ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the common belief that every single fact in the universe is precisely determined by law. It must not be supposed that this is a doctrine accepted everywhere and at all times by all rational men. Necessitarianism and materialism with the Stoics went hand in hand, as by affinity they should. At the revival of learning, Stoicism met with considerable favor, partly because it departed just enough from Aristotle to give it the spice of novelty, and partly because its superficialities well adapted it for acceptance by students of literature and art who wanted their philosophy drawn mild. The necessitarian may say there are, at any rate, no observed phenomena which the hypothesis of chance could aid in explaining. Necessitarianism cannot logically stop short of making the whole action of the mind a part of the physical universe.
