The Mastery of Destiny

You strain for something for years, a post, a person, a place to live, and it slips away at the last moment, while someone who barely tried walks straight into it. Sooner or later most people decide there is a Power above them that does not care what anyone deserves.

Allen opens with exactly that feeling, and he takes it seriously. People call it God, Providence, Fate. The Greek dramatists showed heroes running from a foretold doom and arriving at it by the very road they fled along. Omar Khayyam gave it the famous image: "The Moving Finger writes, and having writ, moves on." No piety, wit or tears will cancel half a line.

English common sense boiled it down to Man proposes, God disposes. Allen doesn't call this superstition. He calls it a long observation of real facts, and then asks what it is actually observing.

Yet the same people who shrug at fate spend their lives acting as if they were free. They make plans, try again after failing, and tell their children to choose well. Allen points out that all moral teaching assumes a person can choose a course and shape what becomes of them.

So there are two experiences, both real, and philosophers have fought over them for centuries. In Allen's day the quarrel was called Determinism versus Free-will, and each side treated the other as simply mistaken.

Allen refuses to join either camp. Between two extremes, he says, there is always a middle way that holds both, because truth "cannot be a partisan." Fate and freedom turn out to be two aspects of one law: the law of cause and effect, applied to human conduct instead of to falling stones.

Here is the hinge of the whole book. Every act is a cause, and every cause is balanced by its effects. Allen fits it into one sentence: "He chooses the cause (this is Free-will), he cannot choose, alter, or avert the effect (this is Fate)."

Think of a sharp remark in a meeting. Whether to say it was entirely yours. What it does once it lands, the silence, the cooled friendship, the way people remember you, is no longer yours to edit.

So freedom lives in the act itself, and destiny is simply being caught up in what you set moving. Nothing about it is arbitrary. For Allen the effect always equals its cause, which is why he can call the whole train of causation eternally just.

In Allen's reconciliation of fate and freedom, where exactly does a person's free will operate?

• Nowhere, since every outcome is fixed in advance
• In softening the results of past deeds by prayer
• In deciding which outcomes to accept or refuse
• In choosing the deeds that set effects in motion✓Correct answer

Allen draws the line at the act: free will is the power to start causes, and once the deed is done its effect is fate, which no prayer or refusal can avert. That same line is why he is not a fatalist, because the causes stay in your hands.

Allen doesn't throw predestination away. He keeps it and changes who signed the decree. Every effect, he grants, is in a sense preordained, but the power that preordains it is a cause, not the verdict of some arbitrary will.

This is stranger than it first sounds. The fatalist is right that certain things are coming for you and cannot be dodged. What the fatalist misses is the author. A person is predestined to certain ends, Allen says, but he himself has issued the mandate, usually without knowing he did.

Allen's own image for this is sound. The blessings and curses that seem to arrive unbidden are "the reverberating echoes of the sounds which he himself sent forth." An echo can startle you. It is still your own voice coming back.

The obvious objection is one Allen raises himself. My deeds come from my character, and nobody asked me which character to be born with. If temper, timidity or talent are handed out at birth, how is any of this fair?

His answer is that characters are never given ready-made. They are evolved. A character is an accumulation of deeds, piled up slowly by the very person who now carries it, so character is itself an effect rather than a starting gift.

Then he goes where many modern readers won't follow. Because a newborn already has a complex character, Allen concludes it was built across many earlier lives, and that birth into this life was determined by one's own deeds in former ones. You can use the rest of the book without accepting rebirth, but it is his explanation, stated plainly, and it is how he closes the chain wherever this life shows no cause.