Destiny may be envisaged as fore-ordained by the Divine (for example, the Protestant concept of predestination) or unfolding through the exertions of human will (for example, in the American concept of Manifest Destiny).

A sense of destiny in its oldest human sense remains still in the soldier's fatalistic image of the "bullet that has your name on it" or the moment when your number "comes up," or the flowering of a romance that was "meant to be."

Destiny may be seen either as a fixed sequen...