SECT. 8.] Chance, Causation, and Design. 243 



general principles of Logic or Induction have. It is simply a 

 body of rules for drawing inferences about classes~oT events 

 wnlch are distinguished by a certain quality. The believer 

 in a Deity will, by the study of nature, be led to form an 

 opinion about His works, and so to a certain extent about 

 His attributes. But it is surely unreasonable to propose 

 that he should abandon his belief because the sequence of 

 events, not, observe, their general tendency towards happi 

 ness or misery, good or evil, is brought about in a way 

 different from what he had expected ; whether it be by dis 

 playing order where he had expected irregularity, or by 

 involving the machinery of secondary causes where he had 

 expected immediate agency. 



8. It is both amusing and instructive to consider 

 what very different feelings might have been excited in our 

 minds by this co-existence of, what may be called, ignorance 

 of individuals and knowledge of aggregates, if they had pre 

 sented themselves to our observation in a reverse order. 

 Being utterly unable to make assured predictions about a 

 .single life, or the conduct of individuals, people are some 

 times startled, and occasionally even dismayed, at the un 

 expected discovery that such predictions can be confidently 

 made when we are speaking of large numbers. And so 

 some are prompted to exclaim, This is denying Providence ! 

 it is utter Fatalism ! But let us assume, for a moment, that 

 our familiarity with the subject had been experienced, in the 

 first instance, in reference to the aggregates instead of the 

 individual lives. It is difficult, perhaps, to carry out such a 

 supposition completely; though we may readily conceive 

 something approaching to it in the case of an ignorant clerk 

 in a Life Assurance Office, who had never thought of life, ex 

 cept as having such a value at such an age, and who had 

 hardly estimated it except in the form of averages. Might 



162 



