OPINION AND PROBABILITY 289 



people marry. Those observations extended over the years 1 841- 

 1865. For example, during the years 1841 to 1 846, the number 

 of men who got married in the towns of Belgium between the 

 ages of twenty-five and thirty, were, respectively, 2681, 2658, 

 2698, 2698. l Again, the statistics of crimes showed the same 

 marked constancy. &quot; There is an annual tax [of human beings] 

 which we pay with frightful regularity to the prisons, convict 

 settlements, and scaffolds.&quot; 2 &quot; It is well known,&quot; writes Pro 

 fessor Welton, 3 &quot; that the number of persons who commit certain 

 crimes, who are born, or who die, in the course of a year bears 

 a remarkably uniform proportion to the total number of the in 

 habitants of any given country; there is, as we say, a pretty 

 constant average preserved in many of the phenomena of social 

 life. For example, something over seventy people out of every 

 million commit suicide every year in England and Wales, whilst 

 in Saxony the proportion is about five times as great as this, and 

 in Ireland only about one-third as large. And these numbers 

 are found to remain very uniform from year to year. Moreover, 

 the averages are found to vary with great regularity according to 

 the months of the year, being highest in June, falling regularly 

 to December, and then gradually rising again ; and this occurs 

 year after year. Further, the proportion who commit suicide at 

 different ages remains fairly constant.&quot; 



Now what does this constancy of averages point to? To a 

 &quot; law which must of necessity be fulfilled &quot; ? 4 No, but simply 

 &quot; to the fact that social and material conditions remain compara 

 tively unchanged for mankind in general. But it is an error to 

 assume that such a statistical uniformity proves anything beyond 

 its own existence. . . . With regard to the future we can only 

 judge that the same numbers will be found to hold, if the same 

 general conditions remain. . . . But this is mere tautology, for it 

 simply says, If the past be exactly repeated it will be exactly re 

 peated. The very question is whether all the conditions known 

 and unknown will remain unchanged. . . . But uniformity in 

 averages . . . involves no necessity for its own continuance. No 

 doubt every element of reality is strictly determined in all its de 

 tails by its conditions given exactly those conditions, that result 

 is necessary. But this necessity is concealed by the average, 

 which neglects all the particular characteristics of the individual 



1 QUETELET, Systeme sociale, p. 68. *ibid. 



3 WELTON, op. cit., p. 198. ^ibid., 198-9. 



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