Page:Logic of Chance (1888).djvu/8

viii make it their special occupation, but its general principles are sure to be cramped if it is not exposed occasionally to the free criticism of those whose main culture has been of a more general character. Probability has been very much abandoned to mathematicians, who as mathematicians have generally been unwilling to treat it thoroughly. They have worked out its results, it is true, with wonderful acuteness, and the greatest ingenuity has been shown in solving various problems that arose, and deducing subordinate rules. And this was all that they could in fairness be expected to do. Any subject which has been discussed by such men as Laplace and Poisson, and on which they have exhausted all their powers of analysis, could not fail to be profoundly treated, so far as it fell within their province. But from this province the real principles of the science have generally been excluded, or so meagrely discussed that they had better have been omitted altogether. Treating the subject as mathematicians such writers have naturally taken it up at the point where their mathematics would best come into play, and that of course has not been at the foundations. In the works of most writers upon the subject we should search in vain for anything like a critical discussion of the fundamental principles upon which its rules rest, the class of enquiries to which it is most properly applicable, or the relation it bears to Logic and the general rules of inductive evidence.

This want of precision as to ultimate principles is perfectly compatible here, as it is in the departments of Morals and Politics, with a general agreement on processes and results. But it is, to say the least, unphilosophical, and denotes a state of things in which positive error is always liable to arise whenever the process of controversy forces us to appeal to the foundations of the science.