The Logic Of Chance Author:John Venn Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE LOGIC OF CHANCE. CHAPTER I. ON CERTAIN KINDS OF GROUPS OR SERIES AS THE FOUNDATION OF PROBABILITY. ) 1. It is sometimes not easy to give a clear de... more »finition of a cience at the outset, so as to set its scope and province before he reader in a few words. In the case of those sciences rhich are more immediately and directly concerned with rhat are termed objects, rather than with what are termed rocesses, this difficulty is not indeed so serious. If the eader is already familiar with the objects, a simple reference i them will give him a tolerably accurate idea of the irection and nature of his studies. Even if he be not uniliar with them, they will still be often to some extent ffinected and associated in his mind by a name, and le mere utterance of the name may thus convey a fair nount of preliminary information. This is more or less le case with many of the natural sciences; we can often '11 the reader beforehand exactly what he is going to study. at when a science is concerned, not so much with objects rectly, as with processes and laws, or when it takes for the ibject of its enquiry some comparatively obscure feature 'awn from phenomena which have little or nothing else in ramon, the difficulty of giving preliminary information tcomes greater. Recognized classes of objects have then to be disregarded and even broken up, and an entirely nove arrangement of the objects to be made. In such cases it i the study of the science that first gives the science its unity for till it is studied the objects with which it is conceniet were probably never thought of together. Here a definitioi cannot be given at the outset, and the process of obtaining i may become by comparison somewhat laborious. The science of Probability, at least on the view taken o it in the following pag...« less