birth in 5500 the mother was of the age of 50 or upwards. This does not quite assign the degree of what may be called the à priori chance against the occurrence of a birth at that age, because the fact of having commenced a family at an early age represents some diminution of the probability of continuing it into later life. But it serves to give some indication of what may be called the
It need not be remarked that any such clues as these to the measure of judicial certainty are far too slight to be of any real value. They only deserve passing notice as a possible logical solution of the problem in question, or rather as
an indication of the mode in which, in theory, such a solution would have to be sought, were the English law, on those subjects, a perfectly consistent scheme of scientific evidence. This is the mode in which one would, under those circumstances, attempt to extract from its proceedings an admission of the exact measure of that standard of certainty which it adopted, but which it declined openly to enunciate.
1 Formal Logic, p. 232.
2 This appears to be the purport of some statements in a very confused passage in Whately's Logic (Bk. II., ch. IV.[ TN: space] § 1). “A modal proposition may be stated as a pure one by attaching the mode to one of the terms, and the proposition will in all respects fall under the foregoing rules;… ‘It is probable that all knowledge is useful;’ ‘probably useful’ is here the predicate.” He draws apparently no such distinction as that between the true and false modality referred to in the next note. What is really surprising is that even Hamilton puts the two (the true and the false modality) upon the same footing. “In regard to these [the former] the case is precisely the same; the mode is merely a part of the predicate.” Logic, I. 257.
3 I allude of course to such examples as ‘A killed B unjustly,’ in which the