Some recent investigations by Mr R. A. Proctor seem to show, however, that there are at least two exceptions to this tolerably uniform distribution. (1) He has ascertained that the stars are decidedly more thickly aggregated in the Milky Way than elsewhere. So far as this is to be relied on the argument is the same as in the case of the double stars; it tends to prove that the proximity of the stars in the Milky Way is not merely apparent, but actual. (2) He has ascertained that there are two large areas, in the North and South hemispheres, in which the stars are much more thickly aggregated than elsewhere. Here, it seems to me, Probability proves nothing: we are simply denying that the distribution is uniform. What may follow in the way of inferences as to the physical process of causation by which the stars have been disposed is a question for the Astronomer. See Mr Proctor's _Essays on Astronomy_, p. 297. Also a series of Essays in _The Universe and the coming Transits_. CHAPTER XI. _ON CERTAIN CONSEQUENCES OF THE OBJECTIVE TREATMENT OF A SCIENCE OF INFERENCE._[1] 1. In the previous edition a large part of this chapter was devoted to the general consideration of the distinction between a Material and a Conceptualist view of Logic. I have omitted most of this here, as also a large part of a chapter devoted to the detailed discussion of the Law of Causation, as I hope before very long to express my opinions on these subjects more fully, and more appropriately, in a treatise on the general principles of Inductive Logic. 1. Students of Logic are familiar with that broad distinction between the two methods of treatment to which the names of Material and Conceptualist may be applied. The distinction was one which had been gradually growing up under other names before it was emphasized, and treated as a distinction within the field of Logic proper, by the publication of Mill's well known work. No one, for instance, can read Whewell's treatises on Induction, or Herschel's Discourse, without seeing that they are treating of much the same subject-matter, and regarding it in much the same way, as that which Mill discussed under the name of Logic, though they were not disposed to give it that name. That is, these writers throughout took it for granted that what they had to do was to systematise the facts of nature in their objective form, and under their widest possible treatment, and to expound the principal modes of inference and the principal practical aids in the investigation of these modes of inference, which reason could suggest and which experience could justify. What Mill did was to bring these methods into close relation with such portions of the old scholastic Logic as he felt able to retain, to work them out into much fuller detail, to systematize them by giving them a certain philosophical and psychological foundation,--and to entitle the result _Logic_.