

SECT. 17.] Chance, Causation, and Design. 255 



natural and indeed inevitable one, but in other cases it is 

 wholly arbitrary. For instance, in cards, &quot;queen of spades 

 and knave of diamonds&quot; is exactly as uncommon as any 

 other such pair: moreover, till bezique was introduced it 

 offered presumably no superior interest over any other 

 specified pair. But during the time when that game was 

 very popular this combination was brought into the category 

 f coincidences in which interest was felt; and, given dis 

 honesty amongst the players, its chance of being designed 

 stood at once on a much better footing 1 . 



Returning then to the pyramid, we see that in balancing 

 the claims of chance and design we must, in fairness to the 

 ter, reckon to its account several other values as well as 

 that of TT, e.g. V2 and V3, and a few more such simple and 

 familiar ratios, as well as some of their multiples. But 

 though the number of such values which might be reckoned 

 on the ground that they are actually known to us, is infinite, 

 yet the number that ought to be reckoned, on the ground 

 that they could have been familiar to the builders of a 

 pyramid, are very few. The order of probability for or against 

 the existence of design will not therefore be seriously altered 

 here by such considerations 2 . 



1 See Cournot, Essai sur le* fonde- more court cards than chance could 



ments de nos connaissances . Vol. i. be expected to assign him; and that 



2 in consequence his average gains for 



deserves notice that con- several years in succession were un- 



siderahons of this kind have found usually large. The counsel for the 



their way into the Law Courts defence urged that still larger gains 



though of course without- any at- had been secured by other players 



tempt at numerical valuation. Thus, without suspicion of unfairness - 



m the celebrated De Eos trial, in (I cannot find that it was explained 



3 far as the evidence was indirect, over how large an area of experience 



one mam ground of suspicion seems these instances had been sought 



have been that Lord De Eos, nor how far the magnitude of the 



when dealing at whist, obtained far stakes, as distinguished from the 



