I glance at this question rather to express a detachment than a view.

For me as a person this theory of predestination has no practical value.  At the utmost it is an interesting theory like the theory that there is a fourth dimension.  There may be a fourth dimension of space, but one gets along quite well by assuming there are just three.  It may be knowable the next time I come to cross roads which I shall take.  Possibly that knowledge actually exists somewhere.  There are those who will tell you that they can get intimations in the matter from packs of cards or the palms of my hands, or see by peering into crystals.  Of such beliefs I am entirely free.  The fact is I believe that neither I know nor anybody else who is practically concerned knows which I shall take.  I hesitate, I choose just as though the thing was unknowable.  For me and my conduct there is that much wide practical margin of freedom.

I am free and freely and responsibly making the future—­so far as I am concerned.  You others are equally free.  On that theory I find my life will work, and on a theory of mechanical predestination nothing works.

I take the former theory therefore for my everyday purposes, and as a matter of fact so does everybody else.  I regard myself as a free responsible person among free responsible persons.

2.4.  A picture of the world of men.

Now I have already given a first picture of the world of fact as it shaped itself upon my mind.  Let me now give a second picture of this world in which I find myself, a picture in a rather different key and at a different level, in which I turn to a new set of aspects and bring into the foreground the other minds which are with me in the midst of this great spectacle.

What am I?

Here is a question to which in all ages men have sought to give a clear unambiguous answer, and to which a clear unambiguous answer is manifestly unfitted.  Am I my body?  Yes or no?  It seems to me that I can externalize and think of as “not myself” nearly everything that pertains to my body, hands and feet, and even the most secret and central of those living and hidden parts, the pulsing arteries, the throbbing nerves, the ganglionic centres, that no eye, save for the surgeon’s knife has ever seen or ever will see until they coagulate in decay.  So far I am not my body; and then as clearly, since I suffer through it, see the whole world through it and am always to be called upon where it is, I am it.  Am I a mind mysteriously linked to this thing of matter and endeavour?