The Cream of the Jest by James Branch Cabell

These ironies Kennaston witnessed among many others, as he read in this or that chance-opened page from the past. Everywhere, it seemed to him, men had labored blindly, at flat odds with rationality, and had achieved everything of note by accident. Everywhere he saw reason to echo the cry of Maugis d'Aigremont -- "It is very strange how affairs fall out in this world of ours, so that a man may discern no plan or purpose anywhere."

Here was the astounding fact: the race did go forward; the race did achieve; and in every way the race grew better. Progress through irrational and astounding blunders, whose outrageousness bedwarfed the wildest clichés of romance, was what Kennaston found everywhere. All this, then, also was foreplanned, just as all happenings at Storisende had been, in his puny romance; and the puppets here, too, moved as they thought of their own volition, but really in order to serve a dénouement in which many of them had not any personal part or interest.