2.

ion; it also illustrates our awareness of how greatly our perception of anything and everything can be determined by the **attitude** which we have previously adopted to the object in question. When we have an attitude of love toward a thing, or a person, we select and emphasize those traits and qualities which will nurture and support our attitude of love. When we hate a thing or a person, the opposite occurs, of course. When we pass from an attitude of love to one of hatred, or from hatred to love, we make a new selection, and often enough, if we are questioned as to how we could see such different and antithetical qualities in the same object, we reply that we have changed our minds, or that we have now perceived the hidden truth about the object, or we sometimes maintain that the object has changed, thus making necessary a change in attitude on our part.

In describing this kind of belief, I am trying to connect the holding of a belief with the presence of an emotional bias and the maintenance of an attitude. And I am also trying to suggest how important a part belief plays in ordinary experience. Emotional bias engenders belief; belief engenders emotional bias; both are involved in the basic attitudes we take toward whatever we encounter in experience, and consequently, if we inspect our experience with care, in the very quality of our experiences.

confronts us.

The same situation may be true when we consider the effect of our political and our philosophical beliefs upon whatever relevant objects we encounter. If we are Republicans, a Democratic orator is likely to seem to us a demagogue, although to a Democrat, the same orator may seem as eloquent as Demosthenes. And there is a vivid example in political belief and bias of the close relationship between belief and perception. The *Revolutionary* who wishes to overthrow the government is called a red, and we respond to the color, red, in this context, in terms of our feeling about the existing government. The reactionary or the fascist is called a white or he is called black. Doubtless, there are profound psychological

4.

us a most important aspect of the nature of the kinds of beliefs which we
have been reviewing, namely, that when we say that we believe something or
hold some belief, we mean that although we believe the belief to be true,
we know that others think that the belief may be untrue? We may feel
an absolute conviction as to the truth of the belief, and yet the fact
that it is untrue to others who are in their right mind makes it or helps
to make it a belief. Indeed, the phrase, "others who are in their right mind"
is a significant one because it is only when we stop distinguishing between
our beliefs and our perceptions, only when we have entirely dismissed all
doubt from our minds, that we are said to be insane.

The disagreement about beliefs is an involved one; for example,
the same person often holds different and contradictory beliefs at dif-
ferent times; and he holds the same beliefs with a different intensity and
quality of conviction; and he attempts to increase his degree of conviction,
assert it, or reinforce it. Let us consider an example of the assertion
of belief which has popular currency for centuries:

> Now, row, row your boat gently down the stream!

> Merrily, Merrily, Merrily: life is but a dream!

The view that life is but a dream, that experience is a set of illusions
and appearances which conceal reality and the true structure of reality
has a very long history, beginning in India. Here in this famous medieval
lyric it is combined with an invitation to pleasure, and the combination
of the two, the view of life and the appeal to be gay in one's boat, gives
it a uniqueness. For the view that life is an illusion, Maya, is usually
combined with the idea of flight or escape from the veil of illusion. And
the idea of hedonism is naturally connected most frequently with the
view that life is sound and fury, signifying nothing, as in the Latin
precept: "at, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die".

Last week Mr. Fergusson spoke of the saintly injunction that
(According to intelligam)
we believe in order that we may understand, and this should suggest another
way in which we hold beliefs: we entertain them. We used the word for the sake of

5.

the understanding or the illumination they may provide, even if they turn
out to be untrue, or if we know we are incapable of holding with conviction.
This is the heuristic aspect of belief, the fact that through encountering
and entertaining beliefs we discover a great deal about perception, emotion,
point of view, and other human beings which might otherwise be concealed
from us. And this aspect of belief is probably as important as any other
in any consideration of the element of belief, religious or any other kind
in the reading of poetry.

For just as we had to recognize the fact of disagreement in the
way that human beliefs hold beliefs and the varying and contradictory
beliefs which they affirm, so we must also acknowledge the fact that
no matter what we believe and no matter how convinced we are of our beliefs,
we are bound to encounter poetry which affirms or implicitly assents to
beliefs which we suppose to be false. And this poetry is valuable as
poetry despite our inability to be that the beliefs which support it are
true.

We can classify poetry from the point of view of belief into
the following kinds:

1) There is the poetry which affirms those beliefs which we
ourselves hold;

2) There is the poetry which affirms beliefs which we suppose
to be false;

3) There is the poetry which is indifferent or irrelevant to
our beliefs, which neither supports nor contradicts our beliefs.

No matter what one's beliefs or lack of belief may be, one
is bound to encounter each of these three kinds of poetry in relationship
to what we think to be true.

In like manner, readers may be classified as being adherents of
a belief, agnostics, sceptics, and there are doubtless those readers who
50 through varying places of belief and doubt.

## RELIGIOUS BELIEF AND THE READING OF POETRY

In attempting to discuss the relationship between religious belief and the reading of poetry, a question which has troubled literary criticism for the past thirty years at least, I must of necessity begin by saying something about the nature of belief in general and how any kind of belief affects our perceptions, our experiences, and our emotions.

It is impossible to define the meaning of belief in general with a precision which will comprehend all the varieties of belief. Nevertheless, we can secure a reasonably satisfactory working definition of belief by reviewing instances of belief in common speech and daily life. We say, for example, that we believe that it will rain tomorrow. This belief is based upon a certain amount of evidence, and we call it a belief, rather than a certainty, because we know that we do not know enough, we do not have a sufficient amount of evidence to be sure that some unforeseen or unknown factor may not present to prevent rain tomorrow. In this sense, we believe in a substance which we call a belief as a way of expressing the inadequacy of our knowledge. If we had enough knowledge, it would not have to be a belief. Moreover, there is no reason in principle why we should not have enough knowledge to transform this belief into a scientific truth.

At the other extreme are those beliefs in which some emotion is a necessary element. We say, for example, that we believe in some human being, meaning that we believe in his future, in his potentialities or the goodness of his character. Here our belief is subject to correction or verification by future experience. We may be confirmed in our belief or we may find it necessary to abandon the belief. But in any case our belief does depend in part upon some emotional bias toward the person in question. And this emotional bias is recognized in innumerable instances. To choose a somewhat grotesque one for the illumination it yields, there is the colloquial and ironic expression: "He has a face which only a mother could love". This illustrates not only the emotional bias involved in all percept-

2.

ion; it also illustrates our awareness of how greatly our perception of anything and everything can be determined by the *attitude* which we have previously adopted to the object in question. When we have an attitude of love toward a thing, or a person, we select and emphasize those traits and qualities which will nurture and support our attitude of love. When we hate a thing or a person, the opposite occurs, of course. When we pass from an attitude of love to one of hatred, or from hatred to love, we make a new selection, and often enough, if we are questioned as to how we could see such different and antithetical qualities in the same object, we reply that we have changed our minds, or that we have now perceived the hidden truth about the object, or we sometimes maintain that the object has changed, thus making necessary a change in attitude on our part.

confronts us

3.

reasons and causes for this relationship between political attitudes and
physical colors; but whatever these reasons are, the connection of belief
and perception is again clear.

When we examine philosophical belief, which is of course very
close to religious belief, the scope of belief often includes the whole
of experience, past, present, and future. On the level of everyday
experience, we speak of a man as being an optimist, or a pessimist, or
a cynic, or innocent, disillusioned, idealistic, realistic, sanguine, or
and the many others like them
enthusiastic. Each of these words/upon inspection refers to an over-all
attitude toward experience and a predominant feeling upon the nature
of experience. The optimist expects the future to turn out well; he thinks
there is a silver lining in very catastrophe. The pessimist looks for and
fears the worst; he suspects that every piece of good fortune is merely
an accident or a trap which will lead to subsequent disappointments. The
or dismisses
cynic disregards/what is good, while the innocent are unaware of what is
evil. And each of these fundamental beliefs or attitudes toward experience
tends to be a selection and an interpretation of experience. We need not
raise the question, at this point, as to what justification, ultimate or
immediate, there is for any of these beliefs and attitudes.

When we come to explicit philosophical beliefs such as belief
in the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, and the existence
of God or the view that all experience is fundamentally material or funda-
mentally spiritual, we must recognize that we are in an area in which,
whatever the actual truth may be, there is a great deal of disagreement
as well as agreement about what the truth in actuality is. I do not wish
is
to beg the question as to what the actual truth about these matters/and

I would like no far as is possible to maintain a neutral attitude, given
the purposes I have in mind. But I do not think it is assuming too much
nor rushing to any unwarranted conclusion to say that the disagreement
about the nature of reality is a very real disagreement, however justified
or unjustified. Now, does not the fact of this disagreement emphasize for

4.

us a most important aspect of the nature of the kinds of beliefs which we
have been reviewing, namely, that when we say that we believe something or
hold some belief, we mean that although we believe the belief to be true,
we know that others think that the belief may be untrue? We may feel
an absolute conviction as to the truth of the belief, and yet the fact
that it is untrue to others who are in their right mind makes it or helps
to make it a belief. Indeed, the phrase, "others who are in their right mind",
is a significant one because it is only when we stop distinguishing between
our beliefs and our perceptions, only when we have entirely dismissed all
doubt from our minds, that we can say to be insane.

Last week Mr. Fergusson spoke of the saintly injunction that
we believe in order that we may understand, and this should suggest another
way in which we hold beliefs: we entertain them. We used the for the sake of

5.

the understanding or the illumination they may provide, even if they turn
out to be untrue, or if we know we are incapable of holding with conviction.
This is the heuristic aspect of belief, the fact that through encountering
and entertaining beliefs we discover a great deal about perception, emotion,
point of view, and other human beings which might otherwise be concealed
from us. And this aspect of belief is probably as important as any other
in any consideration of the element of belief, religious or any other kind,
in the reading of poetry.

In like manner, readers may be classified as being adherents of
a belief, agnostics, skeptics, and there are doubtless those readers who

3.

reasons and causes for this relationship between political attitude and
physical colors, but whatever these reasons are, the connection of belief
and perception is again clear.

Moreover, this instance of the influence of political belief upon
us suggests a brief summary of the way in which emotional bias, like and
dislike, love and hatred, pervades language as well as perception. There
what we may call
exists/a rich rhetoric of bias.

3.