MS 472 (1903) - Lowell Lecture VI

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saw. St Augustine, on the contrary, while holding it impious to think them to be violations of Nature's Laws, regards them apparently as occurences that are to us what the reading of a letter by a man might seem to a dog to be, namely, a manifestation of some higher mastery of things than would be compatible with his nature.

One fallacy into which the necessitarians of class C generally fall in that they imagineing that they can disprove that anything happens by chance by showing that the event has a cause. Thus Boethius at the beginning of the 5th book of his consolations, after citing Aristotle as a necessitarian, which is enough to take one's breath away, so monstrous is the blunder or the impudence of it, has a little ode of twelve lines

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which Mr. Henry Rosher James translate in 24 that imitate the swing of the original very well, but miss the point. By a geographical fiction Boëthius represents that the Tigris and the Euphrates flow from a common lake. Now suppose a boat to be wrecked in that lake and one part of it is carried down the Tigris the other part down the Euphrates and where these rivers, after being separate for hundred of miles flow together again, these two parts of the boats are dashed against one another. There is a fortuitous event if there ever was one; and yet says Boethius the currents forced them to move just as they did so that there was no chance about it. True the existential events were governed by law. But when we speak of chance it is a question of cause. Now it is the ineluctable blunder of a nominalist, as Boëthius was, to talk of the cause of an event. But it is not an existential event that has a cause. It is the fact, which is the

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reference of the event to a general relation that has a cause. The event, it is true was governed by the law of the current. But the fact which we are considering it that the two pieces that were dashed together had long before belonged together. That is a fact that would not happen once in ten thousand times, although when you join to this fact various circumstances of the actual event, and so contemplate quite another fact it would happen every time, no doubt. That is to say nobody can doubt it but an adherent of the E's sect. The example is a very good one as showing that the causal necessitation of a more concrete fact does not prevent a more prescinded or general fact of the same event from being quite fortuitous. The position of Aristotle in this matter is altogether right, and not “veri propinqua ratione,” as Boëthius says; but it is a position that nobody can

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understand who is completely emerged in the state of mind of modern philosophy. Zeller, for example, does not seize it, at all.

But let us drop metaphysics and return to logic. It was Hobbes who first said, referring to and combatting Aristotle's doctrine “Men commonly call that casual whereof they do not perceive the necessary cause,” for Hobbes was a typical stoic in his philosophy. Leibniz emphatically agrees with Hobbes “Fort bien,” he says. “J'y consens, si l'on entend parler d'un hazard réel. Car la fortune et le hazard ne sont que des apparences, qui viennent de l'ignorance des causes, ou de l'abstraction qu'on en fait.” This has been said a thousand times since with an air as if it explained the whole thing.

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I do not doubt that that is the impression of almost everybody in this hall. But I am quite sure that most of you will be glad to reëxamine the question with me. I will just give you the headings of some thoughts about it, which if its not too great a liberty, I would suggest that you take note of and carefully pursue by yourselves when you find leisure. I wish in the latter part of this lecture to make some remarks of great importance in many reasonings; and in order to get any time for those remarks I shall be obliged to make my statement of this part so brief that only the most thorough student of philosophy could fully grasp the meaning of it at the single hearing.