Part 7

Of course not all differences in opinion are based upon the varying uses of words. If, in a group of one hundred intelligent men, fifty men say that they believe in God and fifty that they do not, there may be five in each group who really do not disagree. These ten people may all believe in some sort of life force which can be called either a vital impulse or God. Of course the necessity to answer either “Yes” or “No” deprives some of the chance to say, “What way have I of telling?”

In our imaginary gathering, we may suppose that there are Catholics, believing in the Holy Trinity and certain that the details of dogma are definitely settled by the Church. There are also Protestants of various denominations, differing somewhat as to the conception of the deity. There are Unitarians, with a still different notion. There is a Mussulman, who has no doubt that Allah revealed himself to an Arab named Mohammed. There are deists and pantheists and spiritualists and agnostics and atheists. Also there are people who seldom think about religion, but who call themselves “Baptists” or “Jews” or “Unitarians” when an inquiry is made.

Certainly it is not possible to grade people’s intelligence by the answers they make in a religious census. There is some evidence that the average believer in revealed religion is more stupid than the average doubter or unbeliever. Yet the most enthusiastic atheist must admit that some who share his opinions are decidedly less wise than some who subscribe to, let us say, the tenets of the Roman Catholic Church.

Whence arise the differences in belief? The beginning of the answer is easy, the rest difficult. Most people belong to a certain religious denomination because of the place where they were born and the confession of their parents. John Smith is a Methodist because he was begotten by James Smith upon Adeline Smith, who was then and who had always lived in Atlanta, Georgia. Samuel Cohen is an orthodox Jew because he was begotten by Saul ben Isaac Cohen upon Deborah Cohen in Cracow. And so with the Buddhist, the Hindu, the American Indian believing in a Great Spirit and various little spirits, or the Catholic born in Dublin and going faithfully to mass.

Do the countries which are predominatingly Mohammedan have other religious needs than those of the predominatingly Christian countries? Or is there a peculiar religious instinct inherited among the Turks other than that which is inherited among the Irish? Lessing’s wise Nathan expresses the view that since we can learn little about God through direct experience, we should believe our parents and our ancestors. Yet this is but a form of egotism, and a dangerous form, too. Why should we consider our ancestors wiser than the ancestors of our neighbors who belong to other ecclesiastical organizations?

Robinson’s The Mind in the Making is little more than an attack upon this sort of ancestor-worship, although it does not particularly deal with religion. But we can hardly help returning again and again to the theologians when we discuss the stupidities which are honored chiefly because of their antiquity.

Of course, a change in faith, although it represents a revolt against meaningless stereotypy, does not always indicate any special intelligence. People sometimes change their religions merely as a matter of convenience. (Here, of course, we are dealing with words more than with genuine beliefs.) Samuel Cohen of Cracow may become a convert to the Roman Catholic Church because it will admit him to certain political or social advantages or because he cannot marry Michalina Riboczech, whom he much loves, on any other terms. Or he may come to America and find that he is unable to earn his living except by becoming a Methodist minister. Perhaps he does not possess enough knowledge of the Talmud to be acceptable as a rabbi, but finds ignorance no barrier in a church where he can serve as a living example of conversion to the true faith.

What shall we say of the thousands of Japanese and Chinese who become Christians without any ulterior motive? They find some sort of emotional satisfaction in the new faith which they have not been able to find in their ancestral religions. Why? I do not think the question can be answered satisfactorily with our present knowledge of psychology. Nor can we tell why one brother is a bishop and the other a skeptic, except when there is an element of hypocrisy in one case.

The religious attitude is one of belief based upon little or no evidence. Beyond the field which we consider religious, we regard such an attitude as stupid. As a matter of fact, though, we are influenced everywhere by “such factors of belief as fear and hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the circumpressure of our caste and set.” William James, whose words I have thus employed, argues that because these elements are universal, they are therefore justifiable.

Because we have been considering absolute truth and because the argument is ingenious, I will here quote some sentences from James’s The Will to Believe:

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 skeptic 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 are willing to go in for life upon a trust or assumption which he, for his part, does not care to make.

But if this be unanswerable, then it destroys the system which James is trying to erect. If truth has any meaning at all, it must not be applied to that which is unproved and seemingly unprovable. If we are to think with any accuracy, of course we must recognize that truth and proof are not absolutes. This recognition gives us no cause for returning to the physiology and astrology of the Middle Ages or for postulating God and immortality and free will, when these conceptions seem to be unnecessary for modern scientific thought.

James wrote The Will to Believe as an attack upon the attitude represented in The Ethics of Belief by William Kingdon Clifford. Of Clifford’s viewpoint there is a brief summary in his own words:

We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not know is like what we know.

We may believe the statement of another person when there is reasonable ground for supposing that he knows the matter of which he speaks and that he is speaking the truth so far as he knows it.

It is wrong in all cases to believe on insufficient evidence; and where it is presumption to doubt and to investigate, then it is worse than presumption to believe.

These seem to be principles which we can apply. Certainly there exists no general need to believe whenever intellectual options present themselves. Often, as we have seen, we are expected to act on insufficient information. Thus, the man who declares that he does not know whether there is or is not a God who wishes to be worshipped must either attend church--as though he believed in this sort of divinity--or stay away--as though he did not. Or, though he conceives the possibility that Jehovah wishes to be praised, he may refrain from church attendance and prayer because he has no way of knowing what may be the proper manner in which to go about the matter.

It is not what one believes that matters, except as this is shown in what one does. Therefore a deficiency in will power is at the bottom of much stupidity. Our worldly hells are paved with good intentions. “It is in human nature,” according to Anatole France, “to think wisely and to act in an absurd fashion.”

The shrewdest of business men are caught unaware and imposed upon by swindlers. Many of the tricks commonly employed depend upon the victim’s readiness to share in a doubtful deal. He is made to feel a great joy at the thought of his own acuteness, which joy occupies him to such an extent that his intellectual powers are impaired. Moreover, the victim is given to suppose that great haste is required. At last, when he discovers that he has been beswindled, his vanity usually makes him keep silent. He would be loath to have people know that he is neither as honest nor as wise as he is reputed. Egotism is one of the chief causes of folly, as we have already had occasion to notice.

Some people who are not conspicuous for direct vanity yet show the vice indirectly, through their blind preferences for their own families, their own parties, their own causes. “Wrong or right, my country,” is no wiser a saying than “Right or wrong, my prejudices.” The recent attempts to make out a case for Germanic or Nordic supremacy are entirely ridiculous. As a matter of fact, most Englishmen are racially about the same as most Frenchmen.

It is by no means so evident as it once seemed that the white race is far superior to those of a darker hue. There are even Europeans and Americans who declare the Chinese and the Japanese are wiser than we. As to the negro race, there is but little evidence that it stands on a low intellectual level because of organic limitations. A few colored people of pure blood have performed outstanding achievements. We have reason to believe that their accomplishments are exceptional only because the negroes have had few educational opportunities. The colored people living in the north seem to be more alert and less stupid than those working in the fields of Mississippi and Florida.

Woltmann declares that the negroes are inferior because they attain the age of puberty sooner. At this time, according to some students of the matter, brain development ceases. If this were the case, and if the rate of brain development while it lasts were the same in all races, then we should be able to grade intelligence among races according to climate. We should expect the Eskimos, to whom nubility comes late, to be far more intelligent than the Spanish and Italians, to whom it comes early. But we have no reason to come to any such conclusion.

Otto Ammon, after studying the people of Baden, came to the conclusion that the Nordics (with long heads, blue eyes, and blond hair) are superior to those of Alpine derivation (with short heads and dark hair). But he and the writers in Germany and other countries who agree with him have assumed rather than proved their conclusions. By way of rebuttal, Loewenfeld declares that the two greatest German philosophers, Kant and Schopenhauer, were both short-headed. Goethe, whatever shape his skull may have had, certainly possessed dark hair and eyes. The assumption of Nordic superiority is based upon prejudice rather than upon scientific evidence.

Is stupidity more common among the poor than among the rich? Of course we are unable to answer such questions accurately because of the lack of dependable criteria. But we know that most persons want to become wealthy and we may reasonably infer that those who acquire fortunes do excel in certain intellectual characteristics. That these traits or general mental superiority is transmitted to rich men’s children is sometimes asserted. Of course they are likely to have special educational facilities. Besides this, they have unusual opportunities to show what they can do in positions of responsibility.

And yet they often prove to be inferior in business or in the professions to the children of the poor. Often they have failed to acquire habits of industry. Or else they are anxious to do no work which might seem menial or undignified.

There can be no question that most dynasties have been founded by men of unusual ability. Nevertheless, the kings and queens of Europe are in most cases persons of merely average intellect. Psychoses and neuroses are not rare among them. Perhaps a partial explanation of royal degeneration is to be found in their inbreeding. The mixed fruit of royalty and the common people is almost always declared illegitimate.

Very few great men have had children gifted with genius. So far, the laws of heredity explain comparatively little about the sudden appearance of remarkable traits. But the children of intelligent people are likely to be less stupid than those whose parents are fools. The factors of original nature and of education are both in favor of the former class.

Forms of stupidity vary much with time and place. The tendency to do as one’s fellows do is a strong one. Especially in a mob, it sometimes appears that the prevailing level of intelligence is that of the most stupid members. But mob psychology deals in general with states of excitement. Sometimes actions are attributed to mere numbers which are due to emotional stress felt by all the individuals in the crowd.