The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
universes to have been from eternity impossible: you believe it to have
{156} 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 most iron-clad
determinist among you 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
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 their 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 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 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.
But what a hollow outcry, then, is this against a chance which, if it
were present to us, we 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 {157} 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
based in the existing frame of nature? Is any one ever tempted to
produce an _absolute_ accident, something utterly irrelevant to the
rest of the world? Do not all the 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?[5]
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
{158} intellectual 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 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, 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 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.
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 ambiguity of future
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 {159} 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
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.
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 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 agreed that it seems so. And I now
repeat what I said at the outset, that, from any strict 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.
I wish first of all to show you just what the notion that this is a
deterministic world implies. 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 {160} 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--
"That we might clasp, ere closed, the book of fate,
And make the writer on a fairer leaf
Inscribe our names, or quite obliterate.
"Ah! Love, could you and I with fate conspire
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?"
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,--
"Fool! had that bough a pumpkin bore,
Thy whimsies would have worked no more," etc.
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 obstinate 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 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 him, "You didn't
do it on purpose, did you, dear?" replied, "No, I {161} didn't do it on
purpose," as he raised a rock and smashed her skull. Such an
occurrence, with the mild sentence and self-satisfaction of the
prisoner, is a field for a crop of regrets, which one need not take up
in detail. We feel that, although a perfect mechanical fit to the rest
of the universe, it is a bad moral fit, and that something else would
really have been better in its place.
But for the deterministic philosophy the murder, the sentence, and the
prisoner's optimism 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 the thought.
And here our plot 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 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.
Calling a thing bad means, if it mean anything at all, that the thing
ought not to be, that something else ought to be in its stead.
Determinism, in denying that anything else can be in its stead,
virtually defines the universe {162} 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 are, _it_ could not be different. What we
should regret is that whole frame of things of which 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.
The only deterministic escape from pessimism is everywhere to abandon
the judgment of 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 such a
principle in it, may practically be a better universe than it could
have been without. On every hand, in a small way, we find that a
certain amount of evil is a condition by which a higher form of good is
bought. There is nothing to prevent anybody from generalizing this
view, and trusting that if we could but see things in the largest of
all ways, even such matters as this Brockton murder would appear to be
paid for by the uses that follow in their train. An optimism _quand
même_, a systematic and infatuated optimism like that ridiculed by
Voltaire in his Candide, is one of the possible {163} ideal ways in
which a man may train himself to look on life. Bereft of dogmatic
hardness and lit up with the expression of a tender and pathetic hope,
such an optimism has been the grace of some of the most religious
characters that ever lived.