logically necessary and whose non-existence is not logically impossible. In this sense everything that exists is contingent, as are the laws that describe the way contingent things are related. In another sense, the contingent is the irrelevant. Once we discover a law relating classes of things, from the point of view of this law, the phenomena that are unrelated to it are contingent. And no law can be found that describes the behaviour of some things without the assumption of the irrelevance of other things. In a third sense (a special case of the second) an event is contingent if it occurs as a consequence of the intersection of two series of events, described by laws that are irrelevant to each other.[1]
In the primary sense of the term, we can admit the existence of the contingent in every individual event, but it does not therefore follow that everything about the event is contmgent or novel. In the secondary sense we can legitimately predict that an event will occur as a consequence of a series of earlier ones and yet find that because of the interposition of another series of events what we expected turned out otherwise a good or bad “accident.”
Historians who are immersed in the rich details of historical events, and who are often brought up short by the unexpectedness of happenings, sometimes exaggerate the element of contingency to a point where history appears to them as nothing but a story of the unexpected. The “great man” as well as everything else appears contingent so that in their account he plays no greater role than in the account of the extreme determinist. In consequence, the problem of what specific historical effect a particular individual has at any definite time is a problem that, on this view, can hardly be stated. One contingency is born of another, and who can say where it leads and why. Such historians do not distinguish between three different things: the tautology that the absolutely novel aspect of an event cannot be understood or predicted; the view that the interrelationships between events show such complexity that intelligible explanations and predictions cannot be made; and the view that the contingent can only have historical effects because of what is not contingent.
In a famous passage of an impressive historical work, a distinguishd English scholar claims that the only uniformity the
- ↑ Cf. Morris R. Cohen, Reason and Nature, pp. 151–2, New York, 1932. Also Cournot, Considérations sur La Marche das Idées et des Evenéments dans Les Temps Modernes, ed. by Mentré, vol. I., pp. 1–15.
