420 Credibility of Extraordinary Stories. [CHAP. xvn. 



cases, but they cannot lay claim to any generality. Even 

 the notion of a contest, as any necessary ingredient in the 

 case, must be laid aside. For let us refer again to the way 

 in which the perplexity arises, and we shall readily see, as 

 has just been remarked, that it is nothing more than a par 

 ticular exemplification of a difficulty which has already been 

 recognized as incapable of solution by any general a priori 

 method of treatment. All that we are supposed to have before 

 us is a statement. On this occasion it is made by a witness 

 who lies, say, once in ten times in the long run ; that is, who 

 mostly tells the truth. But on the other hand, it is a state 

 ment which experience, derived from a variety of witnesses on 

 various occasions, assures us is mostly false ; stated numerically 

 it is found, let us suppose, to be false 99 times in a hundred. 

 Now, as was shown in the chapter on Induction, we are 

 thus brought to a complete dead lock. Our science offers no 

 principles by which we can form an opinion, or attempt to 

 decide the matter one way or the other; for, as we found, 

 there are an indefinite number of conclusions which are all 

 equally possible. For instance, all the witness extraordinary 

 assertions may be true, or they may all be false, or they may 

 be divided into the true and the false in any proportion 

 whatever. Having gone so far in our appeal to statistics as 

 to recognize that the witness is generally right, but that his 

 story is generally false, we cannot stop there. We ought to 

 make still further appeal to experience, and ascertain how it 

 stands with regard to his stories when they are of that 

 particular nature: or rather, for this would be to make a 

 needlessly narrow reference, how it stands with regard to 

 stories of that kind when advanced by witnesses of his- 

 general character, position, sympathies, and so on 1 . 



1 Considerations of this kind have mathematical treatment of the sub- 

 indeed been introduced into the ject. The common algebraical solu- 



