ABSTRACT
Feelings, urges, practical preparations, verbal pronouncements, associative linkages and evidential bindings, all play their part in belief, yet are obviously absent from many cases of it, and we can always imagine cases in which they are present without belief. This chapter describes the truism that a belief is approvable to the extent that it submits to the compulsive experience appropriate to it, and, in the paradigm case, to the compulsive experience of sense. Belief has the absolutely and exhaustively infinite character of a spinozistic substance. It is a sort of anticipatory bowing to anticipate the violence which merges into the actual bowing to violence actually exerted. The approvability of a belief, and the probable light that it authorizes, must not be thought of as confined to matters of an empirico-scientific character. Beliefs are subject to norms, standards and values which are not grafted upon, through reason of the chance responses of particular believing persons.
