FATALISM ( from fatal, from Lat. fatalls, relating to fate, from falum, fate, from Ma, l?k. 9civat, ',llama, to speak. Skt. bu d. to shine). The doctrine that the course of events is so deter mined that what an individual wills can have no effect upon that course. Fatalism must be care fully distinguished from determinism (q.v.), as the confusion of these two conceptions has been responsible for much of the popular prejudice existing against determinism. Fatalism, as has been said, denies that will has efficacy in shap ing events; determinism in its scientific form asserts that will may and does shape events. Determinism maintains that this causally effi cient will is itself to lae causally accounted for; this is entirely different from the fatalistic asser tion that will counts for nothing. In fact, de terminism and fatalism are fundamentally an tagonistic. Determinism asserts that events are determined by some of the events that imme diately precede them; that if the latter were different the former would be different. Fatal ism denies that immediately preceding events have anything to do with the origination of events immediately following; it asserts that the latter would occur even if the former were changed. The fatalist means, when he says that he is fated to die at a certain time, that no mat ter how much the intervening events may be al tered the death will, nevertheless, occur at the predetermined moment. To say that one's death is fixed by fate is to deny that it takes place by natural law. Or, more accurately, it is to say that, however much one varies the cause, one cannot vary the effect. For instance, the fatalist soldier does not fear the battle, for lie argues that at a fixed moment he must die; hence a mortal wound received in battle does not shorten his life. Should he escape the wound by avoiding
the battle, he might be poisoned at that appointed time; should he escape the poison by due precau tion. he might slip and crush his skull; should he avoid a fall by keeping quiet indoors, an assassin might attack him in his own apart ments. Thus the death at an appointed hour is decreed. but not the particular means that shall bring it about. Hence the futility of the at tempt to escape death; for such an attempt con sists always in the avoidance of the causes of death, but to avoid one cause exposes one to another. it can now be seen that the fatalist's position is that the end is predetermined, but not the means; the determinist's position is that the events now occurring lead by causality to other events, which are thus fixed because their causes are actually existent. Or, to put it in still an other way, for the fatalist what actually deter mines the event is not another event immediately preceding, hut some mysterious decree issued by some mysterious agent ages before the event. This enables ms to see that fatalism gives no scope to the will. But determinism, which merely asserts that every event has its deter mining conditions in its immediate antecedents. includes among the antecedents the human will, unless the determinism is of a materialistic type, and materialistic determinism is now generally discredited. (See MATERIALISM. ) Thins deter minism is consistent with a belief in the effi ciency of will, and fatalism is not. Consult Mill, Logic, Ratiocination, and Induction, book vi., chapter ii. (London, 1880.