should coincide with the passing beneath it of a man, why it should have chosen just that very moment to fall. The element of choice or intention is as restricted as possible; it recedes as reflexion tries to grasp it; it is elusive, nay, evanescent, but if it were non-existent we should speak only of mechanism, there would be no question of chance. Chance is therefore an intention emptied of its content. It is nothing more than a mere shadow, but the shape is there even if the matter is not. Have we here one of those representations which we call "truly primitive", formed spon- taneously by humanity in obedience to a natural tendency? Not quite. However spontaneous it may be, the idea of chance only reaches our consciousness after having first passed through the layer of accumulated experiences which society 1 We developed this conception of chance in a course of lectures delivered at the College de France in 1898, in connection with the Ilcpl of Alexander of Aphrodisia. ii ON CHANCE 125 deposits within us from the day it first teaches us to speak. It is in the course of this passage that it becomes emptied, since an increasingly mechanistic science drives out of it what purposefulness it contained. We should therefore have to fill it again, give it a body, if we wanted to reconstitute the original representation. The phantom of an intention would then become a living intention. On the other hand, we should now have