A person is intense or alive in proportion to the largeness, intensity, and shape of his beliefs. We are always acting, and there is always a basis for our acting. That basis may be a pattern of comfort, or what we know.
Belief exists as much as we feel we know. In belief, the knowing is felt, and it remains knowing. The more the knowing is looked on and felt, the more it persists; the more it gains dimension, solidity, intensity, mobility.
There is nothing that we know we do not do something about. But what we know can be at odds with our notions of comfort and ego complacency. The knowing may be, and often is, a slight, unperceived, ruffling of or interference with the unconscious procedure of comfort.
Our beliefs, like our feelings, should be based on as much as possible. The more a feeling is based on, the more it is ours, the greater it is. And beliefs are feelings, thought of as a cause of some willed action; some knowingly desired action.
The purpose of mind is to believe. When a person believes, he says this: “I see this to be so; I like the fact that I see it to be so; I don’t mind how much the fact that it is so changes me; I want what I see as true to make me do as much as possible.”
The greatest belief that a mind wants to have is that existence is good, and good for it. This belief is what, without its being put into words, a person at birth has. It is strong, for the physiologically active body stands for it. In the long run, we believe with our bodies. Our bodies must show what we know. And a baby, at the moment that it comes to be, believes by living that living is good. However, as life goes on, this inarticulate belief must get all the support it can; because as a mind grows aware of itself, opposition to seeing existence as good, comes to be, and has to be met. And much knowledge, and intense knowledge, and deep knowledge, is needed to cope with both the bodily trend and the perceptive trend to say that existence is not good—for does not existence seem bad for oneself?
As soon as our knowledge is permitted to be less wide, less intense, less deep than it can be, belief in existence and in life grows weaker. Our life is deep and thorough as much as our belief in it is deep and thorough. And belief is as strong as the knowledge on which it is based.
A belief in existence itself is necessary for a belief in the forms or showings or constituents of existence. We can hardly go after order, explanation, theory, organization, with a full heart, if we somehow think that existence itself is on the side of disorganization, antagonism to the self, deprivation of the ego, harshness to the aspiring soul. We can’t fully be for a thing that is, unless we are for isness or existence itself. When we think that we can correct the evils or infelicities of existence, we are saying that within it lies an indefinite power which may work for its being orderly, handsome, warm, likable.
If we look at ourselves, we shall see that belief is behind every action, including those taking place in a laboratory. We walk because we think it is good to walk; and if we say, “Oh, what’s the use of walking anyway?” the fact that we do (which occurs much the most often) shows that despite our pessimistic, nihilistic pronunciamentos, a belief still is in us that it is good to walk. It is true that the belief is not thorough, a total joy; otherwise there would not be the statements against the necessity of walking. Unless, however, we fall into a state customarily associated with pronounced mental distress, our tendency to disbelieve that it is good to walk, or to wake up, or to eat, or to read, or to write, is successfully combated by an organic force in us equivalent to the belief that the actions mentioned can be reasonably and dignifiedly and praiseworthily taken.
There is something of a confusion as to the relation of belief and knowledge. Somehow, to know as much as one can is scientifically respectable, worthy of sober commendation, esteemed; while to believe as much as one can is looked at askance in scientific or learned milieus, and regarded as a procedure like the procedure of a too devout Baptist, a lady come to God with excessive ardor, or a Hindu person come to cosmic grand secrets in a hurry on a mountain.
The fact remains that there is no true belief unless there is knowledge; and where there is knowledge, if the knowledge is much, there must be belief. Despite constant hints or statements to the contrary, one can’t believe what isn’t true. When a person says he believes something, and it isn’t true, he doesn’t believe that thing. If a person believes a thing, for that thing to be the one he believes, he must have seen it; and to see a thing as that thing is to know it. What a person is saying when he says he believes a thing which isn’t true, is that the comfort side or vanity side of him believes that it would make for comfort if the thing he chooses to call that thing were true. How can the organism—in which belief finally is to be found—accept a thing which really is not true? So when a statement is made of belief where there is not knowledge, what can be justly inferred is, there has been a convenient mishandling of three words—very much of a team—truth, knowledge, belief. These always go together. There is no real instance where they have ever been opposed to each other.
It follows then, that in proportion as a scientist is successfully scientific—attains knowledge solidly, comprehensively, deeply—he has belief. How there can be adequate knowledge that a thing is so without adequate belief that a thing is so, I can’t see; and I don’t believe anybody else can, either. It comes to this: if knowledge is good, belief is good; and if there is knowledge there is belief. Furthermore, if we think that knowledge of the world is good, then we also believe that the world is good, as far, at least, as knowledge of it is good. This, as I will show, is mighty important.