24 ESSAY ON PROBABILITIES. 



better deserves to be made a fundamental principle, than 

 an incidental answer to a futile objection. The past 

 contains our grounds of expectation for the future : 

 Why ? Because we cannot help supposing that there 

 were causes which produced the past, and which con- 

 tinue to act. If there be any one to whom this is not 

 a truth, he cannot proceed with us one step. Suppose 

 that 100 drawings out of an urn all give white balls, the 

 presumption is very strong that the 101st will give a 

 white ball also. But if there neither be, nor ever were, 

 some reason why the balls so drawn should be white 

 rather than black, that is, if the event be pure chance, 

 then the 100 drawings afford no presumption whatever 

 that the 101st will be either white or black. So far 

 then as we have yet gone we have the following positive 

 and negative conclusion : 



The theory of probabilities 

 absolutely requires, in its fun- 

 damental principles, the rejec- 

 tion of the notion that pure 

 chance can produce any two 

 events alike ; that is, it pre- 

 sumes causation and order of 

 some kind or other, that is, 

 providence of some kind or 

 other. 



The theory of probabilities, 

 so far as considerations of ab- 

 solute necessity are concerned, 

 neither denies nor asserts, in 

 whole or in part, any thing 

 whatsoever respecting the mo- 

 ral or intellectual character of 

 the providence which it re- 

 quires to be granted. 



From the preceding we may be certain that no con- 

 clusion in any way leading to natural religion, however 

 faint, is tacitly assumed in the premises. If there- 

 fore such a conclusion should follow legitimately, it 

 stands upon a basis of absolute security. This is not 

 often the case in arguments drawn from nature in gene- 

 ral, on account of the mixture of considerations with 

 which the mind is affected by them. When we speak 

 of the vastness, the regularity, and the permanency of 

 the solar system in general, the very immensity of the 

 argument would prevent the mind from being aware whe- 

 ther there was or was not either an appeal to constitutional 

 feeling, distinct from reason, or even an assumption of 

 the question in the manner of deducing it. The cele- 



