356 Fallacies. [CHAP. xiv. 



ficance. The understanding itself is wandering out of its. 

 proper province, for the conditions of the problem cannot be 

 assigned. When we draw letters out of a bag we know very 

 well what we are doing ; but what is really meant by pro 

 ducing a world by chance ? By analogy of the former case, 

 we may assume that some kind of agent is presupposed ; 

 perhaps therefore the following supposition is less absurd 

 than any other. Imagine some being, not a Creator but a 

 sort of Demiurgus, who has had a quantity of materials put 

 into his hands, and he assigns them their collocations and 

 their laws of action, blindly and at haphazard : what are the 

 odds that such a world as we actually experience should have 

 been brought about in this way ? 



If it were worth while seriously to set about answering 

 such a question, and if some one would furnish us with the 

 number of the letters of such an alphabet, and the length of 

 the work to be written with them, we could proceed to indi 

 cate the result. But so much as this may surely be affirmed 

 about it ; that, far from merely finding the length of this 

 small volume insufficient for containing the figures in which 

 the adverse odds would be given, all the paper which the 

 world has hitherto produced would be used up before we had 

 got far on our way in writing them down. 



24. The most seductive form in which the difficulty 

 about the occurrence of very rare events generally presents 

 itself is probably this. You admit (some persons will be 

 disposed to say) that such an event may sometimes happen ; 

 nay, that it does sometimes happen in the infinite course of 

 time. How then am I to know that this occasion is not one 

 of these possible occurrences ? To this, one answer only can 

 be given, the same which must always be given where 

 statistics and probability are concerned, The present may 

 be such an occasion, but it is inconceivably unlikely that it 



