Fate. The Fates, Fatalism, express a conception which has more or less prevailed in all religions. The words are derived from the Latin Fatum, which has primarily a passive signification, denoting something uttered—a decree or ordinance. The Greeks expressed the same thought by Eîmarmenê. Moira (from meros, 'part' or 'lot,' 'share'), again, was the active personification of the idea—the goddess Fate or Destiny. It constituted in the Greek mythology something like an ultimate monotheistic element—the vague Unity binding together and dominating over the crowd of Olympian deities. With Homer, who in every instance save one speaks of Fate (Moira) in the singular, Fate was not a deity, but a mere personification, the destinies of men being made by him to depend upon the will of the gods; whilst, according to the later Greeks and the Romans, the gods themselves were subject to the control of the Moirai or Paree. Hesiod, however, who is almost contemporary with Homer, speaks of three Fates, whom he calls daughters of Night—Clotho, the spinner of the thread of life; Lachesis, who determines the lot of life; and Atropos, the inevitable. They were usually represented as young women of serious aspect; Clotho with a spindle, Lachesis pointing with a staff to the horoscope of man on a globe, and Atropos with a pair of scales, or sun-dial, or an instrument to cut the thread of life. In the oldest representations of them, however, they appear as matrons, with staffs or sceptres. They had places consecrated to them throughout all Greece, at Corinth, Sparta, Thebes, Olympia, and elsewhere.
With the course of Greek thought the conception of Fate became more spiritualised. In Æschylus it is an inexorable Destiny; in Sophocles and Plato it is more of a free and ordering Will. In the later forms of Greco-Roman speculation, again, it undergoes various modifications. With the Epicureans it seems identical with Chance (Tuchê); with the Stoics it is the very opposite of this. In the one case the Absolute is a mere blind fatality; in the other case it is an imminent necessity of reason, governing with iron sway the apparently accidental phenomena of life.
In the two great religions of modern times, Christianity and Mohammedanism, the same conception is found in various forms. In the latter the Highest seems to be conceived as inexorable law, swallowing up every lower law of activity; yet the abject self-subjection to fate generally understood to be implied in the Moslem Kismet is by no means inculcated in the Koran (see MOHAMMED). In Christianity and the modern speculation which it has coloured it shows itself less broadly in the well-known doctrines of Predestination and of philosophical Necessity. In the Predestination theory of Augustine, Calvin, and many others, the old fatalistic doctrine is repudiated; the recognition of a free determining element in the divine Will separates their idea of it altogether from that of a mere blind Destiny; but the influence of the mode of thought out of which the old idea sprung appears in the manner in which the divine decrees are sometimes spoken of as inexorably overbearing human freedom. In the doctrine of philosophical necessity promulgated by Leibnitz and Edwards, and in a somewhat different form by modern scientific modes of thought, the same idea emerges as inevitable sequence—of an invariable connection linking together all phenomena, material and mental. An immutable law is declared to pervade and harmonise all existence. This is a much higher conception, but is obviously not wholly unrelated to the old pagan doctrine of Fate. See PREDESTINATION, WILL.