It was dark as pitch, but this I rather liked, as there was little probability of any of the red-skins seeing me unless I stumbled upon them accidentally.

The reasonable probability was they composed merely a party of innocent fishermen, returning home after a day of sportplantation servants possibly, who having stolen away unobserved, were now endeavoring to beach their stolen boat, and reach quarters without being seen.

Is it not to violate every moral instinct, and to sacrifice principle to expediency, to argue that we may swear to steal, oppress and murder by wholesale, because it may be necessary to do so only for the time being, and because there is some remote probability that the instrument which requires that we should be robbers, oppressors and murderers, may at some future day be amended in these particulars?

If the evidence of its being a revelation, or that this is its true sense, be only on probable proofs, our assent can reach no higher than an assurance or diffidence, arising from the more or less apparent probability of the proofs.

But the more cogent argument in favour of Aphrodite Urania is to be based upon grounds of analogy or transfer, rather than upon any reasons of antecedent probability.

Bertha Georgie Yeats (W) & Anne Butler Yeats (C); 2Apr65; R358689. USPENSKY, J. V. Introduction to mathematical probability.

v. 190, &c.] The reader will now judge whether there is the slightest probability that Seneca had any intercourse with St. Paul, or was likely to have stooped from his superfluity of wealth, and pride of power, to take lessons from obscure and despised slaves in the purlieus inhabited by the crowded households of Caesar or Narcissus.

Surely, sir, numerical arguments cannot but deserve some consideration, even from those who have learned by long practice to explain away mere probability at pleasure, to select the circumstances of complicated questions, and only to show those which may be produced in favour of their own opinions.

Even Columbus is supposed, with some considerable probability, to have been prompted to his enterprize, which ended in the discovery of America, by the study of these travels; believing, that by a western course through the unexplored Atlantic, he should find a comparatively short passage to those eastern regions of the Indies, which Polo had visited, described, or indicated.

According to all rational probabilities we had no right to expect the war that befell; according to all the human indications as we saw them revealed amongst the Allies we had a right to expect a better peace; according to our abiding and abounding faith we had a right to expect a great bettering of life after the war, and even in spite of the peace.

As the young orphan argued thus exhaustively to herself, the extreme probability of her suppositions made her more and more frenzied to fly instantly beyond the reach of one who, in the event of a General European War, would not be a husband whom her head could approve.

There was sound sense and much consolation in this reasoning: the obvious probabilities of the case were in favour of the fulfilment of the locksmith's expectations.

By the time a man gets well into the seventies, his continued existence is a mere miracle; and when he lays his old bones in bed for the night, there is an overwhelming probability that he will never see the day.

We shall now proceed to gather some further particles of evidence, to add their cumulative weight to the mass of slender probabilities with which we are endeavoring to sustain our conjectures.

Although playing about the thought, the one thing that not even the Colonel was able actually to realise, was the imminent probability of death for himself.

It has been bandied about a good deal lately, sometimes de coeur léger; and within the last six months it has assumed the substance and the weight of a formidable probability.

That neither of them possesses this intrinsic probability may easily be shown; but first it will be advisable to notice another theory, which is more plausibly founded on internal evidence, and claims to be confirmed by documents of unimpeachable validity.

Again, Swift's flying Island of Laputa is a phenomenon so opposed to all scientific probability, and so directly at variance with natural laws, that it loses in interest in a direct ratio with the violence it does to our feelings.

Count Gurowski, whose authority on such a point he ought to be a very bold man to question, says,"In Russia, slavery dates, with the utmost probability, since the introduction of the Northmen, originating with prisoners of war, and being established over conquered tribes of no Slavic descent.

Now in regard to the à priori probability of the existence of planetary influences, I am far from saying that such a thing is impossible.

It is, on the one hand, still clearer that the greater part of the evangelical references usually quoted are really from our present actual Gospels, but, on the other hand, there is a more distinct probability that these are to be assigned rather to the School of Valentinus than to Valentinus himself.

Are any anecdotes or circumstances recorded, respecting the worship of this saint in later times, than I have referred to? {183} What is the historic probability that the stone coffin, discovered in 1822, contained the remains of this remarkable man?

But these conjectural evidences are no longer regarded as having any connection with historical probability or as dating back to the time of the Northmen.

The analogies with ordinary psychology and with the facts of pathology, with those of psychical research, so called, and with those of religious experience, establish, when taken together, a decidedly formidable probability in favor of a general view of the world almost identical with Fechner's.

The immediate probability of the formation of the United States of Europe, suggests how wise we were not to change the location of the Capitol to some facetiously distant western metropolis of the future.