Or suppose I am one of a regiment into which a shot flies, and it strikes me, and me only. At this I am surprised, and why? Our common language will guide us to the reason. 'How strange that it should just have hit _me_ of all men!' We are thinking of the very natural two-fold division of mankind into, ourselves, and everybody else; our surprise is again, as it were, retrospective, and in reference to this division. No anticipation was distinctly formed, because we did not think beforehand of the event, but the event, when it has happened, is at once assigned to its appropriate class. 11. This view is confirmed by the following considerations. Tell the story to a friend, and he will be a little surprised, but less so than we were, _his_ division in this particular case being,--his friends (of whom we are but one), and the rest of mankind. It is not a necessary division, but it is the one which will be most likely suggested to him. Tell it again to a perfect stranger, and his division being different (viz. we falling into the majority) we shall fail to make him perceive that there is anything at all remarkable in the event. It is not of course attempted in these remarks to justify our surprise in every case in which it exists. Different persons might be differently affected in the cases supposed, and the examples are therefore given mainly for illustration. Still on principles already discussed (Ch. VI. §32) we might expect to find something like a general justification of the amount of surprise. 12. The answer commonly given in these cases is confined to attempting to show that the surprise should not arise, rather than to explaining how it does arise. It takes the following form,--'You have no right to be surprised, for nothing remarkable has really occurred. If this particular thing had not happened something equally improbable must. If the shot had not hit you or your friend, it must have hit some one else who was _à priori_ as unlikely to be hit.' For one thing this answer does not explain the fact that almost every one _is_ surprised in such cases, and surprised somewhat in the different proportions mentioned above. Moreover it has the inherent unsatisfactoriness of admitting that something improbable has really happened, but getting over the difficulty by saying that all the other alternatives were equally improbable. A natural inference from this is that there is a class of things, in themselves really improbable, which can yet be established upon very slight evidence. Butler accepted this inference, and worked it out to the strange conclusion given above. Mill attempts to avoid it by the consideration of the very different values to be assigned to improbability before and after the event. Some further discussion of this point will be found in the chapter on Fallacies, and in that on the Credibility of Extraordinary Stories.