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And though it were true and possible that contingent futurities consisting in free actions of reasonable creatures were entirely independent of the decrees of God and of external causes, there would still be means of foreseeing them; for God would see them as they are in the region of the possibles, before he decrees to admit them into existence.
Now such men as he are more zealous to justify a sacrilegious king, than to write what is just and what is true about us, and about our temple; for when they are desirous of gratifying Antiochus, and of concealing that perfidiousness and sacrilege which he was guilty of, with regard to our nation, when he wanted money, they endeavor to disgrace us, and tell lies even relating to futurities.
I suppose by now you have all the train robbers safely tucked away in the penitentiary?" "Not yet," he answered cheerfully. "Not yet!" Her lifted eyebrows and the derisive flash beneath mocked politely his confidence. "By this time I should think they might be hunting big game in deepest Africa." "They might be, but they're not." "What about that investment in futurities you made on the train?
I now think, as soon as I can leave home, of making a tour; but this, like other futurities, is wholly uncertain. The insignificant figure I make, in my own opinion, in this day of political and martial exertions, is an humbling consideration. Remember, I do not intend to libel the colony to which I belong.
The question of the possibility of things that do not happen has already been examined by the ancients. It appears that Epicurus, to preserve freedom and to avoid an absolute necessity, maintained, after Aristotle, that contingent futurities were not susceptible of determinate truth.
For in the region of the possibles they are represented as they are, namely, as free contingencies. Therefore neither the foreknowledge of contingent futurities nor the foundation for the certainty of this foreknowledge should cause us perplexity or seem to prejudice freedom.
And whereas a soil of his lay sick at that time, who was called Abijah, he enjoined his wife to lay aside her robes, and to take the garments belonging to a private person, and to go to Ahijah the prophet, for that he was a wonderful man in foretelling futurities, it having been he who told me that I should be king.
The thousand-fold relation of men is not there. The interest that attaches in nature to each man, because he is right by his wrong, and wrong by his right, because he defies all dogmatizing and classification, so many allowances, and contingencies, and futurities, are to be taken into account, strong by his vices, often paralyzed by his virtues, sinks into entire sympathy with his society.
For this result I resort to my principle of an infinitude of possible worlds, represented in the region of eternal verities, that is, in the object of the divine intelligence, where all conditional futurities must be comprised.
That fault cannot be laid to the charge of the system I approve, where everything happens in accordance with general rules that at most are mutually restrictive. We must therefore not imagine with some Schoolmen, whose ideas tend towards the chimerical, that free contingent futurities have the privilege of exemption from this general rule of the nature of things.
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