SOCIOLOGICAL METHODOLOGY 45 



to be immutable. The normal frequency curve applied to each / 

 species revealed the type nature was aiming to produce. Varia- 

 tions from the norm were considered to be due to accidental 

 causes.^ This law he considered to be of universal application, 

 and it furnished him the background for his doctrine of the 

 " average man " which was one of his great original contributions 

 to anthropology, although we find a similar conception in the 

 writings of Father Buffier.^ The qualities of this typical man, 

 moral and mental as well as physical, were obtained in the same 

 way. He had not only a certain height, weight, complexion, 

 color of hair and eyes, but a certain intellectual acuteness, tem- 

 perament, sensitiveness, — in other words a *^ character," which 

 represented reaction power to physical and social stimuli. Under 

 certain conditions this typical man would react in such a way 

 that society would denominate the action crime or again, suicide, 

 and he considered that the social conditions were on the whole so 

 uniform as to produce regularity in such phenomena. He made j 

 no place for progress in either physical or intellectual capacity, I 

 but only in the acquirement of knowledge and power over nature, j 



Quetelet applied the same method to the study of society that 

 he had to the study of the " average man." He is vague in his 

 definition of society but considers it as a " body " in a sense 

 almost as crude as in the use of the term by Hobbes. The nation-? 

 type, in his thought, was made up of physical, intellectual and 

 moral factors. He recognized a complexity here, however, which 

 had no analogy in man, for he showed that in stature, for example, 

 sections of a people differed, as city and country dwellers, and also 

 that there were various sectional types. 



The statistical method, especially as applied to moral phe- 

 nomena, seems to some to eliminate arbitrary will; not so, how- 

 ever, with Quetelet who emphasized its importance in individual 

 life,^ but showed that the free will manifested itself in activities 

 which were a part of the law-abiding order and that considering a 

 group as a whole this element of arbitrariness did not appear as 



^ Du Systeme Social, pp. 257 f. 



2 Quoted and adopted by A. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 318. 



* Du Systeme Social, p. 96. 



