14 EUery W. Davis 



breath and law begins; happenings that were equally possible 

 become unequally so. Are some favored, some uninfluenced, 

 some disfavored by that first breath? We get a group of 

 happenings faintly bound by law, liable at any moment to be 

 broken up. But law begets law and little by little the realm 

 of the uninfluenced, of chance, diminishes. Can it ever be 

 quite subdued? Not save in infinite time, Mr. C. S. Pierce 

 would tell us. 



Remember the inch line. Law after law, even an infinite 

 number of them, gave us infinite distribution after distribution 

 of points, and yet we were still even infinitely removed from 

 getting the continuous fiow of points upon the line. So is it 

 in the universe. Continuity requires chance to fill in the 

 gaps that law, that machinery, ever leaves. 



We observe, we compare, we discern our laws, we build upon 

 them and live by them. Nay, we even dream of unborn gen- 

 erations to be guided by them, and unseen worlds subject to 

 them. Yet while we so confidently labor and so confidently 

 hope, the unseen, the unknown, the unthought of, is silently, 

 but no less certainly, working to destroy the present and build 

 the future in ways that mock all our theories. 



"There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, 

 Rough hew them how we will." 



But if we only knew more and could see further! That 

 would not alter the case. To naught save infinite intelligence 

 can the complete phenomena of even a fragment of continuity 

 be revealed. The unknown, the, to us, chance, remains to baf- 

 fle us forever. Why, even in astronomy, exactest of the phys- 

 ical sciences, the very observations on which we base every- 

 thing must needs be treated by the theory of errors, the 

 doctrine of chances; mark you, is perfected by that very treat- 

 ment. Striking illustration is it of what we gain by treating 

 the unknown as unknown, chance as chance. 



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