alternative, nay it may be much less likely. In these latter cases, for instance, if the chances are very much against the man's death, it is surely an abuse of language to speak of the ‘fact’ of his dying, even though we qualify it by declaring it to be highly improbable. The subject-matter essential to Probability being the uncertain, we can never with propriety employ upon it language which in its original and correct application is only appropriate to what is actually or approximately certain.
§ 8. It should be remembered also that this state of things, thus characteristic of Probability, is permanent there. So long as they remain under the treatment of that science our conjectures, or whatever we like to call them, never develop into facts. I calculate, for instance, the chance that a die will give ace, or that a man will live beyond a certain age. Such an approximation to knowledge as is thus acquired is as much as we can ever afterwards hope to get,
unless we resort to other methods of enquiry. We do not, as in Induction, feel ourselves on the brink of some experimental or other proof which at any moment may raise it into certainty. It is nothing but a conjecture of a certain degree of strength, and such it will ever remain, so long as Probability is left to deal with it. If anything more is ever to be made out of it we must appeal to direct experience, or to some kind of inductive proof. As we have so often said, individual facts can never be determined here, but merely ultimate tendencies and averages of many events. I may, indeed, by a second appeal to Probability improve the character of my conjecture, through being able to refer it to a narrower and better class of statistics; but its essential nature remains throughout what it was.
It appears to me therefore that the account of the Materialist view of logic indicated at the commencement of this chapter, though substantially sound, needs some slight reconsideration and re-statement. It answers admirably so far as ordinary Induction is concerned, but needs some revision if it is to be equally applicable to that wider view of the nature and processes of acquiring knowledge wherein the science of logic is considered to involve Probability also as well as Induction.
§ 9. Briefly then it is this. We regard the scientific thinker, whether he be the original investigator who discovers, or the logician who analyses and describes the proofs that may be offered, as surrounded by a world of objective phenomena extending indefinitely both ways in time, and in every direction in space. Most of them are, and always will remain, unknown. If we speak of them as facts we mean that they are potential objects of human knowledge, that under appropriate circumstances men could come to determinate and final agreement about them. The scientific or
material logician has to superintend the process of converting as much as possible of these unknown phenomena into what are known, of aggregating them, as we have said above, about the nucleus of certain data which experience and observation had to start with. In so doing his principal resources are the Methods of Induction, of which something has been said in a former chapter; another resource is found in the Theory of Probability, and another in Deduction.
Now, however such language may be objected to as savouring of Conceptualism, I can see no better compendious way of describing these processes than by saying that we are engaged in getting at conceptions of these external phenomena, and as far as possible converting these conceptions into facts. What is the natural history of ‘facts’ if we trace them back to their origin? They first come into being as mere guesses or conjectures, as contemplated possibilities whose correspondence with reality is either altogether disbelieved or regarded as entirely doubtful. In this stage, of course, their contrast with facts is sharp enough. How they