necessary or that the liberation of productive forces from the restrictions of private monopoly is a social necessity, there are at least two things involved. The first is certain assumptions about the biological and psychological nature of man as they appear in a social context. The properties of human behaviour are taken to be relatively invariant, of the same general character but of a specifically different subject matter as the properties investigated by any natural science.
The second reference is to the order of human values and preferences which obtain at the time, to a choice between evils and goods, to a policy of dealing with the given conditions. The order, the choice, the policy may themselves be the predictable result of habit, education, and tradition. But since they are voluntary, they may also be the consequence of intelligent reflection—and in that sense a free determination. This free determination cuts down but can never eliminate the hazards of the future. If, as Hans Reichenbach suggests, every act of ours is a wager against a possible disappointment, the method of intelligence is a method of increasing the odds in our favour.
Many of the might-have-beens of history were beyond human control. It is hard to see what human beings could have done to realize these might-have-beens prior to the decisive events that finally sentenced them to indeterminate status in limbo. We are gratified that the assassin’s bullet missed President Roosevelt in 1933: we deplore the fact that the Reichswehr volley left Hitler alive in the Munich Putsch of 1923. The grounded possibility of a hit in both instances brings home to us the complexity of all historical processes at the same time as it reinforces our sense of helplessness in relation to it. Remembered in season, the grounded, objective possibilities that are outside the scope of human control tend to loosen the rigid formulas of the theorist and curb the natural dogmatism of the man of action. Properly considered, they can fortify us against the sting of defeats imposed upon us by chance and hard luck.
But, as we have seen, other might-have-beens were within human grasp. They are the genuinely lost chances, for they could have been. They were lost because of the failure to be more intelligent, more courageous, more resolute—sometimes a little more of each.
The triumphs of intelligence and will never violate natural and social necessities. They tap unsuspected potential resources
