13. When therefore John Smith presents himself to our notice without, so to say, any particular label attached to him informing us under which of his various aspects he is to be viewed, the process of thus referring him to a class becomes to a great extent arbitrary. If he had been indicated to us by a general name, that, of course, would have been some clue; for the name having a determinate connotation would specify at any rate a fixed group of attributes within which our selection was to be confined. But names and attributes being connected together, we are here supposed to be just as much in ignorance what name he is to be called by, as what group out of all his innumerable attributes is to be taken account of; for to tell us one of these things would be precisely the same in effect as to tell us the other. In saying that it is thus arbitrary under which class he is placed, we mean, of course, that there are no logical grounds of decision; the selection must be determined by some extraneous considerations. Mere inspection of the individual would simply show us that he could equally be referred to an indefinite number of classes, but would in itself give no inducement to prefer, for our special purpose, one of these classes to another.
This variety of classes to which the individual may be referred owing to his possession of a multiplicity of attributes, has an important bearing on the process of inference which was indicated in the earlier sections of this chapter, and which we must now examine in more special reference to our particular subject.
14. It will serve to bring out more clearly the nature of some of those peculiarities of the step which we are now about to take in the case of Probability, if we first examine the form which the corresponding step assumes in the case of ordinary Logic. Suppose then that we wished to ascertain whether a certain John Smith, a man of thirty, who is amongst other things a resident in India, and distinctly affected with cancer, will continue to survive there for twenty years longer. The terms in which the man is thus introduced to us refer him to different classes in the way already indicated. Corresponding to these classes there will be a number of propositions which have been obtained by previous observations and inductions, and which we may therefore assume to be available and ready at hand when we want to make use of them. Let us conceive them to be such as these following:--Some men live to fifty; some Indian residents live to fifty; no man suffering thus from cancer lives for five years. From the first and second of these premises nothing whatever can be inferred, for they are both[4] particular propositions, and therefore lead to no conclusion in this case. The third answers our enquiry decisively.