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calculation in those cases in which it can be employed.
This calculation is often extremely useful and extremely learned ; but k is necessary carefully to distinguish the occasions on which we can avail ourselves of it, for however little the ideas which we attempt to calculate are mingled with those which I have named refractory, and which are truly incalculable, we are inevitably led into the most excessivemis reckonings. It is what I think has happened but too frequently to skilful men, who by their knowledge, and even by their mistakes, have put us into the way of discovering their cause.
I will limit myself to this small number of results. I perceive that it is to diffuse but little direct light on a subject, which is so much the more important and the more extensive, as unfortunately certitude is for the most part far from us. But if I have contributed to the formation of a just and clear idea of it I shall not have been useless. I have much more reason than Condorcet for saying " I have not " thought that I was giving a good ivork, but mere(i ly a work calculated to give birth to better ones.
- See page 183 of the preliminary discourse to the essay on the application
of analysis to the probability of decisions, given by a plurality of votes, in 4to 1785, al'imprimerie royal.
This discourse, the elements of the same author which I have already cited, and the excellent lesson of M. Delaplace, which are to be found in the collection of the Normal schools, are, in my opinion, the three works in which we are best able to see the general spirit and process of the calculation of probabilities, and where we can the most easily discover the causes of its advantages and inconveniences, al» though they are not yet there completely developed,
