II. Chance Influenced: (a) The Order Is Worked In

II. Chance Influenced.II. Der beeinflusste Zufall.

(a) The order is worked in.a) Die Ordnung wird hineingewirkt.

This section is concerned, as its title shows, with the first of the kinds just described in which chance is given a soul. I need hardly stress that the illustrative examples are, without exception, genuine observations.

Example 1. My friend Paul is engaged and wears an engagement ring. For a short time now an evil star seems to have been ruling over it. Paul visits me and tells me that the day before yesterday he pulled the ring off with his glove and nearly lost it, and that just now in the tram he had evidently been playing with it and let it fall, though quite unconsciously: for suddenly the man opposite him had bent down to pick something up and, to his astonishment, handed him the ring. Paul leaves me, and now I find on my table the ring, which he had taken off to show me. Should all this have happened just by chance; should not Paul rather be a fellow player in this “chance”? What if an unacknowledged impulse in him wished to be rid of this ring, or more properly of the tender bond it signifies? Soon afterwards the engagement is broken off.