gether escape harm if he permits himself the habitual use of terms implying degraded forms of belief. There is such a thing as intellectual pitch, which people who want to have their thoughts clean should be careful not to handle.
The career of President Cleveland is often spoken of as a great example of "luck," and this in quarters where one would expect more rational discourse. We imagine that President Cleveland knows pretty well how to account for his so-called luck. He knows that it has been a matter of hard work, of close attention to business, and of presumed identification with a rising popular sentiment in favor of improved political methods. "But," some inveterate believer in luck may urge, "other men have fulfilled all these requirements, and yet have never become Presidents or even Governors. "Why should Cleveland, in particular, have been so successful?" We have here a fine example of one of those questions which, as Mr.Spencer says in his chapter on the "Data of Philosophy," imply very much more than the questioner is aware of. It implies that there are some reasons why the particular man who succeeded should not have succeeded; for, if there were no reasons to the contrary, what is the sense of asking why a man succeeded who had, admittedly, the qualifications for success? No conceivable action of social and political forces could raise every man, or even every qualified man, in a community to presidential rank; and yet some one man must, at every moment, hold that rank. What need, therefore, to suppose that a mysterious influence called "luck" has anything to do with determining the choice of the community? We see what we may call impersonal forces at work which, from their very nature and the conditions under which they operate, must result in the choice of one and the passing over of many others; and yet, when this inevitable result has been arrived at, some people are not satisfied until they have dragged in "luck" to account for it! There are thousands of events that can not be foreseen, the elements on which they depend being too complex for calculation; but none the less are they, and must they be, determined by natural causes. When we cant over a stick of timber, we can predict with certainty how it will fall; partly because the forces brought to bear upon it are of a simple character, and partly because their ratio to the work to be done—to the weight to be moved—is such that a little more or less will not affect the main result. But when we rattle dice in a box, the conditions are reversed: the forces now are many and complex, and are vast in relation to the work to be done. What will be their outcome in the position of the dice on the table, it is altogether beyond human skill to calculate. Were the stick of timber to be hurled from a volcano, carried along by a mighty torrent, or blown up by dynamite, its movements too would become incalculable; but the laws of Nature would not, on that account, lose their hold of it for one moment. Neither do the laws of Nature lose their hold of the dice. There is really no chance in either case; simply an inability on our part to foresee, and therefore to adjust ourselves in advance to, a result which the laws of Nature are working out. If we look closely into the matter, we shall see that all chance occurrences, or what we call such, are simply occurrences lying outside of the range of our calculations, and to which therefore we can only adjust ourselves after the event, whereas, in the case of things we foresee, we make, or may make, our adjustments beforehand. As knowledge increases, and methods of observation and reasoning improve, many things pass from the region of the incalculable to that of the calculable, and, to an infinitely enlarged intelligence, all that appears to us now as most completely fortuitous would appear as
