Few persons, however, would go so far as to interpret it in this sense. All that troubles them is the fear that somehow this general regularity may be found to carry with it causation, certainly in the sense of regular invariable sequence, and probably also with the further association of compulsion. Rejecting the latter association as utterly unphilosophical, I cannot even see that the former consequence can be admitted as really proved, though it doubtless gains some confirmation from this source. 6. The nature of the argument against free-will, drawn from statistics, at least in the form in which it is very commonly expressed, seems to me exceedingly defective. The antecedents and consequents, in the case of our volitions, must clearly be supposed to be very nearly _immediately_ in succession, if anything approaching to causation is to be established: whereas in statistical enquiries the data are often widely separate, if indeed they do not apply merely to single groups of actions or results. For instance, in the case of the misdirected letters, what it is attempted to prove is that each writer was so much the 'victim of circumstances' (to use a common but misleading expression) that he could not have done otherwise than he did under his circumstances. But really no accumulation of figures to prove that the number of such letters remains the same year by year, can have much bearing upon this doctrine, even though they were accompanied by corresponding figures which should connect the forgetfulness thus indicated with some other characteristics in the writers. So with the number of suicides. If 250 people do, or lately did, annually put an end to themselves in London, the fact, as it thus stands by itself, may be one of importance to the philanthropist and statesman, but it needs bringing into much closer relation with psychological elements if it is to convince us that the actions of men are always instances of inflexible order. In fact, instead of having secured our A and B here in closest intimacy of succession to one another,--to employ the symbolic notation commonly used in works on Inductive Logic to illustrate the causal connection,--we find them separated by a considerable interval; often indeed we merely have an A or a B by itself.