It is all very well to insist upon the free-will or cunning side of
living action, more especially now when it has been so persistently
ignored, but though the fortunes of birth and surroundings have all been
built up by cunning, yet it is by ancestral, vicarious cunning, and this,
to each individual, comes to much the same as luck pure and simple; in
fact, luck is seldom seriously intended to mean a total denial of
cunning, but is for the most part only an expression whereby we summarise
and express our sense of a cunning too complex and impalpable for
conscious following and apprehension.
When we consider how little we have to do with our parentage, country and
education, or even with our genus and species, how vitally these things
affect us both in life and death, and how, practically, the cunning in
connection with them is so spent as to be no cunning at all, it is plain
that the drifts, currents, and storms of what is virtually luck will be
often more than the little helm of cunning can control. And so with
death. Nothing can affect us less, but at the same time nothing can
affect us more; and how little can cunning do against it? At the best it
can only defer it. Cunning is nine-tenths luck, and luck is nine-tenths
cunning; but the fact that nine-tenths of cunning is luck leaves still a
tenth part unaccounted for.