Page:Logic of Chance (1888).djvu/31



§ 1. is sometimes not easy to give a clear definition of a science at the outset, so as to set its scope and province before the reader in a few words. In the case of those sciences which are more immediately and directly concerned with what are termed objects, rather than with what are termed processes, this difficulty is not indeed so serious. If the reader is already familiar with the objects, a simple reference to them will give him a tolerably accurate idea of the direction and nature of his studies. Even if he be not familiar with them, they will still be often to some extent connected and associated in his mind by a name, and the mere utterance of the name may thus convey a fair amount of preliminary information. This is more or less the case with many of the natural sciences; we can often tell the reader beforehand exactly what he is going to study. But when a science is concerned, not so much with objects directly, as with processes and laws, or when it takes for the subject of its enquiry some comparatively obscure feature drawn from phenomena which have little or nothing else in common, the difficulty of giving preliminary information becomes greater. Recognized classes of objects have then