e of things entire,
Would we not shatter it to bits, and then
Remould it nearer to the heart's desire?"

Now, it is undeniable that most of these regrets are foolish, and quite
on a par in point of philosophic value with the criticisms on the
universe of that friend of our infancy, the hero of the fable The
Atheist and the Acorn,--

"Fool! had that bough a pumpkin bore,
Thy whimsies would have worked no more," etc.

Even from the point of view of our own ends, we should probably make a
botch of remodelling the universe. How much more then from the point
of view of ends we cannot see! Wise men therefore regret as little as
they can. But still some regrets are pretty obstinate and hard to
stifle,--regrets for acts of wanton cruelty or treachery, for example,
whether performed by others or by ourselves. Hardly any one can remain
_entirely_ optimistic after reading the confession of the murderer at
Brockton the other day: how, to get rid of the wife whose continued
existence bored him, he inveigled her into a desert spot, shot her four
times, and then, as she lay on the ground and said to him, "You didn't
do it on purpose, did you, dear?" replied, "No, I {161} didn't do it on
purpose," as he raised a rock and smashed her skull. Such an
occurrence, with the mild sentence and self-satisfaction of the
prisoner, is a field for a crop of regrets, which one need not take up
in detail. We feel that, although a perfect mechanical fit to the rest
of the universe, it is a bad moral fit, and that something else would
really have been better in its place.

But for the deterministic philosophy the murder, the sentence, and the
prisoner's optimism were all necessary from eternity; and nothing else
for a moment had a ghost of a chance of being put into their place. To
admit such a chance, the determinists tell us, would be to make a
suicide of reason; so we must steel our hearts against the thought.
And here our plot thickens, for we see the first of those difficult
implications of determinism and monism which it is my purpose to make
you feel. If this Brockton murder was called for by the rest of the
universe, if it had to come at its preappointed hour, and if nothing
else would have been consistent with the sense of the whole, what are
we to think of the universe? Are we stubbornly to stick to our
judgment of regret, and say, though it _couldn't_ be, yet it _would_
have been a better universe with something dif