Body and Will, Being an Essay Concerning will in its metaphysical, physiological and pathological aspects

In certain rural districts it is the custom to speak of a child that has been born out of wedlock as a chance-child, and of its mother as having had a misfortune; not that any one really believes the living event to have come by chance, in violation of ordinary law, without conceivable cause, but it is an indirect way of intimating that it ought not rightly to have come, and that it is not certain who has been concerned in the begetting of it. One may compare this way of speaking of a natur...