8. The following imaginary example will serve to bring out the point indicated above. Conceive a people with very short memories, and who preserved no kind of record to perpetuate their hold upon the events which happened amongst them.[5] The whole region of the past would then be to them what much of the future is to us; viz. a region of guesses and conjectures, one in reference to which they could only judge upon general considerations of probability, rather than by direct and specific evidence. But conceive also that they had amongst them a race of prophets who could succeed in foretelling the future with as near an approach to accuracy and trustworthiness as our various histories, and biographies, and recollections, can attain in respect to the past. The present and usual functions of direct evidence or testimony, and of probability, would then be simply inverted; and so in consequence would the present accidental characteristics of improbability before and after the event. It would then be the latter which would by comparison be regarded as 'not always a ground of disbelief,' whereas in the case of the former we should then have it maintained that it always was so. 9. The origin of the mistake just discussed is worth enquiring into. I take it to be as follows. It is often the case, as above remarked, when we are speculating about a future event, and almost always the case when that future event is taken from a game of chance, that all persons are in precisely the same condition of ignorance in respect to it. The limit of available information is confined to statistics, and amounts to the knowledge that the unknown event must assume some one of various alternative forms. The conjecture, therefore, of any one man about it is as valuable as that of any other. But in regard to the past the case is very different. Here we are not in the habit of relying upon statistical information. Hence the conjectures of different men are of extremely different values; in the case of many they amount to what we call positive knowledge. This puts a broad distinction, in popular estimation, between what may be called the objective certainty of the past and of the future, a distinction, however, which from the standing-point of a science of inference ought to have no existence.