treating this element as one of primary importance, no further allusion will be made to it here, but we will pass on at once to a more minute investigation of that distinctive characteristic of certain classes of things which was introduced to notice in the last section.
In these classes of things, which are those with which Probability is concerned, the fundamental conception which the reader has to fix in his mind as clearly as possible, is, I take it, that of a series. But it is a series of a peculiar kind, one of which no better compendious description can be given than that which is contained in the statement that it combines individual irregularity with aggregate regularity. This is a statement which will probably need some explanation. Let us recur to an example of the kind already alluded to, selecting one which shall be in accordance with experience. Some children will not live to thirty. Now if this proposition is to be regarded as a purely indefinite or, as it would be termed in logic, ‘particular’ proposition, no doubt the notion of a series does not obviously present itself in connection with it. It contains a statement about a certain unknown proportion of the whole, and that is all. But it is not with these purely indefinite propositions that we shall be concerned. Let us suppose the statement, on the contrary, to be of a numerical character, and to refer to a given proportion of the whole, and we shall then find it difficult to exclude the notion of a series. We shall find it, I think, impossible to do so as soon as we set before us the aim of obtaining accurate, or even moderately correct inferences. What, for instance, is the meaning of the statement that two new-born children in three fail to attain the age of sixty-three? It certainly does not declare that in any given batch of, say, thirty, we shall find just twenty that fail: whatever might be the strict meaning of the words, this
