124 



SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



ing on the most important concerns of life. Men began 

 to hear with surprise, not unmingled with some vague 

 hope of ultimate benefit, that not only births, deaths, and 

 marriages, but the decisions of tribunals, the results of 

 popular elections, the influence of punishments in check- 

 ing crime, the comparative value of medical remedies and 

 different modes of treatment of diseases, the probable 

 limits of error in numerical results in every department 

 of physical inquiry, the detection of causes, physical, 

 social, and moral nay, even the weight of evidence and 

 the validity of logical argument might come to be sur- 

 veyed with that lynx-eyed scrutiny of a dispassionate 

 analysis, which, if not at once leading to the discovery of 

 positive truth, would at least secure the detection and 

 proscription of many mischievous and besetting fallacies." 

 Both ways of approaching the intricate phenomena of 

 nature and history, that of mechanics dealing with the 

 general laws of motion and of lifeless masses, and that 

 of statistics dealing with the arithmetical properties of 

 large numbers of units, leave out of consideration that 

 hidden and mysterious phenomenon to which alone is 

 attached, if not order and method, yet certainly all 

 that commands interest in the created world : the factor 

 of life the existence of individuality. The view which 

 Laplace took of the universe or of human affairs is an 

 to see how far science and reasoning can go 



The 



Laplace 

 gained his 

 results by 

 disregard- 

 ing the prin- 



alviduaiStv. while disregarding the principle of individuality. 1 



1 See Clerk Maxwell on ' Science 

 and Freewill' (Life by Campbell 

 and Garnett, p. 438) : " Two kinds 

 of knowledge, which we may call for 

 convenience dynamical and statis- 

 tical. The statistical method of 



investigating social questions has 

 Laplace for its most scientific and 

 Buckle for its most popular ex- 

 pounder. Persons are grouped ac- 

 cording to some characteristic, 

 and the number of persons forming 



