experienced, in the first instance, in reference to the aggregates instead of the individual lives. It is difficult, perhaps, to carry out such a supposition completely; though we may readily conceive something approaching to it in the case of an ignorant clerk in a Life Assurance Office, who had never thought of life, except as having such a ‘value’ at such an age, and who had hardly estimated it except in the form of averages. Might we not suppose him, in some moment of reflectiveness, being astonished and dismayed at the sudden realization of the utter uncertainty in which the single life is involved? And might not his exclamation in turn be, Why this is denying Providence! It is utter chaos and chance! A belief in a Creator and Administrator of the world is not confined to any particular assumption about the nature of the immediate sequence of events, but those who have been accustomed hitherto to regard the events under one of the aspects above referred to, will often for a time feel at a loss how to connect them with the other.
§ 9. So far we have been touching on a very general question; viz.[ TN: space] the relation of the fundamental postulates of Probability to the conception of Order or Uniformity in the world, physical or moral. The difficulties which thence arise are mainly theological, metaphysical or psychological. What we must now consider are problems of a more detailed or logical character. They are prominently these two; (1) the distinction between chance arrangement and causal arrangement in physical phenomena; and (2) the distinction between chance arrangement and designed arrangement where we are supposed to be contemplating rational agency as acting on one side at least.
II. The first of these questions raises the antithesis between chance and causation, not as a general characteristic pervading all phenomena, but in reference to some specified occurrence:—Is this a case of chance or not? The most strenuous supporters of the universal prevalence of causation and order admit that the question is a relevant one, and they must therefore be supposed to have some rule for testing the answers to it.
Suppose, for instance, a man is seized with a fit in a house where he has gone to dine, and dies there; and some
one remarks that that was the very house in which he was born. We begin to wonder if this was an odd coincidence and nothing more. But if our informant goes on to tell us that the house was an old family one, and was occupied by the brother of the deceased, we should feel at once that these facts put the matter in a rather different light. Or again, as Cournot suggests, if we hear that two brothers have been killed in battle on the same day, it makes a great difference in our estimation of the case whether they were killed fighting in the same engagement or whether one fell in the north of France and the other in the south. The latter we should at once class with mere coincidences, whereas the former might admit of explanation.
§ 10. The problem, as thus conceived, seems to be one rather of Inductive Logic than of Probability, because there is not the slightest attempt to calculate chances. But it deserves some notice here. Of course no accurate thinker who was under the sway of modern physical notions would for a moment doubt that each of the two elements in question had its own ‘cause’ behind it, from which (assuming perfect knowledge) it might have been confidently inferred. No more would he doubt, I apprehend, that if we could take a sufficiently minute and comprehensive view, and penetrate sufficiently far back into the past, we should reach a stage at which (again assuming perfect knowledge) the co-existence of the two events could equally have been foreseen. The employment of the word casual therefore does not imply any rejection of a cause; but it does nevertheless