(fatum), denotes an inevitable necessity depending upon a superior cause. The word is formed a fato, from speaking, and primarily implies the same with effatum, a word or decree pronounced by God, or a fixed sentence by which the Deity has prescribed the order of things, and allotted to every person what shall befall him. The Greeks called it συμβολή, as if it were a chain or series of things indissolubly linked together.

The term is also used to express a certain unavoidable destination of things, by which all agents, voluntary as well as necessary, are swayed and directed to prescribed ends. In this last sense, fate is distinguished into astrological, arising from the influence and position of the heavenly bodies, which, it was supposed, gave laws both to the elements and mixed bodies, and to the wills of men; and Stoical, defined by Cicero an order or series of causes, in which cause being linked to cause, one produces another, and thus all things flow from one prime first cause. To this fate the Stoics subject even the gods. But fate is divided by later authors into physical and divine. Physical fate is an order and se- ties of natural causes, with their consequent effects; and the results of it are all the events and phenomena of nature.

Divine fate is what is more usually called Providence.