p Necessity and chance are dialectically interconnected. One and same event is necessary and accidental simultaneously—necessary in one respect and accidental in another. The same downpour, being accidental in regard to the destruction of the plant, is a necessary effect of the atmospheric conditions in the area where it happened.

p In contrast to dialecticians, metaphysicians deny the interconnection of necessity and chance. Some of them recognise only necessity and deny the possibility of chance factors in development. From their point of view, everything is inevitable, necessary, and therefore man is powerless to do anything about it, and must passively await the inevitable, inexorable course of events. Other philosophers recognise only chance, which in effect means renunciation of science, and refusal to recognise man’s ability to foresee the course of events and to direct them.

p Necessity and chance can pass into one another: what is chance in certain conditions is necessity in other, different conditions, and vice versa. In primitive society, for example, the exchange of commodities had an accidental character. Everything produced by a commune was as a rule consumed by it. With the rise and development of private property the exchange of goods was extended, and under capitalism it turned into objective necessity.

Necessity and chance do not exist in isolation from each other. In a process necessity appears as the main direction, the trend of development, but this trend breaks its way through a mass of chance phenomena. Chance supplements necessity, is a. form of its manifestation. The mass of chance phenomena always conceals objective necessity or law. Chance serves as the form for the manifestation of necessity in social development too.