United States or Tunisia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He did not stop to weigh probabilities; he forgot how little likely a young foreign seminarist would be to hear news of an accident in Scotland; he felt foolishly certain that his name as that of the man who had killed his brother must be known to all the world!
A manifesting "spirit" may be exactly what it professes to be, but on the whole the probabilities are that it is nothing of the kind; and for the ordinary sitter there is absolutely no means of distinguishing the true from the false, since the extent to which a being having all the resources of the astral plane at his command can delude a person on the physical plane is so great that no reliance can be placed even on what seems the most convincing proof.
Two minutes to midnight; the most respectable flat in respectable Westminster; a lonely and very abstracted novelist and a pale-faced, beautiful woman, enveloped in costly furs, sitting staring with fearful eyes straight before her. This was such a scene as his sense of the proprieties and of the probabilities could never have permitted Henry Leroux to create.
"Don't stand up," he whispered, fearing that some of his companions would rise to their feet in their excitement. There was a possibility that the fugitives had not been detected, though the probabilities were against such a hopeful fact.
He has all along said that he believed you would turn up one of these days, for as the weather was fine and the sea fairly calm when you were run down, the probabilities in favor of your being picked up were great, especially as you were such a good swimmer. I am sure he will be delighted to hear of your return."
"You said that we must look for Tremorel in Paris," he remarked. "And I said truly," responded M. Lecoq in a calmer tone. "I have come to the conclusion that here, perhaps within two streets of us, perhaps in the next house, the fugitives are hid. But let's go on with our calculation of probabilities.
But in politics we must not trouble ourselves with exceedingly exceptional accidents; it is quite difficult enough to count on and provide for the regular and plain probabilities. To speak mathematically, we may easily miss the permanent course of the political curve if we engross our minds with its cusps and conjugate points.
"You well know, gentlemen, that where positive evidence of any supposed fact cannot be produced, our judgments must be decided by the balance of probabilities; and it is for this reason that the study of probabilities, and the power of comparing them, has, in a late celebrated essay, been called the Science of Judges.
So that, were a trans-Neptunian planet discovered, we should be fully prepared to find it rotating, and surrounded by satellites circulating from east to west. The uniformity of movement, upon the probabilities connected with which the French geometer mainly based his scheme, thus at once vanishes. The excessively rapid revolution of the inner Martian moon is a further stumbling-block.
But let any one consider how infinitely numerous and various are the circumstances which either directly or indirectly do or may influence the amount of the national wealth, and then ask himself what are the probabilities that in the longest revolution of ages two nations will be found, which agree, and can be shown to agree, in all those circumstances except one?
Word Of The Day