Universal Salvation and Probability

Every so often, another Catholic encourages me to "dare to hope that all are saved". After all, it is not a matter of doctrine that any specific person is damned. We know that God's mercy is great, and given God's mercy and our beliefs about the bliss of heaven and the torment which is hell, it seems reasonable that any soul would choose to embrace God over separating himself permanently from Him.

For me, this idea seems to fall down, however, when applied to the whole of humanity. In a sense, it's a lot like the issue of the probability of sinlessness which I wrote about briefly a while ago: Given that we have free will, it would seem that in any given situation we could choose to do the right thing -- though obviously we in many cases feel a strong urge not to or don't even have a clear understanding of what the right thing is. However paradoxically, while in every individual choice it would seem that we could choose not to sin, it seems like an impossibility that any one person would in fact make the right choice in every single circumstance, thus living a life entirely without sin (except for original sin.)

Similarly, it seems to me that while there's clearly a chance that any given person, no matter how sinful, will repent before death, embrace God's forgiveness, and be saved, I simply can't imagine it as possible that every single person in the history of humanity would do so. We see people so very frequently, in ordinary life, actively choose to do thing which they know will make them unhappy out of anger, pride or even just habit -- I just don't find it persuasive that no one would ever have chosen to utterly refuse union with God and insist that he would "rather rule in hell and serve in heaven."

So I do not hope that all will be saved -- I stick to hoping that each person will be saved.