380 LAW AND FREEDOM IN HISTORY

phenomenon under consideration which the observer has at his com-
mand is less than ten or thereabouts.

If we take Bergson's elucidation of the concept of 'Chance' as our
clue for unravelling the answer to our question whether the play of
'Chance' can be accepted as a possible explanation of an apparent recal-
citrance of human affairs to laws of Nature, we shall have now to put two
leading questions to ourselves: First, what is the species of order that
we are expecting to find in human affairs ? And, second, what is the other
species of order with which we are actually confronted when we say that
we find ourselves here in the presence of the reign of 'Chance' ? In our
foregoing inquiry into possible explanations of the manifest currency of
laws of Nature in human history, our finding was that these laws govern-
ing human affairs were, for the most part, laws current in the Human
Psyche's own subconscious underworld; and, if this is the species of
order for which we are looking in this field, then the different order,
found in fact to be reigning here, that we label 'Chance' because it is not
what we had been expecting, must be one or other of three possible
alternatives. It may be the order of Physical Nature as contrasted with
Psychic Nature, or the order of human will as contrasted with the sub-
conscious level of the Human Psyche, or the order of God's will as
contrasted both with human wills and with the by-laws, psychic and
physical alike, which the will of God has enacted.1 These three alter-
natives would seem to exhaust the possible identities of the order, not
identical with an expected subconscious psychic order, that we have left
incognito in labelling it 'Chance*. Our negative label must mask some
one of these three positive realities, since a label cannot be pasted on to
a vacuum. We have already noticed that the 'Chance' which appears to
come into play when conflicting human wills frustrate one another is a
label masking the self-assertion of the laws of the Subconscious Psyche.2
On this showing, the 'Chance' which appears to come into play when
these laws of the Subconscious Psyche fail, in their turn, to answer to
conscious expectations by asserting themselves must be a label masking
the operation of some other positive force.

The possibility that 'Chance' in our present context might prove to
be a label masking the order of Physical Nature diminishes to a vanish-
ing point in the light of our inquiry into the amenability of human

1 A belief in the reality of any of these three kinds of order, like a belief in the reality
of the order of Subconscious Psychic Nature, is the offspring of experience wedded to
faith. Without the faith that 'is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things
not seen' (Heb. xi. i), a human being's experience of Physical Nature, his experience of
his fellow human beings, and even his experience of himself, would not guarantee the
reality of any of these phenomena; and a belief in the reality of God and of His action
in the Universe derives from the same twofold source. The experience of an encounter
with God that was attributed to Jacob, Moses, and Samuel, and that was granted
to the prophets of Israel, Judah, and Iran according to these prophets' own conviction,
may not be experienced even bjr the prophets in more than one or two brief flashes in
a lifetime, while the great majority of human beings may never have this experience at
all at first hand; so that a belief in God will be an act of faith for the prophet himself
for most of his life and for most of his followers for all of their lives. 'Blessed are they
that have not seen, and yet have believed' Qohn xx. 29) is thus a truth that is con-
spicuously true of a belief in the reality of God; yet a belief in the reality of one's self,
of other selves, and of Nature, Psychic or Physical, also requires a large measure of faith
as well as of experience. a See pp. 326-37, above.