Not paid; or, paid, inadequate in price."
Dryden, in the words "bears proportion" is in verse more accurate than most of the recent repeaters in prose. And this is not the only case of the kind in his argumentative poetry.
My old friend, the late Dr. Olinthus Gregory,[[154]] who was a sound and learned mathematician, adopted this dangerous kind of illustration in his Letters on the Christian Religion.
He argued, by parallel, from what he supposed to be the necessarily mysterious nature of the impossible quantity of algebra to the necessarily mysterious nature of certain doctrines of his system of Christianity. But all the difficulty and mystery of the impossible quantity is now cleared away by the advance of algebraical thought: and yet Dr. Gregory's book continues to be sold, and no doubt the illustration is still accepted as appropriate.
The mode of argument used by the author of the tract above named has a striking defect. He talks of reducing this world and the next to "present value," as an actuary does with successive lives or next presentations. Does value make interest? and if not, why? And if it do, then the present value of an eternity is not infinitely great. Who is ignorant that a perpetual annuity at five per cent is worth only twenty years' purchase? This point ought to be discussed by a person who treats heaven as a deferred perpetual annuity. I do not ask him to do so, and would rather he did not; but if he will do it, he must either deal with the question of discount, or be asked the reason why.
When a very young man, I was frequently exhorted to one or another view of religion by pastors and others who thought that a mathematical argument would be irresistible. And I heard the following more than once, and have since seen it in print, I forget where. Since eternal happiness belonged to the particular views in question, a benefit infinitely great, then, even if the probability of their arguments were small, or even infinitely small, yet the product of the chance and benefit, according to the usual rule, might give a result which no one ought in prudence to pass over. They did not see that this applied to all systems as well as their own. I take this argument to be the most perverse of all the perversions I have heard or read on the subject: there is some high authority for it, whom I forget.
The moral of all this is, that such things as the preceding should be kept out of the way of those who are not
mathematicians, because they do not understand the argument; and of those who are, because they do.
[The high authority referred to above is Pascal, an early cultivator of mathematical probability, and obviously too much enamoured of his new pursuit. But he conceives himself bound to wager on one side or the other. To the argument (Pensées, ch. 7)[[155]] that "le juste est de ne point parier," he answers, "Oui: mais il faut parier: vous êtes embarqué; et ne parier point que Dieu est, c'est parier qu'il n'est pas."[[156]] Leaving Pascal's argument to make its way with a person who, being a sceptic, is yet positive that the issue is salvation or perdition, if a God there be,—for the case as put by Pascal requires this,—I shall merely observe that a person who elects to believe in God, as the best chance of gain, is not one who, according to Pascal's creed, or any other worth naming, will really secure that gain. I wonder whether Pascal's curious imagination ever presented to him in sleep his convert, in the future state, shaken out of a red-hot dice-box upon a red-hot hazard-table, as perhaps he might have been, if Dante had been the later of the two. The original idea is due to the elder Arnobius,[[157]] who, as cited by Bayle,[[158]] speaks thus:
"Sed et ipse [Christus] quæ pollicetur, non probat. Ita est. Nulla enim, ut dixi, futurorum potest existere comprobatio. Cum ergo hæc sit conditio futurorum, ut teneri et comprehendi nullius possint anticipationis attactu; nonne