ON THE STATISTICAL VIEW OF NATURE. 589 



ing with long columns of human statistics, felt a 

 relief in studying the average or mean man. Is it 

 not possible that in many instances what nature and 

 experience show us is only the average itself our 

 senses and our intellect being too coarse to penetrate 

 to the numberless individual cases out of which the 

 sum or the average is made up ? May not even the 

 simplest phenomenon or thing in nature be in fact 26. 



. Application 



an aggregate, a total, and its apparent behaviour and m physics. 

 properties merely a collective effect? Both the kinetic 

 and the atomic view of natural objects and phenomena 

 seem to favour this way of regarding things, the 

 former showing us in many cases motion and unrest 

 where at the first glance we saw only rest, and the 

 latter dissolving apparently continuous and homogene- 

 ous structures into crowds or assemblages of many 

 particles. 



Thus the apparently steady pressure of gases is now 

 known to be in reality the violent bombardment of 

 the wall of the containing vessel by their mole- 

 cules ; and the most homogeneous and transparent 

 crystal is revealed, by its optical properties, as an 

 assemblage of very minute particles, held together by 

 forces which may be overcome by mechanical or 

 chemical agencies. Regarded from this point of view, 

 our knowledge of natural objects is merely statistical : 

 it deals with aggregates ; it is a collective knowledge. 

 And if we further consider that the sameness of the 

 numberless constituent particles is by no means proved, 

 this collective knowledge turns out to be merely con- 

 cerned with averages : it is statistical, not individual, 



