The stereotype of Labor as Emancipator selects the evidence which
supports itself and rejects the other. And so parallel with the real
movements of working men there exists a fiction of the Labor Movement,
in which an idealized mass moves towards an ideal goal. The fiction
deals with the future. In the future possibilities are almost
indistinguishable from probabilities and probabilities from
certainties. If the future is long enough, the human will might turn
what is just conceivable into what is very likely, and what is likely
into what is sure to happen. James called this the faith ladder, and
said that "it is a slope of goodwill on which in the larger questions
of life men habitually live." [Footnote: William James, _Some
Problems of Philosophy_, p. 224.]
"1. There is nothing absurd in a certain view of the world being true,
nothing contradictory;
2. It _might_ have been true under certain conditions;
3. It _may_ be true even now;
4. It is _fit_ to be true;
5. It _ought_ to be true;
6. It _must_ be true;
7. It _shall_ be true, at any rate true for me."
And, as he added in another place, [Footnote: _A Pluralistic
Universe_, p. 329.] "your acting thus may in certain special cases
be a means of making it securely true in the end." Yet no one would
have insisted more than he, that, so far as we know how, we must avoid
substituting the goal for the starting point, must avoid reading back
into the present what courage, effort and skill might create in the
future.
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