What a day may bring forth is
uncertain; uncertain even to God. Omniscience is impossible; time is
real; what had been omniscience hitherto might discover something more
to-day. "There shall be news," William James was fond of saying with
rapture, quoting from the unpublished poem of an obscure friend,
"there shall be news in heaven!" There is almost certainly, he
thought, a God now; there may be several gods, who might exist
together, or one after the other. We might, by our conspiring
sympathies, help to make a new one. Much in us is doubtless immortal;
we survive death for some time in a recognisable form; but what our
career and transformations may be in the sequel we cannot tell,
although we may help to determine them by our daily choices.
Observation must be continual if our ideas are to remain true. Eternal
vigilance is the price of knowledge; perpetual hazard, perpetual
experiment keep quick the edge of life.
This is, so far as I know, a new philosophical vista; it is a
conception never before presented, although implied, perhaps, in
various quarters, as in Norse and even Greek mythology. It is a vision
radically empirical and radically romantic; and as William James
himself used to say, the visions and not the arguments of a
philosopher are the interesting and influential things about him.
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