Now, there is
disorder in the world, disorder produced by the play of
spontaneous forces which no power enchains: how can that be, if
everything is the result of fate?
But who does not see that this old quarrel between theism and
materialism proceeds from a false notion of liberty and fatality,
two terms which have been considered contradictory, though really
they are not. If man is free, says the one party, all the more
surely is God free too, and fatality is but a word; if everything
is enchained in nature, answers the other party, there is neither
liberty nor Providence: and so each party argues in its own
direction till out of sight, never able to understand that this
pretended opposition of liberty and fatality is only the natural,
but not antithetical, distinction between the facts of activity
and those of intelligence.
Fatality is the absolute order, the law, the code, fatum, of the
constitution of the universe. But this code, very far from being
exclusive in itself of the idea of a sovereign legislator,
supposes it so naturally that all antiquity has not hesitated to
admit it; and today the whole question is to find out whether, as
the founders of religions have believed, the legislator preceded
the law in the universe,--that is, whether intelligence is prior
to fatality,--or whether, as the moderns claim, the law preceded
the legislator,--in other words, whether mind is born of nature.
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