7. That the distinction before us has no essential connection whatever with time is indeed obvious on a moment's consideration. Conceive for a moment that some one had opportunities of knowing whether A. B. would die or not. If he told us that A. B. would die to-morrow, we should in that case be just as ready to believe him as when he tells us that A. B. _has_ died. If we continued to feel any doubt about the statement (supposing always that we had full confidence about his veracity in matters into which he had duly enquired), it would be because we thought that in his case, as in ours, it was equivalent to a guess, and nothing more. So with the event when past, the fact of its being past makes no difference whatever; until the credible witness informs us of what he knows to have occurred, we should doubt it if it happened to come into our minds, just as much as if it were future. The distinction, therefore, between probability before the event and probability after the event seems to resolve itself simply into this;--before the event we often have no better means of information than to appeal to statistics in some form or other, and so to guess amongst the various possible alternatives; after the event the guess may most commonly be improved or superseded by appeal to specific evidence, in the shape of testimony or observation. Hence, naturally, our estimate in the latter case is commonly of much more value. But if these characteristics were anyhow inverted; if, that is, we were to confine ourselves to guessing about the past, and if we could find any additional evidence about the future, the respective values of the different estimates would also be inverted. The difference between these values has no necessary connection with time, but depends entirely upon the different grounds upon which our conception or conjecture about the event in question rests.