Passage (William James, *The Will to Believe*, 1896, Section I): "Let us give the name of *hypothesis* to anything that may be proposed to our belief; and just as the electricians speak of live and dead wires, let us speak of any hypothesis as either *live* or *dead*. A live hypothesis is one which appeals as a real possibility to him to whom it is proposed. If I ask you to believe in the Mahdi, the notion makes no electric connection with your nature — it refuses to scintillate with any credibility at all. As an hypothesis it is completely dead. To an Arab, however (even if he be not one of the Mahdi's followers), the hypothesis is among the mind's possibilities: it is alive. This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker. They are measured by his willingness to act. Next, let us call the decision between two hypotheses an *option*. Options may be of several kinds. They may be — 1, *living* or *dead*; 2, *forced* or *avoidable*; 3, *momentous* or *trivial*; and for our purposes we may call an option a *genuine* option when it is of the forced, living, and momentous kind. " The tone of the passage is best described as:
Aexploratory and informal
Bsolemn and reverential
Csystematic and definitional
Dpolemical and confrontational
Answer & Solution
Correct answer: C. systematic and definitional
James opens with the formal locution "Let us give the name of *hypothesis* to anything that may be proposed to our belief." He labels his terms with italics (*live*, *dead*, *option*, *forced*, *momentous*, *genuine*) and proceeds in numbered subdivisions. This is the register of someone laying out a framework before applying it — i.e. *systematic and definitional*.
- **A** is wrong because the prose is structured rather than free-form; *exploratory* would mean trying out positions without settling them.
- **B** misses the technical register; nothing here is religious or hushed despite the religious subject matter.
- **D** would require an opponent under attack. There is no opponent in this section, only a definition-laying exercise.
Related questions
An argument states 'the village bus service is unreliable, so it should be banned'. The unA 'strengthen' CR question asks which option, if true, would:In a GMAT Critical Reasoning question, the FIRST step to take is:In formal GMAT register, which idiom is correct? 'Her findings are _____ those of the earlWhich uses correct parallel structure? 'On weekends she enjoys _____.'Choose the option with correct subject-verb agreement: 'The collection of old coins _____ On GMAT Sentence Correction, the recommended elimination strategy is to:In a GMAT Sentence Correction question, option (A) ALWAYS represents: