Summary

• The dislike of chance
• Chance is a negative notion
• Not everything in the Universe is connected

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 The stronghold of the deterministic sentiment is the antipathy to the idea of chance. As soon as we begin to talk indeterminism to our friends, we find a number of them shaking their heads.  This notion of alternative possibility, they say, this admission that any one of several things may come to pass, is, after all,only a roundabout name for chance; and chance is something the notion of which no sane mind can for an instant tolerate in the world.  What is it, they ask, but barefaced crazy unreason, the negation of intelligibility and law ?  And if the slightest particle of it exist anywhere, what is to prevent the whole fabric from falling together, the stars from going out, and chaos from recommencing her topsy-turvy reign ? 

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    Remarks of this sort about chance will put an end to discussion as quickly as anything one can find. I have already told you that 'chance' was a word I wished to keep and use.  Let us then examine exactly what it means, and see whether it ought to be such a terrible bugbear to us.  I fancy that squeezing the thistle boldly will rob it of its sting. 

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 The sting of the word 'chance' seems to lie in the assumption that it means something positive, and that if anything happens by chance, it must needs be something of an intrinsically irrational and preposterous sort.  Now chance means nothing of the kind.  It is a purely negative and relative term, giving us no information about that of which it is predicated, except that it happens to be disconnected with something else - not controlled, secured, or necessitated by other things in advance of its own actual presence.  As this point is the most subtile one of the whole lecture, and at the same time the point on which all the rest hinges, I beg you to pay particular attention to it.  What I say is that it tells us nothing about what a thing may be in itself to call it 'chance'.  It may be a bad thing, it may be a good thing.  It may be lucidity, transparency, fitness incarnate, matching the whole system of other things, when it has once befallen, in an unimaginably perfect way.  All you mean by calling it 'chance' is that this is not guaranteed, that it may also fall out otherwise.  For the system of other things has no positive hold on the chance-thing.  Its origin is in a certain fashion negative: it escapes, and says, Hands off! coming, when it comes, as a free gift, or not at all.

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    This negativeness, however, and this opacity of the chance-thing when thus considered ab extra, or from the point of view of previous things or distant things, do not preclude its having any amount of positiveness and luminosity from within, and at its own place and moment.  All that this chance character asserts about it is that there is something in it really of its own, something that is not the unconditional property of the whole.  If the whole wants this property, the whole must wait till it can get it, if it be a matter of chance.  That the universe may actually be a sort of joint-stock society of this sort, in which the sharers have both limited liabilities and limited powers, is of course a simple and conceivable notion.

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Nevertheless, many persons talk as if the minutest dose of disconnectedness of one part with another, the smallest modicum of independence, the faintest tremor of ambiguity about the future, for example, would ruin everything, and turn this goodly universe into a sort of insane sand-heap or nulliverse, no universe at all....