The proof and measurement of association between two things

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Abstract
All knowledge—beyond that of bare isolated occurrence—deals with uniformities. Of the latter, some few have a claim to be considered absolute, such as mathematical implications and mechanical laws. But the vast majority are only partial; medicine does not teach that smallpox is inevitably escaped by vaccination, but that it is so generally; biology has not shown that all animals require organic food, but that nearly all do so; in daily life, a dark sky is no proof that it will rain, but merely a warning; even in morality, the sole categorical imperative alleged by Kant was the sinfulness of telling a lie, and few thinkers since have admitted so much as this to be valid universally. In psychology, more perhaps than in any other science, it is hard to find absolutely inflexible coincidences; occasionally, indeed, there appear uniformities sufficiently regular to be practically treated as laws, but infinitely the greater part of the observations hitherto recorded concern only more or less pronounced tendencies of one event or attribute to accompany another.

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