584 



SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



23. 

 Buckle. 



out"; 1 society, as it were, exacting a certain proportion 

 of crime, as it does of suicide, poverty, physical and 

 mental disease, for the maintenance of its equilibrium 

 and as an " alarming " 2 tribute to its stability. The 

 extreme consequences which seemed to flow from this 

 doctrine were not drawn by Quetelet, who believed in a 

 gradual though slow development of human society, and 

 in moral as well as physical causes and influences. They 

 were drawn, however, by what we may term the mathe- 

 matical school of social philosophers, who relied greatly 

 upon the figures collected by Quetelet and confirmed by 

 others. In this country the statistical labours of Quetelet 

 were made known by Sir John Herschel in a brilliant 

 article 3 in the ' Edinburgh Keview ' on the " Translation 

 of Quetelet's Letters to Prince Albert on the Theory of 

 Probabilities." They do not seem to have been regarded 

 as detrimental to the moral aspect of human history till 

 Henry Thomas Buckle, in his celebrated ' History of 

 Civilisation,' 4 made use of Quetelet's statistics in sup- 



1 ' Sur 1'Homme,' vol. ii. p. 241. 



2 Cf. vol. ii. p. 262 ; also 

 'Systeme Social' (1848), p. 95, 

 and the ' Me"moire sur la Statistique 

 Morale' (1848). 



3 Vol. xcii. p. 18. 



4 The ' History of Civilisation,' 

 vol. i., appeared in 1857, and was 

 very soon translated in Germany, 

 running in a short time through 

 five editions. There the statistical 

 theories of Quetelet had not made 

 that impression which they made 

 in some other countries. This is 

 explained by the fact that the 

 philosophy of Kant, to which 

 Buckle himself referred in a long 

 passage in his "Introduction," had 

 long before Quetelet accustomed 



thinkers to abandon the popular 

 conception of freewill, which sees 

 in it merely the absence of causal 

 determinateness, in favour of the 

 causal connection of so-called free 

 actions with the motives and the 

 moral character. The subject has 

 been very fully discussed by F. A. 

 Lange in his well-known ' History 

 of Materialism ' (Eng. trans, by 

 Thomas, vol. iii. p. 196, &c.) 

 Lange refers to a remark of the 

 well - known political economist, 

 Prof. Adolph Wagner, who, in his 

 work ' Die Gesetzmassigkeit in den 

 scheinbar willkiihrlichen mensch- 

 lichen Handlungen ' (Hamburg, 

 1864, p. xiii, &c. ), mentions the 

 fact that Quetelet's writings had 



