rattles down the street, bells in the
neighbouring steeple chime the quarter, a girl in the next house is
practising her scales, and throughout the world innumerable events are
happening which may never happen together again; so that should one of
them recur, we have no reason to expect any of the others. This is
Chance, or chance coincidence. The word Coincidence is vulgarly used
only for the inexplicable concurrence of _interesting_ events--"quite a
coincidence!"

On the other hand, many things are now happening together or coinciding,
that will do so, for assignable reasons, again and again; thousands of
men are leaving the City, who leave at the same hour five days a week.
But this is not chance; it is causal coincidence due to the custom of
business in this country, as determined by our latitude and longitude
and other circumstances. No doubt the above chance
coincidences--writing, cab-rattling, chimes, scales, etc.--are
causally connected at some point of past time. They were predetermined
by the condition of the world ten minutes ago; and that was due to
earlier conditions, one behind the other, even to the formation of the
planet. But whatever connection there may have been, we have no such
knowledge of it as to be able to deduce the coincidence, or calculate
its recurrence. Hence Chance is defined by Mill to be: Coincidence
giving no ground to infer uniformity.

Still, some chance coincidences do recur according to laws of their own:
I say _some_, but it may be all. If the world is finite, the possible
combinations of its elements are exhaustible; and, in time, whatever
conditions of the world have concurred will concur again, and in the
same relation to former conditions. This writing, that cab, those
chimes, those scales will coincide again; the Argonautic expedition, and
the Trojan war, and all our other troubles will be renewed. But let us
consider some more manageable instance, such as the throwing of dice.
Every one who has played much with dice knows that double sixes are
sometimes thrown, and sometimes double aces. Such coincidences do not
happen once and only once; they occur again and again, and a great
number of trials will show that, though their recurrence has not the
regularity of cause and effect, it yet has a law of its own, namely--a
tendency to average regularity. In 10,000 throws there will be some
number of double sixes; and the greater the number of throws the more
closely will the avera