ABSTRACT
The understanding of chance that underpins this book is influenced by Henri Bergson’s definition of the vital order. Bergson insists that the modernist interest in relativism is in fact a confusion between two kinds of order: the ‘vital order’ on the one hand, the ‘automatic order’ on the other. The vital order is voluntary, willed and directed by human intention; the automatic order is geometrical, physical, observed in nature and somewhat inert. The vital order is essentially what we understand as creation. It is ‘manifested to us less in its essence than in some of its accidents’, Bergson writes.1 These accidents are imagination in action: they can initiate, complement or interrupt, and totally alter our thinking behind a project.
