The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy

…which the most notable is The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897). During this decade, which may be correctly described as James’s religious period, all of his studies were concerned with one aspect or another of the religious question.

…believe in his famous essay “The Will to Believe” (1897). James argued that one may have a reasonable right to hold a religious or metaphysical belief (e.g., that there is a perfect, eternal, and personal aspect of the universe) when the belief in question would supply a vital psychological and…

…theory of truth; in his The Will to Believe (1897), he asserted that human beings have a right to believe even in the face of inconclusive evidence and that, because knowledge is essentially an instrument, the practical consequences of a belief are the real test of its truth: true beliefs…