To see the future as clearly as we see the past, what does it require?
Saint Paul tells us that "spiritual things are spiritually discerned." The future is visible to the spiritual sight. No one doubts but that the future is known to God, for it is He who creates and controls it. And man is the child of God, and his true life is in co-operating with God in every form of the higher activity. So far as he may co-operate with God he becomes, himself, a creative force; making, shaping, and determining this future, and thus, to an increasing degree, he becomes aware of it, or sees it, before it is realized on the outward plane. The day is not, indeed, distant, when humanity will live far less blindly than now. As man develops his psychic self and lives the life of the spirit,—the life of intellect and thought and purpose and prayer, rather than the life of the senses, he will perceive his future. To just the degree that one lives in the energies which are immortal does he perceive the future. Knowledge penetrates into the unknown and the unseen. Leverrier postulated Neptune long before his "long-distance" theory was verified. The intelligent recognition of the unseen forces and unseen presences, the intelligent conception of the manner in which these unseen forces are working out the problems of destiny, alone enables one to consciously combine with them; to enter into the processes of evolution as an intelligent factor, and thus redeem his individual life to harmony, beauty, and happiness.
The question confronts one as a very determining problem in life,—can man control his circumstances? To go deeper still, can he create them? Or is he the product of his environment? Is every life just that which it is made? Or does there work, under all our human will and endeavor, a force resistless as gravitation and as constant as attraction? A writer, considering this subject, thus expresses his own convictions:—
"I believe that every life is the exact and necessary outcome of its environment, and that there is in reality not one particle of actual freedom in this respect from the cradle to the grave. I cannot here go into any extended proof of my position. The syllogism may be stated as follows:
"Every phenomenon is the necessary result of pre-existing causes:
"Life is but a succession of phenomena.
"Therefore every life is necessarily determined by pre-existing causes.
"I do not see how the conclusion can be escaped that from the time we open our eyes upon the world and receive our first impressions, we are thrust forward between insurmountable walls of fate that leave no room for freedom. It is true that so far as external or objective forces are concerned we may be, as a rule, under no compulsion to follow one more than another; but subjectively we are in no sense free, because the peculiar way in which the will will act under given conditions must depend upon the preponderating subjective force. To hold otherwise is to contend that a lesser force can overcome a greater,—which is absurd."