ing with most of the essential
facts of a career. Whence comes this faculty? There are no fixed or
certain laws. We do not detect, for instance, any constant relation
between the activity of the unconsciousness and the development of the
intellect. This activity obeys rules of which we know nothing. So far
as we at present can tell, it would seem to be purely accidental. We
discover it in one man, and not in another; nor have we any clue that
shall help us to guess at the reason of this difference.

11

The probable course pursued by fortunate or contrary chances may well
be as follows. A happy or untoward event, that has sprung from the
profound recesses of great and eternal laws, arises before us and
completely blocks the way. It stands motionless there: immovable,
inevitable, disproportionate. It pays no heed to us; it has not come
on our account, but for itself, because of itself. It ignores us
completely. It is we who approach the event; we who, having arrived
within the sphere of its influence, will either fly from it or face it,
try a circuitous route or fare boldly onwards. Let us assume that the
event is disastrous: fire, death, disease, or a somewhat abnormal form
of accident or calamity. It waits there, invisible, indifferent,
blind, but perfect and unalterable; but as yet it is merely potential.
It exists entire, but only in the future; and for us, whose intellect
and consciousness are served by senses unable to perceive things
otherwise than through the succession of time, it is as though it were
not. Let us be still more precise; let us take the case of a
shipwreck. The ship that must perish has not yet left the port; the
rock or the shoal that shall rend it sleeps peacefully beneath the
waves; the storm that shall burst forth at the end of the month is
slumbering, far beyond our gaze, in the secret of the skies. Normally,
were nothing written, had the catastrophe[3] not already taken place in
the future, fifty passengers would have arrived from five or six
different countries, and have duly gone on board. But destiny has
clearly marked the vessel for its own. She must most certainly perish.
And for months past, perhaps for years, a mysterious selection has been
at work amongst the passengers who were to have departed upon the same
day. It is possible that out of fifty who had originally intended to
sail, only twenty will cross the gangway at the moment of lifting the
anchor. It is