ABSTRACT
Richards on belief and sincerity is indebted to philosophical and critical lines of thought going back to Hume on miracles. He drew on
the writings of James and John Stuart Mill, Alexander Bain, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and James Ward; on J. H. Newman's Christian apologetics; on the criticism of Coleridge and Arnold; on Moore's intuition and goodness. "Belief" fell under intense scrutiny during the second half of the nineteenth century, when the historical sciences and Darwinism were eroding the perceived foundations of religion.3 Arnold's life illustrates the dilemma, since the central event of his youth had been the loss of Christian faith: on what grounds, he questioned, could one discover the sanctions for belief and conduct? Such authority should not be left to chance encounters in colleges, reading rooms, museums, and the popular press. One must refound the system of public and private education from the earliest level and enhance the status of criticism in the universities, public journals, parliaments, and churches. In Literature and Dogma (r873), Arnold distinguished between "belief" or scientific acceptance (a conviction regarding "what can and should be known to be true") and "extrabelief," taken from Goethe's Aberglaube and standing for belief "beyond what is certain and verifiable," "beyond the range of possible experience." Extra-belief was embodied in "hope" and "anticipation," and was conveyed by imaginative or mythic vision. "Extra-belief," said Goethe, is the "poetry of life," and for Arnold it has "the rights of poetry." Poetic beliefs of "high seriousness" felt like religious beliefs in their psychological action. And they seemed "extra" -that is, beyond the present system of ordinary belief and capable of serving as a standard, a goal, a sanction. 4
Arnold reformulated the Renaissance educational ideal for modern society and promoted the authority of criticism. In this, as in other ways, he was Richards' chief model. But his religious studies did not encompass the psychology of belief and many questions were left unanswered. To pursue these, Richards returned to a (now unfamiliar) terrain of Anglo-American philosophical psychology.
