holds between any two events if it is literally impossible for one event to occur if the other does not, or for the first not to occur if the other does. In short, the two events logically entail each other. Now if all events are related to one another in this way, once we assume that any event happened differently from what it did—or even that one single detail of it happened differently—every other event would have had to happen differently. But on such a supposition, whenever we ask an “if” question, we cannot intelligently say what would have happened, for anything might have happened. We can no longer rely upon relationships observed to hold in other situations to enable us to tell what will now ensue—for these relationships themselves have been automatically altered the very moment we have assumed a hypothesis contrary to fact. From this point of view, all situations or events are mutually interdependent—parts of one total situation or one great event. A hypothesis contrary to fact cannot be stated without self-contradiction. And since it is a self-contradictory statement, anything can be tied to it no matter how fanciful.
This philosophy of history is a specific application of a metaphysical world view. It is occasionally suggested by some forms of theological determinism, but more expressively developed in the Hegelian system of absolute idealism and its variants. It is never carried out consistently, nor can it ever establish its basic assumptions that all things are necessarily involved in each other and that any true judgment, therefore, entails the totality of all other true judgments. Why, indeed, should the conjoining of any two historical statements like “Wellington fought at Waterloo” (which is in fact true), and “Gold was not discovered in California” (which is in fact false), result in a contradiction? Or can one seriously believe that if my dog whose name is “Trailer” had been called “Tiger” everything else in the world would necessarily have been affected? Here is not the place to criticize in detail the metaphysical theory of the block universe. Its consequences for history reveal its weaknesses sufficiently for present purposes. For it implies that there are no objective possibilities in history, that the future is already actual but unborn, that human effort or the lack of it is predetermined, and that intelligence can never make a difference to what is in the process of becoming but “like the owl of Minerva begins its flight only when the shades of twilight have already fallen” (Hegel).
