g's inconsequential letters to Spinoza and in Bernard Shaw's
shamelessly silly Preface to _Back to Methuselah_. Fundamental
confusions remain astonishingly stable throughout the centuries.

Spinoza, when he maintained that all things are necessarily determined
by the laws of their own being, certainly did not mean to say that, for
example, the toothbrush I shall buy to-morrow will be determined by the
stellar dust of aeons ago. He did not wish to maintain that the infinite
occurrences of the past were slowly but persistently moving to that far
from divine or distant event. No aboriginal astronomer royal could have
predicted the pending purchase merely by exhaustively analyzing the then
stellar dust. For toothbrushes and their purchase are determined by the
nature of human beings, not by the nature of embryonic stars. And
Spinoza's doctrine of necessity maintains that all events are determined
by their proper causes, not that everything is immediately caused by
some antediluvian event. And this is true even though we can start from
any event in the present, no matter how trivial, and go back to an event
causally antecedent, and from that to another, even until we recede into
the stellar dust itself. But this only amounts to saying, what is
undoubtedly true, that neither I nor the toothbrush could now exist if
the stellar dust, and the whole series of intervening events, had not
existed. But this is totally different from saying that the stellar dust
existed that I might exist to-day and buy a toothbrush to-morrow, or,
what equals the same, that I and the toothbrush exist so that the
stellar dust and the exceedingly long consequence of natural events
should have a final purpose, an ultimate end--even if not an ideal
fulfillment. Now only when causality, as in the latter case, is
perversely teleological is determinism fatalistic. Fatalism is the
result only when the ends of activity are necessarily but arbitrarily
determined. But when causality is not arbitrarily teleological, or when
only the natures of things, the instruments or means of activity are
necessarily determined, then determinism involves no fatalism at all.

The only truly fatalistic systems which have had an important influence
in the history of mankind, have been certain religious systems--the
Christian religion among them. The energies of western men were, for
over fourteen centuries, robbed of all vitality and meaning because
Christian theology irrevocabl