Quoted By:
As a sentence proceeds, it continually narrows the freedom of the application of the succeeding terms, and tends to fix their destiny of meaning, so to speak.
A sentence does this by means of the syntax or operational rules of the language in which it is spoken. Yet this meaning, is actually a reflection of the original choice of intent on the part of the speaker, who is the framer of the sentences. If there were no rules of operation and syntax, no orderly procession of results, no freedom would be possible. Freedom in fact means not only choice of cause but guarantee of effect once a cause is chosen. Fate and free will are two sides of the same coin. The first is the crystallization of the second. Imagine for a moment a world in which one never could know what would occur when one re-enacted the same cause. This would not be a world of freedom but of chaos, which constitutes one of the worst tyrannies.
Almost as important as the existence in the universe of laws or patterns of consequence is the fact that one may change consequence-pattern if one changes the intent that generates the causal pattern to which the consequence is but nature’s appropriate response. We cannot always predict what the appropriate consequences for actions will be. Indeed, that ability is called “wisdom.” But we can study the configurations of relational pattern between act and consequence and thus learn better how to determine what this appropriateness in any given case means.
It is thus there is no immutable destiny.
