a term we apply to events, to denote that they happen without any necessary or foreknown cause. Our aim is to ascribe those things to chance which do not necessarily follow as the natural effects of any sufficient cause; but our ignorance and precipitancy often lead us to attribute effects to chance which proceed from a determinate cause. When we say a thing happens by chance, we really mean no more than that its cause is unknown to us; not, as some vainly imagine, that chance itself can be the cause of any thing. The case of the painter, who, unable to express the foam at the mouth of a horse which he had painted, threw his sponge in despair at the piece, and by chance did that which he could not before do by design, is an eminent instance of the force of chance; yet it is obvious all we mean by chance here is, that the painter did not fore-calculate the effect, or that he did not throw the sponge with a view to produce it.

Chance is frequently personified and erected into a chimerical being, whom we conceive as acting arbitrarily, and producing all the effects the real causes of which do not appear to us; in which sense the word coincides with the τύχη, fortuna, of the ancients.

Chance is also used for the manner of deciding things, the conduct or direction of which is left at large, and not reducible to any determinate rules or measures, or where there is no ground for preference, as at cards, dice, lotteries, and the like.

The ancient sortilege or chance, M. Placette observes, was instituted by God himself; and in the Old Testament we find several standing laws and express commands which prescribed its use on certain occasions. Hence the Scripture says, "The lot or chance fell on Matthias," when it was in question who should fill Judas's place in the apostolate; and hence also arose the sortes sanctorum, or method of determining things, among the ancient Christians, by opening some of the sacred books, and pitching on the first verse the eye rested on as a sure prognostic of what was to happen. The sortes Homericæ, Virgilianæ, Prenestinae, and the like, used by the heathens, were reported to with the same view, and in the same manner. St Augustin seems to approve of this method of determining things future, and owns that he had practised it himself, grounding his doing so on the principle that God presides over chance.