should connect the forgetfulness thus indicated with some other characteristics in the writers. So with the number of suicides. If 250 people do, or lately did, annually put an end to themselves in London, the fact, as it thus stands by itself, may be one of importance to the philanthropist and statesman, but it needs bringing into much closer relation with psychological elements if it is to convince us that the actions of men are always instances of inflexible order. In fact, instead of having secured our A and B here in closest intimacy of succession to one another,—to employ the symbolic notation commonly used in works on Inductive Logic to illustrate the causal connection,—we find them separated by a considerable interval; often indeed we merely have an A or a B by
§ 7. Again, another deficiency in such reasoning seems to be the laying undue weight upon the mere regularity or persistency of the statistics. These may lead to very important results, but they are not exactly what is wanted for the purpose of proving anything against the freedom of the will; it is not indeed easy to see what connection this has with such facts as that the annual number of thefts or of suicides remains at pretty nearly the same figure. Statistical uniformity seems to me to establish nothing else, at least directly, in the case of human actions, than it does in that of physical characteristics. Take but one instance, that of the misdirected letters. We were already aware that the height, weight, chest measurement, and so on, of a large number of persons preserved a tolerably regular average amidst innumerable deflections, and we were prepared by analogy to anticipate the same regularity in their mental characteristics. All that we gain, by counting the numbers of letters which are posted without addresses, is a certain amount of direct evidence that this is the case. Just as observations of the former kind had already shown that statistics of the strength and stature of the human body grouped themselves about a mean, so do those of the latter that a similar state of things prevails in respect of the readiness and general trustworthiness of the memory. The evidence is not so direct and conclusive in the latter case, for the memory is not singled out and subjected to measurement by itself, but is taken in combination with innumerable other influencing circumstances. Still there can be little doubt that the statistics tell on the whole in this direction, and that by duly varying and extending them they may obtain considerable probative force.
The fact is that Probability has nothing more to do with Natural Theology, either in its favour or against it, than the
general principles of Logic or Induction have. It is simply a body of rules for drawing inferences about classes of events which are distinguished by a certain quality. The believer in a Deity will, by the study of nature, be led to form an opinion about His works, and so to a certain extent about His attributes. But it is surely unreasonable to propose that he should abandon his belief because the sequence of events,—not, observe, their general tendency towards happiness or misery, good or evil,—is brought about in a way different from what he had expected; whether it be by displaying order where he had expected irregularity, or by involving the machinery of secondary causes where he had expected immediate agency.
§ 8. It is both amusing and instructive to consider what very different feelings might have been excited in our minds by this co-existence of, what may be called, ignorance of individuals and knowledge of aggregates, if they had presented themselves to our observation in a reverse order. Being utterly unable to make assured predictions about a single life, or the conduct of individuals, people are sometimes startled, and occasionally even dismayed, at the unexpected discovery that such predictions can be confidently made when we are speaking of large numbers. And so some are prompted to exclaim, This is denying Providence![** TN: space] it is utter Fatalism! But let us assume, for a moment, that our familiarity with the subject had been