Williams is writing about a third sort of necessity, distinct from two he treats earlier in Shame and Necessity: the first is the necessity of one human being acting under the power of another while the second is the necessity that is felt to hold due to some sort of practical grasp of a situation. The first is “necessity imposed on some human beings by others,” the second is “the inner necessity of practical conclusion” (130). The type he is treating in this chapter he calls “supernatural necessity,” but by this he does not mean ghouls and goblins. He means a sort of necessity that escapes typical human ways of explaining the world—this method of explanation, for Williams, is something that is historical, and the supernatural of the ancient Greeks is not self-evidently the same as what we moderns might feel to be supernatural, and there is not typical way of explaining the world, as such.

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