Sociological theories of History 539 



painters. But for Giotto and Charles VIII, French painting might 

 have been very different. It may be said that "if Giotto had not 

 appeared, some other great initiator would have played a role 

 analogous to his, and that without Charles VIII there would have 

 been the commerce with Italy, which in the long run would have 

 sufficed to place France in relation with Italian artists. But the 

 equivalent of Giotto might have been deferred for a century and 

 probably would have been different ; and commercial relations would 

 have required ages to produce the rayonnement imitatif of Italian 

 art in France, which the expedition of the royal adventurer provoked 

 in a few years 1 ." Instances furnished by political history are simply 

 endless. Can we conjecture how events would have moved if the son 

 of Philip of Macedon had been an incompetent? The aggressive 

 action of Prussia which astonished Europe in 1740 determined the 

 subsequent history of Germany ; but that action was anything but 

 inevitable ; it depended entirely on the personality of Frederick the 

 Great. 



Hence it may be argued that the action of individual wills is a 

 determining and disturbing factor, too significant and effective to 

 allow history to be grasped by sociological formulae. The types and 

 general forms of development which the sociologist attempts to 

 disengage can only assist the historian in understanding the actual 

 course of events. It is in the special domains of economic history 

 and Cidtwgeschichte which have come to the front in modern times 

 that generalisation is most fruitful, but even in these it may be con- 

 tended that it furnishes only partial explanations. 



17. The truth is that Darwinism itself offers the best illustration 

 of the insufficiency of general laws to account for historical develop- 

 ment. The part played by coincidence, and the part played by 

 individuals limited by, and related to, general social conditions 

 render it impossible to deduce the course of the past history of man 

 or to predict the future. But it is just the same with organic 

 development. Darwin (or any other zoologist) could not deduce the 

 actual course of evolution from general principles. Given an 

 organism and its environment, he could not show that it must evolve 

 into a more complex organism of a definite pre-determined type ; 

 knowing what it has evolved into, he could attempt to discover and 

 assign the determining causes. General principles do not account 

 for a particular sequence ; they embody necessary conditions ; but 

 there is a chapter of accidents too. It is the same in the case of 

 history. 



1 I have taken this example from G. Tarde's La logique sociale- (p. 403), Paris, 1904, 

 where it is used for quite a different purpose. 



