NO DOUBT it will have come as an immense relief to all listeners to BBC radio — with the possible exception of the massed ranks of attentive guinea-pigs — to hear last week that the vast majority of those who are opposed to vivisection do not approve of grave robbing, and that violent direct action is the work of only a tiny handful of their number. It was stated with the calm authority that such claims always are, and went as unchallenged as they also always are.

Nobody ever asks: How do you know? Have you asked them? All of them? Or even: How big is vast, how small is tiny? It has become standard within sensitive areas of contemporary debate that “the vast majority” and its cohort “the tiny handful” may not only be invoked without a sceptical eyebrow raised, but also so readily assimilated into common understanding that a discussion about racist police, football hooligans, Muslim extremists or manic Ulstermen will begin: “The vast majority, of course, are against . . . ” before it moves swiftly on, as if it would be impertinent for anyone involved to query what is meant by “of course”.

Yet we have not the slightest idea whether the statement is truthful or not. For all sorts of reasons, we cannot, and do not, accurately poll such groups. We know that there are people whose private sympathies veer far more strongly towards the welfare of bunnies than babies, but we don’t know how many they are, let alone where. We know how many bent coppers are caught, but we don’t know how many hide dastardly black hearts, any more than we can guess how many soccer fans are quietly rooting for the team’s pet thug. And you cannot possibly assess the radicalism of a collective Muslim viewpoint when you cannot reach those who do not speak English, those living here illegally, a swath of the women or those uninterested in speaking to the infidel in the first place.

It is reasonable for us to hope that we are right; to have sufficient aspiration for the nature of Man that we would prefer him, in the full splendour of his vast majorities, to be on the side of the good guys. But it is unreasonable for us quite arbitrarily to suspend our logic, our numeracy, our grasp of statistics and our basic intelligence, in order to translate that hope into facts, for no other reason than that we would wish them to be true.