184 ESSAY ON THE RATIONALE OF 



the acts of others relative to the affair that come to his knowledge 

 and may influence him — his friendships and enmities — ^his promises, 

 his threats, the truth of his discourses, the falsehood of his apologies, 

 pretences, and explanations — his looks, his speech, his silence where 

 he was called to speak — every thing which tends to establish the 

 connection between all these particulars, every circumstance, prece- . 

 dent, concomitant, and subsequent, become parts of circumstantial 

 evidence. These are in their matter infinite, and cannot be com- 

 prehended within any rules or brought under any classification."* 



All of these facts and circumstances are, however, susceptible of 

 a general, though not of a perfect, arrangement under two classes ; 

 namely, moral indications afforded by the language and conduct of 

 the party, and secondly, facts which may be termed, for want of a 

 more appropriate terra, abstract facts — that is, facts apparently ex- 

 trinsic and independent of moral conduct. This arrangement, 

 indefinite as it is, is grounded upon the apparent rather than 

 the real qualities of actions, and cannot be regarded as strictly accu- 

 rate, since all the actions of a rational agent are prompted by mo- 

 tives, though it be not always practicable to trace the connection 

 between them. 



These great divisions are capable of reduction to subdivisions, 

 every one of which may be made the centre of an assemblage of 

 curious and instructive cases, many of them of the most extraordi- 

 nary and tragic interest. But, ample as are my materials, on this 

 occasion I can do no more than thus briefly advert to the practica- 

 bility of such an arrangement and classification. 



It is obvious, that, in all questions of moral evidence, where we 

 seek for the hidden cause of observed phenomena, we impliedly or 

 expressly assume and refer to a standard of probability, both as re- 

 spects physical and phsychological facts. I need not remark upon the 

 difference between mathematical and moral probability, nor observe 

 that moral probability does not imply any deficiency in the proof, 

 but only marks the particular nature of that proof, as contradistin- 

 guished from another species of proof. t — Moral probability is the 

 accordance of facts which we receive upon testimony, with other 

 facts with which we are previously acquainted.;}: It would ob- 

 viously be most erroneous and unsafe to be influenced in our recep- 

 tion of facts, solely by the results of our own observation and 



" Burke's Works, vol. ii., p. 623. 



•f Stewart's Elements of the Phihsoj)hy of the Human Mind, vol. ii., p. 252. 



X Abercrombie, On the Intellectual Powers, p. 74. 



