and that no matter how much it might zig-zag he could
surely bring it home at last.

{183}

Now, it is entirely immaterial, in this scheme, whether the creator
leave the absolute chance-possibilities to be decided by himself, each
when its proper moment arrives, or whether, on the contrary, he
alienate this power from himself, and leave the decision out and out to
finite creatures such as we men are. The great point is that the
possibilities are really _here_. Whether it be we who solve them, or
he working through us, at those soul-trying moments when fate's scales
seem to quiver, and good snatches the victory from evil or shrinks
nerveless from the fight, is of small account, so long as we admit that
the issue is decided nowhere else than here and now. _That_ is what
gives the palpitating reality to our moral life and makes it tingle, as
Mr. Mallock says, with so strange and elaborate an excitement. This
reality, this excitement, are what the determinisms, hard and soft
alike, suppress by their denial that _anything_ is decided here and
now, and their dogma that all things were foredoomed and settled long
ago. If it be so, may you and I then have been foredoomed to the error
of continuing to believe in liberty.[12] It is fortunate for the
winding up of controversy that in every discussion with determinism
this _argumentum ad hominem_ can be its adversary's last word.

[1] An Address to the Harvard Divinity Students, published in the
Unitarian Review for September, 1884.

[2] And I may now say Charles S. Peirce,--see the Monist, for 1892-93.

[3] "The whole history of popular beliefs about Nature refutes the
notion that the thought of a universal physical order can possibly have
arisen from the purely passive reception and association of particular
perceptions. Indubitable as it is that men infer from known cases to
unknown, it is equally certain that this procedure, if restricted to
the phenomenal materials that spontaneously offer themselves, would
never have led to the belief in a general uniformity, but only to the
belief that law and lawlessness rule the world in motley alternation.
From the point of view of strict experience, nothing exists but the sum
of particular perceptions, with their coincidences on the one hand,
their contradictions on the other.

"That there is more order in the world than appears at first sight is
not discovered; _till the order is looked for_. The first impulse to
loo