SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES.
I. The Meaning of Contingency. (Lect. iv. p. 76.)
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.[1] 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;[2] and so we say
there is no absolute contingency, no utter caprice.
