ON THE UNCERTAINTY OF CONCLUSIONS. 
3 
Nothing can be more simple or more satisfactory than 
this account of the affair, and yet nothing is more natural 
than that he should be accused of the crime and brought to 
trial. The evidence against him was convincing and it was 
all absolutely true. It was not strange, therefore, that his 
conviction and imprisonment should follow. 
It will doubtless appear to many that the foregoing is too 
closely allied to the sensational to serve fitly as an introduc¬ 
tion to an address prepared for a society of philosophers, and 
I am ready to acknowledge the apparent validity of the crit¬ 
icism. I am led to its selection, however, because it is an 
account of an actual occurrence, which illustrates in a man¬ 
ner not to be misunderstood a not unrecognized proposition 
to a brief exposition and partial development of which I ask 
your attention this evening. This proposition is that in the 
treatment of many questions with which we are confronted in this 
ivorId our premises may be absolutely true and our logical pro¬ 
cesses apparently unassailable and yet our conclusions very much 
in error. 
No department of human knowledge or region of mental 
activity will fail to yield ample illustration and proof of this 
proposition. An astonishingly large number of debatable 
questions present themselves to the human intellect. Many 
of them are conceded to be of such a nature that differences 
of opinion concerning them must continue, perhaps, indefi¬ 
nitely. 
But there is a very large and a very important class of 
problems, the solution of which is apparently not impossible 
and often seemingly easy, regarding which the most diverse 
views are most persistently held by persons not differing 
greatly in intelligence or intellectual training. 
Men whose business is to weigh evidence and to reach cor¬ 
rect conclusions in spite of inadequacy of information and 
perversion of logic constitute no exception to this statement, 
but, on the contrary, furnish many of its most notable illus¬ 
trations. 
Many of the questions which present themselves to our 
