WHY DO LAWS OF NATURE NOT ALWAYS WORK? 379
leaves us just where we were; for it leaves still unanswered our original
question asking who the child's true father is.

All nature is but art, unknown to thee;

All chance, direction which thou canst not see.1

This relativity, and consequent inconclusiveness, of the concept of
Chance has come to our attention already in this Study in other con-
texts ;2 and, in order to make sure, once again, of making this logical
point clear, we will quote, once again, a French philosopher's lucid ex-
position of it.

'If, at a venture, I select a volume in my library, I may replace it on the
shelves, after taking a glance at it, with the remark "This isn't verse". But
is this really what I perceived when I was turning the pages ? Clearly not.
I did not see, and I never shall see, an absence of verse. What I did see
was prose. But, as it is poetry that I am wanting, I express what I find in
terms of what I am looking for; and, instead of saying "Here is some
prose", I say "This isn't verse". Inversely, if it takes my fancy to read
some prose and I stumble on a volume of verse, I shall exclaim "This isn't
prose"; and in using these words I shall be translating the data of my
perception, which shows me verse, into the language of my expectation
and my interest, which are set upon the idea of prose and therefore will
not hear of anything else. . . .

'An order is contingent, and appears so to us, in relation to the inverse
order, in the way in which verse is contingent in relation to prose, and
prose in relation to verse. ... If we analyse the idea of Chance, which is
a near relation to the idea of Disorder, we shall find the same elements.
When the purely mechanical operation of the causes -which bring the
roulette to a halt on a particular number makes me win and so behaves
as a good genius would have behaved if he had been looking after my
interests, and when the purely mechanical force of the wind snatches a tile
from the roof and flings it down on my head—thus acting as an evil genius
would have acted if he had been plotting against my life—in both cases
I find a mechanism in a place where I would have looked for—and ought,
it would seem, to have encountered—an intention; and that is what I
am expressing when I speak of "Chance". And in describing an anarchic
world, where the phenomena follow one another at the pleasure of their
caprice, I shall say, again, that this is the reign of "Chance", and I shall
mean by this that I find myself confronted by acts of will, or rather by
"decrees", when what I was looking for was mechanism. . . . The idea of
"Chance" simply objectifies the state of mind of someone whose expecta-
tion has been directed towards one of two species of order and who then
encounters the other. Chance and Disorder ares then, necessarily con-
ceived of as relative/3

In another context4 we have noticed already that this mirage of
'Chance* and 'Disorder', even when it has been conjured up out of the
emotional underworld of the Psyche by some disappointment of ex-
pectations, can avail to obscure the regularities and uniformities of an
underlying positive order only so long as the number of instances of the

i Pope: An Essay on Man, Ep. i, 11. 389-90.
z In, V. v. 419-21 and VII. viL 544, n. 3.

3 Bergson, Henri: L'gvolution Crlatrice> 24th ed. (Paris 1921, Alcaa), pp. 239-58.
quoted in V. v. 419, n. 4. « On p. 206, n. zt above.