SECT. 2.] Fallacies. 33S 



2. (I.) One of the most fertile sources of error and 

 confusion upon the subject has been already several times 

 alluded to, and in part discussed in a previous chapter. 

 This consists in choosing the class to which to refer an 

 event, and therefore judging of the rarity of the event and 

 the consequent improbability of foretelling it, after it lias 

 happened, and then transferring the impressions we expe 

 rience to a supposed contemplation of the event beforehand. 

 The process in itself is perfectly legitimate (however unne 

 cessary it may be), since time does not in strictness enter 

 at all into questions of Probability. No error therefore 

 need arise in this way, if we were careful as to the clas^ 

 which we thus selected; but such carefulness is often neg 

 lected. 



An illustration may afford help here. A man onci 

 pointed to a small target chalked upon a door, the targe 

 having a bullet hole through the centre of it, and surprise( 

 some spectators by declaring that he had fired that sho 

 from an old fowling-piece at a distance of a hundred yards. 

 His statement was true enough, but he suppressed a rather 

 important fact. The shot had really been aimed in a general 

 way at the barn-door, and had hit it; the target was after 

 wards chalked round the spot where the bullet struck. A 

 deception analogous to this is, I think, often practised uncon 

 sciously in other matters. We judge of events on a similar 

 principle, feeling and expressing surprise in an equally un 

 reasonable way, .and deciding as to their occurrence on 

 grounds which are really merely a subsequent adjunct of our 

 own. Butler s remarks about the story of Ca3sar, discussed 

 already in the twelfth chapter, are of this character. He 

 selects a series of events from history, and then imagines a 

 person guessing them correctly who at the time had not the 

 history before him. As I have already pointed out, it is one 



