<.6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the instrument which executes it." From various other sources Buckle 

 brought together other pieces of evidence, especially one which is now 

 quoted by all who discuss the subject, the regularity from year to 

 year of letters posted, whose writers forget to direct them. It may 

 by this time be taken as proved by such facts that each particular 

 class of human actions may be estimated, and, to a great extent, even 

 predicted, as a regular product of a definite social body under definite 

 conditions. To quote another luminous instance of this regularity of 

 action, M. Quetelet gives a table of the ages of marriage in Belgium 

 ("Phys. Soc," i., p. 275). Here the numbers of what may be called 

 normal marriages, those between men under 45 with women under 30, 

 as well as of the less usual unions where the women are between 30 

 and 45, show the sort of general regularity which one would expect 

 from mere consideration of the circumstances. The astonishing: fea- 

 ture of the table is the regularity of the unusual marriages. Disre- 

 garding decimals, and calculating the approximate whole numbers in 

 their proportion to 10,000 marriages, the table shows, in each of five 

 five-year periods from 1841 to 1865, 6 men aged from 30 to 45 who 

 married women aged 60 or more, and 1 to 2 men aged 30 or less who 

 married women aged 60 or more. M. Quetelet may well speak of this 

 as the most curious and su^o-estive statistical document he has met 

 with. These young husbands had their liberty of choice, yet. their 

 sexagenarian brides brought them up one after the other in periodical 

 succession, as sacrifices to the occult tendencies of the social system. 

 The statistician's comment is : " It is curious to see man, proudly en- 

 titling himself King of Nature, and fancying himself controlling all 

 things by his free-will, yet submitting, unknown to himself, more rig- 

 orously than any other being in creation, to the laws he is under sub- 

 jection to. These laws are coordinated with such wisdom that they 

 even escape his attention." 



The admission of evidence like this, however, is not always followed 

 by the same philosophical explanation of it. Buckle finds his solution 

 by simply discarding the idea that human action " depends on some 

 capricious and personal principle peculiar to each man, as free-will oi 

 the like ; " on the contrary, he asserts " the great truth that the ac- 

 tions of men, being guided by their antecedents, are in reality never 

 inconsistent, but, however capricious they may appear, only form part 

 of one vast scheme of universal order, of which we, in the present 

 state of knowledge, can barely see the outline." M. Quetelet's argu- 

 ment from the same evidence differs remarkably from this. His ex- 

 pedient for accounting for the regularity of social events, without 

 throwing over the notion of arbitrary action, is to admit the existence 

 of free-will, but to confine its effects within very narrow bounds. He 

 holds that arbitrary will does not act beyond the limits at which sci- 

 ence begins, and that its effects, though apparently so great, may, if 

 taken collectively, be reckoned as null, experience proving that indi- 



