, in different areas of life:
“Wherever the option between losing truth and gaining it is not momentous, we can throw the chance of gaining truth away, and at any rate save ourselves from any chance of believing falsehood, by not making up our minds at all till objective evidence has come.” (THE WILL TO BELIEVE, William James.)
“In scientific questions, this is almost always the case; and even in human affairs in general, the need of acting is seldom so urgent that a false belief to act on is better than no belief at all.” (THE WILL TO BELIEVE, William James.)
I think he is saying that in the natural sciences, we can often remain uncommitted to a particular scientific theory because there is no great rush to decide. For instance, the theory of evolution has less immediate impact on our personal lives than, say, whether someone we know has committed a serious crime. Knowing that someone is a murderer, and is to be shunned, to avoid being killed oneself, is of greater immediate concern to most people than whether Darwinian evolution or Lamarckian evolution is correct.
James distinguishes many scientific issues, like the theory of evolution, from a court case:
“Law courts, indeed, have to decide on the best evidence attainable for the moment, because a judge’s duty is to make law as well as to ascertain it, and (as a learned judge once said to me) few cases are worth spending much time over: the great thing is to have them decided on any acceptable principle, and got out of the way. But in our dealings with objective nature we obviously are recorders, not makers, of the truth; and decisions for the mere sake of deciding promptly and getting on to the next business would be wholly out of place.” (THE WILL TO BELIEVE, William James, emphasis added.)
I take James as meaning that sometimes, what is needed is a quick, and decisive opinion by the judge, not necessarily the “optimal” choice. A decision, one way or the other, is what is needed, rather than waiting to get more data.
As a legal professional, I’m not sure I 100% agree with his example here. In a death penalty case, a “prompt” decision is not better than the “optimal” decision of determining whether the defendant is actually guilty. The possibility of a mistake in a criminal case is unacceptable. In certain breach of contract disputes, he probably does have a better point. (And, this is why criminal cases require a higher burden of proof.) At any rate, it is true that sometimes you must make a quick decision because waiting is less optimal than either decision you could make. When an out of control truck is about to run you down on the street, you may not have time to decide whether jumping right or jumping left is better. You’ve got to jump, immediately, so less analysis goes into the decision than would be the case with more time. (The stakes are very high, but the time to decide creates a less than optimal analysis -but more optimal than waiting.)
James Probably makes the distinction between Morality (“oughts”) on the one hand, and scientific questions (“Is-statements”) on the other because of the “Is-Ought problem”:
“The question next arises: Are there not somewhere forced options in our speculative questions, and can we (as men who may be interested at least as much in positively gaining truth as in merely escaping dupery) always wait with impunity till the coercive evidence shall have arrived? It seems a priori improbable that the truth should be so nicely adjusted to our needs and powers as that.”
“Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose solution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is a question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it did exist. Science can tell us what exists; but to compare the worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but what Pascal calls our heart.” (THE WILL TO BELIEVE, William James, emphasis added.)
For James, as for David Hume, morality, that which one “ought to do”, is not something that can be derived from observing “what sensibly exists”. Morality is based in “our heart”, by which he means some feeling other than what we can see.
I do not think that Ayn Rand’s response to this would be to say that the mere observation of facts creates any kind of “moral commandment” or “duty” to live. Observation of facts will demonstrate that life is conditional, and that it is not guaranteed to us. Observation of facts will also lead to the conclusion that certain actions must be taken to maintain one’s life. Observation will also lead you to understand that a certain methodology maximizes the probability of living. However, the choice to live, for Rand, is a choice. (A “basic” choice) :
“Life or death is man’s only fundamental alternative. To live is his basic act of choice. If he chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course.” (Ayn Rand, Philosophy: Who Needs It, “Causality versus Duty”)
As a teenager or young adult, possibly younger, most of us have a “background knowledge” we have gained from observation, school, and our elders. Some of it is right, and some of it is not. Also, by the time we’re in our teenage years, most of us are able to have some conception of our own lives, and to recognize that living is conditional on our actions. With this “cognitive context”, we then make that choice to live, over and over, throughout our lives. To the extent that we recognize, implicitly or explicitly, that rationality is necessary for our survival, we can then reform, and adapt some of our ideas, or flatly reject, others.
I think the difference between Rand on the one hand, and William James, and David Hume, on the other, is that Rand would say something like this:
Why do you need science at all? Why do you need to reason at all?
For Rand, it is only the “basic choice” to live, combined with the axiom “existence exists”, that demands you observe facts and make logical conclusions based on those observations. From this basis, Rand develops a morality based in the virtue of rationality, aimed at pursuing the cardinal values of Reason, Purpose, and Self-esteem. These three components constitute the essence of “man’s life” for Rand.
Rand does base morality in what “sensibly exists”, which is the nature of existence, and the choice to live. Does one have to live according to Rand? No, it is a choice. But for those who choose life, there is no other option but the virtue of rationality.
The difference between Rand and William James is that he is not recognizing why we need morality at all. He wants to find some basis for holding “traditional morality”, which, for Western Man, is some variant of the Judeo-Christian system of morality. To that end, James is willing to equate the passion of the scientific search for the truth with the “passion” to believe what your parents and ministers told you as a child. In the process, he disregards the “reason that we reason”, which is the enhancement and promotion of human life. Once the choice to live is jettisoned as conditioning our quest for knowledge, the entire endeavor of science becomes, psychologically, and existentially, pointless. Religion, or any other irrationalism, is then just as meaningful. (Or equally lacking in meaning.)
Since James rejects life as the standard of value in favor of Judeo-Christian morality, he is left with nothing but skepticism with respect to all knowledge:
“If we had an infallible intellect with its objective certitudes, we might feel ourselves disloyal to such a perfect organ of knowledge in not trusting to it exclusively, in not waiting for its releasing word. But if we are empiricists, if we believe that no bell in us tolls to let us know for certain when truth is in our grasp, then it seems a piece of idle fantasticality to preach so solemnly our duty of waiting for the bell.” (THE WILL TO BELIEVE, William James, emphasis added.)
The “bell that tolls in us” when it comes to the certainty of our knowledge is the concept of man’s life:
“Man has a single basic choice: to think or not, and that is the gauge of his virtue.” (Ayn Rand, For The New Intellectual, Galt’s Speech.)
“Virtue is not an end in itself. Virtue is not its own reward or sacrificial fodder for the reward of evil. Life is the reward of virtue—and happiness is the goal and the reward of life.” (Ayn Rand, For The New Intellectual, Galt’s Speech. )
For William James, Certain Types of Facts Can Be Created By Enough People Feeling that It Is So
Social organization and the relations among men are ultimately based in a moral code. Both Rand and William James would agree on this point.
In the case of James, his moral system is ultimately based in a faith that he believes is no different than the “faith in science”:
“There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. And where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the ‘lowest kind of immorality’ into which a thinking being can fall. Yet such is the logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend to regulate our lives!” (THE WILL TO BELIEVE, William James.)
James’ morality is based in faith, or more specifically, the “will to believe” in faith. Therefore, all social systems are also based in “the will to believe” for him:
“A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to his own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is a pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted.” (THE WILL TO BELIEVE, William James.)
James’ belief that social systems are based in nothing but “the will to believe” has an interesting logical consequence in practice. When a society fails, it is based in the lack of sufficient “will”. He gives the example of the robbery of a train:
“A whole train of passengers (individually brave enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter can count on one another, while each passenger fears that if he makes a movement of resistance, he will be shot before any one else backs him up. If we believed that the whole car-full would rise at once with us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would never even be attempted.” (THE WILL TO BELIEVE, William James.)
While James leaves the realm of science to evidence and logic, the area ultimately governing human behavior, morality, is left to “will” or “passion”. For him, any social system can “work” if enough people believe it. This is because you cannot derive “ought statements” from “is statements”, an idea he got from David Hume, and, also because of what I think is an additional part, which is in bold here:
“Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose solution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is a question not of what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it did exist.” (THE WILL TO BELIEVE, William James, emphasis added.)
A social system is good because enough people believe it “should exist”, or because it “should work”. In other words, because enough people feel that it is so, then it is so, according to William James.
Rand denies that any social system can “work” if enough people believe it. For her, reality is what it is. Capitalism leads to prosperity and communism leads to its opposite, no matter how many people sincerely want collectivism to “work”.
Rand says that if enough people want to live, and consistently understand that choice to live, then certain social systems are better than others in achieving that goal. For Rand, individuals must be free to pursue their own rational self-interest. If they all do so, within a system of government that protects and respects rights to private property, then such a system is practical. Free market capitalism will be the social result.
Rand denies that all it takes is enough people “believing” in socialism for it to lead to prosperity. It denies the existence of the individual, whose own life is important to him, because he chooses to live. (Those who don’t choose to live need no morality, social system, or system of government.) Since there is no “social organism”, and “society” is just a number of individuals, the ultimate result of any socialist system is the war of all against all, and the destruction of the society:
“The alleged goals of socialism were: the abolition of poverty, the achievement of general prosperity, progress, peace and human brotherhood. The results have been a terrifying failure—terrifying, that is, if one’s motive is men’s welfare.
Instead of prosperity, socialism has brought economic paralysis and/or collapse to every country that tried it. The degree of socialization has been the degree of disaster. The consequences have varied accordingly.” (Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness, “The Monument Builders”.)
The ideas of William James and other late 19th-Century American Philosophers are known as “Pragmatism”. This is premised in their supposed “practicality”. But, as we have seen, James banishes science into a sort of “intellectual ghetto” by saying the “will” to pursue science is based in nothing but the same “will” to believe what the Bible says. James makes observation and scientific knowledge ultimately purposeless. In contrast, Rand, says we must practice observation and the method of logic, no matter how strongly we “want to believe” in their contraries, because it is the only way to practice the art of living.