1. Probability and Chance, Fritz Mauthner's Studies of Improbability

It is a very common thing, these days, to encounter people who declare that they think this or that to be a fact. The typical reaction one has in such encounters is how fortunate and at the same time how simple-minded such people are—fortunate, because they have no idea what it really means to believe in something they have figured out, and simple-minded because they don t have a glimmering of how far removed from reality their thoughts may be. But we should be aware that we mustn't allow this realization to depress us. It will make us very modest indeed, but not to the point of driving us into melancholia, to a sense of despair about human life because of the great difficulty of achieving truth. For we know that the life of the human soul is unending and must be a quest, that it may even be due to a wise ordaining that the quest for truth is so difficult. And we will find that life rests upon this fact.