Bain's Recantation

Bain's Recantation In the years before 1872, Bain, in various places,' gave an account of belief which was novel and was destined, upon crossing the Atlantic, to win many friends and to influence many people. In 1872, however, in the third edition of Mental and Moral Science, he appended to the chapter on belief a note which begins as follows. In the chapter on Belief, I have given what I now regard as a mistaken view of the fundamental nature of the state of Belief, namely, to refer it to the Spontaneous Activity of the System. I consider the correct view to be that belief is a primitive disposition to follow out any sequence that has been once experienced, and to expect the result. It is a fact or incident of our intellectual nature, although dependent as to its energy upon our Active and Emotional tendencies.2 Content in 1872 thus to confess his past sins, Bain thereafter set about a systematic mending of his ways. That was carried through in the third edition (1875) of his The Emotions and the Will. Of it Bain observed both that its chapter on belief had been rewritten "with some modifications" and that it had been "subjected to a thorough revision, being almost entirely rewritten."s Readers of Bain have not found it easy to understand his recantation. F. H. Bradley confessed himself puzzled. "In the third edition of his Emotions (1875) Professor Bain apparently reconsiders the question, but I can neither tell if he abandons his theory, nor what it is that, if so, he puts in its place. As I am entirely unable to understand this last theory, my remarks must be taken to apply to the earlier one. ''4 Max Fisch, after comparing Bain's post-recantation with his pre-recantation expositions, concluded that "the general effect remains the same." Some difference was found, but it is one of emphasis only. In the exposition of 1875, he found that a "slightly greater prominence is given to the 'intellectual' aspect of belief at the beginning of the chapter and in a few other places. ''5 But if the difference is not x For a list, see the invaluable article by Max Fisch, "Alexander Bain and the Genealogy of Pragmafism,"Journal of the Historyof ldeas0954): 418. Appendix, Note on Belief, loo. s Alexander Bain, The Emotionsand the Will, 1875,Preface: Autobiography,326. 4 F. H. Bradley, The Principlesof Logic, Vol. 1: 2o, note. 5 Fisch,422. [107] IO8 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 4" 1 JANUARY 1986 one of substance, it remains to be explained why Bain recanted, saying he had given a mistaken view. Not all readers of Bain have found anything puzzling in his recantation. R. B. Braithwaite gave an account of it which is admirably forthright. What Bain recanted, he claimed, was his view that action, or readiness to act, is the differentia of belief. Prior to 1872, Bain had held that what distinguishes believing a proposition from merely entertaining it is acting, or being ready to act, on it. After 1872, no such claim was ever again repeated by Bain.c It is not at all easy to accept Braithwaite's account. It is in the 1875 edition of The Emotions that Bain says, "The readiness to act is thus what makes belief something more than fancy.''7 In the same passage, he insists that, although many of our beliefs are without any immzdiate regard to practical ends, "we must not depart from their reference to action--, otherwise they lose their fundamental character as things credited, and pass into mere fancies, and the sport of thinking." Delete, in short, what he calls "the tacit appeal to action," and you no longer have beliefs, things credited, but fancies only. It is tempting and plausible to treat such passages as fatal to Braithwaite's thesis. But more than one saving hypothesis may suggest itself. One is that, in revising the text for the third edition, Bain occasionally nodded and the old Bain escaped the imperfect vigilance of the new one, or, in other words, that such passages are to be explained away as leftovers and inconsistencies in the...