The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy

Let us give the name of hypothesis to anything that may be proposed to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either live or dead. A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature,-it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, how...