a term applied to an event that happens without being contrived, expected, or foreseen. In other words, it is the effect of an unknown, or the unexpected effect of a known cause. Those things are frequently ascribed to chance which do not seem necessarily to follow as the natural effects of any adequate cause; but through ignorance or precipitancy, effects proceeding from a determinate cause are often attributed to chance. The term chance, as commonly used, really means nothing more than that the cause of the event is unknown; not, as some have imagined, that an event can happen without a cause. The case of the painter who, in despair at his inability to express the foam at the mouth of a horse he had painted, threw his sponge at the picture and did that by chance which he could not before do by design, is an eminent instance of the common meaning of the term; since he did not fore-calculate the result, nor throw the sponge with a view to produce it.

Chance is frequently personified, and then corresponds to the Fortuna of the ancients. Chance is also used for the manner of deciding things, the direction of which is not reducible to any determinate rules, or where there is no ground for preference, as at cards, dice, lotteries, and the like. The doctrine of chances is discussed under the head Probability.

The ancient sortilegium or chance was of divine origin, since in the Old Testament we find several standing laws and express commands which prescribed its use on certain occasions. We read in the Acts—"the lot fell upon 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 solving difficulties among the ancient Christians, by opening some of the sacred books, and regarding the first verse that arrested the eye as a prognostic. The sortes Homericæ, Virgilianæ, Prenestinae, and the like, used by the heathens, were of a similar kind. St Augustin seems to approve of this method of determining things future, and even admits that he had practised it, justifying his doing so on the ground that God presides over chance.