The picture which these conclusions suggest is of a man about the centre of the road being struck by a vehicle the brakes of which were applied about the moment of impact. It is not suggested that there was any reason why the deceased should not have seen the vehicle approaching or why a person in the centre of the road should not have been observed by the driver of the vehicle for, although it was dark, visibility in the area was not otherwise obstructed or impeded. Possibly, this is why the jury thought that both parties were equally to blame. But there is no evidence concerning the movements of either the vehicle or the deceased in the critical few seconds before the impact. It is therefore possible that in those few seconds the deceased's own actions could have created a state of imminent danger to himself and made the impact inevitable. It is also possible that the conduct of the driver of the car created the danger or contributed to it. All sorts of possibilities as to how the accident happened may be imagined. But in the end the time-honoured question that we have to determine, and it is a question of law, is whether it was reasonably open to the jury on the evidence to find that the death of the deceased was caused, either wholly or in part, by the negligence of the driver of the unidentified vehicle. There can at least be no doubt that it was open to the jury to find that the deceased was struck and knocked down and pushed or carried along and finally run over by the vehicle and that his death resulted from the injuries he then received. So the real difficulty is to determine whether there was sufficient evidence to justify the finding that the driver was to blame for the accident. It is clear that it is a mistake to think that because an event is unseen its cause cannot be reasonably inferred: Jones v. Great Western Railway Co. [1] . Inferences from actual facts that are proved are just as much part of the evidence as those facts themselves. In a civil cause "you need only circumstances raising a more probable inference in favour of what is alleged where direct proof is not available it is enough if the circumstances appearing in evidence give rise to a reasonable and definite inference; they must do more than give rise to conflicting inferences of equal degree of probability so that the choice between them is mere matter of conjecture: see per Lord Robson, Richard Evans & Co. Ltd. v. Astley [2] All that is necessary is that according to the course of common experience the more probable inference from the circumstances that sufficiently appear by evidence or admission, left unexplained, should be that the injury arose from the defendant's negligence. By more probable is meant no more than that upon a balance of probabilities such an inference might reasonably be considered to have some greater degree of likelihood". These passages are extracted from the unanimous judgment of this Court (Dixon J., as he then was, Williams, Webb, Fullagar and Kitto JJ.), in Bradshaw v. McEwans Pty. Ltd. [1] . We should think that, applying these principles to the present case, inferences sufficiently appear from the circumstances to which we have referred that make it at least more probable than not that the unidentified vehicle was being driven in a negligent manner at the time of the accident and that this was the cause of the accident. Castlebar Road is a street with lights, the night was fine and clear, and there were no trees or other objects to obstruct the driver's vision of the road and pathways. Provided the headlights of the vehicle were in a proper condition, and it would be fatal for the defendant to argue that they were not, the headlights alone should have provided the driver with a quite satisfactory vision in front of and to the side of the vehicle. Yet the vehicle not only struck the deceased but pushed or carried him for forty-two feet in front of it and then ran over him before it stopped. The medical evidence of the condition of his body after the accident demonstrates the violence of the impact. There is a suggestion in the evidence that a vehicle with its brakes in proper condition which takes forty-two feet to pull up after the brakes have been applied would be travelling at about thirty miles per hour. There is no reliable evidence to this effect and it was open to the jury to hold that the vehicle was travelling faster. But let it be assumed that the vehicle, immediately before the collision, was travelling at about thirty miles per hour. It was still open to the jury to find that this speed was excessive in all the circumstances. The deceased was struck in the centre of the road. Immediately before the collision he must either have been proceeding along or standing in the centre of the road or he must have been crossing it, and in any of these positions the driver of the vehicle, if he had been keeping a proper lookout, should have been able to see him in time to apply his brakes and stop or at least slow down the vehicle in time. If the driver's vision was temporarily obscured for any reason - approaching headlights have been suggested - it was open to the jury to hold that he should have slowed down, and that, even if thirty miles per hour was not an excessive speed to drive along a suburban road at night when his vision was perfect, it was excessive to continue to do so in periods when his vision was obscured. It was certainly open to the jury to hold that a driver who drove along a suburban road at night at such a speed that the vehicle could not be pulled up in less than forty-two feet in an emergency was driving carelessly. Nor can the fact that the driver took refuge in flight be overlooked. If the action had been brought against the driver, weight might have been attached to this circumstance. But the present action was not brought against the driver. He could not be found. It is a separate cause of action created by s. 47 of the Motor Car Act 1951 Vict. brought against the nominal defendant. It was contended that this fact could be only used as an admission against a party to the action and the driver is not a party. It is unnecessary finally to decide this point. Ordinarily this would be so; but s. 47 provides that any person who could have obtained a judgment against the driver of the unidentified vehicle may obtain against the nominal defendant the judgment which in the circumstances he could have obtained against the driver of the motor car. This appears to assimilate the position of the nominal defendant to that of the driver. It is therefore difficult to see why the probative value of the driver's flight unexplained should not be as great against the nominal defendant as against the driver. At any rate, it is at least a fact the jury were entitled to take into account in weighing the probabilities. The deceased might of course have done many foolish things. He might for instance have lurched suddenly from a safe position into the path of the vehicle, the driver's vision might have been suddenly obscured by approaching headlights; there are many other possibilities that might have happened but of none of them is there any evidence. And there is no reason for inferring that any such situation existed. After fixing the point of impact it was possible for the jury to say that the unidentified vehicle had approached from the east, and, probably, that it was travelling in the centre of Castlebar Road. In those circumstances it is not unreasonable to infer that there was no traffic approaching from the opposite direction and, therefore, that there was no reason why the driver of the vehicle could not, and should not, have seen a person in the middle of the road. Of course, if the unidentified vehicle was proceeding along the left-hand side of Castlebar Road until immediately before the impact and yet managed to strike the deceased in the centre of the road the inference of negligence would be even stronger. The question may, therefore, be said to be limited to the question whether there is any reason why the jury should have supposed that it was probable, or equally likely, that some conduct on the part of the deceased created a situation in which the driver of the vehicle could not have avoided him by the exercise of reasonable care. If the deceased had run across the road or proceeded partly across and then turned back no doubt such a situation might have arisen. But the deceased was middle-aged and the jury was entitled to conclude that he was sober and in normal health, that he was on his way home, that, probably, at the moment of impact there were not opposing streams of traffic and, in the circumstances of the case, that there was not the slightest reason to suppose that there was any conduct of this kind on his part.