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38 these assumptions, and therefore something resembling the consequences which follow from them, is really secured in a very great number of cases. But although this may prevail approximately, it is in the highest degree improbable that it could ever be secured, even artificially, with anything approaching to rigid accuracy. For one thing, the causes of deflection will seldom or never be really independent of one another. Some of them will generally be of a kind such that the supposition that several are swaying in one direction, may affect the capacity of each to produce that full effect which it would have been capable of if it had been left to do its work alone. In the common example, for instance, of firing at a mark, so long as we consider the case of the tolerably good shots the effect of the wind (one of the causes of error) will be approximately the same whatever may be the precise direction of the bullet. But when a shot is considerably wide of the mark the wind can no longer be regarded as acting at right angles to the line of flight, and its effect in consequence will not be precisely the same as before. In other words, the causes here are not strictly independent, as they were assumed to be; and consequently the results to be attributed to each are not absolutely uninfluenced by those of the others. Doubtless the effect is trifling here, but I apprehend that if we were carefully to scrutinize the modes in which the several elements of the total cause conspire together, we should find that the assumption of absolute independence was hazardous, not to say unwarrantable, in a very great number of cases. These brief remarks upon the process by which the deflections are brought about must suffice for the present purpose, as the subject will receive a fuller investigation in the course of the next chapter.

According, therefore, to the best consideration which can at the present stage be afforded to this subject, we may