I. What Do We Call Chance?

I. What Do We Call Chance?I. Was nennen wir Zufall?

When do we speak of chance? Almost only when it strikes us by what it achieves; and that happens when there is an arrangement in its results of the kind we are used to from the ordering hand of an intelligent being. They then counterfeit purposeful formations, and in the face of such products of blind hazard we feel moved to admire chance and its capricious play.

In the morning I read, in the agricultural supplement of my newspaper, an article on rabbit breeding. At midday we have spinach for our vegetable. In the afternoon Herr Priestel calls on me. My brother, who attends courses of popular education every day, comes home pleased, because the lecture was stimulating. In these events there is nothing that would move me to speak of chance. On the following day, however, I read an article on the cultivation of cabbage (Kohl); at midday we have cabbage for our vegetable; in the afternoon Herr Kohl calls on me; and soon after, my brother, coming from his lecture, bursts out: “What stale cabbage that was today!”^†I So much cabbage in one day: what a teasing game of chance! And we might perhaps exclaim something similar if one fine day we found on a lottery board, among the numbers drawn, the sequence 1, 2, 3, although this would be not a whit more wonderful than, say, the sequence 14, 58, 33, which we would pass by without a glance.

We would also speak of a strange chance if, in town, we came upon F. Th. Vischer’s Aesthetik (published only once, and now rare) at four second-hand booksellers one after the other. On the other hand, the simultaneous appearance of a new work of poetry by Gerhart Hauptmann in the windows of all the bookshops does not surprise us in the least. To express in other words what is self-evident and yet unavoidable: the order that meets us in the picture of events makes us think of chance only when we know no cause governing it. Thus, in the case of books or other goods of the same kind in the shop windows: a novelty just published, the fashion, a holiday, a large consignment of goods from abroad.

This observation is not superfluous, if only because even within the province of chance there are circumstances in which we assume (if wrongly) a cause of the order. I remarked just now that one is inclined to think specially ordered combinations of numbers in the lottery less probable than others; why, then, do the lottery’s devotees stake on combinations of numbers that are distinguished precisely by a particular order, indeed, that recommend themselves to them by this very singularity? Suppose I dreamed of my wife’s birthday (16. 9. 88), and I were superstitious; this trio of numbers is for me exactly as striking as 1, 2, 3, and yet I would stake on it. Why? Because the mathematical concept of chance, because all calculation of probability ends there; because, in my belief, chance rather grows beyond itself, ceases to be blind chance, and one supposes a web of purposefully guided happenings; the lottery case becomes one of those shop-window cases with a common cause, except that the cause there was of everyday clarity, whereas here it is mysterious and, in the superstitious view, can at most be divined in moments of happy divination, though not known in its nature. Many a one will then give chance other names too, such as “destiny” and the like; unwarranted confusions of concepts will also slip in. More will be said of this later.

To sum up what has gone before: we usually become aware of chance only when events surprise us by some special order, as though purpose had guided them, without our finding a cause for this order, so that chance itself confronts us as a purposeful something, as a jack-of-all-trades full of whims. We succumb only too easily to the universally human trait of transferring our own thinking and feeling into everything possible. An explorer of Africa told me something very characteristic. He tried in vain to give the Black people, who were made curious by the ticking of his watch, a notion of the force of a spring; they were satisfied only when he explained to them that the spirit of his grandfather was shut up in the case. And it is just as characteristic that we usually think of chance only in order to endow it with a spirit, to furnish it with some human qualities or other, and to speak of it as capricious, teasing, malicious, witty, devilish, kindly.

It is not reflection but feeling that makes us sense it so. Now the strangest thing is that there is something right in this feeling. Chance is really often purposeful, in a friendly and in a hostile direction; there is really often a spirit in chance, but this spirit is our own, in that we ourselves play along in the supposed “chance,” only without knowing it, just as the participants in a spiritualist séance often take part in the movements of the little table without having any idea of it. To be sure, the “chance” in which we ourselves take an active part is no longer pure chance, but, as it were, a counterfeit chance, a sham chance.

Before I lead my readers into the astonishingly wide field of chances with a soul in them, I must still meet the fallacy that there is no such thing as chance at all. This view has something seductive about it, since it derives from the irreproachable proposition that everything that happens is determined by causes. Absolute chance is indeed an absurdity. But there is a relative chance, and that is what matters. I walk past a house at five minutes past ten; the famous tile falling from the roof of that house strikes me and kills me (please, I mean only for example). That the tile falls at this time is no chance, for the inclemencies of the weather have loosened the tile so far that the eddy of wind just sweeping over the roof had to finish it off. That I come past at five past ten precisely is no chance either, for I am due at a quarter past ten at an office to which the shortest way takes me past there. Having been busy beforehand, I stepped into the street just before ten, so that I may not choose a roundabout way. At my speed of walking, which is delayed by eight seconds by the posting of a letter in a letter box, I must be at the critical spot at exactly five past ten. So neither the fall of the tile nor my presence at that house is a matter of chance, for both are grounded in causes down to the smallest detail. But the meeting of the two events is

chance, for, caused as each of them is on its own account, they do not cause each other, and indeed are not causally connected at all. So there we have the chance that is in question: relative chance.

And what, then, of the sham chance with a soul in it, which is properly to occupy us? It can come about in two ways:

first, in that we take an unconscious part in the events; here, then, we bring about the order of what happens;

secondly, in that we so take, so interpret and so twist events that in truth come together only by chance, that we falsify their picture; here, then, we change the picture of the events, not the events themselves; we look into the picture something that is not in it, as we might see into drifting wreaths of smoke the image of a dear friend lately dead.

The boundary between the two possibilities is not rigid; there are transitions; and there are also compound cases in which both kinds of influence appear at once.