A mode of concluding from experience must be pronounced untrustworthy when subsequent experience refuses to confirm it. According to this criterion, induction by simple enumeration—in other words, generalization of an observed fact from the mere absence of any known instance to the contrary—affords in general a precarious and unsafe ground of assurance; for such generalizations are incessantly discovered, on further experience, to be false. Still, however, it affords some assurance, sufficient, in many cases, for the ordinary guidance of conduct. It would be absurd to say, that the generalizations arrived at by mankind in the outset of their experience, such as these—food nourishes, fire burns, water drowns—were unworthy of reliance.[186]There is a scale of trustworthiness in the results of the original unscientific induction; and on this diversity (as observed in the fourth chapter of the present book) depend the rules for the improvement of the process. The improvement consists in correcting one of these inartificial generalizations by means of another. As has been already pointed out, this is all that art can do. To test a generalization, by showing that it either follows from, or conflicts with, some stronger induction, some generalization resting on a broader foundation of experience, is the beginning and end of the logic of induction. Joe started for the door, then after the manner of a good cook, turned, carefully drained the grease from the bacon and set the frying-pan over on the back of the stove. He grabbed his cane, hobbled to the door, and stood looking at the driveway.Well, Ill be doggoned, he said. Looking for policemen that knew me, as well as any of the thugs Id met at Rucci’s Three C Club. And, so help me, I just passed a hole in the wall restaurant when somebody called: Rob Trenton, occupying a sidewalk table for the second consecutive afternoon, consuming Cinzano at intervals carefully spaced so that he could maintain perpetual occupancy of his table, realized, to his disgust, that the law of averages is a treacherous thing. Every one of the shipboard bores he had avoided on the trip across insisted on dropping into the vacant chair beside him, telling him at length what he should see in Paris. But the one person Rob wanted desperately to see failed to show up. There is a light burning in the small shack. Theres the chip on the ground, Wallington said. Somebody cut it off very recently. It’s good and fresh... that’s a marker. Though a syllogism framed according to any of these formulæ is a valid argument, all correct ratiocination admits of being stated in syllogisms of the first figure alone. The rules for throwing an argument in any of the other figures into the first figure, are called rules for thereduction of syllogisms. It is done by the conversion of one or other, or both, of the premises. Thus an argument in the first mood of the second figure, as— Ibid., 58, 59. I couldnt see any sense in telling him she’d been with her lawyer as well as two hoodlums and their tramp women. But I knew what he was thinking of and I said: That solitary kiss by the lake, under a full moon. And then he walked her back to the hotel, and... well, wait a minute... he kissed her once again. I watched her go up the steps into the hotel. I watched him looking after her as she disappeared. Then he put his hands in his pockets and walked away. As already remarked, one of the main results of the science of social statics would be to ascertain the requisites of stable political union. There are some circumstances which, being found in all societies without exception, and in the greatest degree where the social union is most complete, may be considered (when psychological and ethological laws confirm the indication) as conditions of the existence of the complex phenomena calleda State. For example, no numerous society has ever been held together without laws, or usages equivalent to them; without tribunals, and an organized force of some sort to execute their decisions. There have always been public authorities whom, with more or less strictness and in cases more or less accurately defined, the rest of the community obeyed, or according to general opinion were bound to obey. By following out this course of inquiry we shall find a number of requisites, which have been present in every society that has maintained a collective existence, and on the cessation of which it has either merged in some other society, or reconstructed itself on some new basis, in which the conditions were conformed to. Although these results, obtained by comparing different forms and states of society, amount in themselves only to empirical laws; some of them, when once suggested, arefound to follow with so much probability from general laws of human nature, that the consilience of the two processes raises the evidence to proof, and the generalizations to the rank of scientific truths. According to Pearl, my sister and the trooper Harley Welles go out back to have a smoke or whatever else. Pearl and the guys are hanging around the bandstand, fending off the multitude of fans fighting for their autographs, oh sure, when suddenly there comes a shriek from the alley behind the fire house. Someone is yellingRape! My sister Annie is yelling “Rape! Again. More urgently this time. Lennie and Freddie are black, and therefore not eager to go anywhere near the location where a white girl is getting raped, you know whut Im sayin, bro? Stephen is white, but neither is he too keen about rushing to the scene of a felony in progress. Pearl is black but female and presumably incapable of complicity in a sexual attack. It is she who rushes out the open side door of the fire house into a May night alive with fireflies, and stops dead in her tracks when she sees Annie standing alone against the wall of the fire house, the trooper Harley Welles nowhere in sight. Dr. Dixon followed instructions. The dog kept pulling away towards the extreme end of the leash. Roy raced over to the porch, panic-stricken, and up the steps. He turned the brass handle and pushed the heavy front door open, the hall still in darkness. Arguing in a circle, however, is a stronger case of the fallacy, and implies more than the mere passive reception of a premise by one who does not remember how it is to be proved. It implies an actual attempt to prove two propositions reciprocally from one another; and is seldom resorted to, at least in express terms, by any person in his own speculations, but is committed by those who, being hard pressed by an adversary, are forced into giving reasons for an opinion of which, when they began to argue, they had not sufficiently considered the grounds. As in the following example from Archbishop Whately:Some mechanicians attempt to prove (what they ought to lay down as a probable but doubtful hypothesis)[265] that every particle of matter gravitates equally: why? ‘because those bodies which contain more particles ever gravitate more strongly, i.e., are heavier:’ ‘but (it may be urged) those which are heaviest are not always more bulky;’ ‘no, but they contain more particles, though more closely condensed:’ ‘how do you know that?’ ‘because they are heavier:’ ‘how does that prove it?’ ‘because all particles of matter gravitating equally, that mass which is specifically the heavier must needs have the more of them in the same space.’  It appears to me that the fallacious reasoner, in his private thoughts, would not be likely to proceed beyond the first step. He would acquiesce in the sufficiency of the reason firstgiven, “bodies which contain more particles are heavier. It is when he finds this questioned, and is called upon to prove it, without knowing how, that he tries to establish his premise by supposing proved what he is attempting to prove by it. The most effectual way, in fact, of exposing a petitio principii, when circumstances allow of it, is by challenging the reasoner to prove his premises; which if he attempts to do, he is necessarily driven into arguing in a circle. Never saw nothin like it in my life, Pearl says, shaking her head. Her losin it that way..