In the second place, this condition of unstable assent, this constant liability to have our judgment affected, to any degree and at any moment, by the accession of new knowledge, though doubtless characteristic of Probability, does not seem to me characteristic of it in its sounder and more legitimate applications. It seems rather appropriate to a precipitate judgment formed in accordance with the rules, than a strict example of their natural employment. Such precipitate judgments may occur in the case of ordinary deductive conclusions. In the practical exigencies of life we are constantly in the habit of forming a hasty opinion with nearly full confidence, at any rate temporarily, upon the strength of evidence which we must well know at the time cannot be final. We wait a short time, and something else turns up which induces us to alter our opinion, perhaps to reverse it. Here our conclusions may have been perfectly sound under the given circumstances, that is, they may be such as every one else would have drawn who was bound to make up his mind upon the data before us, and they are unquestionably 'relative' judgments in the sense now under discussion. And yet, I think, every one would shrink from so terming them who wished systematically to carry out the view that Logic was to be regarded as an organon of truth. 16. In the examples of Probability which we have hitherto employed, we have for the most part assumed that there was a certain body of statistics set before us on which our conclusion was to rest. It was assumed, on the one hand, that no direct specific evidence could be got, so that the judgment was really to be one of Probability, and to rest on these statistics; in other words, that nothing better than them was available for us. But it was equally assumed, on the other hand, that these statistics were open to the observation of every one, so that we need not have to put up with anything inferior to them in forming our opinion. In other words, we have been assuming that here, as in the case of most other sciences, those who have to draw a conclusion start from the same footing of opportunity and information. This, for instance, clearly is or ought to be the case when we are concerned with games of chance; ignorance or misapprehension of the common data is never contemplated there. So with the statistics of life, or other insurance: so long as our judgment is to be accurate (after its fashion) or justifiable, the common tables of mortality are all that any one has to go by.