Guess

“ That one which is based on sound scientific knowledge is sure to have a corresponding value; and that which is a mere hasty random guess is likely to have but little value. Every great step in our progress in discovering causes has been made in exactly the same way as that which I have detailed to you. ”

“ At least that is what it would be like if your guesses were accurate, not only in their statement, but also in their proportion, and also in their order. It is millions to one that your guesses are nothing of the kind. ”

“ In common phrase, they all are guesses which have at first but little value, and only attain importance in proportion as they are verified by long-continued criticism, which has for its object to see whether the facts accord with the theory. ”

“ I have met many women who were in the habit of coming to conclusions that were altogether ridiculous and illogical; but they were conclusions—drawn from insufficient data—and not guesses. No sane human being regulates—or does not regulate—its life, as we are supposed to do, by a series of vague and uncontrolled guesses. ”

“ Finding the minor premise is a matter of observation, and if you fail to observe the significant fact about the problem, the really useful major premise may lie dormant, known and retained but not recalled, while false clues suggest inapplicable major premises and give birth to plenty of reasoning but all to no purpose. Some persons with abundant knowledge are ineffective reasoners from lack of a sense for probability. The efficient reasoner must be a good guesser. ”

“ Fertility of imagination and abundance of guesses at truth are among the first requisites of discovery; but the erroneous guesses must be many times as numerous as those which prove well founded. The weakest analogies, the most whimsical notions, the most apparently absurd theories, may pass through the teeming brain, and no record remain of more than the hundredth part. ”

“ The line of thought proposed is intended to show it probable that any thing which has been or is, might, viewed antecedently to its existence, by an exercise of pure reason, have by possibility been guessed: and on the hypothesis of sufficient keenness and experience, that this idea may be carried even to the future. Any thing, meaning every thing, is a word not used unadvisedly ”

“ All this was very loose guessing, and I don’t pretend it was ingenious or scientific. I wasn’t any kind of Sherlock Holmes. But I have always fancied I had a kind of instinct about questions like this. I don’t know if I can explain myself, but I used to use my brains as far as they went, and after they came to a blank wall I guessed, and I usually found my guesses pretty right. ”

“ Since therefore all knowledge resolves itself into probability, and becomes at last of the same nature with that evidence, which we employ in common life, we must now examine this latter species of reasoning, and see on what foundation it stands. ”

“ We may fairly ask, though, whether, after all this is granted, it pays to spend our time in speculation upon circumstantial evidence, when all our conclusions may possibly be wrong, when they can not possibly be true unless they are put into a general form, and when the presumption in their favor is only a probability at best. Would it not be wise for us to spend all our time in the observation of nature, rather than to devote our energies to the discussion of general problems? ”

“ Why should we want to know the probability that the fact will accord with our conclusion? That implies that we are interested in all possible worlds, and not merely the one in which we find ourselves placed. ”

“ Our assent to the conclusion being grounded on the truth of the premisses, we never could arrive at any knowledge by reasoning, unless something could be known antecedently to all reasoning.
Examples of truths known to us by immediate consciousness, are our own bodily sensations and mental feelings. I know directly, and of my own knowledge, that I was vexed yesterday, or that I am hungry to-day. Examples of truths which we know only by way of inference, are occurrences which took place while we were absent, the events recorded in history, or the theorems of mathematics. ”

“ In almost every case where we are called upon to form a judgment, and to act upon it, the premises are so uncertain, the conditions of the problem so numerous and so little known, and its relations to other things admit of so much variation, that our conclusion can be nothing but a probability ”

“ It is by such appeals to facts that all analogous superstitions, even in our day, attempt to justify themselves; the supposed evidence of experience is necessary to their hold on the mind. I quite admit that the influence of such coincidences would not be what it is, if strength were not lent to it by an antecedent presumption; but this is not peculiar to such cases; preconceived notions of probability form part of the explanation of many other cases of belief on insufficient evidence. ”

“ Does not an account of thinking, basing itself on modern scientific procedure, demand a statement in which all the distinctions and terms of thought—judgment, concept, inference, subject, predicate, and copula of judgment, etc., ad infinitum—shall be interpreted simply and entirely as distinctive functions or divisions of labor within the doubt-inquiry process? ”

“ When therefore we see other creatures, in millions of instances, perform like actions, and direct them to like ends, all our principles of reason and probability carry us with an invincible force to believe the existence of a like cause. ”

“ Every assertion concerning Things, whether in concrete or in abstract language, is an assertion that some fact, or group of facts, has been, is, or may be expected to be, found, wherever a certain other fact, or group of facts, is found. Belief in this, is therefore either remembrance that we did have, or expectation that we shall have, or a belief of the same nature with expectation that in 418 some given circumstances we should have, or should have had, direct perception of a particular fact. ”

“ What hypothesis, if any, do you oppose to our own thesis as to this complete and individual, this teleological constitution of the realm of Being, which we have asserted as our Fourth Conception. What is it that you doubt? And what alternative would be true if your doubt were well founded? Hesitate not to give your doubt all possible precision. Philosophy lives upon the comprehension of the meaning of its own doubts. ”

“ Observation extends only to the sensations by which we recognize objects; but the propositions which we make use of, either in science or in common life, relate mostly to the objects themselves. In every act of what is called observation, there is at least one inference—from the sensations to the presence of the object ”

“ In such noble and sublime studies as these, 'tis a glory to arrive at probability, and the search itself rewards the pains. But there are many degrees of probable, some nearer to the truth than others, in the determining of which lies the chief exercise of our judgment. ”

“ We say of a fact or statement, that it is proved, when we believe its truth by reason of some other fact or statement from which it is said to follow. Most of the propositions, whether affirmative or negative, universal, particular, or singular, which we believe, are not believed on their own evidence, but on the ground of something previously assented to, from which they are said to be inferred. ”

“ I shall venture to affirm as a general proposition which admits of no exception, that the knowledge of this relation is not, in any instance, attained by reasonings a priori; but arises entirely from experience, when we find that any particular objects are constantly conjoined with each other; ... nor can our reason, unassisted by experience, ever draw any inference concerning real existence and matter of fact. ”

“ Of the science, therefore, which expounds the operations of the human understanding in the pursuit of truth, one essential part is the inquiry: What are the facts which are the objects of intuition or consciousness, and what are those which we merely infer? But this inquiry has never been considered a portion of logic. ”

“ Perception being infallible evidence of whatever is really perceived, the error now under consideration can be committed no otherwise than by mistaking for conception what is, in fact, inference. We have formerly shown how intimately the two are blended in almost every thing which is called observation, and still more in every Description. (255) What is actually on any occasion perceived by our senses being so minute in amount, and generally so unimportant a portion of the state of facts which we wish to ascertain or to communicate ”

“ Those philosophers, who have divided human reason into knowledge and probability, and have defin’d the first to be that evidence, which arises from the comparison of ideas, are oblig’d to comprehend all our arguments from causes or effects under the general term of probability. ”

“ We have remark’d, that the conclusion, which we draw from a present object to its absent cause or effect, is never founded on any qualities, which we observe in that object, consider’d in itself, or, in other words, that ‘tis impossible to determine, otherwise than by experience, what will result from any phenomenon, or what has preceded it. ”

“ What to some may appear a high degree of probability, or amount to practical certainty, may to another investigator, perhaps less familiar with {85} the facts in the case, appear of less value and lead him to reject the conclusion entirely. ”

“ As demonstration is subject to the controul of probability, so is probability liable to a new correction by a reflex act of the mind, wherein the nature of our understanding, and our reasoning from the first probability become our objects. ”

“ For, once launched on this line of hypothesis and inference, with a Supreme Governor assumed, and the task thrown upon us of making out what he means us to infer and what we may suppose him to do and to intend, one of us may infer one thing and another of us another, and neither can possibly prove himself to be right or his adversary to be wrong. ”

“ Whilst Psychology explains how the mind goes forward from data to conclusions, Logic takes a conclusion and goes back to the data, inquiring whether those data, together with any other evidence (facts or principles) that can be collected, are of a nature to warrant the conclusion. ”

“ What warrant have we, beyond undemonstrable probability, that the attributes of that portion of matter that can be reached by the senses belong also to all that portion of which the senses can directly teach us nothing? ”

“ This proposition I take to be a mere interpretation of universal experience, a statement in words of what every one is internally convinced of. No one who believed that he knew thoroughly the circumstances of any case, and the characters of the different persons concerned, would hesitate to foretell how all of them would act. Whatever degree of doubt he may in fact feel, arises from the uncertainty whether he really knows the circumstances, or the character of some one or other of the persons, with the degree of accuracy required ”

“ On the other hand, if we add observation to observation without attempting to draw not only certain conclusions but also conjectural views from them, we offend against the very end for which only observations ought to be made. ”

“ If we assume one hypothesis to be true, a hundred others rush in upon the mind, and demand consideration. From every one of these a host of interesting conclusions can be drawn, each suggesting another, until the brain grows weary of action. ”

“ As a rule, when inquiring deliberately into the cause of an event, whether in nature or in history, we first reflect upon the circumstances of the case and compare it with similar ones previously investigated, and so are guided by a preconception more or less definite of 'what to look for,' what the cause is likely to be, that is, by an hypothesis. ”

“ But as ‘tis frequently found, that one observation is contrary to another, and that causes and effects follow not in the same order, of which we have had experience, we are oblig’d to vary our reasoning on, account of this uncertainty, and take into consideration the contrariety of events. ”

“ At any rate we can reason quite as well with hypotheses and probabilities as with absolute truths, and this is in fact what we usually do, whether or not we are aware that our premisses are conditional and hypothetical. ”

“ We should never predicate probabilities except on some degree of actual evidence, or some likelihood of occurrence, falling within the limits, analogically or otherwise, of human observation and experience. ”

“ This general situation of our thought in all those branches of inquiry where, as very often in mathematics, we deal with universal truth, and reason out results about Being, while still viewing Reality as Another than thought, is a situation that stimulates us to manifold inquiries. ”

“ If reasoning be from particulars to particulars, and if it consist in recognizing one fact as a mark of another, or a mark of a mark of another, nothing is required to render reasoning possible, except senses and association ”

“ These inductive conclusions cannot command absolute confidence, like mathematical axioms; but they approach the truth, and gain increasing probability, in proportion as we extend the basis of observed facts on which we build. ”