d thing, it may be a good
thing. It may be lucidity, transparency, fitness incarnate, matching
the whole system of other things, when it has once befallen, in an
unimaginably perfect way. All you mean by calling it 'chance' is that
this is not guaranteed, that it may also fall out otherwise. For the
system of other things has no positive hold on the chance-thing. Its
origin is in a certain fashion negative: it escapes, and says, Hands
off! coming, when it comes, as a free gift, or not at all.

This negativeness, however, and this opacity of the chance-thing when
thus considered _ab. extra_, or from the point of view of previous
things or distant things, do not preclude its having any amount of
positiveness and luminosity from within, and at its own place and
moment. All that its chance-character asserts about it is that there
is something in it really of its own, something that is not the
unconditional property of the whole. If the whole wants this property,
the whole must wait till it can get it, if it be a matter of chance.
That the universe may actually be a sort of joint-stock society of this
sort, in which the sharers have both limited liabilities and limited
powers, is of course a simple and conceivable notion.

Nevertheless, many persons talk as if the minutest {155} dose of
disconnectedness of one part with another, the smallest modicum of
independence, the faintest tremor of ambiguity about the future, for
example, would ruin everything, and turn this goodly universe into a
sort of insane sand-heap or nulliverse, no universe at all. Since
future human volitions are as a matter of fact the only ambiguous
things we are tempted to believe in, let us stop for a moment to make
ourselves sure whether their independent and accidental character need
be fraught with such direful consequences to the universe as these.

What is meant by saying that my choice of which way to walk home after
the lecture is ambiguous and matter of chance as far as the present
moment is concerned? It means that both Divinity Avenue and Oxford
Street are called; but that only one, and that one _either_ one, shall
be chosen. Now, I ask you seriously to suppose that this ambiguity of
my choice is real; and then to make the impossible hypothesis that the
choice is made twice over, and each time falls on a different street.
In other words, imagine that I first walk through Divinity Avenue, and
then imagine that the powers governing the