It would be extremely surprising, I said when I began, if this indefatigable and exhaustive enquiry into Chance, pursued for over fifty years, had failed to yield some sort of result. I am wondering, at the end of this investigation, what that result is. At the cost of an insane waste of money, time, physical, nervous and moral energy and spiritual forces perhaps more precious still, it has taught us that Chance is in short Chance, that is to say, an aggregate of effects whereof we do not know the causes. But we knew as much as this before; and our new discovery is a little derisory. We have seen the shadowy appearance of certain laws or habits from which a few players appear to derive advantage, though this advantage is always precarious. But these apparent laws, which tend obscurely and uncertainly to instil a little order into Chance, are, like Chance itself, but inconsistent and ephemeral summaries of results from unknown causes. Upon the whole we have learnt nothing, unless perhaps it be that we were wrong to attach greater importance to those manifestations of destiny than they possess. If we look at them more closely, we find that there is nothing more behind all these catastrophes and all these mysteries of luck than the catastrophe and the mysteries which we put there. We link our fate to the fate of a little ball which is not responsible for it; and, because we entrust it for a moment with our fortune, we fondly imagine that mysterious moral powers are bent on directing and ending its course at the right or wrong moment. It knows nothing of all this; and, though the lives of thousands of men depended on its fall to the right or the left of the point at which it stops, it would not care. It has laws of its own, which it must obey and which are so complex that we do not even try to explain them. It is just a little ball, honestly seeking the little red or black hole in which to go to sleep and having nothing very much to tell us of the secrets of a luck or destiny which exist only within ourselves. THE RIDDLE OF PROGRESS XI THE RIDDLE OF PROGRESS 1 This war, which is one such as had never yet been waged upon this earth of ours, leads us to consider the great problem of the future of mankind.