ABSTRACT
In William James's language, the options are live, the consequences momentous, and the choice unavoidable. Preeminently ethical or moral questions have been raised, questions not about the justification of a will to believe but about the action to be taken. In a well-known essay on the relation of existentialism to humanism, Sartre refers to a young man forced by circumstances to choose between the welfare of a parent and the cause of his people who had come to him for advice. Frederic Schick, addressing the difficulty for such a resolution in the Sartre case, argues convincingly that a person's conduct doesn't derive from his beliefs and desires only. Julien Sorel, born into a peasant family in a world of bourgeois predominance that, as he sees it, robs him of the pre-eminence to which his energy, talent, and distinction of spirit entitle him, takes it upon himself to make his way in the world.
