se, The precise
knowledge of antecedents and consequents makes men practical as well as
philosophical Necessarians.--It is the want of this knowledge which
is the principle and soul of gambling, and of all games of chance or
partial skill. The supposition is, that the issue is uncertain, and that
there is no positive means of ascertaining it. It is dependent on the
turn of a die, on the tossing up of a halfpenny: to be fair it must be
a lottery; there is no knowing but by the event; and it is this which
keeps the interest alive, and works up the passion little short of
madness. There is all the agitation of suspense, all the alternation
of hope and fear, of good and bad success, all the eagerness of desire,
without the possibility of reducing this to calculation, that is,
of subjecting the increased action of the will to a known rule, or
restraining the excesses of passion within the bounds of reason. We
see no cause beforehand why the run of the cards should not be in our
favour: we will hear of none afterwards why it should not have been so.
As in the absence of all data to judge by, we wantonly fill up the
blank with the most extravagant expectations, so, when all is over, we
obstinately recur to the chance we had previously. There is nothing to
tame us down to the event, nothing to reconcile us to our hard luck, for
so we think it. We see no reason why we failed (and there was none, any
more than why we should succeed)--we think that, reason apart, our will
is the next best thing; we still try to have it our own way, and fret,
torment, and harrow ourselves up with vain imaginations to effect
impossibilities.(2) We play the game over again: we wonder how it
was possible for us to fail. We turn our brain with straining at
contradictions, and striving to make things what they are not, or, in
other words, to subject the course of nature to our fastastical wishes.
_'If it had been so--if we had done such and such a thing'_--we try it
in a thousand different ways, and are just as far off the mark as
ever. We appealed to chance in the first instance, and yet, when it has
decided against us, we will not give in, and sit down contented with our
loss, but refuse to submit to anything but reason, which has nothing to
do with the matter. In drawing two straws, for example, to see which
is the longest, there was no apparent necessity we should fix upon the
wrong one, it was so easy to have fixed upon the other, nay, at one time
w