The Question of Purpose

The Question of Purpose is an essay written by the enigmatic A S Finch. It is included in the volume The Collected Lectures of A S Finch.

An extract from it served as background to The Maiden and the Shadow.

Extract
''Human beings are, rightly, considered to be terribly inclined to impose patterns on random events, to see connections and to seek understanding where there is, in fact, only coincidence. But coincidence is a strange concept, and I would like to examine it for a moment before moving on to our main topic.''

''Anyone thinking about coincidence philosophically will very quickly find themselves drawn into confusions. If the universe is, as the scientists tell us, essentially orderly and regular, a great machina mundi slowly and irresistibly winding down from order into chaos, then some daimon, standing perhaps on the shoulder of God, could predict all of its movements and changes, down to the most insignificant motions of the dust in the air. Such a being could trace the chains of cause and effect, from which all events spring, back to their knots and origins, and would in the end find that everything which we call chance, luck and coincidence, will turn in on itself and show itself to be the result of some bind of circumstance from which all inevitably follows. To this being, then, there is no such thing as coincidence – there is only fate, only that which happens and that which does not. ''

''Surely, though, there are such things as coincidences. Even if it were inevitable that, when I go to Gloucester tomorrow to consult Dr Follet’s archives, I shall bump into my distant cousin on his way to buy a coach-and-four, it would still surprise me very greatly, and very much more so for my just having used it as an example in a lecture about coincidence. Perhaps, then, we should think of coincidence, not as chance, not as lack of connection, but as divergence of cause. If the chains of fate which led up to my going to Gloucester, my cousins’ being in Gloucester, and my using him as an example in a lecture, diverge, unconnected, for months or years, and are parted by hundreds of miles, then I should certainly say that our meeting is a coincidence, and I am right to do so. A coincidence occurs, therefore, whenever the threads of causation which led to each of its separate elements diverge sufficiently widely. There is, of course, a huge grey area as to what counts as coincidence and what does not – but it is not our business to get tangled up in such questions of lexicography today.''

''Before I leave the topic of coincidence, I would like to make one final remark. Although human beings are remarkably prone to seeing patterns where there is only coincidence, we are also extremely bad at spotting the patterns which surround us and of which we are a part. The reason that everything looks so clear in hindsight, is because it is very difficult to see, when immersed in the business of living a life, how innumerable tiny incidents can, without being obviously connected, act as the signs and harbingers for some great change or chance which, though it comes upon those involved with great suddenness, can be seen by our watching daimon as stemming from a knot in the threads of fate which is not, in fact, all that distant, and whose threads have not unravelled all that far. ''