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Mr ELLIS's REMARKS ON THE FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLE 



or (which is the same thing), in what may be called an ideal and practically impossible 

 realization of all which it potentially contains. If this be granted, it seems to follow that the 

 fundamental principle of the theory of probabilities may be regarded as included in the fol- 

 lowing statement ; — " The conception of a genus implies that of numerical relations among 

 the species subordinated to it." 



(2) But in what relation, it may be asked, do these conceptions stand to outward 

 realities ? How can they be made the foundation of a real science, that is, of a science relating 

 to things as they really exist ? We are by such questions led back to what was long the great 

 controversy of philosophy; — I mean the contest between the realists and the nominalists. 

 The former in asserting the reality of universals did not maintain that what we think of when 

 we use a general term is an actually existing thing. Like every one else they admitted, that 

 in one sense nothing can exist but the individual, nevertheless they held that universals are 

 not mere figments of the mind, but that they have a reality of their own which is the founda- 

 tion of the truth of general propositions. To assert therefore that the theory of probabilities 

 has for its foundation a statement touching genera and their species, and is at the same time a 

 real science, is to take a realistic view of its nature. And this I believe is what, on consideration, 

 we cannot avoid doing. 



If it be said that the grouping phenomena together is merely a mental act wholly discon- 

 nected from outward reality and altogether arbitrary, it may be replied that no mental act can 

 be so. Why and how facts and ideas correspond is no doubt one of the great questions of 

 philosophy; but the answer to it is surely to be developed from the consideration, that man in 

 relation to the universe is not spectator ab extra, but in some sort a part of that which he con- 

 templates, and that the rebus avolsa ratio, which is in truth the fundamental postulate of nomi- 

 nalism, is therefore inconcessible. The thoughts we think are, it is true, ours, but so far as they 

 are not mere error and confusion, so far as they have anything of truth and soundness, they are 

 something and much more. The Veritas essendi (to recur to the language of the schoolmen) 

 is the fountain from whence the Veritas cognoscendi is derived. The meaning which these 

 phrases were intended to convey is expressed in more modern language by Leibnitz in the 

 passage which I have cited in the note*. In every science the fact and the idea correspond 

 because the former is the realization of the latter, but as this realization is of necessity partial 

 and incomplete — or rather because in the same fact are simultaneously realized a variety of 

 separate ideas, separate, that is, as we conceive them — this correspondence is but imperfect and 

 approximate. It is only when in thought we remove the action of disturbing causes to an 

 indefinite distance, that we can conceive the absolute verification of any a priori law. Only on 

 the horizon of our mental prospect earth and sky, the fact and the idea, are seen to meet, 

 though in reality the atmosphere is everywhere present. Everywhere it surrounds and inter- 

 penetrates the yfj /xeXaiva on which we stand ; — making it put forth and sustain all the 

 numberless forms of organization and of life. The indefinitely prolonged series of trials, which 

 enters into the ordinary statement of the fundamental principle of the theory of probabilities, 



* C'est Dieu qui est la derniere raison des choses, et la 

 connaissance de Dieu n'est pas moins le principe des sciences, 

 que son essence et sa volonte" sont les principes des etres. 



[Erdmann, p. 106]. A little further on he adds : Celt sanc- 

 tifier la philosophie, que de faire couler sen ruisseaux de la 

 fontaine des attributs de Dieu. 



