Annual Address of the President. 
9 
ticular fact or group of facts. It is precisely at such points as these 
that the mathematical theory would be of most service. Moreover, 
that statistics can be interpreted to indicate large tendencies in the 
development of society has long been known, and aside from the diffi- 
culty, often impossibility, of getting reliable statistics, it has been clearly 
realized that incautious inferences from such data may be exceedingly 
misleading. 
Furthermore, it must always be borne in mind that, as to the character 
of the inferences we are to draw from our statistical data, they must be 
in the nature of an evaluation of probabilities, and that individual 
events or facts are in the main trivial. For example, I throw a die; 
each individual throw may be any one of the six faces, but if I continue 
to throw the die, what will be observed is that in the long run — if the 
die is not “loaded” — any particular face, as for example, the ace 1 , will be 
thrown one-sixth of the time. What, then, must be the attitude of the 
historian towards particular events as marking a tendency or as diagnos- 
tic of healthy or degenerative change ? We are here dealing with a case 
of loaded dice; if we consider such facts, disentangled from their emo- 
tional setting, removed from the perspective, under which they pre- 
sented themselves to the national consciousness, they cease to be the living 
tissue from which the social organism is built up and it is here that we 
come upon the main difficulty of the statistical study of social phenomena. 
It is indeed doubtful whether we can ever come to know or adequately 
picture to ourselves the emotional attitude of even contemporaneous peo- 
ples who have been nurtured under widely different traditions from 
our own. We are often astonished and perplexed by their ways of look- 
ing at things — the emotional halo, roseate or sombre, through which they 
see life. The difficulty does hot, of course, end here. We meet it with 
our fellows nurtured under conditions so similar to our own. 
In considering social tendencies, therefore, we have not only the dif- 
ficulty of dealing with peoples alien in time and perhaps race, but we 
have another difficulty which seems to me greater than all the others — 
namely, what may be called the national personality, the composite of 
all the personalities of the people, or as we might call it the statistical 
personality. 
How it would seem that any attempt to arrive by introspection at a 
realization of what this civic or national counsciousness is like^ is out of 
the question. Of how small a part of our own brain activity are we 
really conscious? In the case of an aggregation of individuals consti- 
tuting a society, cooperating in innumerable ways, dominant popular 
ideals can hardly be identical with the diverse motives of its constituent 
elements. 
Thus it would seem probable that the ideal of a people, the statistical 
