that might be offered. What some persons strenuously assert, others as strenuously deny, and whatever hope there may be of speedy agreement in the case of physical phenomena, experience shows that there is not much prospect of this in the case of those which are moral and historical, to say nothing of theological. So long as those who are in agreement confine their intercourse to themselves, their ‘facts’ are accepted as such, but as soon as they come to communicate with others all distinction between fact and conception is lost at once, the ‘facts’ of one party being mere groundless ‘conceptions’ to their opponents. There is therefore, I think, in these cases a real difficulty in carrying out distinctly and consistently the account which the Materialist logician offers as to the reference of names. It need hardly be pointed out that what thus applies to names or terms applies equally to propositions in which particular or general statements are made involving names.
§ 6. But when we step into Probability, and treat this from the same material or Phenomenal point of view, we can no longer neglect the question which is thus presented to us. The difficulty cannot here be rejected, as referring to what is merely temporary or occasional. The intermediate condition between conjecture and fact, so far from being temporary
or occasional only, is here normal. It is just the condition which is specially characteristic of Probability. Hence it follows that however decidedly we may reject the Conceptualist theory we cannot altogether reject the use of Conceptualist language. If we can prove that a given man will die next year, or attain sufficiently near to proof to leave us practically certain on the point, we may speak of his death as a (future) fact. But if we merely contemplate his death as probable? This is the sort of inference, or substitute for inference, with which Probability is specially concerned. We may, if we so please, speak of ‘probable facts,’ but if we examine the meaning of the words we may find them not merely obscure, but self-contradictory. Doubtless there are facts here, in the fullest sense of the term, namely the statistics upon which our opinion is ultimately based, for these are known and admitted by all who have looked into the matter. The same language may also be applied to that extension of these statistics by induction which is involved in the assertion that similar statistics will be found to prevail elsewhere, for these also may rightfully claim universal acceptance. But these statements, as was abundantly shown in the earlier chapters, stand on a very different footing from a statement concerning the individual event; the establishment and discussion of the former belong by rights to Induction, and only the latter to Probability.
§ 7. It is true that for want of appropriate terms to express such things we are often induced, indeed compelled, to apply the same name of ‘facts’ to such individual contingencies. We should not, for instance, hesitate to speak of the fact of the man dying being probable, possible, unlikely, or whatever it might be. But I cannot help regarding such expressions as a strictly incorrect usage arising out of a deficiency of appropriate technical terms. It is doubtless certain that one or other of the two alternatives must happen, but this alternative certainty is not the subject of our contemplation; what we have before us is the single alternative, which is notoriously uncertain. It is this, and this only, which is at present under notice, and whose occurrence has to be estimated. We have surely no right to dignify this with the name of a fact, under any qualifications, when the opposite alternative has claims, not perhaps actually equal to, but at any rate not much inferior to its own. Such language, as already remarked, may be quite right in Inductive logic, where we are only concerned with conjectures of such a high degree of likelihood that their non-occurrence need not be taken into practical account, and which are moreover regarded as merely temporary. But in Probability the conjecture may have any degree of likelihood about it; it may be just as likely as the other