Page 248 - erewhon

that act upon him. We see but a part, and being thus unable
to generalise human conduct, except very roughly, we deny
that it is subject to any fixed laws at all, and ascribe much
both of a man’s character and actions to chance, or luck, or
fortune; but these are only words whereby we escape the
admission of our own ignorance; and a little reflection will
teach us that the most daring flight of the imagination or
the most subtle exercise of the reason is as much the thing
that must arise, and the only thing that can by any possibil-
ity arise, at the moment of its arising, as the falling of a dead
leaf when the wind shakes it from the tree.
‘For the future depends upon the present, and the present
(whose existence is only one of those minor compromises
of which human life is full—for it lives only on sufferance
of the past and future) depends upon the past, and the past
is unalterable. The only reason why we cannot see the fu-
ture as plainly as the past, is because we know too little
of the actual past and actual present; these things are too
great for us, otherwise the future, in its minutest details,
would lie spread out before our eyes, and we should lose our
sense of time present by reason of the clearness with which
we should see the past and future; perhaps we should not
be even able to distinguish time at all; but that is foreign.
What we do know is, that the more the past and present
are known, the more the future can be predicted; and that
no one dreams of doubting the fixity of the future in cases
where he is fully cognisant of both past and present, and
has had experience of the consequences that followed from
such a past and such a present on previous occasions. He