116 Luck, or Cunning? 
prosperous. Given time—of which there is no scant in the 
matter of organic development—and cunning will do more 
with ill luck than folly with good. People do not hold six 
trumps every hand for a dozen games of whist running, if 
they do not keep a card or two up their sleeves. Cunning, 
if it can keep its head above water at all, will beat mere 
luck unaided by cunning, no matter what start luck may 
have had, if the race be a fairly long one. Growth is a kind 
of success which does indeed come to some organisms with 
less effort than to others, but it cannot be maintained 
and improved upon without pains and effort. A foolish 
organism and its fortuitous variation will be soon parted, 
for, as a general rule, unless the variation has so much 
connection with the organism’s past habits and ways of 
thought as to be in no proper sense of the word “ fortuitous,” 
the organism will not know what to do with it when it has 
got it, no matter how favourable it may be, and it is little 
likely to be handed down to descendants. Indeed the kind 
of people who get on best in the world—and what test to 
a Darwinian can be comparable to this ?—commonly do 
insist on cunning rather than on luck, sometimes perhaps 
even unduly ; speaking, at least, from experience, I have 
generally found myself more or less of a failure with those 
Darwinians to whom I have endeavoured to excuse my 
shortcomings on the score of luck. 
It may be said that the contention that the nature 
of the organism does more towards determining its future 
than the conditions of its immediate environment do, is 
only another way of saying that the accidents which have 
happened to an organism in the persons of its ancestors 
throughout all time are more irresistible by it for good or 
ill than any of the more ordinary chances and changes 
of its own immediate life. I do not deny this; but these 
ancestral accidents were either turned to account, or 
neglected where they might have been taken advantage of ; 
they thus passed either into skill, or want of skill; so that 
