enough to point out tolerably clearly the kind of things with which we have to deal, but it is not sufficiently definite for purposes of accurate thought. We must therefore attempt a somewhat closer analysis.
There are certain phrases so commonly adopted as to have become part of the technical vocabulary of the subject, such as an ‘event’ and the ‘way in which it can happen.’ Thus the act of throwing a penny would be called an event, and the fact of its giving head or tail would be called the way in which the event happened. If we were discussing tables of mortality, the former term would denote the mere fact of death, the latter the age at which it occurred, or the way in which it was brought about, or whatever else in it might be the particular circumstance under discussion. This phraseology is very convenient, and will often be made use of in this work, but without explanation it may lead to confusion. For in many cases the way in which the event happens is of such great relative importance, that according as it happens in one way or another the event would have a different name; in other words, it would not in the two cases be nominally the same event. The phrase therefore will have to be considerably stretched before it will conveniently cover all the cases to which we may have to apply it. If for instance we were contemplating a series of human beings, male and female, it would sound odd to call their humanity an event, and their sex the way in which the event happened.
If we recur however to any of the classes of objects already referred to, we may see our path towards obtaining a more accurate conception of what we want. It will easily be seen that in every one of them there is a mixture of similarity and dissimilarity; there is a series of events which have a certain number of features or attributes in
