Determinism
<p>The following quotation from the article on Fatalism, contained in the New International Encyclopædia, will show the distinctive points between the teachings of Fatalism and those of the scientific school of Determinism, which latter agrees
in many important essentials with the Arcane Teaching. The writer of the article says, in part: Fatalism is “the doctrine that
the course of events is so determined that what an individual wills can have no great effect on that course. Fatalism must be
carefully distinguished from Determinism, 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 shaping events.
Determinism maintains that this causally efficient will is itself to be casually accounted for; this is entirely different from
the fatalistic assertion that Will counts for nothing. In fact Determinism and Fatalism are fundamentally antagonistic. Determinism asserts that events are determined by some of the events that immediately precede them; that if the latter were different the former would be different. Fatalism 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.…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.…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 still another way, for the fatalist what actually determines the event is not another event immediately preceding, but some mysterious decree issued by some mysterious agent ages before the event. This enables us to see that Fatalism gives no scope to the will. But Determinism,
which merely asserts that every event has its determining conditions in its immediate antecedents, includes among the
antecedents the human Will.…Thus Determinism is consistent with a belief in the efficiency of Will, and Fatalism is not.”
In short, Determination holds that events are Determined— Fatalism holds that they are Predetermined. The one recognizes
Natural Laws as the determining power—the other holds that Supernatural Decree predetermines and foreordains. </p>
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