168 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



"It is in this marvellous power to do wrong .... that the impossibility 

 stands of forming scientific calculations of what men will do before the fact, o~ 

 scientific explanations of what they have done after the fact." 1 



Mr. Buckle " would deliver himself from the eccentricities of this and that 

 individual by a doctrine of averages. . . . Unfortunately, the average of one 

 generation need not be the average of the next. . . . No two generations are 

 alike." s 



"There" (in history) "the phenomena never repeat themselves. There we 

 are dependent wholly on the record of things said to have happened once, but 

 which never happen or can happen a second time. There no experiment is pos- 

 sible ; we can watch for no recurring fact to test the worth of our conjec- 

 tures." 3 



Here Mr. Froucle chooses, as the ground on which to join issue, the 

 old battle-ground of free-will versus necessity : declaring a Social Sci- 

 ence to be incompatible with free-will. The first extract implies, not 

 simply that individual volition is incalculable that " there is no ade- 

 quate science of " man, no science of Psychology ; but it also asserts, 

 by implication, that there are no causal relations among his states of 

 mind: the volition by which "natural causes are liable to be set 

 aside," being put in antithesis to natural, must be supernatural. Hence 

 we are, in fact, carried back to that primitive form of interpretation 

 contemplated at the outset. 



A further comment is, that because volitions of some kinds cannot 

 be foreseen, Mr. Froude concludes that no volitions can be foreseen : 

 ignoring the fact that the simple volitions determining ordinary con- 

 duct are so regular that prevision having a high degree of probability 

 is easy. If, in crossing a street, a man sees a carriage coming upon 

 him, you may safely assert that, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases 

 out of a thousand, he will try to get out of the way. If, being pressed 

 to catch a train, he knows that by one route it is a mile to the station 

 and by another two miles, you may conclude with considerable confi- 

 dence that he will take the one-mile route ; and, should he be aware 

 that losing the train will lose him a fortune, it is pretty certain that, if 

 he has but ten minutes to do the mile in, he will either run or call a 

 cab. If he can buy next door a commodity of daily consumption bet- 

 ter and cheaper than at the other end of the town, we may affirm that, 

 if he does not buy next door, some special relation between him and 

 the remoter shopkeeper furnishes a strong reason for taking a worse 

 commodity at greater cost of money and trouble. And though, if he 

 has an estate to dispose of, it is within the limits of possibility that he 

 will sell it to A for 1,000 though B has offered 2,000 for it ; yet the 

 unusual motives leading to such an act need scarcely be taken into ac- 

 count as qualifying the generalization that a man will habitually sell 

 to the highest bidder. Now, since the predominant activities of citi- 

 zens are determined by motives of this degree of regidarity, there 



1 " Short Studies on Great Subjects," vol. i., p. 24. 



2 Ibid., vol. L, p. 22. 3 Ibid., vol. i., p v 15. 



