When the wisest of the seven wise men of Greece was asked to name some happy person, he cited several, all of whom were among the dead. “And do you know none living who is happy?” queried his royal host, who had expected his own name to be mentioned among the fortunate few. “Call no man happy,” replied the sage, “until he is dead.” He forgot not that in the temples of his native land, Tyche, Goddess of Chance, was represented holding in one hand a rudder, for it is she who guides the affairs of men; but in the other hand a sphere, to warn of the instability of her favors. Like the King of Lydia, most of her modern votaries remember her former but forget her latter attribute.
Science preaches that the progress of thought has been from a time when Caprice and Chance were deemed everything in nature and Law was nothing, to the present day, when Law is known to be everything and Caprice and Chance are nothing.
Science may preach till it is hoarse, but there is something in the human mind ever insisting that the ancient Goddess, or some other inscrutable fatality, coerces the history of the individual; and that, from his birth, luck, good or bad, merriment or melancholy, marks him for her own. Rarely have I asked a man of large experience who denied the mighty influence of the unforeseen and unforeseeable in practical affairs. Some of the most extensive enterprises are based on the recognition of this truth, and it is mathematically demonstrable; for mathematicians are prepared to show that disorder itself is orderly, and that the vagaries of chance are bound by laws, and pinned in a straight jacket of formulas.
But what their apparatus of signs and symbols does not show, where it completely breaks down, is precisely the only point of human interest in the whole matter,—in its application to the individual life and fortunes. Averages and general laws they give us; but it is also a mathematical law that the average is never applicable to the individual. What is true of the whole series is never true of any one member of the series. No man who insured his life ever died at the precise minute which, according to the actuary’s tables, terminated his calculable expectation of life.
Let us see what, from this point of view, these computations about luck or chance teach.
In mathematics they are included in the Calculus of Probabilities, the discovery of which is attributed to Pascal. A gambling nobleman asked him what are the chances of turning a red or black card in cutting the pack a given number of times. As all the cards are either red or black, Pascal replied that it would be expressed by the formula x/2. In ordinary language, this means that when two events are equally probable, they will occur equally in the long run; and in practical affairs, when we neither know nor suspect things are unequal, we must assume them to be equal.
On these simple principles all calculations of chances, to be worth anything, must be based. But they are not so simple as they sound. Pascal’s formula, like all formulas of the higher mathematics, expresses an abstract truth only, and one that can never be realized in fact. The longer the run, the more certain will it be that the two events never will occur equally; and the more frequent will be long series of the recurrence of one or the other.
Turning aside from abstruse calculations, which can be readily found elsewhere by those who would like to see them, let us inquire as to the practical results of this Logic of Chance when applied to the fortunes of the individual.
These observed and calculated results establish the following interesting rule:—In matters of pure luck, about two-thirds of any given number of persons will come out substantially even, in any large number of trials; of the remaining third, about one-half will be noticeably lucky, and the remaining one-half noticeably unlucky. Thus, of six who venture, four will have no special fortune, good or bad; one will be quite “in vein”; one quite “out of vein.”
Suppose the players are thirty-six, and we select the lucky six, and pit them against each other, as in “progressive” games; the same law will hold good, one coming out noticeably better, one noticeably worse than the rest; and so on indefinitely, the number of the extremes diminishing at the rate of six to one at each new trial.
This is the Law of Luck; but it is obvious that it leaves luck, good and bad, a real fact; and among a million men, or in a great city like New York or London, we must find extraordinary examples of “sequences,” both of the favors and the frowns of fortune; not in gambling only, but in those thousands of accidental events which make up the welfare or misery of personal experience.
All the moralists I have read on the subject seem to blink and stagger at this obvious and necessary conclusion,—that the history of many individuals is and must be enormously controlled, in spite of any efforts of their own, by pure luck. In cutting the cards twenty times in succession, about twenty people in a million will cut red every time and another twenty will cut black every time; and so it will be with all other matters of pure chance in life. There is no use in trying to dodge this certain result of a sum in simple division. We must count it in, in all plans and calculations for success and happiness in our individual life.
The important question is, what value must we assign to it?
Here is where men make several frequent and disastrous errors.
The most common is an error in arithmetic which the little I have above said on the calculus of chance should be enough to correct. It is putting faith in their good luck, or falling into discouragement from their bad luck. Each is equally silly. A sequence of any kind of luck does not offer the slightest presumption that it will continue. The chances remain precisely as at the beginning, and are about six to one against the continuance of either extreme in the same individual. In matters of pure chance no sustained coincidence in either direction adds the least probability to its continuance. This is what is so difficult for men to believe; and so it comes about that faith in good luck is the source of most bad luck. A “run of good luck” has wrecked the lives of more men than has the repetition of disasters.
The reason for this is easily shown. The general rule in life is that a man’s prosperity is conditioned closely by the amount and kind of his knowledge, and his skill in the use of it. But the man who “trusts to luck” distinctly renounces the advantages of knowledge, and builds his hopes on his acknowledged impotence to influence the results. He abandons himself to the current of events, and makes no effort to look forward and see whether it will suck him into a whirlpool, or land him on some sunny shore. Scarcely any state of mind could be fraught with greater peril to his future.
We have the sayings, “dumb luck” and “a fool for luck;” and the Italians their proverb that one must have a little of the fool in him, un poco di matto, to be lucky. Most men are fools, so it is inherently probable that the lucky man will belong to the majority; but beyond that, his folly is conspicuous who bases his hopes of fortune rather on luck than on labor and forethought. The immorality of gambling and its ruinous influence on the happiness of life lie in the fact that it disclaims as useless every precept which prudence, skill, and knowledge lay down as essential to individual success.
It is mathematically certain that some people will have an astonishing succession of fortunate experiences which they have nowise aided in bringing about, ripe plums dropping into their mouths from invisible trees. They are popularly called “lucky fellows.” But the ancient Greeks, with that wonderful acumen in practical affairs which was their own, considered them peculiarly dangerous associates, to be avoided as partners in regular business, scarcely safe to associate with as companions. When Polycrates, King of Samos, was crowned with such repeated successes that it seemed as if the very gods might envy him, his friend, the King of Egypt, advised him to throw his most precious jewel, a wonderfully carved signet-ring, into the sea; and when this was brought back the next day by a fisherman, who had found it in the belly of a fish that had swallowed it, the King of Egypt withdrew his fleet and severed his treaty; for he knew some dreadful disaster awaited such unheard-of fortune; and it soon came when Polycrates fell into the hands of his enemy, and was crucified alive on the Asian strand.
The story is probably a fable; but its moral is an eternal truth. The hour of prosperity is ever dangerous; but when the prosperity has come without labor or effort or forethought, it is nearly always fatal. Unexpected success enervates the will and fosters illusions of the mind. The ancients represented the goddess Fortuna as proffering a cup of intoxicating wine to her favorites. Either they recognize their success as the result of pure chance, and persuade themselves that they are fortune’s favorite children, and can safely hazard any risks; or their vanity leads them to attribute what was the result of chance to their own miraculous sagacity, and they thus magnify to a dangerous degree their own capacities. Either conclusion leads them surely on the downward road to ruin.
Nowhere is this mental debility which seizes the believers in luck more absurdly shown than in the return to primeval superstition which it brings with it. The gambler, in his faith in caprice and chance, sinks to the level of the primitive savage, and accepts the superstitions of that level with equal readiness. The most cultivated habitué of Monte Carlo has his fetishes; he watches for signs and omens; he is as much the slave of auspicious or inauspicious auguries as an Australian cannibal. Pitiable retrogression of the human intellect! What absurdity will he not commit to “break the run of the luck” when it is against him! He will turn his chair thrice around; he will avoid playing if a red-whiskered man opposite him stakes; he will go to his hotel and change his coat. He knows that every principle of right reason and sound logic teaches that events cannot be modified by actions in no way relating to them, but he quietly renounces reason and logic as his guides!
Surely no man who is engaged in the intelligent pursuit of happiness will put himself in that position! I do not forget the pleasure of the game. That will be considered on a later page. But there is no need to argue that a pleasure which leads to the habitual disregard of reason as a monitor cannot be trusted as a permanent contributor to happiness.
One important practical point remains to be noted. Neither in the gambling room, nor outside, is there half so much mere luck in affairs as most people imagine. The cards are stacked, the dice are loaded, the balls are weighted. Only the gulls believe the game is fair. Shrewd men in business transactions like to conceal their hands, and persuade their clients and associates that much is the result of accident which they themselves have brought about. The plan has many advantages, and plays successfully on the most responsive chords of human weakness. It is said that the late Baron Rothschild of London declined to embark in an enterprise unless its promoters were known as lucky men. Do not imagine that he was governed by any foolish superstition. He knew, perhaps better than any one, what is the real significance of constant luck in the stock market; and would have been the last to have accepted it in the sense of the guileless gambler.
Much that in the lives of others we are apt to attribute to luck turns out on closer examination to be the natural though infrequent result of certain cultivated qualities. I have heard of several persons who have had handsome legacies left them by strangers in unexpected acknowledgment of kindness shown. Uniform courtesy is almost sure to be followed sooner or later by some such reward. People who are what we call “quick-witted,” whose judgment is cool and action prompt, are apt to be lucky even in misfortune. William of Normandy, landing for the conquest of England, tripped and fell on the sand. It was an evil presage, and his soldiers shrank back in terror. But William, seizing a handful of the soil, cried—“Thus I grasp this earth, and, by the splendor of God, I shall keep it.” With this he turned the gloomy portent into one the most auspicious. Moderate luck with good sense will repair any blunder, while folly will spoil the best of chances. “Fortune favors the bold,” simply because they have the courage to act; but she rarely favors them when they act without knowledge and prudence. When Shakespeare in the familiar passage says, “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune,” he assumes that the fortunate man knows when flood-tide arrives.
As we are thus often deceived in the lives of others, so we are almost as frequently the dupes of our own experience. It is not easy to decide, concerning our successes and failures, which are owing to luck and which to ourselves. Confucius advises those who fail to follow the example of the archer when he misses the target, and examine first the instruments employed, and then themselves, as the cause of failure is likely to be in one or the other. Some minds are more exhilarated by gains than they are depressed by losses; others deplore losses more keenly than they enjoy successes; few estimate both at a just relative value.
Even the very unlucky should feel some cheerfulness when he reflects how in modern times we have learned to conciliate the Fates, and compel even the most adverse destiny to drop the ugliest of its masks. This we accomplish through the various forms of insurance, all of them based on the study of the very caprices of Fortune herself. Marvelous example of mind setting at nought the threats of brute nature! The very disasters before which our ancestors bowed most hopeless and most helpless, are those whose attacks we dread the least. Hail and lightning, storms on the ocean and fire in populous cities, we read about with small concern providing our property is well insured. By the same process we can protect our children from poverty and our own old age from want. Beneficent discovery, which in its varied forms has added incalculably to the happiness of man by freeing him from the terrors of the unknown, and providing him with a shield behind which he can afford to smile at the gloomiest frowns of Fate!
Subtler than any beast of the field is man, and filled with Promethean courage to rob the gods themselves! But behind the impenetrable veil, through which he sees not even darkly, are powers who smile in derision at his attempts to free himself from their eternal mastery. No logic can explain and no calculus compute the workings of their mysterious ways. Against the elemental wrath of fire and water man can guard himself; but against the results of the most thoughtless of his words or the slightest of his actions he has no protection, for he has not and cannot form the least idea of their consequences. Here Destiny rules undisputed and supreme.
Such reflections led the great Goethe in his old age to dwell more and more on the illimitable influence of trifling events, bedeutende Kleinigkeiten. Dull critics have misunderstood and some of the dullest have even made merry about his insistence on this pivotal truth in the history of every individual and in that of the world. The fate of nations has ever been decided by the most trivial occurrences. Cæsar, going to the Senate, refused to read a letter which was handed him, saying, “Business for to-morrow.” Had he opened it, the greatest empire that ever was would have had a different story to transmit to a different posterity. One summer morning the pretty Arleta, daughter of a Norman butcher, tripped down to the brook to wash her mother’s soiled linen. Had she waited a few minutes later, Robert the Devil would have already passed, and neither their son, the bastard William of Normandy, nor his thousands of knights would have set their iron heels on English soil. Louis XVI stops at St. Ménéhould to eat a pig’s foot, and the great and famous line of the Bourbons of France is extinguished by that single dish.
These are celebrated examples. But the thoughtful man will recognize in his own life and in the lives of those around him how they have been altered, directed, completely transformed by such slightest of incidents. His decision to pursue this or that avocation, that as to where he should settle, the first meeting with her who is his wife, the conversation which led to such or such an investment of the first importance, these, the most momentous actions of his life, turned on such casual and insignificant incidents that it makes him shiver to think of it! In such moments he is ready to exclaim,
The prime motors of the thought of the world have not been the ponderous tomes of schoolmen nor the decrees of councils and universities. What, asks a philosophical historian, were the two most important events in the intellectual history of England during the seventeenth century? The Paradise Lost? The King James’ Version? No. One was the commitment of a strolling tinker to Bedford Jail; the other the decision of a distempered youth to make himself a coat of leather and go to live in a hollow tree. The one gave us the “Pilgrim’s Progress;” the other the immortal doctrine that faith, the true faith, “finds center everywhere,” and cares not to fix itself in form.
“Slaves of Chance!” Of Chance? Have I the right word? Is it Chance which through millions of years has steadily guided the increasing purpose which runs through all nature, which has multiplied the organs of animals and widened the minds of men with the progress of the suns; which has disabled the armies of kings by the weaponless words of a peasant; which has confounded wisdom by folly and foiled strength by weakness; never anywhere losing sight of the goal, unseen of men but surely divined, toward which tends the Motion of the World?
Chance? No. But by what other name shall I name it? Shall I take refuge in the jargon of the pulpit and call these “special providences?” Helpless evasion of the question! Impotent effort to distinguish between the special and the general designs of the Designer, obscuring the one central point to be kept in sight, that the special is the general and the general the special.
But why seek a name? A name becomes a fetish as much as a stock or a stone, and men bow down to it and worship it with as much abasement of their better natures. Enough, if in the fates of mighty nations and in each lightest act of the individual life we recognize the same Directing Force, invisible but nowise unintelligible, rather speaking with sun-clear words to our enlightened reason of conscious purpose and definite intention, to which the iron laws of Nature and the wild vagaries of Chance are ductile instruments and obedient servants.
This is the ultimate expression of abstract science and of that solid philosophy which is built on the inductive study of both nature and man. Its lesson to the individual is, that he is neither the helpless creature of necessity nor the slave of chance; that he is master of his immediate action, but of its consequences he is not master; that there are unseen forces at work arranging the incidents and accidents of his life, and these forces he can in no wise control; but if he is alert and diligent they cannot entangle his own individuality in the mesh of events, he can rise superior to them, can be himself, and win happiness to some degree in any surroundings; and he may go forward in the sublime and certain confidence that his existence is an essential part of an eternal plan, which asks neither faith nor authority for its recognition, for it is the logical condition of the very reason by which he knows that he is Himself and not another.
The calculus of probabilities has already destroyed the gods; if it could rule out the unexpected, it would promote man to their seats; but the fleshless face of old Time wears a perpetual though silent grin.
Fortune-tellers are put in jail because they deceive; they should be hanged, did they tell the truth. How dull were life, could it be read ahead! Only a weak nature, such as his, would say with Hartley Coleridge, “Happiness is the exclusion of all hap, that is, chance.” More virile are the words of Charles James Fox, inveterate gambler that he was, “The next best thing to winning is to lose.” The uncertainty of the future is the only stimulus to exertion, and its obscurity is the source of our chief delights.
Always expect a change of luck. Then, if it is from good to bad, you will be prepared for it; and if from bad to good, you will have enjoyed the pleasure of expecting it, as well as its arrival.
“Give your son luck and throw him in the sea,” says a Spanish proverb.
There are men who succeed through their misfortunes rather than their good fortunes.
People regard bad luck as a kind of injustice. They secretly say with Louis XIV, when his armies were defeated in Flanders, “Has God forgotten all I have done for Him?”
The ancients reckoned a man’s luck, good or bad, among the gifts with which he is endowed by nature.
In very strong characters there is something which eludes analysis and defies definition, the very goad of destiny, driving them on their allotted paths with unrelenting and inevitable impulse. This is what the ancient Greeks, and among the moderns especially Goethe, recognized as the “demonic force.” It endows a life with dramatic unity and historic completeness.
Fate lies in fetters, so she no longer rules the stage.
The folly of some men turns out better than the foresight of others.
With Courage and Civility as allies you can often take captive Good-luck.
He who has well considered all the chances is prepared for the worst.
Because one cannot see ahead clearly, should he put out his eyes?
The captain who prefers trusting to luck to taking an observation is not the man to sail with.
Bacon advises to use such as have been lucky because of the confidence they breed in others and the effort they will make “to maintain their prescription.”
The first principle of success in the game of life is to be willing to lose. The player who will not sacrifice his pawns will soon have his king in check.
Keep your wits about you. In the immediate exigencies of life a full pocketbook is more useful than a fine bank balance.
Do you ever ask yourself why you expect good fortune to come without effort and bad fortune to stay away without precautions?