theStech/trainer_dataset · Datasets at Fast360

source stringclasses 3 values	answer stringlengths 0 156k	extra dict
book	and impossibility on the other are the sole categories of the real. Possibilities that fail to get	null
book	realized are, for determinism, pure illusions: they never were possibilities at all. There is nothing inchoate, it says, about this universe of ours, all that was or is or shall be actual in it having been from eternity virtually there. The cloud of alternatives our minds escort this mass of actuality withal is a cloud of sheer deceptions, to which ‘ impossibilities ’ is the only name	null
book	that rightfully belongs.	null
book	The issue, it will be seen, is a perfectly sharp one, which no eulogistic terminology can smear	null
book	over or wipe out. The truth must lie with one side or the other, and its lying with one side	null
book	makes the other false.	null
book	The question relates solely to the existence of possibilities, in the strict sense of the term, as things that may, but need not, be. Both sides admit that a volition, for instance, has occurred. The indeterminists say another volition might have occurred in its place; the determinists swear that nothing could possibly have occurred in its place. Now, can science be called in to tell us which of these two point- blank contradicters of each other is right? Science professes	null
book	to draw no conclusions but such as are based on matters of fact, things that have actually happened; but how can any amount of assurance that something actually happened give us	null
book	68	null
book	the least grain of information as to whether another thing might or might not have happened	null
book	in its place? Only facts can be proved by other facts. With things that are possibilities and not facts, facts have no concern. If we have no other evidence than the evidence of existing facts, the possibility -question must remain a mystery never to be cleared up.	null
book	And the truth is that facts practically have hardly anything to do with making us either determinists or indeterminists. Sure enough, we make a flourish of quoting facts this way or that; and if we are determinists, we talk about the infallibility with which we can predict one another’ s conduct; while if we are indeterminists, we lay great stress on the fact that it is just	null
book	because we cannot foretell one another’s conduct, either in war or statecraft or in any of the great and small intrigues and businesses of men, that life is so intensely anxious and hazardous a game. But who does not see the wretched insufficiency of this so- called	null
book	objective testimony on both sides? What fills up the gaps in our minds is something not objective, not external. What divides us into possibility men and anti- possibility men is	null
book	different faiths or postulates,—postulates of rationality. To this man the world seems more rational with possibilities in it, —to that man more rational with possibilities excluded; and	null
book	talk as we will about having to yield to evidence, what makes us monists or pluralists,	null
book	determinists or indeterminists, is at bottom always some sentiment like this.	null
book	The stronghold of the deterministic sentiment is the antipathy to the idea of chance. As soon as we begin to talk indeterminism to our friends, we find a number of them shaking their heads. This notion of alternative possibility, they say, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass, is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance; and chance is something the notion of which no sane mind can for an instant tolerate in the world. What is it, they ask, but barefaced crazy unreason, the neg ation of intelligibility and law? And if the	null
book	slightest particle of it exist anywhere, what is to prevent the whole fabric from falling together, the stars from going out, and chaos from recommencing her topsy-turvy reign?	null
book	Remarks of this sort about chance will put an end to discussion as quickly as anything one	null
book	can find. I have already told you that ‘ chance’ was a word I wished to keep and use. Let us	null
book	then examine exactly what it means, and see whether it ought to be such a terrible bugbear to us. I fancy that squeezing the thistle boldly will rob it of its sting.	null
book	The sting of the word ‘ chance’ seems to lie in the assumption that it means something	null
book	positive, and that if anything happens by chance, it must needs be something of an intrinsically irrational and preposterous sort. Now, chance means nothing of the kind. It is a purely negative and re lative term,	null
book	22 giving us no information about that of which it is	null
book	predicated, except that it happens to be disconnected with something else,—not controlled, secured, or necessitated by other things in advance of its own actual presence. As this point is the most subtile one of the whole lecture, and at the same time the point on which all the rest hinges, I beg you to pay particular attention to it. What I say is that it tells us nothing about what a thing may be in itself to call it ‘ chance. ’ It may be a bad thing, it may be a good thing.	null
book	It may be lucidity, transparency, fitness incarnate, matching the whole system of other things, when it has once befallen, in an unimaginably perfect way. All you mean by calling it ‘chance’ is that this is not guaranteed, that it may also fall out otherwise. For the system of	null
book	other things has no positive hold on the chance-thing. Its origin is in a certain fashion negative: it escapes, and says, Hands off! coming, when it comes, as a free gi ft, or not at all.	null
book	This negativeness, however, and this opacity of the chance-thing when thus considered ab. extra , or from the point of view of previous things or distant things, do not preclude its	null
book	22 Speaking technically, it is a word with a positive denotation, but a connotation that is negative. Other things	null
book	must be silent about what it is: it alone can decide that point at the moment in which it reveals itself.	null
book	69	null
book	having any amount of positiveness and luminosity from within, and at its own place and	null
book	moment. All that its chance -character asserts about it is that there is something in it really of	null
book	its own, something that is not the unconditional property of the whole. If the whole wants this	null
book	property, the whole must wait till it can get it, if it be a matter of chance. That the universe may actually be a sort of joint-stock society of this sort, in which the sharers have both limited liabilities and limited powers, is of course a simple and conceivable notion.	null
book	Nevertheless, many persons talk as if the minutest dose of disconnectedness of one part with	null
book	another, the smallest modicum of independence, the faintest tremor of ambiguity about the future, for example, would ruin everything, and turn this goodly universe into a sort of insane sand-heap or nulliverse, no universe at all. Since future human volitions are as a matter of	null
book	fact the only ambiguous things we are tempted to believe in, let us stop for a moment to make ourselves sure whether their independent and accidental character need be fraught with such direful consequences to the universe as these.	null
book	What is meant by saying that my choice of which way to walk home after the lecture is ambiguous and matter of chance as far as the present moment is concerned? It means that both Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street are called; but that only one, and that one either one,	null
book	shall be chosen. Now, I ask you seriously to suppose that this ambiguity of my choice is real; and then to make the impossible hypothesis that the choice is made twice over, and each time falls on a different street. In other words, imagine that I first walk through Divinity Avenue, and then imagine that the powers governing the universe annihilate ten minutes of time with all that it contained, and set me back at the door of this hall just as I was before the choice was made. Imagine then that, everything else being the same, I now make a different choice and traverse Oxford Street. You, as passive spectators, look on and see the two alternative universes,—one of them with me walking through Divinity Avenue in it, the other with the same me walking th rough Oxford Street. Now, if you are determinists you believe one of	null
book	these universes to have been from eternity impossible: you believe it to have been impossible because of the intrinsic irrationality or accidentality somewhere involved in it. But looking outwardly at these universes, can you say which is the impossible and accidental one, and which the rational and necessary one? I doubt if the mos t iron -clad determinist among you	null
book	could have the slightest glimmer of light on this point. In other words, either universe after the fact and once there would, to our means of observation and understanding, appear just as	null
book	rational as the other. There would be absolutely no criterion by which we might judge one necessary and the other matter of chance. Suppose now we relieve the gods of thei r	null
book	hypothetical task and assume my choice, once made, to be made forever. I go through Divinity Avenue for good and all. If, as good determinists, you now begin to affirm, what all good determinists punctually do affirm, that in the nature of things I couldn’t have gone	null
book	through Oxford Street,—had I done so it would have been chance, irrationality, insanity, a horrid gap in nature,— I simply call your attention to this, that your affirmation is what the	null
book	Germans call a Machtspruch, a mere conception fulminated as a dogma and based on no insight into details. Before my choice, either street seemed as natural to you as to me. Had I happened to take Oxford Street, Divinity Avenue would have figured in your philosophy as the gap in nature; and you would have so proclaimed it with the best deterministic conscience in the world.	null
book	But what a hollow outcry, then, is this against a chance which, if it were present to us, we	null
book	could by no character whatever distinguish from a rational necessity! I have taken the most trivial of examples, but no possible example could lead to any different result. For what are the alternatives which, in point of fact, offer themselves to human volition? What are those futures that now seem matters of chance? Are they not one and all like the Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street of our example? Are they not all of them kinds of things already here and	null
book	70	null
book	based in the existing frame of nature? Is any one ever tempted to produce	null
book	an absolute accident, something utterly irrelevant to the rest of the world? Do not all the	null
book	motives that assail us, all the futures that offer themselves to our choice, spring equally from the soil of the past; and would not either one of them, whether realized through chance or through necessity, the moment it was realized, seem to us to fit that past, and in the completest and most continuous manner to interdigitate with the phenomena already there?	null
book	23	null
book	The more one thinks of the matter, the more one wonders that so empty and gratuitous a hubbub as this outcry against chance should have found so great an echo in the hearts of men. It is a word which tells us absolutely nothing about what chances, or about the modus operandi of the chancing; and the use of it as a war -cry shows only a temper of intellectual	null
book	absolutism, a demand that the world shall be a solid block, subject to one control,—which temper, which demand, the world may not be bound to gratify at all. In every outwardly verifiable and practical respect, a world in which the alternatives that now actually distract your choice were decided by pure chance would be by me absolutely undistinguished	null
book	from the world in which I now live. I am, therefore, entirely willing to call it, so far as your choices go, a world of chance for me. To yourselves , it is true, those very acts of choice,	null
book	which to me are so blind, opaque, and external, are the opposites of this, for you are within them and effect them. To you they appear as decisions; and decisions, for him who makes them, are altogether peculiar psychic facts. Self -luminous and self- justifying at the living	null
book	moment at which they occur, they appeal to no outside moment to put its stamp upon them or make them continuous with the rest of nature. Themselves it is rather who seem to make nature continuous; and in their strange and intense function of granting consent to one possibility and withholding it from another, to transform an equivocal and double future into an inalterable and simple past.	null
book	But with the psychology of the matter we have no concern this evening. The quarrel which determinism has with chance fortunately has nothing to do with this or that psychological detail. It is a quarrel altogether metaphysical. Determinism denies the ambig uity of future	null
book	volitions, because it affirms that nothing future can be ambiguous. But we have said enough to meet the issue. Indeterminate future volitions do mean chance. Let us not fear to shout it from the house-tops if need be; for we now know that the idea of chance is, at bottom, exactly the same thing as the idea of gift,—the one simply being a disparaging, and the other a eulogistic, name for anything on which we have no effective claim . And whether the world	null
book	be the better or the worse for having either chances or gifts in it will depend altogether on what these uncertain and unclaimable things turn out to be.	null
book	And this at last brings us within sight of our subject. We have seen what determinism means: we have seen that indeterminism is rightly described as meaning chance; and we have seen that chance, the very name of which we are urged to shrink from as from a metaphysical pestilence, means only the negative fact that no part of the world, however big, can claim to control absolutely the destinies of the whole. But although, in discussing the word ‘ chance, ’ I	null
book	may at moments have seemed to be arguing for its real existence, I have not meant to do so yet. We have not yet ascertained whether this be a world of chance or no; at most, we have	null
book	23 A favorite argument against free -will is that if it be true, a man's murderer may as probably be his best friend	null
book	as his worst enemy, a mother be as likely to strangle as to suckle her first -born, and all of us be as ready to jump	null
book	from fourth -story windows as to go out of front doors, etc. Users of this argument should properly be excluded	null
book	from debate till they learn what the real question is. 'Free -will' does not say that everything that is physically	null
book	conceivable is also morally possible. It merely says tha t of alternatives that really tempt our will more than one	null
book	is really possible. Of course, the alternatives that do thus tempt our will are vastly fewer than the physical	null
book	possibilities we can coldly fancy. Persons really tempted often do murder their best friends, mothers do strangle their f irst-born, people do jump out of fourth- story windows, etc.	null
book	71	null
book	agreed that it seems so. And I now repeat what I said at the outset, that, from any strict	null
book	theoretical point of view, the question is insoluble. To deepen our theoretic sense of the difference between a world with chances in it and a deterministic world is the most I can hope to do; and this I may now at last begin upon, after all our tedious clearing of the way.	null
book	I wish first of all to show you just what the notion that this is a deterministic world implies.	null
book	The implications I call your attention to are all bound up with the fact that it is a world in which we constantly have to make what I shall, with your permission, call judgments of regret. Hardly an hour passes in which we do not wish that something might be otherwise; and happy indeed are those of us whose hearts have never echoed the wish of Omar Khayam —	null
book	“That we might clasp, ere closed, the book of fate, And make the writer on a fairer leaf	null
book	Inscribe our names, or quite obliterate.	null
book	“Ah! Love, could you and I with fate conspire	null
book	To mend this sorry scheme of things entire, Would we not shatter it to bits, and then Remould it nearer to the heart ’s desire? ”	null
book	Now, it is undeniable that most of these regrets are foolish, and quite on a par in point of philosophic value with the criticisms on the universe of that friend of our infancy, the hero of the fable The Atheist and the Acorn, —	null
book	“Fool! had that bough a pumpkin bore, Thy whimsies would have worked no more,” etc.	null
book	Even from the point of view of our own ends, we should probably make a botch of remodelling the universe. How much more then from the point of view of ends we cannot see! Wise men therefore regret as little as they can. But still some regrets are pretty ob stinate	null
book	and hard to stifle,—regrets for acts of wanton cruelty or treachery, for example, whether performed by others or by ourselves. Hardly any one can remain entirely optimistic after	null
book	reading the confession of the murderer at Brockton the other day: how, to get rid of the wife whose continued existence bored him, he inveigled her into a desert spot, shot her four times, and then, as she lay on the ground and said to hi m, “You didn’t do it on purpose, did you,	null
book	dear? ” replied, “ No, I didn’t do it on purpose,” as he raised a rock and smashed her skull.	null
book	Such an occurrence, with the mild sentence and self -satisfaction of the prisoner, is a field for	null
book	a crop of regrets, which one need not take up in detail. We feel that, although a perfect mechanical fit to the res t of the universe, it is a bad moral fit, and that something else would	null
book	really have been better in its place.	null
book	But for the deterministic philosophy the murder, the sentence, and the prisoner’ s optimism	null
book	were all necessary from eternity; and nothing else for a moment had a ghost of a chance of being put into their place. To admit such a chance, the determinists tell us, would be to make a suicide of reason; so we must steel our hearts against th e thought. And here our plot	null
book	thickens, for we see the first of those difficult implications of determinism and monism which it is my purpose to make you feel. If this Brockton murder was called for by the rest of the universe, if it had to come at its preappointed hour, and if nothing else would have been consistent with the sense of the whole, what are we to think of the universe? Are we stubbornly to stick to our judgment of regret, and say, though it couldn’t be, yet it would have	null
book	been a better universe with something different from this Brockton murder in it? That, of course, seems the natural and spontaneous thing for us to do; and yet it is nothing short of deliberately espousing a kind of pessimism. The judgment of regret calls the murder bad.	null
book	72	null
book	Calling a thing bad means, if it mean anything at all, that the thing ought not to be, that	null
book	something else ought to be in its stead. Determinism, in denying that anything else can be in its stead, virtually defines the universe as a place in which what ought to be is impossible,—in other words, as an organism whose constitution is afflicted with an incurable taint, an irremediable flaw. The pessimism of a Schopenhauer says no more than this,—that the murder is a symptom; and that it is a vicious symptom because it belongs to a vicious whole, which can express its nature no otherwise than by bringing forth just such a symptom as that at this particular spot. Regret for the murder must transform itself, if we are determinists and wise, into a larger regret. It is absurd to regret the murder alone. Other things being what they	null
book	are, it could not be different. What we should regret is that whole frame of things of which	null
book	the murder is one member. I see no escape whatever from this pessimistic conclusion, if, being determinists, our judgment of regret is to be allowed to stand at all.	null
book	The only deterministic escape from pessimism is everywhere to abandon the judgment of	null
book	regret. That this can be done, history shows to be not impossible. The devil, quoad existentiam , may be good. That is, although he be a principle of evil, yet the universe, with	null

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and impossibility on the other are the sole categories of the real. Possibilities that fail to get

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realized are, for determinism, pure illusions: they never were possibilities at all. There is nothing inchoate, it says, about this universe of ours, all that was or is or shall be actual in it having been from eternity virtually there. The cloud of alternatives our minds escort this mass of actuality withal is a cloud of sheer deceptions, to which ‘ impossibilities ’ is the only name

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that rightfully belongs.

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The issue, it will be seen, is a perfectly sharp one, which no eulogistic terminology can smear

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over or wipe out. The truth must lie with one side or the other, and its lying with one side

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makes the other false.

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The question relates solely to the existence of possibilities, in the strict sense of the term, as things that may, but need not, be. Both sides admit that a volition, for instance, has occurred. The indeterminists say another volition might have occurred in its place; the determinists swear that nothing could possibly have occurred in its place. Now, can science be called in to tell us which of these two point- blank contradicters of each other is right? Science professes

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to draw no conclusions but such as are based on matters of fact, things that have actually happened; but how can any amount of assurance that something actually happened give us

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68

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the least grain of information as to whether another thing might or might not have happened

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in its place? Only facts can be proved by other facts. With things that are possibilities and not facts, facts have no concern. If we have no other evidence than the evidence of existing facts, the possibility -question must remain a mystery never to be cleared up.

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And the truth is that facts practically have hardly anything to do with making us either determinists or indeterminists. Sure enough, we make a flourish of quoting facts this way or that; and if we are determinists, we talk about the infallibility with which we can predict one another’ s conduct; while if we are indeterminists, we lay great stress on the fact that it is just

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because we cannot foretell one another’s conduct, either in war or statecraft or in any of the great and small intrigues and businesses of men, that life is so intensely anxious and hazardous a game. But who does not see the wretched insufficiency of this so- called

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objective testimony on both sides? What fills up the gaps in our minds is something not objective, not external. What divides us into possibility men and anti- possibility men is

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different faiths or postulates,—postulates of rationality. To this man the world seems more rational with possibilities in it, —to that man more rational with possibilities excluded; and

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talk as we will about having to yield to evidence, what makes us monists or pluralists,

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determinists or indeterminists, is at bottom always some sentiment like this.

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The stronghold of the deterministic sentiment is the antipathy to the idea of chance. As soon as we begin to talk indeterminism to our friends, we find a number of them shaking their heads. This notion of alternative possibility, they say, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass, is, after all, only a roundabout name for chance; and chance is something the notion of which no sane mind can for an instant tolerate in the world. What is it, they ask, but barefaced crazy unreason, the neg ation of intelligibility and law? And if the

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slightest particle of it exist anywhere, what is to prevent the whole fabric from falling together, the stars from going out, and chaos from recommencing her topsy-turvy reign?

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Remarks of this sort about chance will put an end to discussion as quickly as anything one

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can find. I have already told you that ‘ chance’ was a word I wished to keep and use. Let us

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then examine exactly what it means, and see whether it ought to be such a terrible bugbear to us. I fancy that squeezing the thistle boldly will rob it of its sting.

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The sting of the word ‘ chance’ seems to lie in the assumption that it means something

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positive, and that if anything happens by chance, it must needs be something of an intrinsically irrational and preposterous sort. Now, chance means nothing of the kind. It is a purely negative and re lative term,

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22 giving us no information about that of which it is

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predicated, except that it happens to be disconnected with something else,—not controlled, secured, or necessitated by other things in advance of its own actual presence. As this point is the most subtile one of the whole lecture, and at the same time the point on which all the rest hinges, I beg you to pay particular attention to it. What I say is that it tells us nothing about what a thing may be in itself to call it ‘ chance. ’ It may be a bad thing, it may be a good thing.

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It may be lucidity, transparency, fitness incarnate, matching the whole system of other things, when it has once befallen, in an unimaginably perfect way. All you mean by calling it ‘chance’ is that this is not guaranteed, that it may also fall out otherwise. For the system of

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other things has no positive hold on the chance-thing. Its origin is in a certain fashion negative: it escapes, and says, Hands off! coming, when it comes, as a free gi ft, or not at all.

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This negativeness, however, and this opacity of the chance-thing when thus considered ab. extra , or from the point of view of previous things or distant things, do not preclude its

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22 Speaking technically, it is a word with a positive denotation, but a connotation that is negative. Other things

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must be silent about what it is: it alone can decide that point at the moment in which it reveals itself.

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69

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having any amount of positiveness and luminosity from within, and at its own place and

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moment. All that its chance -character asserts about it is that there is something in it really of

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its own, something that is not the unconditional property of the whole. If the whole wants this

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property, the whole must wait till it can get it, if it be a matter of chance. That the universe may actually be a sort of joint-stock society of this sort, in which the sharers have both limited liabilities and limited powers, is of course a simple and conceivable notion.

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Nevertheless, many persons talk as if the minutest dose of disconnectedness of one part with

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another, the smallest modicum of independence, the faintest tremor of ambiguity about the future, for example, would ruin everything, and turn this goodly universe into a sort of insane sand-heap or nulliverse, no universe at all. Since future human volitions are as a matter of

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fact the only ambiguous things we are tempted to believe in, let us stop for a moment to make ourselves sure whether their independent and accidental character need be fraught with such direful consequences to the universe as these.

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What is meant by saying that my choice of which way to walk home after the lecture is ambiguous and matter of chance as far as the present moment is concerned? It means that both Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street are called; but that only one, and that one either one,

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shall be chosen. Now, I ask you seriously to suppose that this ambiguity of my choice is real; and then to make the impossible hypothesis that the choice is made twice over, and each time falls on a different street. In other words, imagine that I first walk through Divinity Avenue, and then imagine that the powers governing the universe annihilate ten minutes of time with all that it contained, and set me back at the door of this hall just as I was before the choice was made. Imagine then that, everything else being the same, I now make a different choice and traverse Oxford Street. You, as passive spectators, look on and see the two alternative universes,—one of them with me walking through Divinity Avenue in it, the other with the same me walking th rough Oxford Street. Now, if you are determinists you believe one of

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these universes to have been from eternity impossible: you believe it to have been impossible because of the intrinsic irrationality or accidentality somewhere involved in it. But looking outwardly at these universes, can you say which is the impossible and accidental one, and which the rational and necessary one? I doubt if the mos t iron -clad determinist among you

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could have the slightest glimmer of light on this point. In other words, either universe after the fact and once there would, to our means of observation and understanding, appear just as

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rational as the other. There would be absolutely no criterion by which we might judge one necessary and the other matter of chance. Suppose now we relieve the gods of thei r

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hypothetical task and assume my choice, once made, to be made forever. I go through Divinity Avenue for good and all. If, as good determinists, you now begin to affirm, what all good determinists punctually do affirm, that in the nature of things I couldn’t have gone

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through Oxford Street,—had I done so it would have been chance, irrationality, insanity, a horrid gap in nature,— I simply call your attention to this, that your affirmation is what the

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Germans call a Machtspruch, a mere conception fulminated as a dogma and based on no insight into details. Before my choice, either street seemed as natural to you as to me. Had I happened to take Oxford Street, Divinity Avenue would have figured in your philosophy as the gap in nature; and you would have so proclaimed it with the best deterministic conscience in the world.

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But what a hollow outcry, then, is this against a chance which, if it were present to us, we

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could by no character whatever distinguish from a rational necessity! I have taken the most trivial of examples, but no possible example could lead to any different result. For what are the alternatives which, in point of fact, offer themselves to human volition? What are those futures that now seem matters of chance? Are they not one and all like the Divinity Avenue and Oxford Street of our example? Are they not all of them kinds of things already here and

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based in the existing frame of nature? Is any one ever tempted to produce

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an absolute accident, something utterly irrelevant to the rest of the world? Do not all the

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motives that assail us, all the futures that offer themselves to our choice, spring equally from the soil of the past; and would not either one of them, whether realized through chance or through necessity, the moment it was realized, seem to us to fit that past, and in the completest and most continuous manner to interdigitate with the phenomena already there?

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23

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The more one thinks of the matter, the more one wonders that so empty and gratuitous a hubbub as this outcry against chance should have found so great an echo in the hearts of men. It is a word which tells us absolutely nothing about what chances, or about the modus operandi of the chancing; and the use of it as a war -cry shows only a temper of intellectual

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absolutism, a demand that the world shall be a solid block, subject to one control,—which temper, which demand, the world may not be bound to gratify at all. In every outwardly verifiable and practical respect, a world in which the alternatives that now actually distract your choice were decided by pure chance would be by me absolutely undistinguished

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from the world in which I now live. I am, therefore, entirely willing to call it, so far as your choices go, a world of chance for me. To yourselves , it is true, those very acts of choice,

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which to me are so blind, opaque, and external, are the opposites of this, for you are within them and effect them. To you they appear as decisions; and decisions, for him who makes them, are altogether peculiar psychic facts. Self -luminous and self- justifying at the living

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moment at which they occur, they appeal to no outside moment to put its stamp upon them or make them continuous with the rest of nature. Themselves it is rather who seem to make nature continuous; and in their strange and intense function of granting consent to one possibility and withholding it from another, to transform an equivocal and double future into an inalterable and simple past.

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But with the psychology of the matter we have no concern this evening. The quarrel which determinism has with chance fortunately has nothing to do with this or that psychological detail. It is a quarrel altogether metaphysical. Determinism denies the ambig uity of future

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volitions, because it affirms that nothing future can be ambiguous. But we have said enough to meet the issue. Indeterminate future volitions do mean chance. Let us not fear to shout it from the house-tops if need be; for we now know that the idea of chance is, at bottom, exactly the same thing as the idea of gift,—the one simply being a disparaging, and the other a eulogistic, name for anything on which we have no effective claim . And whether the world

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be the better or the worse for having either chances or gifts in it will depend altogether on what these uncertain and unclaimable things turn out to be.

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And this at last brings us within sight of our subject. We have seen what determinism means: we have seen that indeterminism is rightly described as meaning chance; and we have seen that chance, the very name of which we are urged to shrink from as from a metaphysical pestilence, means only the negative fact that no part of the world, however big, can claim to control absolutely the destinies of the whole. But although, in discussing the word ‘ chance, ’ I

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may at moments have seemed to be arguing for its real existence, I have not meant to do so yet. We have not yet ascertained whether this be a world of chance or no; at most, we have

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23 A favorite argument against free -will is that if it be true, a man's murderer may as probably be his best friend

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as his worst enemy, a mother be as likely to strangle as to suckle her first -born, and all of us be as ready to jump

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from fourth -story windows as to go out of front doors, etc. Users of this argument should properly be excluded

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from debate till they learn what the real question is. 'Free -will' does not say that everything that is physically

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conceivable is also morally possible. It merely says tha t of alternatives that really tempt our will more than one

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is really possible. Of course, the alternatives that do thus tempt our will are vastly fewer than the physical

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possibilities we can coldly fancy. Persons really tempted often do murder their best friends, mothers do strangle their f irst-born, people do jump out of fourth- story windows, etc.

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agreed that it seems so. And I now repeat what I said at the outset, that, from any strict

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theoretical point of view, the question is insoluble. To deepen our theoretic sense of the difference between a world with chances in it and a deterministic world is the most I can hope to do; and this I may now at last begin upon, after all our tedious clearing of the way.

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I wish first of all to show you just what the notion that this is a deterministic world implies.

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The implications I call your attention to are all bound up with the fact that it is a world in which we constantly have to make what I shall, with your permission, call judgments of regret. Hardly an hour passes in which we do not wish that something might be otherwise; and happy indeed are those of us whose hearts have never echoed the wish of Omar Khayam —

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“That we might clasp, ere closed, the book of fate, And make the writer on a fairer leaf

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Inscribe our names, or quite obliterate.

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“Ah! Love, could you and I with fate conspire

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To mend this sorry scheme of things entire, Would we not shatter it to bits, and then Remould it nearer to the heart ’s desire? ”

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Now, it is undeniable that most of these regrets are foolish, and quite on a par in point of philosophic value with the criticisms on the universe of that friend of our infancy, the hero of the fable The Atheist and the Acorn, —

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“Fool! had that bough a pumpkin bore, Thy whimsies would have worked no more,” etc.

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Even from the point of view of our own ends, we should probably make a botch of remodelling the universe. How much more then from the point of view of ends we cannot see! Wise men therefore regret as little as they can. But still some regrets are pretty ob stinate

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and hard to stifle,—regrets for acts of wanton cruelty or treachery, for example, whether performed by others or by ourselves. Hardly any one can remain entirely optimistic after

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reading the confession of the murderer at Brockton the other day: how, to get rid of the wife whose continued existence bored him, he inveigled her into a desert spot, shot her four times, and then, as she lay on the ground and said to hi m, “You didn’t do it on purpose, did you,

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dear? ” replied, “ No, I didn’t do it on purpose,” as he raised a rock and smashed her skull.

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Such an occurrence, with the mild sentence and self -satisfaction of the prisoner, is a field for

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a crop of regrets, which one need not take up in detail. We feel that, although a perfect mechanical fit to the res t of the universe, it is a bad moral fit, and that something else would

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really have been better in its place.

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But for the deterministic philosophy the murder, the sentence, and the prisoner’ s optimism

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were all necessary from eternity; and nothing else for a moment had a ghost of a chance of being put into their place. To admit such a chance, the determinists tell us, would be to make a suicide of reason; so we must steel our hearts against th e thought. And here our plot

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thickens, for we see the first of those difficult implications of determinism and monism which it is my purpose to make you feel. If this Brockton murder was called for by the rest of the universe, if it had to come at its preappointed hour, and if nothing else would have been consistent with the sense of the whole, what are we to think of the universe? Are we stubbornly to stick to our judgment of regret, and say, though it couldn’t be, yet it would have

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been a better universe with something different from this Brockton murder in it? That, of course, seems the natural and spontaneous thing for us to do; and yet it is nothing short of deliberately espousing a kind of pessimism. The judgment of regret calls the murder bad.

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72

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Calling a thing bad means, if it mean anything at all, that the thing ought not to be, that

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something else ought to be in its stead. Determinism, in denying that anything else can be in its stead, virtually defines the universe as a place in which what ought to be is impossible,—in other words, as an organism whose constitution is afflicted with an incurable taint, an irremediable flaw. The pessimism of a Schopenhauer says no more than this,—that the murder is a symptom; and that it is a vicious symptom because it belongs to a vicious whole, which can express its nature no otherwise than by bringing forth just such a symptom as that at this particular spot. Regret for the murder must transform itself, if we are determinists and wise, into a larger regret. It is absurd to regret the murder alone. Other things being what they

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are, it could not be different. What we should regret is that whole frame of things of which

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the murder is one member. I see no escape whatever from this pessimistic conclusion, if, being determinists, our judgment of regret is to be allowed to stand at all.

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The only deterministic escape from pessimism is everywhere to abandon the judgment of

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regret. That this can be done, history shows to be not impossible. The devil, quoad existentiam , may be good. That is, although he be a principle of evil, yet the universe, with

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