Nor, I believe, are the facts ever so presented that it seems to us as
if the supreme power, whatever it may be, had a special spite against a
family or an individual. Neither, lastly, do we receive the impression
(which, it must be observed, is not purely fatalistic) that a family,
owing to some hideous crime or impiety in early days, is doomed in later
days to continue a career of portentous calamities and sins.
Shakespeare, indeed, does not appear to have taken much interest in
heredity, or to have attached much importance to it. (See, however,
'heredity' in the Index.)
What, then, is this 'fate' which the impressions already considered lead
us to describe as the ultimate power in the tragic world? It appears to
be a mythological expression for the whole system or order, of which the
individual characters form an inconsiderable and feeble part; which
seems to determine, far more than they, their native dispositions and
their circumstances, and, through these, their action; which is so vast
and complex that they can scarcely at all understand it or control its
workings; and which has a nature so definite and fixed that whatever
changes take place in it produce other changes inevitably and without
regard to men's desires and regrets. And whether this system or order is
best called by the name of fate or no,[12] it can hardly be denied that
it does appear as the ultimate power in the tragic world, and that it
has such characteristics as these.
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