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Updated: June 2, 2025
GOD may have this probability increased to certainty. BOSWELL. 'When it is increased to certainty, freedom ceases, because that cannot be certainly foreknown, which is not certain at the time; but if it be certain at the time, it is a contradiction in terms to maintain that there can be afterwards any contingency dependent upon the exercise of will or any thing else. JOHNSON. 'All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it . I did not push the subject any farther.
For here with so much of ruin and failure impending, and with sorrow prepared so soon to smite a many of these revellers in ways foreknown to Jurgen; and with death resistlessly approaching so soon to make an end of almost all this company in some unlovely fashion that Jurgen foreknew exactly, here laughter seemed unreasonable and ghastly.
When a State or a family is about to flourish, there are sure to be happy omens; and when it is about to perish, there are sure to be unpropitious omens. The events portended are set forth by the divining-grass and the tortoise. When calamity or good fortune may be about to come, the evil or the good will be foreknown by the perfectly sincere man, who may therefore be compared with a spirit."
The greatest part of these advantages are wanting in the employment of these fictions among the moderns; and to which however they are, in some measure, compelled to have recourse, for want of theatrical subjects striking enough to be agreeably thrown into a dance; by which I do not mean to exclude all subjects that have not those poetical fictions of Greek and Roman antiquity for a basis; on the contrary, it might justly pass for a barrenness of invention, the being reduced constantly to borrow from them, but purely to point out a treasure, ever open to the artist who shall know how to make a selection with judgment and taste: always remembering, that the more universally the fable is foreknown, the more easy will the task be of rendering it intelligible in the execution.
In other words, if it be absurd or self-contradictory to say, that a future event is foreknown, and, at the same time, might not come to pass, this proposition is true of the volitions of the divine no less than of the human mind; for they are all alike foreknown.
These Stars, they say, have a great influence both as to good and bad in Mens Nativities; and from the consideration of their several Natures, may be foreknown what will befal Men afterwards.
Each knows that on fulfilling the requisite conditions, he shall have a preconceived impression that after a definite series of actions will come a group of sensations of a foreknown kind.
The Cardinal, who hates her, brands her emotion with the name of shame. She rebukes him, hurling a jibe at his own mother. And when they point with spiteful eagerness to the jewels blazing on her breast, to the silks and satins that she rustles in, her husband lying murdered, she retorts: Had I foreknown his death, as you suggest, I would have bespoke my mourning.
But I would have you act so as that, let either of these tenets be true, you may still be sure of making yourself easy and happy; and for that purpose let me recommend to you a uniform life of justice and piety; always choosing the good rather than the bad side of every action: for this, say they what they will to the contrary, is not above the power of a reasonable being to practise: and doing so, you may without scruple say, If there is foreknowledge of my actions, or they are decreed, I then am one who is foreknown or decreed to be happy.
Hence, then, the actions of men are as unalterably fixed from eternity, as if they had been the subject of an immutable decree.” But to dispel this grand illusion, it should be remembered, that the actions of men will not come to pass because they are foreknown; but they are foreknown because they will come to pass.
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