QUETELET ON THE SCIENCE OF MAN. 47 



vidual wills are neutralized in the midst of general wills (p. 100). 

 Free-will, though of sufficient power to prevent our predicting the ac- 

 tions of the individual, disappears in the collective action of large 

 bodies of men, which results from general social laws, which can ac- 

 cordingly be predicted like other results regulated by natural laws. 

 We may perhaps apprehend the meaning of Quetelet's views more 

 clearly from another passage, where, to show how apparently isolated 

 events may be really connected under some wide law, he compares single 

 facts to a number of scattered points, which seem not related to one an- 

 other till the observer, commanding a view of a series of them from a 

 distance, loses sight of their little accidents of arrangement, and at the 

 same time perceives that they are really arranged along a connecting 

 curve. Then the writer goes on to imagine, still more suggestively, that 

 these points might actually be tiny animated creatures, capable of free 

 action within a very narrow range, while nevertheless their spontaneous 

 movements would not be discernible from a distance (p. 94), where only 

 their laws of mutual relation would appear. M. Quetelet can thus con- 

 ciliate received opinions by recognizing the doctrine of arbitrary volition, 

 while depriving it of its injurious power. 1 His defence of the exist- 

 ence of free-will is perhaps too much like the famous excuse of the 

 personage who was blamed for going out shooting on the day he had 

 received the news of his father's death, and who defended himself on 

 the ground that he only shot very small birds. But it is evident that 

 the statistics of social regularity have driven the popular notion of 

 free-will into the narrow space included between Quetelet's restriction 

 and Buckle's abolition of it. In fact, no one who studies the temper 

 of our time will deny the increasing prevalence of the tendency of the 

 scientific world to reject the use of the term free-will in its vulgar 

 sense that of unmotived spontaneous election and even to discour- 

 age its use in any other sense as apt to mislead, while its defenders 

 draw their weapons not so much from observation of facts as from 

 speculative and dogmatic philosophy. 



To those who accept the extreme principle that similar men under 

 similar circumstances must necessarily do similar acts ; and to those, 

 also, who adopt the notion of free-will as a small disturbing cause 

 which disappears in the large result of social law, the regularity of 

 civilized life carries its own explanation. Society is roughly homo- 

 geneous from year to year. Individuals are born, pass on through 

 stage after stage of life, and die ; but at each move one drops into 

 another's place, and the shifting of individuals only brings change 

 into the social system, so far as those great general causes have been 

 at work which difference one age from another the introduction of 

 different knowledge, different principles, different arts, different indus- 

 trial materials and outlets. The modern sociologist, whatever his 



1 In regard to the relation of statistics to the doctrine of fatalism, see Dr. Farre'B 

 " Report on the Programme of the Fourth Session of the Statistical Congress." 



