It would be extremely surprising, I said when I began, if this indefatigable and exhaustive enquiry into Chance, pursued for over fifty years, had failed to yield some sort of result. I am wondering, at the end of this investigation, what that result is. At the cost of an insane waste of money, time, physical, nervous and moral energy and spiritual forces perhaps more precious still, it has taught us that Chance is in short Chance, that is to say, an aggregate of effects whereof we do not know the causes. But we knew as much as this before; and our new discovery is a little derisory. We have seen the shadowy appearance of certain laws or habits from which a few players appear to derive advantage, though this advantage is always precarious. But these apparent laws, which tend obscurely and uncertainly to instil a little order into Chance, are, like Chance itself, but inconsistent and ephemeral summaries of results from unknown causes. Upon the whole we have learnt nothing, unless perhaps it be that we were wrong to attach greater importance to those manifestations of destiny than they possess. If we look at them more closely, we find that there is nothing more behind all these catastrophes and all these mysteries of luck than the catastrophe and the mysteries which we put there. We link our fate to the fate of a little ball which is not responsible for it; and, because we entrust it for a moment with our fortune, we fondly imagine that mysterious moral powers are bent on directing and ending its course at the right or wrong moment. It knows nothing of all this; and, though the lives of thousands of men depended on its fall to the right or the left of the point at which it stops, it would not care. It has laws of its own, which it must obey and which are so complex that we do not even try to explain them. It is just a little ball, honestly seeking the little red or black hole in which to go to sleep and having nothing very much to tell us of the secrets of a luck or destiny which exist only within ourselves.

THE RIDDLE OF PROGRESS

XI
THE RIDDLE OF PROGRESS

1

THIS war, which is one such as had never yet been waged upon this earth of ours, leads us to consider the great problem of the future of mankind.

Dare we hope that humanity will one day renounce these monstrous follies and that they will become altogether impossible? To this question, if we wish to meet it at its source, I see but one reply, which I have already given elsewhere and which I will here recapitulate and complete, namely, that we are engulfed in a universe which has no more limit in time than it has in space, which had no beginning, as it will have no end, and which has behind it as many myriads of myriads of years as it discovers ahead of it. Yesterday’s eternity and to-morrow’s are precisely identical. All that the universe is going to do it must have already done, for it has had as many opportunities of doing so as it will ever have. All the things that it has not done are things which it will never be able to do, because nothing will be added, in space or time, to what it has already possessed in space or time. It has necessarily made in the past all the efforts and all the experiments which it will make in the future; and all that has gone before, having been subject to the same chances, is perforce the same as all that is to follow.

2

It is probable, therefore, that there was once an infinity of worlds similar to our own, even as it is likely that there is an infinity of such similar worlds at present, the infinity of space being comparable with that of time. These coincidences, however difficult for us to picture, must inevitably occur and recur in the immeasurable and the innumerous in which we are immersed, that is, unless the infinity of possible combinations be less unlimited than those of time and space.

This is where our capacity of imagination halts, for it is easier for us to conceive the infinities of space and time than the infinity of combinations. To obtain some idea of the latter, we should have to understand the substance and the nature, the laws and the forces, in a word, the whole riddle of existence. None the less is it true that this possible infinity of combinations is our only hope; without it there would be nothing more to expect of a universe which obviously would have tried and exhausted everything before our coming.

But, if this number of combinations is really infinite, it is open to us to say that the earth is an experiment which had not yet been made and an experiment which has failed, since suffering and evil have the upper hand of happiness and goodness. If the experiment has failed, we are its victims; but we are not forbidden to hope that our efforts will in some way modify combinations which will be more fortunate in other places or at another time. If the experiment has failed, it does not follow that others have not succeeded and are not more fortunate, at this very moment, in other worlds than ours. We may even suppose that, in the infinity of these combinations and experiments, the most successful tend to become fixed and crystallized and that, in view of their infinite number, they will bring about successfully in the future what they have not brought about successfully in the past. This is a hazardous glimmer; but I doubt whether any others will be discovered to keep us uplifted above despair.