188 Roy heard him panting, clearly struggling to climb. Roy desperately hoped that he was using the handrail to help himself up. The route takes about 15 minutes of walking time as it wangles its way here and there around large boulders, hanging vines, and crisp oval leaves, dried and layered on the jungle floor. It is quiet and peaceful here. An occasional rustle of lizard, the silent holes of some invisible unknown predator. I wonder what lives in those arm-sized holes, and whether they are sleeping or thinking about me thumping through their peaceful ageless gardens. Chapter I. I said:I guess maybe youd better talk with the lady first Wendel, and then called out: “Bring her in, Mac! And yet, when a coincidence can not be deduced from known laws, nor proved by experiment to be itself a case of causation, the frequency of its occurrence is the only evidence from which we can infer that it is the result of a law. Not, however, its absolute frequency. The question is not whether the coincidence occurs often or seldom, in the ordinary sense of those terms; but whether it occurs more often than chance will account for; more often than might rationally be expected if the coincidence were casual. We have to decide, therefore, what degree of frequency in a coincidence chance will account for; and to this there can be no general answer. We can only state the principle by which the answer must be determined; the answer itself will be different in every different case. girl on webcams But though general names are imposed by the vulgar without any more definite connotation than that of a vague resemblance; general propositions come in time to be made, in which predicates are applied to those names, that is, general assertions are made concerning thewhole of the things which are denoted by the name. And since by each of these propositions some attribute, more or less precisely conceived, is of course predicated, the ideas of these various attributes thus become associated with the name, and in a sort of uncertain way it comes to connote them; there is a hesitation to apply the name in any new case in which any of the attributes familiarly predicated of the class do not exist. And thus, to common minds, the propositions which they are in the habit of hearing or uttering concerning a class make up in a loose way a sort of connotation for the class name. Let us take, for instance, the word Civilized. How few could be found, even among the most educated persons, who would undertake to say exactly what the term Civilized connotes. Yet there is a feeling in the minds of all who use it, that they are using it with a meaning; and this meaning is made up, in a confused manner, of every thing which they have heard or read that civilized men or civilized communities are, or may be expected to be. How do you know there are voices? girl on webcams Mard said:I thought of that angle. Wendels undoubtedly carrying insurance and his wife would be the beneficiary. A dead man couldn’t fight a divorce action and none would be necessary. I’ll stick with him. Don’t you worry. Meaning I am but a mere teacher of English in the New York City school system. So howd you end up here in Maine? I asked Jessie. When, however, the coincidence is one which can not be accounted for by any known cause, and the connection between the two phenomena, if produced by causation, must be the result of some law of nature hitherto unknown; which is the case we had in view in the last chapter; then, though the probability of a casual coincidence may be capable of appreciation, that of the counter-supposition, the existence of an undiscovered law of nature, is clearly unsusceptible of even an approximate valuation. In order to have the data which such a case would require, it would be necessary to know what proportion of all the individual sequences or co-existences occurring in nature are the result of law, and what proportion are mere casual coincidences. It being evident that we can not form any plausible conjecture as to this proportion, much less appreciate it numerically, we can not attempt any precise estimation of the comparitive probabilities. But of this we are sure, that the detection of an unknown law of nature—of some previously unrecognized constancy of conjunction among phenomena—is no uncommon event. If, therefore, the number of instances in which a coincidence is observed, over and above that which would arise on the average from the mere concurrence of chances, be such that so great an amount of coincidences from accident alone would be an extremely uncommon event; we have reason to conclude that the coincidence is the effect of causation, and may be received (subject to correction from further experience) as an empirical law. Further than this, in point of precision, we can not go; nor, in most cases, is greater precision required, for the solution of any practical doubt.[182] girl on webcams Omitting, for the present, the case of Resemblance, (a relation which requires to be considered separately,) there seems to be one thing common to all these cases, and only one; that in each of them there exists or occurs, or has existed or occurred, or may be expected to exist or occur, some fact or phenomenon, into which the two things which are said to be related to each other, both enter as parties concerned. This fact, or phenomenon, is what the Aristotelian logicians called thefundamentum relationis. Thus in the relation of greater and less between two magnitudes, the fundamentum relationis is the fact that one of the two magnitudes could, under certain conditions, be included in, without entirely filling, the space occupied by the other magnitude. In the relation of master and servant, the fundamentum relationis is the fact that the one has undertaken, or is compelled, to perform certain services for the benefit and at the bidding of the other. Examples might be indefinitely multiplied; but it is already obvious that whenever two things are said to be related, there is some fact, or series of facts, intowhich they both enter; and that whenever any two things are involved in some one fact, or series of facts, we may ascribe to those two things a mutual relation grounded on the fact. Even if they have nothing in common but what is common to all things, that they are members of the universe, we call that a relation, and denominate them fellow-creatures, fellow-beings, or fellow-denizens of the universe. But in proportion as the fact into which the two objects enter as parts is of a more special and peculiar, or of a more complicated nature, so also is the relation grounded upon it. And there are as many conceivable relations as there are conceivable kinds of fact in which two things can be jointly concerned. Dr. Whewell maintains that the general proposition which binds together the particular facts, and makes them, as it were, one fact, is not the mere sum of those facts, but something more, since there is introduced a conception of the mind, which did not exist in the facts themselves.The particular facts, says he,[102] “are not merely brought together, but there is a new element added to the combination by the very act of thought by which they are combined.... When the Greeks, after long observing the motions of the planets, saw that these motions might be rightly considered as produced by the motion of one wheel revolving in the inside of another wheel, these wheels were creations of their minds, added to the facts which they perceived by sense. And even if the wheels were no longer supposed to be material, but were reduced to mere geometrical spheres or circles, they were not the less products of the mind alone—something additional to the facts observed. The same is the case in all other discoveries. The facts are known, but they are insulated and unconnected, till the discoverer supplies from his own store a principle of connection. The pearls are there, but they will not hang together till some one provides the string. The front door opens. From the preceding observations it will easily be collected, that whenever the names given to objects convey any information—that is, whenever they have properly any meaning—the meaning resides not in what theydenote, but in what they connote. The only names of objects which connote nothing are proper names; and these have, strictly speaking, no signification.[12].