that shall leave the rails, they pass underneath the tower at
the exact moment of its collapse, they enter the house in which the
fire is smouldering, cross the forest on which lightning shall fall,
entrust all they have to the banker who means to abscond. They love
the one woman on earth whom they should have avoided, they make the
gesture they should not have made, they do the thing they should not
have done. But when fortune beckons and the others are hastening,
urged by the deep voice of benevolent powers, these pass by, not
hearing; and, vouchsafed no advice or warning but that of their
intellect, the very wise old guide whose purblind eyes see only the
tiny paths at the foot of the mountain, they go astray in a world that
human reason has not yet understood. These men have surely the right
to exclaim against destiny; and yet not on the grounds that they would
prefer. They have the right to ask why it has withheld from them the
watchful guard who warns their brethren. But, this reproach once
made--and it is the cardinal reproach against irreducible
injustice--they have no further cause of complaint. The universe is
not hostile to them. Calamities do not pursue them; it is they who go
towards calamity Things from without wish them no ill; the mischief
comes from themselves. The misfortune they meet has not been lying in
wait for them; they selected it for their own. With them, as with all
men, events are posted along the course of their years, like goods in a
bazaar that stand ready for the customer who shall buy them. No one
deceives them; they merely deceive themselves. They are in no wise
persecuted; but their unconscious soul fails to perform its duty. Is
it less adroit than the others: is it less eager? Does it slumber
hopelessly in the depths of its secular prison: and can no amount of
will-power arouse it from its fatal lethargy, and force the redoubtable
doors that lead from the life that unconsciously is aware of all things
to the intelligent life that knows nothing?

13

A friend in whose presence I was discussing these matters said to me
yesterday: "Life, whose questions are more searching than those of the
philosophers, will this very day compel me to add a somewhat curious
problem to those you have stated. I am wondering what the result will
be when two 'lucks'--in other words, two unconsciousnesses, of which
one is adroit and fortunate, the other inept and bungling--meet and in
some