386 becoming more human by becoming more godlikeof alternative orders: of the roads not taken, and of the solutions re-
jected or subordinated, in the history of thought and of institutions.
Th ese contrasting experiences supply the material with which po liti-
cal prophecy and intellectual vision must work. We use paths foresworn
to envision alternatives in the penumbra of the feasible next steps. Th at
we can all do so, according to our temperaments and circumstances, is
not only part of the creed of democracy; it is also part of the truth about
who we are. Openness to the new is openness to ourselves and to one
another.
In this way, there emerges the new in life and in thought. Th at the
new can emerge is a consequence both of who we are and of how nature
works. It results from who are: we exceed the or ga nized settings of life
and of thought. It follows as well from how nature works: if time is real
and inclusive, not even the laws of nature and the basic constituents
of the observed universe can be beyond its reach. They, too, must
in principle be mutable. Over a long enough stretch of cosmologi-
cal time, the laws of nature may evolve together with the phenomena
that they govern.
If anything can be really new in the world, it must not be simply the
enactment of a possible state of aff airs that was simply waiting for the
conditions of its enactment to be fulfi lled. Th ere must not be a closed
horizon of possible states of aff airs, real but not actual, in the ghostlike
condition of possessing all the attributes of reality except for the fi nal
attribute of embodiment in the actual. Our view of the possible must be
subsequent to the creation of the new, not prior to it. When the new
emerges in nature or is created by us, we change retrospectively our
understanding of the possible. Such an account of the workings of na-
ture provides the conception of the new with a second source, outside
the constitution of a human being.
Our openness to the new is related to our openness to one another.
Both can fi nd inspiration in the same comprehensive view and in con-
vergent impulses. If we were to give the last word to the structures of
society and of thought, they would suck life out of us, for the fi rst at-
tribute of life is our surfeit over these structures. Th ey would require us
to view one another and to deal with one another according to the
places that we occupy in them, or to the roles that they assign to each of
us. We, however, are who we are precisely because we are not simply the