Here are two men who view life through the same glasses, dark glasses if you will, lenses that distort if you will, but lenses that are similar, surely. Hardy saw that chance seemed to be the deciding factor in survival and that human ethics are not recognized by the law of Nature. According to John Laird, a fatalist is a man who believes that all action everywhere is controlled by the nature of things or by a power superior to things. Determinism is the doctrine that every event, including every human action, is the inevitable result of preceding events. Thus, Determinism is a different process, trying to explain the same question.
Determinism seeks to explain conditions which fatalism is content to describe.
By 1870 Hardy had developed a metaphysic that stressed the lack of orderliness in the universe and the conflict between the individual consciousness and this lack of order. The ideas and emotions that Hardy cautiously termed his tentative metaphysic took shape so gradually that no point in his career can be indicated where the fatalism of his youth gave way to the final determinism of his old age. Schopenhauer's concepts concerning free will and fatalism closely parallel Hardy's fatalistic and deterministic philosophy. Therefore, the will predetermines everything, and it is an impetuous will. Hardy bought this book, and it is still in his library.