In this scientific age, there are more persons who can appreciate a train of exact serial reasoning than of those who can do justice to a combination of probabilities. It is not very rare to find disputants capable of testing a mathematical demonstration, who if they had to examine a probable argument might dismiss it with the proverbial maxim, which says that no chain is stronger than its weakest link.
There are arguments which are like a chain, and to them the maxim applies: one weak link vitiates the conclusion. Such are the demonstrations in Euclid. But the argument which runs through this book is not of that kind, rather it resembles a bundle, and to such the maxim does not apply. It cannot be said, for example, that no faggot is stronger than its weakest stick. And this is the simile which applies to the evidence in probable reasoning. It is not linked, but massed.
When Gulliver awoke on the shore of Liliput and found that he was fastened to the ground, the threads which bound him were severally slight, but the total effect was irresistible. Analogous thereto was the combined effect of many partial and inconclusive arguments on the mind of Sir Francis Palgrave, when he testified that ‘no one, taking all the points of evidence together, can reasonably doubt but that it did belong to king Alfred[60].’
This conclusion may now be somewhat amplified. I trust we are now in a position to say with reasonable confidence, that not only did this Jewel belong to Alfred of Wessex, having been made by his order; but further, that it was his work, having been made after his design; and further again, that the design referred to, and was based upon, his own position; and, moreover, that the Jewel was a production of his youth, of the period after his return from Rome, and before he assumed a share in public affairs by the side of his brother Æthelred.
[58] See above, p. 8.
[59] The Anglo-Saxon text may be found in Cardale’s edition (1829), p. 338, and in the recent edition by Mr. Sedgefield, p. 129.
[60] See above, p. 84.
