For the purpose with which this illustration was proposed, viz.[** TN: space] the graphical display of the succession of digits in any one of the incommensurable constants of arithmetic or geometry, the above may suffice. After actually testing some of them in this way they seem to me, so far as the eye, or the theoretical principles to be presently mentioned, are any guide, to answer quite fairly to the description of randomness.
§ 16. As we are on the subject, however, it seems worth going farther by enquiring how near we could get to the ideal of randomness of direction. To carry this out completely two improvements must be made. For one thing, instead of confining ourselves to eight directions we must admit an infinite number. This would offer no great difficulty; for instead of employing a small number of digits we should merely have to use some kind of circular teetotum which would rest indifferently in any direction. But in the next place instead of short finite steps we must suppose them indefinitely short. It is here that the actual unattainability makes itself felt. We are familiar enough with the device, employed by Newton, of passing from the discontinuous polygon to the continuous curve. But we can resort to this
device because the ideal, viz.[** TN: space] the curve, is as easily drawn (and, I should say, as easily conceived or pictured) as any of the steps which lead us towards it. But in the case before us it is otherwise. The line in question will remain discontinuous, or rather angular, to the last: for its angles do not tend even to lose their sharpness, though the fragments which compose them increase in number and diminish in magnitude without any limit. And such an ideal is not conceivable as an ideal. It is as if we had a rough body under the microscope, and found that as we subjected it to higher and higher powers there was no tendency for the angles to round themselves off. Our ‘random line’ must remain as ‘spiky’ as ever, though the size of its spikes of course diminishes without any limit.
The case therefore seems to be this. It is easy, in words, to indicate the conception by speaking of a line which at every instant is as likely to take one direction as another. It is easy moreover to draw such a line with any degree of minuteness which we choose to demand. But it is not possible to conceive or picture the line in its ultimate form.[6] There is in fact no ‘limit’ here, intelligible to the understanding or picturable by the imagination (corresponding to the asymptote of a curve, or the continuous curve to the incessantly developing polygon), towards which we find ourselves continually approaching, and which therefore we are apt to conceive ourselves as ultimately attaining. The usual assumption therefore which underlies the Newtonian infinitesimal geometry and the Differential Calculus, ceases to apply here.
§ 17. If we like to consider such a line in one of its approximate stages, as above indicated, it seems to me that
some of the usual theorems of Probability, where large numbers are concerned, may safely be applied. If it be asked, for instance, whether such a line will ultimately tend to stray indefinitely far from its starting point, Bernoulli's ‘Law of Large Numbers’ may be appealed to, in virtue of which we should say that it was excessively unlikely that its divergence should be relatively great. Recur to our graphical illustration, and consider first the resultant deviation of the point (after a great many steps) right or left of the vertical line through the starting point. Of the eight admissible motions at each stage two will not affect this relative position, whilst the other six are equally likely to move us a step to the right or to the left. Our resultant ‘drift’ therefore to the right or left will be analogous to the resultant difference between the number of heads and tails after a great many tosses of a penny. Now the well-known outcome of such a number of tosses is that ultimately the proportional approximation to the à priori probability, i.e.[ TN: space] to equality of heads and tails, is more and more nearly carried out, but that the absolute deflection is more and more widely displayed.