Necessity and Contingency

Reason persuades necessity; the cosmos is built where intelligible order meets the wandering cause.

Future contingents are genuinely undetermined; tomorrow's sea-battle is not yet true or false.

Atoms fall by necessity, but a slight swerve breaks the chains of fate and leaves room for freedom.

The One is beyond necessity and contingency alike; its self-procession is freedom itself.

God foreknows all things necessarily, yet human wills remain genuinely contingent.

Contingent beings require a necessary being; God wills some effects necessarily and some contingently.

Nothing is contingent: everything that exists follows from the necessity of the divine nature.

Truths of reason are necessary; truths of fact are contingent. God chose this world as the best among infinite possibles.

We never perceive necessary connection; 'necessity' is only the mind's felt custom of expecting one event after another.

Necessity belongs to the forms of experience, not to things in themselves, and the existence of a necessary being cannot be proved.

Necessity and contingency are moments of actuality; true freedom is the insight that necessity is its own.