because it is not obviously applicable to his case. This influences
the losers as well as the winners; both are absorbed in their own
minute portions of the game, and forget that the law makes distinct
provision for temporary losses and gains, great and small, but is
as indifferent to the times and order of such occurrences as to the
personality of those affected.
The distinction between the individual and the statistical aspect of
a problem may be further illustrated in the much-discussed question
of the differences in brain characteristics of men and women.
When the claimants for woman's equality point to the acknowledged
inability of an anatomist to determine whether a particular brain
belonged to a man or a woman as conclusive evidence of their
contention, they unconsciously assume that the problem is capable
of determination in the individual specimen. A sounder logic would
insure greater caution. The differences in question may be certainly
established and typical, and yet depend upon statistical, not upon
individual data. Give the anatomist a goodly number of fairly
selected brains and tell him that all the women's brains are in
one group, and all the men's brains in another, and he will tell
you which group is feminine, which masculine; and this more than
offsets his failure in the former test. It establishes a statistical
regularity. Individually we may argue that many women of our
acquaintance have larger heads than the men; that the English, are
not taller than the French, because the Frenchmen we have chanced to
meet have been quite as tall as the Englishmen of our acquaintance;
that the laws of chance do not apply to the gaming-table, because
on that basis we should have come out even and not as losers; and
that coincidences cannot explain our strange mental experiences,
because they are altogether too peculiar and too frequent. It is only
in the most complete stages and in the more definite realms that
knowledge becomes applicable accurately and definitely to individual
cases. For the present it is well if, with such abstruse or rather
indefinite material, we can glimpse the statistical regularity of
the entire group of phenomena, trace here and there the possible or
probable application of general principles, and refuse to allow our
opinions to be disarranged by rather startling individual cases. The
explanation of these, however interesting they may be to ourselves
or entertaining to others, is not the test of our knowledge of the
subject.
I pick up a stone, and with a peculiar turn of the hand throw it from
me; probably no student of mechanics can exactly calculate the course
of that projectile,--nor is it worth while. What he can do is to show
what laws are obeyed by ideal projectiles, ideally thrown under ideal
conditions, and how far the more important practical cases tend to
agree with or diverge from these conditions. It is unfair to test his
science by its minute applicability to our special experiences.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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