7. It is true that for want of appropriate terms to express such things we are often induced, indeed compelled, to apply the same name of 'facts' to such individual contingencies. We should not, for instance, hesitate to speak of the fact of the man dying being probable, possible, unlikely, or whatever it might be. But I cannot help regarding such expressions as a strictly incorrect usage arising out of a deficiency of appropriate technical terms. It is doubtless certain that one or other of the two alternatives must happen, but this alternative certainty is not the subject of our contemplation; what we have before us is the _single_ alternative, which is notoriously uncertain. It is this, and this only, which is at present under notice, and whose occurrence has to be estimated. We have surely no right to dignify this with the name of a fact, under any qualifications, when the opposite alternative has claims, not perhaps actually equal to, but at any rate not much inferior to its own. Such language, as already remarked, may be quite right in Inductive logic, where we are only concerned with conjectures of such a high degree of likelihood that their non-occurrence need not be taken into practical account, and which are moreover regarded as merely temporary. But in Probability the conjecture may have any degree of likelihood about it; it may be just as likely as the other alternative, nay it may be much less likely. In these latter cases, for instance, if the chances are very much against the man's death, it is surely an abuse of language to speak of the 'fact' of his dying, even though we qualify it by declaring it to be highly improbable. The subject-matter essential to Probability being the uncertain, we can never with propriety employ upon it language which in its original and correct application is only appropriate to what is actually or approximately certain.