I believe!

Letting Mary-Jane Rubenstein's Pantheologies open new worlds for us - we're alternating weeks reading her book and reading sources she cites - is turning out to be a wonderful education. As part of this week's digging into the sources of her project, as outlined in her introducion, I had occasion to return to William James' A Pluralistic Universe, which I don't think I've looked at since graduate school. 

Rubenstein takes the idea of a "pluralist pantheism" from this book, even as, she argues, James isn't ultimately willing to go there. She's right but no matter. James of all people would expect others to see farther, and the vista is splendid. I'll doubtless have occasion to dwell on some of James' pluralist thoughts, with which I resonate deeply. But here's a gem, from the book's last pages, which ties together all his thinking about religion going back to "The Will to Believe." What he calls the "Ladder of Faith" is the way, he proposes, that anyone arrives at believing anything - and why it matters that we do. 

A conception of the world arises in you somehow, no matter how. Is it true or not? you ask. 

It might be true somewhere, you say, for it is not self-contradictory. 

It may be true, you continue, even here and now. 

It is fit to be true, it would be well if it were true, it ought to be true, you presently feel. 

It must be true, something persuasive in you whispers next; and then—as a final result— 

It shall be held for true, you decide; it shall be as if true, for you. 

And your acting thus may in certain special cases be a means of making it securely true in the end.

James, William. A Pluralistic Universe: Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the Present Situation in Philosophy [London: Longman, Green, 1909], 328-29