Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 6, 2025
The defalcation had startled them, but it could not be said to have surprised any one; it was to be expected of a man in Northwick's position; it happened every day somewhere, and the day had come when it should happen there. They did not say God was good and that Mahomet was His prophet, but they were fatalists all the same.
Many other great philosophers took and take the other view: the Lucretian pagans, the Moslem fatalists, the modern monists and determinists, all roughly confine themselves to saying that God gave man a law. The mediaeval Christian insisted that God gave man a charter.
"I wish I could be as sure of anything," said Melbourne, "as Tom Macaulay is of everything." Melbourne was a man of affairs, Macaulay a man of books; and so throughout the story the men of action have been fatalists, from Cæsar to Napoleon and Bismarck, nothing certain except the invisible player behind the screen. Of all human contrivances the most imperfect is government.
There were also the Niyati-vâdins, or fatalists, who believed that all that happens is the result of Niyati or fixed order, and the Yadricchâ-vâdins who, on the contrary, ascribed everything to chance and apparently denied causation, because the same result follows from different antecedents.
Does he once enter a protest against the doctrine of the Stoics, or of the materialistic fatalists, according to which all things in heaven and earth are involved in an “implex series of causes?” He does not. On the contrary, he has stated and enforced the great argument from cause and effect, in the strongest possible terms.
The fatalists do not deny it, for, by the strangest blunder, it is the presence of evil which has made them fatalists. Now, I say that the presence of evil, far from giving evidence of fatality, breaks fatality, does violence to destiny, and supposes a cause whose erroneous but voluntary initiative is in discordance with the law.
Most necessarians have been themselves deceived by the expression: they are apt to be partially fatalists as to their own actions, with a weaker spirit of self-culture than the believers in free-will, and to fail to see that the fact of their character being formed for them, that is, by their circumstances, including their own organisation, is consistent with its being formed by themselves, as intermediate agents, moulding it in any particular way which they may wish.
Ryder's anger was great, because Clovelly remarked with mock seriousness that the lascars were picturesque, and asked the American if he had watched them listlessly eating rice and curry as they squatted between decks; whether he had observed the Serang, with his silver whistle, who ruled them, and despised us "poor white trash;" and if he did not think it was a good thing to have fatalists like them as sailors they would be cool in time of danger.
His faith in the cause compelled him to fight to a finish. He was not of the potter's common clay of which fatalists are made.
It seems to belong to the gay, smiling, easy-going East of Scheherazade and Aladdin, not to the sombre and reserved Orient of fierce mystics and fanatical fatalists. Yet we feel, or imagine that we feel, the hidden presence of passions and possibilities that belong to the tragic side of life underneath this laughing mask of comedy.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking