Page:The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism (1911).djvu/474



While preparing these lectures for the press I have been asked by a friendly critic for a definition of contingency. Possibly the request was prompted by the conviction, com- monly enough entertained, that there is really no contingency in the world at all ; and this, it is supposed, any serious attempt to define contingency would sooner or later disclose. Absolute chance is certainly nonsense; and relative chance, it may be said, is after all not really chance, and implies nothing but ignorance or — it may be — irrelevance to the matter in hand. The truth of this I have already fully admitted in the text; but I have also distinguished between the contingency of chance and the contingency of freedom. It is the latter contingency that is here in question, and, whatever may be said of its validity, its meaning at least seems clear. If the future of the world is partly determined by the conduct of free agents there will continually be new beginnings that were not foreseen; and new possibilities will become imminent, that no knowledge of the past can surely forecast. All these possibilities will find a place within a certain ‘domain’ (to adopt a mathematical term), inasmuch as the world was never a chaos, but definite from the first; and so we say there is no absolute contingency, no utter caprice.