that "life"--with its higher developments and still
latent powers--is an impotent nonentity. The philosophic attitude,
surely, is to observe and recognise its effects, both what it can and
what it cannot achieve, and to realise that our present knowledge of it
is extremely partial and incomplete.

* * * * *

NOTE ON FREE WILL AND FOREKNOWLEDGE.

In the above chapter I must not be understood as pretending to settle
the thorny question of a reconciliation between freedom of choice and
pre-determination or prevision. All I there contend for is that no
mechanical or scientific determinism, subject to special conditions in
a limited region, can be used to contradict freedom of the will, under
generalised conditions, in the Universe as a whole.

Nevertheless there are things which may perhaps be usefully said, even
on the larger and much-worn topic of the present note. If we still
endeavour to learn as much as possible from human analogies, examples
are easy:--

An architect can draw in detail a building that is to be; the dwellers
in a valley can be warned to evacuate their homesteads because a city
has determined that a lake shall exist where none existed before.
Doubtless the city is free to change its mind, but it is not expected
to; and all predictions are understood to be made subject to the
absence of disturbing, _i.e._ unforeseen, causes. Even the prediction
of an eclipse is not free from a remote uncertainty, and in the case of
the return of meteoric showers and comets the element of contingency is
not even remote.

But it will be said that to higher and superhuman knowledge all
possible contingencies would be known and recognised as part of the
data. That is quite possibly, though not quite certainly, true: and
there comes the real difficulty of reconciling absolute prediction of
events with real freedom of the actors in the drama. I anticipate that
a complete solution of the problem must involve a treatment of the
subject of _time_, and a recognition that "time," as it appears to us,
is really part of our human limitations. We all realise that "the past"
is in some sense not non-existent but only past; we may readily surmise
that "the future" is similarly in some sense existent, only that we
have not yet arrived at it; and our links with the future are less
understood. That a seer in a moment of clairvoyance may catch a glimpse
of futurity--some partial picture of wh