Darwin's dilemma 245 



either or both of these terms. Upon what grounds? When we 

 throw dice at random, we do not know which sides will in fact 

 turn up, though we know the possible alternatives; when we 

 aim birdshot at a duck, we do not know which of the pellets 

 will actually bring it down, though we may be confident that 

 some of them will do the work. Something is known here, but 

 there is also something unknown: we are blind as to which 

 sides of the dice will turn up, or which pellet or pellets will 

 strike. (Notice that we in fact use the random distribution of 

 many pellets to compensate for the uncertain course of a single 

 bullet.) Now there is also something blind about chance or 

 fortune in human affairs. Socrates did not go to the market 

 this morning to meet the debtor he had been wanting to meet, 

 yet he met him all the same, by chance, for he did not know 

 his debtor would be there. So here too there is blindness. 

 Could this be the reason randomness and chance are said to be 

 one and the same.f* 



I have dwelt for a few moments on Sir Julian's position — 

 not irreverently, I hope — merely to point out its paradoxical 

 nature. Let me add, in all fairness, that whoever holds that 

 nature does act for the sake of something ought to be aware 

 of the obvious difficulties of such a position. If it is maintained, 

 for example, that a bird builds a nest for the sake of offspring 

 as yet unborn, and does so quite unwittingly, it is after all, far 

 from obvious how anything that does not as yet exist can 

 already be a cause — especially in the case of blind agency. 

 Purposeful activity in nature is also readily oversimplified, and 

 made to look like the argument concluding et voild pourquoi 

 voire fille est jnuette; it is obviously good for a man to have 

 hands, but this does not show how he acquired them. Tele- 



anything more than the mere possibility of these particular arrangements of letters, 

 which just happen to be meaningful. In virtue of what principle is " a million 

 monkeys " meaningiul, and " the slithy toves " not, if both are arrived at by aim- 

 less monkeys? Where is the reason why the former and not the latter arrangement 

 should be judged favorable? Cf. The Hollow Universe (Oxford University Press: 

 London, 1960), pp. 97-110; "Abstraction from Matter" (III) in Laval theologique 

 et philosophique, 1960, n. 2, pp. 174-188. 



