But I did not enter into this digression merely to give a few tips on gambling, or the advice not to gamble at all when gambling can be avoided. The calculation of probabilities is of vast utility in matters infinitely more important than markets or games. With it mathematicians have put mere telescopists to shame. Give a mathematician the past course of a planet, and he will calculate its future course without taking the trouble to find out a thing about the nature of planets. This is no chimera. It has been done. The vagaries of the motions of a heavenly body fall into series; into cycles; into cycles within cycles. Accuracy in prediction is determined by accuracy and amount of past observations, and by nothing else. But what has this to do with the human will? Everything. The so-called “laws” of science, including the Law of Conservation, are the laws of chance, nothing more. They are founded upon the behavior of great masses of particles, or the behavior of one or a few particles (more accurately, _particulars_) over long periods of time. As Lillie phrases it, the regularity of nature is a “statistical regularity,” like the regularity of the statistics of suicide. It does not interfere with the freedom of the individual, of the particular. Here is the answer to Freud’s absurd statement that the attempt to reconcile human free will with divine omnipotence is always a failure. The actuary calculates the number of suicides that are going to take place--does he thereby compel you to kill yourself? There is, of course, this difference between an actuary and Omniscience. The actuary only knows the total result. Omniscience must know the individuals who will help to make up that result. Omniscience knows just what we are, individually. Omniscience knows every Psyche, and knows what it will chose. I may know that a pair of dice are so loaded that they will always come up sixes. Is it my knowledge which compels them so to fall? But some will say that if our human dice are loaded, it must have been God who loaded them, and that beneath that load free will disappears. It might have been that way, I will admit. Omniscience, being also Omnipotence, might have loaded the dice, beyond question. Omnipotence was under no compulsion to grant free will to anything. But by the same reasoning, Omnipotence was free to withhold Its hand, and to let us determine to a certain extent our actions for ourselves. Even the finite mind has been able to see how this can be without interfering at all with that regular march of events which characterizes a cosmos in distinction from a chaos. A cosmos of free particulars will still have a “statistical regularity.”