OPINION AND PROBABILITY 291 



upon special laws ; which, however, in their total action, must obey the large 

 social law to which they are all subordinate. And the power of the larger law 

 is so irresistible, that neither love of life nor fear of another world can avail 

 anything towards even checking its operation &quot;. 



It is only by a complete misconception of the significance of averages 

 that any such &quot; must&quot; or any such rigorously necessary &quot; //,&quot; can be thus 

 read into them. An average is not to be regarded as a secret something which 

 determines events. This blunder is often made in social statistics. After 

 finding a certain average in human affairs, we conclude that some secret fate 

 is at work. By the aid of a little rhetoric we easily persuade ourselves that an 

 event is fully accounted for when &quot; the law of averages &quot; demands it. &quot; There 

 may be an average in birth and death and crime, but after all, the average is 

 not responsible for any of them. It takes something more potent than an 

 average to produce typhoid fever or to crack a safe.&quot; &quot; 



That there is a certain regularity in those social phenomena which result 

 from man s free activity is undeniable. But the regularity is periodical rather 

 than constant ; nor is there any exact law governing the duration of the phases 

 or periods. Tabulated returns have been made out, showing the periodical 

 recurrence of economic crises in France, England, and the United States, 

 from the beginning of the century to 1882. The practical coincidence of the 

 dates in those tables clearly indicates similarity of causes and solidarity of 

 their activity and effects. But if the fact of periodicity is certain, the apparition 

 of such commercial crises, and the intervals between them, are variable ele 

 ments. This variability is the outcome of causes so complex that it is quite 

 impossible to attempt to formulate any sort of a periodic law. 3 



&quot;The free action of human beings,&quot; writes M. Bertrand, 4 &quot;as also the 

 action of animals in spite of what Descartes has said of them bring into 

 the domain of causality an element inaccessible to the calculus.&quot; 



The justice of this remark must be apparent to any impartial student of 

 natural and social phenomena. We have already referred to the futility of any 

 attempt to reduce all reality to a system subject to purely mechanical laws. A 

 cosmic system made up of &quot; indifferent &quot; atoms and local motion, capable of 

 exact mathematical measurement, and invariable in the sum-total of its elements 



l Hist. of Civilization, vol. i., p. 25, apud WELTON, op. cit., p. 199. 



2 BOWNE, op. cit. t p. 188. 



3 The table of cases from 1800 to 1882 is as follows : 



France. England. United States. 



1804 1803 1803 



1810 1810 1810 



1814-1815 1815 1814 



1818 1818 1818 



1825 1825 1826 



1830 1830 



1836-1839 1836-1839 1837-1839 



1847 1847 1848 



1857 1857 1857 



1864 1864-1866 



1873 1873 



1882 1882 1882 



4 op. cit., Preface, p. xlix, 



19* 



