Then there is the additional difficulty that in every inference there are leaps made by each inferer according to his character and training. And the maker does not consider whether the other fellow can make similar leaps or whether his route is different. E. g., when an English philosopher says, “We really ought not to expect that the manufacture of woolens shall be perfected by a nation which knows no astronomy,”--we are likely to say that the sentence is silly; another might say that it is paradoxical and a third that it is quite correct, for what is missing is merely the proposition that the grade of culture made possible by astronomy is such as to require textile proficiency also. “In conversation the simplest case of skipping is where the conclusion is drawn directly from the minor premise. But many other inferences are omitted, as in the case of real thinking. In giving information there is review of the thinking of other people; women and untrained people do not do this, and hence the disconnectedness of their conversation.”[156] In this fact is the danger in examining witnesses, inasmuch as we involuntarily interpolate the missing details in the skipping inferences, but do it according to our own knowledge of the facts. Hence, a test of the correctness of the other man’s inference becomes either quite impossible or is developed coarsely. In the careful observation of leaping inferences made by witnesses--and not merely by women and the uneducated--it will be seen that the inference one might oneself make might either have been different or have proceeded in a different way. If, then, all the premises are tested a different result from that of the witness is obtained. It is well known how identical premises permit of different conclusions by different people. In such inferences certain remarkable things occur which, as a rule, have a given relation to the occupation of the witness. So, e.g., people inclined to mathematics make the greatest leaps, and though these may be comparatively and frequently correct, the danger of mistake is not insignificant when the mathematician deals in his mathematical fashion with unmathematical things.