82

G82

there may not lurk, unsuspected by him, a determination to force himself to believe in a certain value for the ratio, nor that this has not frustrated all his efforts to make the sample a fair one; and if he cannot be [quite sure / absolutely certain] even of his own honesty, how can he so much as approach certainty as to the correctness of his concluded approximation to the ratio not having been destroyed by external circumstances? A theoretician,—or rather, a papyrobite, a man whose vitality is that of sentences written down or imagined,—may reply that that contingency is covered by