Essays in Statistics. 193 



the conjectural to the scientific state. It supplies the psychologist 

 and the moralist with materials with observations and experi- 

 ments. But this is only the beginning of science, not its perfection. 



And, indeed, how could it be expected, in the present state of 

 the moral sciences, that figures could solve every problem ? The 

 philosophers of the present century have shown (and the positivist 

 school have performed a fair proportion of the work) that the 

 sciences are not isolated systems of doctrine, each detached from 

 each, but that there exists among them an hierarchical subordina- 

 tion, so that the more complex rest on the more simple, and pre- 

 suppose them. The mathematical, physical, biological, moral, and 

 social sciences represent so many phases of a continuous process, 

 which advances from the simple to the complex. Social pheno- 

 mena presuppose thought and sensation ; these presuppose life ; life 

 presupposes physical and chemical conditions ; physical and chem- 

 ical facts presuppose mathematical conditions, time, space, and 

 quantity, which are simply the most vague and general conditions 

 of existence. In this series of an increasing complexity, and of a 

 decreasing comprehensiveness, it would be folly to imagine that 

 the superior science could exist before the inferior science were 

 constituted. But quantitative determination exists only in mathe- 

 matics, and to some extent in physics ; it has not yet penetrated 

 into biology ; how, then, could it have attained to the moral and 

 social sciences? It is, perhaps, doubtful if it will ever reach them. 

 Number is an instrument at once too coarse to unravel the delicate 

 texture of these phenomena, and too fragile to penetrate deeply 

 into their complicated and multiple nature. With all its apparent 

 precision it stops at the surface of things, for it can give us only 

 quantity, which is a very unimportant thing as compared with 

 quality. 



In short, this statistical research into heredity fails to do what 

 it promised. Yet, by comparing facts and grouping figures, it 

 arrives at the same result as ourselves, but by another route : it 

 establishes psychological heredity, and the objective reality of 

 its laws. 



