he contrary, says they exist _nowhere_, and that
necessity on the one hand and impossibility on the other are the sole
categories of the real. Possibilities that fail to get 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 that rightfully belongs.

The issue, it will be seen, is a perfectly sharp one, which no
eulogistic terminology can smear over or wipe out. The truth _must_
lie with one side or the other, and its lying with one side makes the
other false.

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 {152} 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 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 the least grain of
information as to whether another thing might or might not have
happened 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.

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 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