When Isaac Bashevis Singer was asked, in a late interview published in the online journal Salon, if he believed in free will, he replied, “Of course I believe in free will. Do I have a choice?” I confess to having had something of the same split response a few years ago when I ran across a comment, from the American thinker Charles Sanders Peirce, that “chance begets order.” Here is the entire passage, from an essay called “Evolutionary Love,” published in 1893. The Origin of Species, says Peirce, “was published toward the end of the year 1859. The preceding years since 1846 had been one of the most productive seasons . . . [in some ways] the most productive period of equal length in the entire history of science from its beginnings until now. The idea that chance begets order, which is one of the cornerstones of modern physics . . . was at that time put in its clearest light.”

I am not a physicist, a biologist, a psychologist, or a philosopher; I was trained as a scholar of literature and the humanities, and I subscribe to William James’s definition of the humanities, which states that anything studied historically is the humanities.

My initial trouble with the notion that “chance begets order” lay in my assumptions. I had and still have a strong feeling of the rightness of the Newtonian world. Nature is governed by laws, which can be discovered. Falling bodies, for instance, are governed by the law of gravity. In a modern version, Buckminster Fuller says nature is the law. The orbits of the planets can be computed, and we can send spacecraft out to observe and even use those orbits. We can put a space probe into a planet’s gravitational field, where the probe accelerates, like a stone in a slingshot, and is then flung farther out into space. Things are connected; physical laws are universal. From watching an apple fall, Newton was moved to consider that the moon obeyed the same force as the apple. Gravity shapes the moon’s orbit.

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