Accident (philosophy)

“ Accident, the intricate web of fate, gives them their fit soil, their heat, their germinating impulse. And the world about them, seeing the fruit of these seeds alone, calls the man good or bad, and thus makes its rude analysis of character, as something set and fixed, stamped upon the soul forever. ”

“ And not unfrequently do accidents befall such an one, and he hurts himself grievously; hence come those accidents which we may call indefinite, for of this kind of accident there is often no definite cause, for the cause of it is casual, and that is indefinite. ”

“ We shall crawl from under one cart-wheel straight under another.
The essence of tragedy, which is creative crisis, is that a man should go through with his fate, and not dodge it and go bumping into an accident. ”

“ Is the Creator of all to be limited and only his creature unlimited? How often, in the midst of a great accident, has not some mind suggested a redress totally at variance with the rules by which the accident was produced, creating a surprise to usual circumstances, and checking the catastrophe before it could recover its equanimity and prearranged and understood mode of conduct! ”

“ Accident, that convenient word given to the imaginary hack to which so many fires are referred, if truthfully interpreted, will, in general, be found to be equivalent to carelessness, recklessness, or guilt. ”

“ One accident is said to be the subject of another, not as though one accident could uphold another; but because one accident inheres to substance by means of another, as color to the body by means of the surface ”

“ Now and then it occurs to one to reflect upon what slender threads of accident depend the most important circumstances of his life; to look back and shudder, realizing how close to the edge of nothingness his being has come. ”

“ The vulgar notion that our lives are the sport of accident,—the minute too early or too late, the calm that detained us, the snow-storm that blocked the road, the chance meeting with this or that man, which we lay such stress on,—what are they in reality but trivial incidents without force or effect, save that they impel to action? ”

“ There is no need to banish from reality this clear evidence that the accident has not the nature of that whole—by us called body—to which it belongs, nor of the permanent properties which accompany the whole. ”

“ Even when the catastrophe depends upon some so-called accident, it must be made to appear necessary that our human purposes should sometimes be caught and strangled in the web of natural fact which envelops them. ”

“ And though there is nothing final we can do about it, and very little in any sense, still—this curious accident of the human intellect enables us to do something. We can at least admit the plain facts of our horrible case. Here, a self-realizing accident, we briefly are. Death will dissipate us one by one, and the world in due time. That much we know. But while we last, why must we add imaginary evils to our real ones, and torment ourselves with false hopes and ridiculous fears?
"Why can't each one of us learn to say: 'I am an accident of no consequence in a world that means nothing. ”

“ What I feel sure I know by this time is that all the things we think happen by chance and accident are only part of the weaving of the scheme of life. When you begin to suspect this and to watch closely you also begin to see how trifles connect themselves with one another, and seem in the end to have led to a reason and a meaning, though we may not be clever enough to see it clearly. Nothing is an accident. ”

“ The accident that turns one into the road is only the means which Providence takes to procure the working out of certain ends. Accidents are many: life is as full of accidents as a fire is full of sparks, and any spark is enough to set fire to the train. ”

“ From these classifications of accidents it will be at once apparent that the general notion of accident, as a dependent mode of being, superadded to the essence of a substance and in some way determining the latter, is realized in widely different and merely analogical ways in the different ultimate classes of accidents. ”

“ But, inasmuch as we are not wise enough to be able to unravel all these long and complicated series of causes and effects which lead to the falling of the branch upon the man, we call such an event an accident. ”

“ The venturesome element in life, above all in the life of thought, only lent it a new charm. Though at first the large amount of accident and chaos in the world oppressed him, he came to say "dear accident," "beautiful chaos." ”

“ The will of nature may be learned from things upon which we are all agreed. As when our neighbor’s boy has broken a cup, or the like, we are ready at once to say, “These are casualties that will happen”; be assured, then, that when your own cup is likewise broken, you ought to be affected just as when another’s cup was broken. Now apply this to greater things. Is the child or wife of another dead? There is no one who would not say, “This is an accident of mortality.” ”

“ This accidental existence, which is dependent on beings, is like other properties of things which depend on them. It is an accident among accidents, and certainly that which is the essence is superior to that which is the accident. For the essence is the origin, and the accident is the consequence; the essence is dependent on itself, and the accident is dependent on something else—that is to say, it needs an essence upon which to depend. ”

“ How an accident may be understood to be in its subject. 3. When an accident is said to be in a body, it is not so to be understood, as if any thing were contained in that body; as if, for example, redness were in blood, in the same manner, as blood is in a bloody cloth, that is, as a part in the whole; for so, an accident would be a body also. But, as magnitude, or rest, or motion, is in that which is great, or which resteth, or which is moved, (which, how it is to be understood, every man understands) so also, it is to be understood, that every other accident is in its subject. ”

“ Nor do they admit that any accidents determine the nature of a substance, or predispose it to receive certain other accidents: for, according to their opinion, an accident cannot be the substratum of another accident, as we have shown in explaining the ninth proposition ”

“ In a long series of events of the same kind, the mere chances of accident sometimes offer these curious veins of good or bad fortune, which many persons do not hesitate to attribute to a kind of fatality. ”

“ The number of persons who, every day, meet with an accidental death, all over the world, is very considerable. But how can we bring a tile onto the head of an important character, or fling him under the wheels of a vehicle in the middle of a story, under the pretext that accident must have its due? ”

“ A man meets with an accident—he is mortally wounded in battle—crushed by a railway accident—burnt in a fire—all but drowned in water—sick of a fatal malady lingering with vain hopes and vainer love of life—the marked victim of consumption—these all have their immediate and most excruciating tortures benumbed or alleviated by the skill of the physician ”

“ What is life but one long chain of accidents, if by accident we understand all that falls out without our own intention or volition. We cannot control these accidents. There is a power above circumstance and accident that controls them, as gravitation controls the motions of material things. ”

“ To satisfy these men, as well as may be, they answer best that define an accident to be the manner by which any body is conceived; which is all one as if they should say, an accident is that faculty of any body, by which it works in us a conception of itself. Which definition, though it be not an answer to the question propounded, yet it is an answer to that question which should have been propounded, namely, whence does it happen that one part of any body appears here, another there? ”

“ Accident is, in a wide sphere, such an every-day matter that we need not be surprised if it sometimes invades the territory where order is the rule. And one personification or another of the capricious power of chance easily helps us over the difficulties which further reflection might find in the exceptions. Yes, indeed, Exception has a peculiar fascination; it is a subject of astonishment, a θαῦμα, and the credulity with which in this first stage of pure association we adopt our supposed rules is matched by the equal credulity with which we adopt the miracles that interfere with them. ”

“ Now the appearance or disappearance of such an accident in a substance undoubtedly involves a real change in the latter, and not merely in our thought; when a body moves, or comes to rest, or alters its form, there is a change in the reality as well as in our thought; and in this sense these accidents are real and intrinsic to their substances. ”

“ The concept of an accident really distinct from its substance involves no intrinsic repugnance. Yet an accident is a mode of being which is so weak and wanting in reality, if we may speak in such terms, that it cannot naturally exist except by inhering, mediately or immediately, in the stronger and more real mode of being which is substance. But an incomplete substance is a higher grade of reality than any accident. Therefore if accidents can be real, a fortiori incomplete substances can be real. ”

“ The moving accident, the rare conjunction, whatever it be, doesn't make the story—in the sense that the story is our excitement, our amusement, our thrill and our suspense; the human emotion and the human attestation, the clustering human conditions we expect presented, only make it. ”

“ Fancy this great man, in perplexity from some unexpected accident how to supply the loss of a friend, vacating one of these seats, with an individual, who by no means must be inferior to his predecessor in obsequious attention to his patron’s political interests, his intentions, and injunctions. Accident, the veriest accident, might introduce the practitioner of the law to huggery of another kind.—What think you now, good people? ”

“ PROPOSITION VI. Accidents do not continue in existence during two time-atoms.
PROPOSITION VII. Both positive and negative properties have a real existence, and are accidents which owe their existence to some causa efficiens.
PROPOSITION VIII. All existing things, i.e., all creatures, consist of substance and of accidents, and the physical form of a thing is likewise an accident.
PROPOSITION IX. No accident can form the substratum for another accident. ”

“ The influence of countless worlds upon the destiny of one who, by capricious accident, if accident ever exists in history, had been entrusted with the destiny of so large a portion of one little world ”

“ But this is impossible; for not even more than two terms can be combined in accidental predication. For (1) an accident is not an accident of an accident, unless it be because both are accidents of the same subject. I mean, for instance, the white is musical and the latter is white, only because both are accidental to man. ”

“ It is provoking when accident upsets our craftiest calculations. He had the mortification to perceive that he had not crushed the rebellion so completely as he had wished--by driving all the malcontents off the face of the earth. ”

“ I believe, on the contrary, that everything takes place by accident; and that, if the gods interfere at all with what we do, it is but to drive us on again upon our way, as a herd does to a stray bull that wanders from the drove. ”

“ The doctrine that extremes meet contains much truth in it—truth which is illustrated and exemplified more frequently, we think, than is generally supposed. A tremendous accident is often much less damaging to the person who experiences it than a slight one. ”

“ To graze is not merely to touch superficially, but to strike not directly, not so as to bury the body of the thing striking in the matter struck.
Theobald trifles, as is usual. Accident and chance may admit a subtle distinction; accident may be considered as the act, and chance as the power or agency of fortune; as, It was by chance that this accident befel me. At least, if we suppose all corrupt that is inaccurate, there will be no end of emendation. ”

“ The tearing of that paragraph was an accident."
"An accident? Did you not notice this morning how anxious he was to know if we had read this critique; how relieved he seemed when he learned we had not? ”

“ To dream of an accident is a warning to avoid any mode of travel for a short period, as you are threatened with loss of life.
For an accident to befall stock, denotes that you will struggle with all your might to gain some object and then see some friend lose property of the same value in aiding your cause. ”

“ It is singular that accident should have placed me within the reach of the only being from whom I could expect either sympathy or relief in the extraordinary circumstances in which I am placed--circumstances which I did not believe I should ever disclose to mortal man, but which I shall disclose to you. ”

“ If, by any lucky accident, he had been led to arrange the arts, either by their objects, and the things to which they are addressed, or by their means, and the things by which they are executed, he would have discovered his mistake in an instant. ”

“ Accidents.—Accident stories may be anything from a sprained ankle to a disastrous railroad wreck, but they all depend upon one element for their interest. They are all printed because people in general are interested in the injuries and deaths of other people—physical calamity is the common ground in all these stories. ”