ABSTRACT
People have, and have always had, ambivalent feelings about the future. In a rapidly changing world, where what has happened is often an unreliable guide to what will happen, we are apt to agree with Francis Bacon’s observation that ‘men must pursue things which are just in present, and leave the future to the divine Providence’. What has not yet occurred cannot be a legitimate object of our concern and care, because for all we know it may not occur at all. On the other hand, we cannot help but be aware that what happens in the future is less a matter of ‘Providence’ than it is of what we do in the present. We can, that is, affect the future even though we cannot know it. This, no doubt, is why we spend so much of our time in formulating plans, not only for our own personal future but also for the circumstances in which we as well as our descendants will live. When things go wrong with our lives, or with the environment in which we live them, few of us are sufficiently philosophical to blame fate for what has happened. We blame, instead, the ‘planners’ for their lack of forethought, or for their insensitivities, or for their sheer ignorance of what does happen.
