If not a blind force
but a seeing force runs things, we may reasonably expect better
issues. This vague confidence in the future is the sole pragmatic
meaning at present discernible in the terms design and designer. But
if cosmic confidence is right not wrong, better not worse, that is a
most important meaning. That much at least of possible 'truth' the
terms will then have in them.
Let me take up another well-worn controversy, THE FREE-WILL PROBLEM.
Most persons who believe in what is called their free-will do so
after the rationalistic fashion. It is a principle, a positive
faculty or virtue added to man, by which his dignity is
enigmatically augmented. He ought to believe it for this reason.
Determinists, who deny it, who say that individual men originate
nothing, but merely transmit to the future the whole push of the
past cosmos of which they are so small an expression, diminish man.
He is less admirable, stripped of this creative principle. I imagine
that more than half of you share our instinctive belief in free-
will, and that admiration of it as a principle of dignity has much
to do with your fidelity.
But free-will has also been discussed pragmatically, and, strangely
enough, the same pragmatic interpretation has been put upon it by
both disputants.
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