William James's nineteenth-century defence of possibilities
the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism
The sweeping 'whole' leaves out an important contemporary dissent. William James's 'The Dilemma of Determinism', first published in the Unitarian Review in September 1884 and inspected here in the 1897 Will to Believe collection, contrasts determinism with a world containing genuinely unrealized possibilities. He calls the deterministic universe an 'iron block' and argues that the evidence of what happened does not settle whether something else could have happened. See especially pp. 150–153. Read James's essay.
This is a close conceptual parallel to the leaf that might have been scarlet: each writer resists identifying actuality with the only real possibility. It also makes Chesterton's self-portrait more precise. He is reporting a perceived intellectual atmosphere, not documenting unanimous nineteenth-century opinion. The parallel does not establish borrowing, and James's argument about possibilities does not identify Chesterton's implied chooser.
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