But, lastly, there is, doubtless, a true meaning attached to fortune,
distinct both from prudence and from courage; and distinct too from that
absence of depressing or bewildering passions, which (according to my
favourite proverb, “extremes meet,”) the fool not seldom obtains in as
great perfection by his ignorance as the wise man by the highest energies
of thought and self-discipline. Luck has a real existence in human
affairs, from the infinite number of powers that are in action at the
same time, and from the co-existence of things contingent and accidental
(such as to _us_ at least are accidental) with the regular appearances
and general laws of nature. A familiar instance will make these words
intelligible. The moon waxes and wanes according to a necessary law.
The clouds likewise, and all the manifold appearances connected with
them, are governed by certain laws no less than the phases of the moon.
But the laws which determine the latter are known and calculable, while
those of the former are hidden from us. At all events, the number and
variety of their effects baffle our powers of calculation; and that the
sky is clear or obscured at any particular time, we speak of, in common
language, as a matter of accident. Well! at the time of the full moon,
but when the sky is completely covered with black clouds, I am walking on
in the dark, aware of no particular danger: a sudden gust of wind rends
the cloud for a moment, and the moon emerging discloses to me a chasm or
precipice, to the very brink of which I had advanced my foot. This is
what is meant by luck, and according to the more or less serious mood or
habit of our mind we exclaim, how lucky! or, how providential! The
co-presence of numberless phænomena, which from the complexity or
subtlety of their determining causes are called contingencies, and the
co-existence of these with any regular or necessary phænomenon (as the
clouds with the moon for instance), occasion coincidences, which, when
they are attended by any advantage or injury, and are at the same time
incapable of being calculated or foreseen by human prudence, form good or
ill luck. On a hot sunshiny afternoon came on a sudden storm and spoilt
the farmer’s hay; and this is called ill luck. We will suppose the same
event to take place, when meteorology shall have been perfected into a
science, provided with unerring instruments; but which the farmer had
neglected to examine. This is no longer ill luck, but imprudence. Now
apply this to our proverb. Unforeseen coincidences may have greatly
helped a man, yet if they have done for him only what possibly from his
own abilities he might have effected for himself, his good luck will
excite less attention and the instances be less remembered. That clever
men should attain their objects seems natural, and we neglect the
circumstances that perhaps produced that success of themselves without
the intervention of skill or foresight; but we dwell on the fact and
remember it, as something strange, when the same happens to a weak or
ignorant man. So, too, though the latter should fail in his undertakings
from concurrences that might have happened to the wisest man, yet his
failure being no more than might have been expected and accounted for
from his folly, it lays no hold on our attention, but fleets away among
the other undistinguished waves, in which the stream of ordinary life
murmurs by us, and is forgotten. Had it been as true as it was
notoriously false, that those all-embracing discoveries, which have shed
a dawn of science on the art of chemistry, and give no obscure promise of
some one great constitutive law, in the light of which dwell dominion and
the power of prophecy; if these discoveries, instead of having been as
they really were, preconcerted by meditation, and evolved out of his own
intellect, had occurred by a set of lucky accidents to the illustrious
father and founder of philosophic alchemy; if they presented themselves
to Sir Humphry Davy exclusively in consequence of his luck in possessing
a particular galvanic battery; if this battery, as far as Davy was
concerned, had itself been an accident, and not (as in point of fact it
was) desired and obtained by him for the purpose of insuring the
testimony of experience to his principles, and in order to bind down
material nature under the inquisition of reason, and force from her, as
by torture, unequivocal answers to prepared and preconceived
questions—yet still they would not have been talked of or described, as
instances of _luck_, but as the natural results of his admitted genius
and known skill. But should an accident have disclosed similar
discoveries to a mechanic at Birmingham or Sheffield, and if the man
should grow rich in consequence, and partly by the envy of his
neighbours, and partly with good reason, be considered by them as a man
below par in the general powers of his understanding; then, “Oh, what a
lucky fellow! Well, Fortune does favour fools—that’s certain! It is
always so!”—and forthwith the exclaimer relates half a dozen similar
instances. Thus accumulating the one sort of facts and never collecting
the other, we do, as poets in their diction, and quacks of all
denominations do in their reasoning, put a part for the whole, and at
once soothe our envy and gratify our love of the marvellous, by the
sweeping proverb, “Fortune favours fools.”