Page:The World and the Individual, First Series (1899).djvu/423

404 true either that I shall be alive a year from now or that I shall not be alive. Life insurance is a provision made to meet future facts that are regarded as realities, and that are respected accordingly. Future Being is thus the familiar object of hope and fear, of common sense prudence, as well as of predictive science. Omit the future from your scheme of Being, and your world loses all its practical human interest. To be sure, the future, unlike the past, is not regarded as irrevocable, and a believer in freedom thinks the future partly contingent. But even the contingent future event has its Being. Wait, namely, and you shall find out what that Being is, while even now the principle of contradiction applies to assertions about it. Suppose a judge endowed with free will, and deliberating as to the fate of a prisoner left to his judicial discretion. While the prisoner awaits the judge’s decision, the fact awaited is supposed by this hypothesis to be a contingent fact. But is not the prisoner anxiously expecting his own discovery of the Being of that very fact? And while he waits, is he dealing with a mere fancy or dream, or a baseless unreality? No, the dreaded decision, although future, and by this hypothesis contingent, is a fact, and has Being; and that is why one awaits its announcement with such concern.

Present Being of two sorts, namely in nature and in minds, Past and Future Being, these four types of reality we have now enumerated as types recognized by common sense and natural science. Our study of the Third Conception of Being, some time since, made us familiar with the still different sort of reality ordinarily attributed to the realm of moral and of mathematical truth. This