in THE TWO KINDS OF ORDER 247 



person : in both cases I find a mechanism where I 

 should have looked for, where, indeed, it seems as if 

 I ought to have found, an intention. That is what I 

 express in speaking of chance. And of an anarchi 

 cal world, in which phenomena succeed each other 

 capriciously, I should say again that it is a realm of 

 chance, meaning that I find before me wills, or rather 

 decrees, when what I am expecting is mechanism. 

 Thus is explained the singular vacillation of the mind 

 when it tries to define chance. Neither efficient cause 

 nor final cause can furnish the definition sought. The 



o 



mind swings to and fro, unable to rest, between the 

 idea of an absence of final cause and that of an absence 

 of efficient cause, each of these definitions sending it 

 back to the other. The problem remains insoluble, in 

 fact, so long as the idea of chance is regarded as a 

 pure idea, without mixture of feeling. But, in reality, 

 chance merely objectifies the state of mind of one who, 

 expecting one of the two kinds of order, finds himself 

 confronted with the other. Chance and disorder are 

 therefore necessarily conceived as relative. So if we 

 wish to represent them to ourselves as absolute, we 

 perceive that we are going to and fro like a shuttle 

 between the two kinds of order, passing into the one just 

 at the moment at which we might catch ourselves in the 

 other, and that the supposed absence of all order is really 

 the presence of both, with, besides, the swaying of a 

 mind that cannot rest finally in either. Neither in things 

 nor in our idea of things can there be any question of 

 presenting this disorder as the substratum of order, 

 since it implies the two kinds of order and is made of 

 their combination. 



But our intelligence is not stopped by this. By a 

 simple sic jubeo it posits a disorder which is an &quot; absence 



