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 through
Oxford Street. Now, if you are determinists you believe one of these
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 th