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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



gether escape harm if he permits him- 

 self the habitual use of terms implying 

 degraded forms of belief. There is such 

 a thing as intellectual pitch, which peo- 

 ple who want to have their thoughts 

 clean should be careful not to handle. 



The career of President Cleveland 

 is often spoken of as a great example 

 of " luck," and this in quarters where 

 one would expect more rational dis- 

 course. We imagine that President 

 Cleveland knows pretty well how to 

 account for his so-called luck. He 

 knows that it has been a matter of 

 hard work, of close attention to busi- 

 ness, and of presumed identification 

 with a rising popular sentiment in 

 favor of improved political methods. 

 " But," some inveterate believer in 

 luck may urge, "other men have ful- 

 filled all these requirements, and yet 

 have never become Presidents or even 

 Governors. Why should Cleveland, in 

 particular, have been so successful ? " 

 We have here a fine example of one of 

 those questions which, as Mr. Spencer 

 says in his chapter on the " Data of 

 Philosophy," imply very much more 

 than the questioner is aware of. It 

 implies that there are some reasons 

 why the particular man who succeed- 

 ed should not have succeeded ; for, if 

 there were no reasons to the contrary, 

 what is the sense of asking why a man 

 succeeded who had, admittedly, the 

 qualifications for success? No con- 

 ceivable action of social and political 

 forces could raise every man, or even 

 every qualified man, in a community to 

 presidential rank ; and yet some one 

 man must, at every moment, hold that 

 rank. What need, therefore, to sup- 

 pose that a mysterious influence called 

 "luck " has anything to do with deter- 

 mining the choice of the community? 

 We see what we may call impersonal 

 forces at work which, from their very 

 nature and the conditions under which 

 they operate, must result in the choice 

 of one and the passing over of many 

 others; and yet, when this inevitable 

 result has been arrived at, some peo- 



ple are not satisfied until they have 

 dragged in " luck " to account for it ! 

 There are thousands of events that 

 can not be foreseen, the elements on 

 which they depend being too complex 

 for calculation ; but none the less are 

 they, and must they be, determined by 

 natural causes. When we cant over a 

 stick of timber, we can predict with 

 certainty how it will fall ; partly be- 

 cause the forces brought to bear upon 

 it are of a simple character, and partly 

 because their ratio to the work to be 

 done — to the weight to be moved — is 

 such that a little more or less will not 

 affect the main result. But when we 

 rattle dice in a box, the conditions are 

 reversed : the forces now are many and 

 complex, and are vast in relation to the 

 work to be done. What will be their 

 outcome in the position of the dice on 

 the table, it is altogether beyond 

 human skill to calculate. Were the 

 stick of timber to be hurled from a 

 volcano, carried along by a mighty tor- 

 rent, or blown up by dynamite, its 

 movements too would become incal- 

 culable ; but the laws of Nature would 

 not, on that account, lose their hold of 

 it for one moment. Neither do the 

 laws of Nature lose their hold of the 

 dice. There is really no chance in 

 either case ; simply an inability on our 

 part to foresee, and therefore to adjust 

 ourselves in advance to, a result which 

 the laws of Nature are working out. 

 If we look closely into the matter, we 

 shall see that all chance occurrences, 

 or what we call such, are simply oc- 

 currences lying outside of the range of 

 our calculations, and to which therefore 

 we can only adjust ourselves after the 

 event, whereas, in the case of things 

 we foresee, we make, or may make, our 

 adjustments beforehand. As knowl- 

 edge increases, and methods of obser- 

 vation and reasoning improve, many 

 things pass from the region of the in- 

 calculable to that of the calculable, and, 

 to an infinitely enlarged intelligence, 

 all that appears to us now as most 

 completely fortuitous would appear as 



