Luck or Cunning

mmon Sense,

stating. This, as I have already implied, is probably the reason why those who hav

the other go without saying, by force of association. There is no fear of its being lost sight of; association is one of the few really liberal things in nature; by liberal, I mean precipitate and inaccurate; the power of words, as of pictures, and indeed the power to carry on life at all, vests in the fact that association does not stick to the letter of its bond, but will take the half for the whole without even looking closely at the coin given to make sure that it is not counterfeit. Through

only pay by altering its mode of life, and how long is it likely to be before a new departure in its mode of life comes out in its own person and in those of its family? Granted it will at first come out in their appearance only, but there can be no change in appearance without some slight corresponding organic modification. In practice there is usually compromise in these matters. The universe, if it does not give an organi

of habit, are already perceptible; no Darwinian will deny that these differences are likely to be inherited, and, in the absence of intermarriage between the two colonies, to result in still more typical difference than that which exists at present. According to Mr. Darwin, the improved type of the more successful race would not be due mainly to transmitted perseverance in well-doing, but to the fact that if any member of the German colony "happened" to be born "ever so slightly," &c. Of course this last is true to a certain extent also; if any member of the German colony does "happen to be born," &c., then he will stand a better chance of surviving, and, if he marries a wife like himself, of transmitting his good qualities; but how about the happening? How is it that this is of such frequent occurrence in the one colony, and is so rare in

is, and therefore that if either is to be insisted on to the exclusion of the other, it should be cunning, not luck. Which is more correctly said to be the main means of the development of capital-Luck? or Cunning? Of course there must be something to be developed-and luck, that is to say, the unknowable and unforeseeable, enters everywhere; but is it more convenient with our oldest and best-established ideas to say that luck is the main means of the development of capital, or that cunning is so?

nt-and cunning will do more with ill luck than folly with good. People do not hold six trumps every hand for a dozen games of whist running, if they do not keep a card or two up their sleeves. Cunning, if it can keep its head above water at all, will beat mere luck unaided by cunning, no matter what start luck may have had, if the race be a fairly long one. Growth is a kind of success which does indeed come to some organisms with less effort than to others, but it cannot be maintained and improved upon without pains and effort. A foolish organism and its fortuitous variation will be soon parted, for, as a general rule, unless the variation has so much

y this; but these ancestral accidents were either turned to account, or neglected where they might have been taken advantage of; they thus passed either into skill, or want of skill; so that whichever way the fact is stated the result is the same; and if simplicity of statement be regarded, there is no more convenient way of putting the matter than to say that though luck is mighty, cunning is mightier still. Organism commonly

ion of the outside world within the limits of the personality, or that it is at any rate a prophesying of, and essay after, the more living phase of matter in the direction of which it is tending. If approached from the dynamical or living side of the underlying substratum, it is the beginning of the comparatively stable equilibrium which we call brute matter; if fro

that govern the development of wealth generally are supposed also to govern the particular form of health and wealth which comes most closely home to us-I mean that of our bodily implements or organs. What is the stomach but a living sack, or purse of untanned leather, wherein we keep our means of subsistence? Food is money made easy; it is petty cash in its handiest and most reduced form; it is our way of assimilating our possessions and making them indeed our own. What is the purse but a kind of abridged extra corporeal stomach wherein we keep the money which we convert

nd non ego-every kind of Irish bull, in fact, which a sound logician abhors-and it is only because it has persevered, as I said in "Life and Habit," in thus defying logic and arguing most virtuously in a most vicious circle, that it has come in the persons of some of its descendants to reason with sufficient soundness. And what the am?ba is man is

adrift from the most living form of matter (I mean most living from our point of view), and remain absolutely without connection with it for any length of time, any more than a seal can live without coming up sometimes to breathe; and in so far as they become linked on to living beings they live. Everything is living which is in close communion with, and interpermeated by, that something which we call mind or thought. Giordano Br

minds about not letting life outside the body too decisively to allow the question to be reopened; that if this be tolerated we shall have societies for the prevention of cruelty to chairs and ta

parts of the body are more living and vital than others, and those who stick to common sense may allow this, but if they do they must close the discussion on the spot; if they listen to another syllable they are lost; if they let the innocent interlocutor say so much as that a piece of well-nourished healthy brain is more living than the end of a finger-nail that wants cutting, or

o be questioned. Common sense is not yet formulated in manners of science or philosophy, for only few consider them; few decisions, therefore, have been arrived at which all hold final. Science is, like love, "too young to know what conscience," or common sense, is. As soon as the world began to busy itself with evolution it said good-bye to common sense, and must get on with uncommon sense as best it can. The first lesson that uncommon sense will teach it is that con

most living parts?" The answer to this was given a few years ago with a flourish of trumpets, and our biologists shouted with one voice, "Great is protoplasm. There is no life but protoplasm, and Huxley is its prophet." Read Huxley's "Physical Basis of Mind." Read Professor Mivart's article, "What are Living Beings?" in the Contemporary Review, July, 1879. Read Dr. Andrew Wilson's article in the Gentleman's M

man's address to the British Association in 1879, a

sed it, 'the physical basis of life;' wherever there is life from its lowest to its high

iving substance. From this it should follow, and doubtless does follow in Professor Allman's mind, that large tracts of the human body, if not the greater part by weight (as bones, skin, muscular tissues, &c.), are no more alive than a coat or pair of boots in wear is alive, except in so far as the bones, &c., are more closely and nakedly permeated by protoplasm than the coat or boots, and are thu

and no more capable of acting in concert with it than bricks can understand and act in concert with the bricklayer. As the bricklayer is held to be living and the bricks non-living, so the bones and skin which protoplasm is supposed to construct are held non-living and the protoplasm alone living. Protoplasm, it is said, goes about masked behind t

ot grow together; they are mended by the protoplasm which permeates the Haversian canals; the bones themselves are no more living merely because they are tenanted by something which really does live, than a house lives

toplasm cements two broken ends of a piece of bone. Ces choses se font mais ne s'expliquent pas. So some denizen of another planet looking at our earth through a telescope which showed him much, but still not quite enough, and seeing the St. Gothard tunnel plumb on end so that he could not see the holes of entry and exit, would think the trains there a kind of caterpillar which went through the mountain by a pure effort of the will-that enabled them in some mysterious way to disregard material obstacles and dispense

his, however, will appear more clearly in the following chapter. It will also appear how far-reaching were the consequences of the denial of design that was involved in Mr. Darwin's theory that luck is the main