In real life there is not, as there is in every jigsaw puzzle, one picture and one picture only into which all the pieces will eventually fit. It is the totalitarian mind which thinks that there is one and only one picture. All the various brands of totalitarianism, violently as they differ among themselves, have this in common. Each holds that it has the key and pattern of history, that it knows the scheme of things, and that all that happens is foreseen and explained in its doctrine. But to the liberal mind this claimlike any other human claim to omniscienceis presumptuous and it is false.
Nobody knows that much.
The future is not predetermined in any book that any man has written. The future is what men will make it, and about the present, in which the future is being prepared, we know something but not everything, and not nearly enough. Being newspapermen in the American liberal tradition, the way we interpret the news is not by fitting the facts to a dogma. It is by proposing theories or hypotheses which are then tested by trial and error. We put forward the most plausible interpretation we can think of, the most plausible picture into which the raw news fits, and then we wait to see whether the later news fits into the interpretation.