Quotes from William James' "Is Life Worth Living?"

These passages come from the closing sections of a speech by William James

James speaks of the most essential aspect of our being, which he says is that region within "where we dwell alone with our willingnesses and unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears." "Here," he says, "is our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all abstract statements and scientific arguments - the veto, for example, that the strict positivist pronounces upon our faith - sound to us like mere chatterings of the teeth. For here possibilities, not finished facts, are the realities with which we have to actively deal . . . "

"I confess that I do not see why the very existence of an invisible world may not in part depend on the personal response which any one of us may make to the religious appeal. God himself, in short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our fidelity. For my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and tragedy of this life mean, if they mean anything short of this. If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. But it feels like a real fight - as if there were something really wild in the universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild, half-saved universe our nature is adapted.. . .

"These, then, are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. The scientific proof that you are right may not be clear before the day of judgment (or some stage of being which that expression may serve to symbolize) is reached. But the faithful fighters of this hour . . . may then turn to the faint-hearted, who here declined to go on, with words like those with which Henry IV greeted the tardy Crillon after a great victory had been gained: 'Hang yourself, brave Crillon! We fought at Arques, and you were not there."

William James, "Is Life Worth Living?" Address at Harvard University from 1895.