Chance and Spontaneity

Chance and spontaneity are reckoned among causes.

Many things exist and come to exist as a result of chance and spontaneity.

How are chance and spontaneity present among the causes enumerated?

Are they the same or different? What are chance and spontaneity?

Some people even question whether they are real or not.

They say that nothing happens by chance. Instead, everything which we ascribe to chance or spontaneity has some definite cause.

For example, I come ‘by chance’ to the market and finding there a man whom I wanted to meet but did not expect to meet is due to my wish to go and buy in the market.

They maintain that in other cases commonly attributed to chance, it is always possible to find a cause. But not with chance.

If chance were real, it would seem strange. This is why none of the ancient wise men assigned chance for the cause of the generation.

Many things both come to be and are by chance and spontaneity, and although know that each of them can be ascribed to some cause (as the old argument said which denied chance), nevertheless they speak of some of these things as happening by chance and others not.

For this reason also they ought to have at least referred to the matter in some way or other.

Certainly the early physicists found no place for chance among the causes which they recognized-love, strife, mind, fire, or the like.

This is strange, whether they supposed that there is no such thing as chance or whether they thought there is but omitted to mention it-and that too when they sometimes used it, as Empedocles does when he says that the air is not always separated into the highest region, but ‘as it may chance’.

At any rate he says in his cosmogony that ‘it happened to run that way at that time, but it often ran otherwise.’ He tells us also that most of the parts of animals came to be by chance.

There are some who ascribe this heavenly sphere and all the worlds to spontaneity.

They say that the vortex arose spontaneously, i.e. the motion that separated and arranged in its present order all that exists. This statement might well cause surprise.

They assert that chance is not responsible for the existence or generation of animals and plants, nature or mind or something of the kind being the cause of them.

It is not any chance that a thing that comes from a given seed is an olive as one kind, and a man as another kind.

Yet at the same time they assert that the heavenly sphere and the divinest of visible things arose spontaneously, having no such cause as is assigned to animals and plants.

If this is so, then we need to dwell on it. For besides the other absurdities of the statement, it is the more absurd that people should make it when they see nothing coming to be spontaneously in the heavens, but much happening by chance among the things which as they say are not due to chance; whereas we should have expected exactly the opposite.

Others believe that chance is a cause, but that it is inscrutable to human intelligence, as being a divine thing and full of mystery.

So we must inquire what chance and spontaneity are.