“Fortuity; especially the absence of a cause necessitating an event.” This is absolute chance, the existence of which we deny. The “Century Dictionary” adds the following little note: “Absolute chance, the (supposed) spontaneous occurrence of events undetermined by any general law or by any free volition. According to Aristotle, events may come about in three ways: first, by necessity or an external compulsion; second, by nature or the development of an inward germinal tendency; and third, by chance, without any determining cause or principle whatever, by lawless, sporadic originality.”[12] We understand chance as being, from certain premisses, an incalculable coincidence, either not intended to be calculated, or, for certain reasons, from a given standpoint with a limited and definite amount of knowledge, not capable of calculation. Determinism, as we understand the term, does not imply as the “Century Dictionary” has it in its definition of necessitarianism, that “the law of cause and effect” is “mechanical.” It simply asserts that the law of cause and effect holds good universally, and that there is no effect that is not definitely determined, according to the nature of the things in action, by causes and all their circumstances. NECESSITY AND CHANCE. Mr. Peirce says: “_All_ the diversity and specificalness of events is attributable to chance—diversification, specificalness, and irregularity of things, I suppose is chance—and this diversity cannot be due to laws that are immutable.” (P. 332.) Our world-view leads us to other conclusions; we say: Every specificalness or particularity is such by possessing a certain form and standing in a definite relation (in time as well as space) to all other things of the universe. Of every concrete thing we can say it is now and here, or it was then and there. It is or was made up in this special way, and it stands or it stood in these special relations to its surroundings. Proportions, relations, forms—these are what account for the diversification and specificalness of all things in the universe; they are what explain the irregularities of individual cases and of all those events which appear as chance to him who, although he may be well informed about the nature of a thing, does not know the relation of its complex surroundings, exercising according to law their disturbing influence upon its actions which otherwise would be uniform. And since no two spots of space and no two instances of time are the same, since the relations of every atom are different in every position and at every moment of its existence, we need not be astonished to find diversity and specificalness in this world of samenesses. We do not believe in absolute chance, but we believe in chance. What is chance? Chance is any event not especially intended, either not calculated, or, with a given and limited stock of knowledge, incalculable.