In the same way a piece of statistics, however accurate, concerns only one of an infinite number of factors. You get nearer the truth as you combine one set of statistics with a second, a third, a fourth; but though you were to have a thousand sets they would not outweigh your general judgment based on observation.
For instance, a man knows perfectly well what he means by a wet day. Your statistician may come along with his figures of rainfall and may prove by them that a very fine day was a wet one. He says, "Half an inch of rain fell in twenty-four hours." But if the half-inch of rain all fell in one hour just before the dawn of a hot and cloudless summer's day he is wrong and you are right. To give even a rough impression through mere statistics of what common sense calls "a wet day" you would have to compare many sets of figures. There would be first of all the inches of rainfall, then the number of hours during which perceptible rain was falling, then the number of hours during which the sky was overcast, then the rate of evaporation, then figures showing what proportion of rainfall came in the waking and in the sleeping hours, then a table showing how far the rain was intermittent, for a day during which you have rainfall in the first half and none in the second is not at all the same thing as a day in which rain falls every half-hour. And even when you had all those statistics combined, no sane man would accept them against his own general impression.
There is a parallel here with the very legitimate suspicion people are beginning to feel toward what is called "scientific" argument in social and domestic matters. If a man has worked hard all the morning in the open air and is very hungry he looks forward to a beefsteak and a pint of beer at luncheon, and if some science fellow comes along with a tabloid and a little water out of a tank it is no good telling the man that such a meal will be "scientifically the equivalent" of what he was expecting. He knows very well that the word "equivalent" here is a lie; and it is hard lines that the noble title of Science should have been degraded as it has been in our generation by nonsense of this sort. They are still at it, but I do not think it will last long, for it is provoking anger. There are people who come and tell country folk that the rooms in which they sleep must have a certain "cubical capacity," so that a great healthy man as strong as an ox and sleeping as no townsman can sleep is "scientifically" proved to be in a very parlous way when he lives as his English fathers have lived before him for a thousand years. And "I with these mine eyes have seen" an inspector insisting that the window-space of a room should be not less than one-tenth or one-quarter or whatever it was of the floor-space, without noting that the window in one case looked on to a blank wall, and in another on to the infinite spaces of the sea.