ABSTRACT
The sense of contingency, the feeling that anything that happens might have happened differently, has a frivolous side and also a profound one. The notion occurs familiarly to frivolous clever people who know all sorts of men and countries, and are themselves the sport of miscellaneous alternate desires. If they were stupid and ignorant they would think everything had to be as it 53is at home; that there could be no good language, religion, or taste other than their own. And if they were stupid but learned—not a rare combination—they would incline to think that everything must necessarily happen as the men of science, or the philosophies of history, explain that it happens according to physical or dialectical laws. These pedants ignore two considerations. The first is that these so-called laws are rash generalisations, the dialectics verbal and arbitrary, and the theories of science hypothetical; they are perhaps true only locally, or approximately, or often, or for rough statistical averages. The second consideration is that even if known laws held universally for our known world, this fact would be itself contingent, and other worlds or other ages might be laughing at it, like the immortal gods. On this point the sentiments of worldly sceptics seem to me more enlightened.
