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 reference to the Mahdi serves primarily to:
Aintroduce a religious doctrine that James will later argue must be accepted on faith.
Bprovide a concrete case that illustrates how the same hypothesis can be live for one audience and dead for another.
Cdismiss Islamic theology as making no contact with reason.
Dshow that all religious hypotheses are dead to the modern intellectual.
Answer & Solution
Correct answer: B. provide a concrete case that illustrates how the same hypothesis can be live for one audience and dead for another.
James pairs two readings of the *same* hypothesis: dead to his (American academic) audience, alive to an Arab thinker. The example is a *contrast device* — its job is to make the relativity of liveness vivid. James says immediately afterward: "This shows that deadness and liveness in an hypothesis are not intrinsic properties, but relations to the individual thinker."
- **A** is wrong because the Mahdi is not advanced as a doctrine to accept; it is named only to test the *concept of liveness*.
- **C** misreads James's tone; his "no electric connection with your nature" describes the *audience's* relation to the hypothesis, not a verdict on Islamic theology.
- **D** overgeneralises — the passage does not claim all religious hypotheses are dead to moderns.
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