college teachers, divided into nine different conferences by
subject, and secondly, of ten representative teachers combining and
revising the work of the conferences, with careful reference to the
present condition of American schools.

32. Indirect Evidence. The term "indirect evidence" may be used for
all evidence as to fact in which reasoning consciously plays a part.
Without it we should be helpless in large regions of our intellectual
life, notably in science and history, and constantly in everyday life.
Clearly the line between direct and indirect evidence is vague and
uncertain; it is one of the first things learned in psychology that our
perceptions and judgments of things about us are almost never based
exclusively on the testimony of our senses, and that we are all the time
jumping to conclusions from very partial observations.

Professor Muensterberg gives the following example from his own
experience of this unintentional substitution of indirect evidence for
direct:

Last summer I had to face a jury as witness in a trial. While I was with
my family at the seashore my city house had been burglarized and I was
called upon to give an account of my findings against the culprit whom
they caught with part of the booty. I reported under oath that the
burglars had entered through a cellar window, and then described what
rooms they had visited. To prove, in answer to a direct question, that
they had been there at night, I told that I had found drops of candle
wax on the second floor. To show that they intended, to return, I
reported that they had left a large mantel clock, packed in wrapping
paper, on the dining-room table. Finally, as to the amount of clothes
which they had taken, I asserted that the burglars did not get more than
a specified list which I had given the police.

Only a few days later I found that every one of these statements was
wrong. They had not entered through the window, but had broken the lock
of the cellar door; the clock was not packed by them in wrapping paper,
but in a tablecloth; the candle droppings were not on the second floor,
but in the attic; the list of lost garments was to be increased by seven
more pieces; and while my story under oath spoke always of two burglars,
I do not know that there was more than one.[23]

Constantly in everyday life we make offhand assertions in the full
belief that we are giving direct evidence, when as a matter of fact we
are announcing inferences.