# A determined event is still an event

Commentary on Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton.

On [CH04.P023](https://glosses.org/orthodoxy/pg16769-r1/CH04.P023/#char=875,940): "nothing ever really had happened since the beginning of the world"

The joke compresses a philosophical complaint: if every later state was already settled, the world's apparent adventures contain no genuinely open alternatives. It should not be mistaken for a literal statement of what determinists deny. Laplace's *Philosophical Essay on Probabilities* (first published in French in 1814), chapter II, describes successive events as causes and effects and imagines an intelligence able to calculate every state from complete knowledge of forces and positions. His world changes; its changes are determined. The inspected English witness is Truscott and Emory's 1902 translation from the sixth French edition, pp. 3–5, rather than the original 1814 text. [Read chapter II](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Philosophical_Essay_on_Probabilities/Chapter_2).

This distinction also sharpens the green-leaf example. Imagining a scarlet leaf establishes an imaginable alternative; it does not establish that the same complete physical antecedents and laws could produce either colour. A determinist can allow a scarlet leaf under different antecedents. Chesterton's strongest objection here concerns treating the whole actual arrangement as self-explanatory or absolutely necessary, a stronger claim than determination given antecedents. His nursery test restores surprise at the arrangement; it does not by itself refute causal determinism. Laplace supplies a precise comparison, not an identified source Chesterton demonstrably used.

## Sources

- [Pierre-Simon Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, trans. F. W. Truscott and F. L. Emory (1902)](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Philosophical_Essay_on_Probabilities/Chapter_2), Chapter II, pp. 3–5; paragraphs beginning 'Present events are connected' and 'We ought then to regard'
- [Laplace, A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities: 1902 title page and translation statement](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/58881/58881-h/58881-h.htm), Title page; 'TRANSLATED FROM THE SIXTH FRENCH EDITION'; chapter II

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