“Indeed, I fear you will have to,” I replied. “Our opticians already talk of having reached the limits of their art.”
“Do not imagine that I spoke in any spirit of petulance,” my companion resumed. “The slowness of your progress is not so remarkable to us as that you make any at all, burdened as you are by a disability so crushing that if we were in your place I fear we should sit down in utter despair.”
“To what disability do you refer?” I asked. “You seem to be men like us.”
“And so we are,” was the reply, “save in one particular, but there the difference is tremendous. Endowed otherwise like us, you are destitute of the faculty of foresight, without which we should think our other faculties well-nigh valueless.”
“Foresight!” I repeated. “Certainly you cannot mean that it is given you to know the future?”
“It is given not only to us,” was the answer, “but, so far as we know, to all other intelligent beings of the universe except yourselves. Our positive knowledge extends only to our system of moons and planets and some of the nearer foreign systems, and it is conceivable that the remoter parts of the universe may harbor other blind races like your own; but it certainly seems unlikely that so strange and lamentable a spectacle should be duplicated. One such illustration of the extraordinary deprivations under which a rational existence may still be possible ought to suffice for the universe.”
“But no one can know the future except by inspiration of God,” I said.
“All our faculties are by inspiration of God,” was the reply, “but there is surely nothing in foresight to cause it to be so regarded more than any other. Think a moment of the physical analogy of the case. Your eyes are placed in the front of your heads. You would deem it an odd mistake if they were placed behind. That would appear to you an arrangement calculated to defeat their purpose. Does it not seem equally rational that the mental vision should range forward, as it does with us, illuminating the path one is to take, rather than backward, as with you, revealing only the course you have already trodden, and therefore have no more concern with? But it is no doubt a merciful provision of Providence that renders you unable to realize the grotesqueness of your predicament, as it appears to us.”
“But the future is eternal!” I exclaimed. “How can a finite mind grasp it?”
“Our foreknowledge implies only human faculties,” was the reply. “It is limited to our individual careers on this planet. Each of us foresees the course of his own life, but not that of other lives, except so far as they are involved with his.”