22 ESSAY ON PROBABILITIES. 



game,, which are really good, are applied to collections 

 of many games, with regard to which they are not ap- 

 plicable. I will leave it to any one to say, whether the 

 considerations pointed out in the succeeding pages have 

 the tendency to promote the pursuit of fair gaming as 

 a means of profit. 



With regard to gambling as a stimulus, it must be 

 observed, that the passion has every where subsided with 

 the increase of education and occupation. If the his- 

 torians who write for schoolboys could spare a little space 

 among their interminable accounts of kings, treaties, 

 battles, to insert some account of the manners of the 

 several ages of Europe, it would be matter of surprise 

 that the universal rage for games of chance, should have 

 left any time for the (so called) great actions which fill 

 the books. The wars of the middle ages would be 

 looked upon as belonging only to one particular class of 

 the stimuli by which the universal vacancy was sought 

 to be filled up. From the old Germans, who played 

 away, to one another, their wives, their children, and 

 lastly themselves, down to the time * of the French re- 

 volution, the continent of Europe (and during a part 

 of the time, Great Britain, though in a less degree,) 

 gives, comparatively to ourselves, the notion of succes- 

 sive races devoted to gambling throughout the upper 

 class, the only one upon whose occupations we get fre- 

 quent details. 



IV. That the basis of it is an irreligious principle. 

 There is a word in our language with which I shall 

 not confuse this subject, both on account of the dis- 

 honourable use which is frequently made of it, as an 

 imputation thrown by one sect upon another, and of the 

 variety of significations attached to it. I shall use the 

 word anti-deism to signify the opinion that there does 

 not exist a Creator, who made and sustains the universe. 

 The charge is, that a theory of probabilities (called 

 chances) is necessarily anti-deistical, because it refers 



* Quanri, avant la revolution francaiae, les etats de certaines provinces 

 etaient assembles, on y jouait un jeu terrible, et tel que 1'endroit oii il se 

 tt'nait; dans la ci-devant province de Bre'tagne, s'appellait Veitfer Diet. 

 0es Jeux (Encyc. Meth.) 1792. 



