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This fore-knowledge of God, however, should not be regarded as having caused the actions of men, just as your own previous knowledge that a certain event is to occur, or your desire that it should happen, is not and can never be the reason for its occurrence. As to thy question concerning the origin of creation.
Still, a great deal of clear foresight is obviously within his power whenever he likes to exercise it; and even when he is not exercising it, frequent flashes of fore-knowledge come through into his ordinary life, so that he often has an instantaneous intuition as to how things will turn out even before their inception.
"Admitting that we occidentals do not understand the character of your..." I began. It was as if she had been prepared for me by some mysterious fore-knowledge. She checked me gently "Their impulses their..." she sought the proper expression and found it, but in French..."their mouvements d'ame." Her voice was not much above a whisper. "Very well," I said. "But still we are looking at a conflict.
She got hold of the works of Dugald Stewart, Hartley, and Priestley; plunged boldly into the maze of metaphysics, and grappled unhesitatingly with the mysterious subjects of fore-knowledge and free-will. But in philosophy as in religion, her immense egotism led her astray. She accepted nothing for the existence of which she could not account by causes intelligible to her own mind.
It was not until the writer saw, in 1848, the triumph of all the enemies of progress that he knew in the depths of his heart that he belonged, not to the conquerors, but to the vanquished. The Republic lay inanimate; but, gazing on her form, he saw that she was liberty, and not even the sure fore-knowledge of the ruin and exile that must follow could prevent his espousal with the dead.
I might here, as I am accidentally led into this subject, show several passages in Milton that have as excellent turns of this nature as any of our English poets whatsoever; but shall only mention that which follows, in which he describes the fallen angels engaged in the intricate disputes of predestination, free-will, and fore-knowledge; and, to humour the perplexity, makes a kind of labyrinth in the very words that describe it.
I was going to say to Charley not to you that, if there be a God, he would not have compelled us to be, except with the absolute fore-knowledge that, when we knew all about it, we would certainly declare ourselves ready to go through it all again if need should be, in order to attain the known end of his high calling.
Hardly a town in New England holds stronger reminders of the past, or has a more intensely New England atmosphere than Andover, wherein the same decorous and long-winded discussions of fate, fore-knowledge and all things past and to come, still goes on, as steadily as if the Puritan debaters had merely transmigrated, not passed over, to a land which even the most resigned and submissive soul would never have wished to think of as a "Silent Land."
Oh, Man of the new ages of science, will you have the new fore-knowledge, the magical command of effects, which the scientific inquiry into causes as they are actual in nature, puts into our hands, in every other practice, in every other culture and cure, will you have the rule of this knowledge imposed upon your fields, and orchards, and gardens, to assist weak nature in her 'conservations' and 'advancements' in these, to teach her to bring forth here the latent ideals, towards which she struggles and vainly yearns, and can only point to, and wait for, till science accepts her hints; will you have the Georgics of this new Virgil to load your table with its magic clusters; will you take the Novum Organum to pile your plate with its ideal advancements on spontaneous nature and her perfections; will you have the rule of that Organum applied in its exactest rigors, to all the physical oppositions of your life, to minister to your physical safety, and comfort, and luxury, and never relax your exactions from it, till the last conceivable degree of these has been secured; and in this department of art and science, this, in which the sum of our good and evil is contained, in a mere oversight of it, in a disgraceful indifference and carelessness about it, be content to accept, without criticism, the machinery of the past instrumentalities that the unlearned ages of the world have left to us, arts whose precepts were concluded ages ere we knew that knowledge is power.
"Others apart sat on a hill retired, In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high Of providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate, Fixed fate, free-will, fore-knowledge absolute, And found no end, in wandering mazes lost." Sheer Lane, February 10, 1710.
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