The Logic of Chance: An Essay on the Foundations and Province of the Theory of Probability, with Especial Reference to Its Logical Bearings and Its Application to Moral and Social Science

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Macmillan, 1876 - Philosophy - 488 pages
 

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Page 13 - Are God and Nature then at strife, That Nature lends such evil dreams So careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single life...
Page 473 - In a given state of society, a certain number of persons must put an end to their own life. This is the general law ; and the special question as to who shall commit the crime depends of course upon special laws ; which, however, in their total action, must obey the large social law to which they are all subordinate.
Page 331 - Conclusive, or, as they are elsewhere termed, imperative or absolute, presumptions of law, are rules determining the quantity of evidence requisite for the support of any particular averment, which is not permitted to be overcome by any proof that the fact is otherwise.
Page 465 - The science of human nature is of this description. It falls far short of the standard of exactness now realized in Astronomy; but there is no reason that it should not be as much a science as Tidology is, or as Astronomy was when its calculations had only mastered the maiu phenomena, but not the perturbations.
Page 225 - It is seldom, if ever, between a consequent and a single antecedent, that this invariable sequence subsists. It is usually between a consequent and the sum of several antecedents; the concurrence of all of them being requisite to produce, that is, to be certain of being followed by, the consequent. In such cases it is very common to single out one only of the antecedents under the denomination of Cause, calling the others merely Conditions.
Page 284 - Caesar, or of any other man. For suppose a number of common facts so and so circumstanced, of which one had no kind of proof, should happen to come into one's thoughts ; every one would, without any possible doubt, conclude them to be false. And the like may be snid of a single common fact.
Page 225 - The cause, then, philosophically speaking, is the sum total of the conditions, positive and negative, taken together; the whole of the contingencies of every description, which being realized, the consequent invariably follows.
Page 255 - The notion that what is of primary importance to the logician in a proposition, is the relation between the two ideas corresponding to the subject and predicate (instead of the relation between the two phenomena which they respectively express), seems to me one of the most fatal errors ever introduced into the philosophy of logic...
Page 234 - Though there be no such thing as chance in the world, our ignorance of the real cause of any event has the same influence on the understanding and begets a like species of belief or opinion.
Page 311 - ... 14. Even after this philosophy began to pass away, the divisions of modality originally founded upon it might have proved, as De Morgan has remarked1, of considerable service in mediaeval times. As he says, people were much more frequently required to decide in one way or the other upon a single testimony, without there being a sufficiency of specific knowledge to test the statements made. The old logician " did not know but that any day of the week might bring from Cathay...

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