portance, which is often
decided without discussion in one sentence,--nay, in one clause of a
sentence,--by those very writers who spin out whole chapters in their
efforts to show {150} what 'true' freedom is; and that is the question
of determinism, about which we are to talk to-night.

Fortunately, no ambiguities hang about this word or about its opposite,
indeterminism. Both designate an outward way in which things may
happen, and their cold and mathematical sound has no sentimental
associations that can bribe our partiality either way in advance. Now,
evidence of an external kind to decide between determinism and
indeterminism is, as I intimated a while back, strictly impossible to
find. Let us look at the difference between them and see for
ourselves. What does determinism profess?

It professes that those parts of the universe already laid down
absolutely appoint and decree what the other parts shall be. The
future has no ambiguous possibilities hidden in its womb: the part we
call the present is compatible with only one totality. Any other
future complement than the one fixed from eternity is impossible. The
whole is in each and every part, and welds it with the rest into an
absolute unity, an iron block, in which there can be no equivocation or
shadow of turning.

"With earth's first clay they did the last man knead,
And there of the last harvest sowed the seed.
And the first morning of creation wrote
What the last dawn of reckoning shall read."

Indeterminism, on the contrary, says that the parts have a certain
amount of loose play on one another, so that the laying down of one of
them does not necessarily determine what the others shall be. It
admits that possibilities may be in excess of actualities, and that
things not yet revealed to our knowledge may really in themselves be
ambiguous. Of two {151} alternative futures which we conceive, both
may now be really possible; and the one become impossible only at the
very moment when the other excludes it by becoming real itself.
Indeterminism thus denies the world to be one unbending unit of fact.
It says there is a certain ultimate pluralism in it; and, so saying, it
corroborates our ordinary unsophisticated view of things. To that
view, actualities seem to float in a wider sea of possibilities from
out of which they are chosen; and, _somewhere_, indeterminism says,
such possibilities exist, and form a part of truth.

Determinism, on t