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 schem