If you are going to put yourself forward as an authority, however, you must round out your knowledge of the facts by extending it beyond your own personal experience. If it is a question of entrance requirements, you cannot stop with your own experience, or even with that of your own class at school. You must go back to the records of a number of classes before and perhaps after your own, and talk them over with the principal of the school, to see whether there are any special circumstances which affect any of them. If you are arguing for or against a change in the present rules of football, you would have to go beyond the games of your own college team, and beyond those of the present season. If, for example, it were a question of amending the rules concerning the forward pass, you could not speak with full authority unless you had looked up the accounts of the principal games for two or three years at any rate. If you put yourself forward, then, as a witness on one of these cases of complicated facts, you must make it clear to your readers that you have a right to be considered such. If you have the right, it would be folly to hide your light under a bushel.
An example of the care which is taken by men who have made themselves authorities on their subjects is to be found in the following passage from President Eliot's address, "A Wider Range of Electives in College Admission Requirements."[21][!--Note--] Notice how broad a basis he lays for his conclusions both in facts and in the opinions of other authorities.
What should be the grounds of a just valuation of all the subjects that can be presented at admission examinations which include numerous options?
That question introduces us to a difficult inquiry. It is, of course, not an intelligent method to attribute a value to each subject in accordance with the time devoted to the examination in that subject. What clue have we toward a better mode of determining the value which ought to be attributed to each of the numerous electives, when the young men cannot present all the permitted subjects, and hardly three fifths of them, indeed, if the range is adequately widened? I believe that the best criterion for determining the value of each subject is the time devoted to that subject in schools which have an intelligent program of studies. The Committee of Ten[22][!--Note--] examined the number of subjects used in about two hundred of the best secondary schools in this country, and the time-allotments for the several subjects. They found a great variety of practice as to both selection of subjects and time-allotments. You can hardly say that there is an accepted time-allotment in these secondary schools for any subject—not even for the old traditional subjects. The time-allotments differ widely in different parts of the country, and even in different schools in the same part of the country. If, then, we are to determine by school time-allotments the valuations of the different subjects, prescribed and elective, which may enter into admission examinations, we must have some sort of standard programs for secondary schools. At present (1896) I know no programs which can answer that purpose, except the provisional programs of the Committee of Ten. They may fairly be said to be the best-studied programs now before the country, and to represent the largest amount of professional consent, simply because they are the result of the work, first, of ninety school and college teachers, divided into nine different conferences by subject, and secondly, of ten representative teachers combining and revising the work of the conferences, with careful reference to the present condition of American schools.
32. Indirect Evidence. The term "indirect evidence" may be used for all evidence as to fact in which reasoning consciously plays a part. Without it we should be helpless in large regions of our intellectual life, notably in science and history, and constantly in everyday life. Clearly the line between direct and indirect evidence is vague and uncertain; it is one of the first things learned in psychology that our perceptions and judgments of things about us are almost never based exclusively on the testimony of our senses, and that we are all the time jumping to conclusions from very partial observations.
Professor Münsterberg gives the following example from his own experience of this unintentional substitution of indirect evidence for direct:
Last summer I had to face a jury as witness in a trial. While I was with my family at the seashore my city house had been burglarized and I was called upon to give an account of my findings against the culprit whom they caught with part of the booty. I reported under oath that the burglars had entered through a cellar window, and then described what rooms they had visited. To prove, in answer to a direct question, that they had been there at night, I told that I had found drops of candle wax on the second floor. To show that they intended, to return, I reported that they had left a large mantel clock, packed in wrapping paper, on the dining-room table. Finally, as to the amount of clothes which they had taken, I asserted that the burglars did not get more than a specified list which I had given the police.
Only a few days later I found that every one of these statements was wrong. They had not entered through the window, but had broken the lock of the cellar door; the clock was not packed by them in wrapping paper, but in a tablecloth; the candle droppings were not on the second floor, but in the attic; the list of lost garments was to be increased by seven more pieces; and while my story under oath spoke always of two burglars, I do not know that there was more than one.[23][!--Note--]
Constantly in everyday life we make offhand assertions in the full belief that we are giving direct evidence, when as a matter of fact we are announcing inferences. The distinction is of importance in many ways, and not least as a means of avoiding heat in argument; for to question a man's inference is much less likely to make him angry than to deny his statement of fact.
For the practical purposes of argument we may let the distinction between observation and inference, and consequently that between direct and indirect evidence, turn on whether the inference is a conscious and readily distinguishable part of the judgment or not. Though bringing to light an unconscious inference is often an essential part of the detection of false reasoning, where there is no such practical consequence, we need not be too curious here about the line between direct observation and inference from observation. For the rough and ready purposes of everyday arguments it is exact enough to say that where you recognize that you are basing your conclusion as to a fact on some process of reasoning, then you are resting on indirect evidence; where you do not recognize the inference without reflection, you are resting on direct evidence.
In the following discussion of reasoning I shall sometimes be dealing with proving a fact, sometimes with arguing forward to a policy. In many cases the two processes are practically identical, for if the fact is established the policy follows as a matter of course: in these cases, therefore, for the sake of convenience I shall use the terms interchangeably, and keep them separate only where there is danger of confusion.