Decision order and time in human affairs

Let us make a supposition about the nature of things, namely, that the rival possible outcomes which a man will imagine for an available act of his own cannot be listed from a knowledge, however complete, of what is and what has been. Two things amongst others follow. Decision, by which a man finds and adopts that one amongst his available acts which promises or suggests the outcome that he most desires, is more than mere response to circumstances and contains an element which we may call inspiration, which brings essential novelty into the historical sequence of states of affairs. Decision thus becomes the locus of unending creation of history, and acquires the meaning which intuition and working attitude to life give it, in contrast to the character, implied for it by those who seek a sequential calculus of human conduct, of a passive link in chains of neces sity. Secondly, in analysing decision, the use of a distributional uncertainty variable, that is, probability, becomes in principle inappropriate and must give way to a non-distributional un certainty variable such as possibility, understood as discrimin able in some manner into degrees; for example, by being identified with potential surprise.

Such is the kernel of this book's argument. It offers an escape from the conclusion that choice and creative freedom are illusory; illusory, because there is in general only one act by which a man of consistent tastes can rationally respond to given circumstances. We do not assert that our premises are true, only that the meaning they imply for 'decision' is in teresting and corresponds to people's unselfconscious feelings and the assumptions by which they live in practice.