SCIENCE OF HISTORY. 645 



ive man. If it is the law of human life, the law must be realized in history. 

 The experience of human affairs when looked at en masse, must be in ac- 

 cordance with it if true, or repugnant to it if false. The support which 

 this a posteriori verification affords to the law, is the part of the case which 

 has been most clearly and triumphantly brought out by Mr. Buckle. 



The facts of statistics, since they have been made a subject of careful re- 

 cordation and study, have yielded conclusions, some of which have been very 

 startling to persons not accustomed to regard moral actions as subject to uni- 

 form laws. The very events which in their own nature appear most capri- 

 cious and uncertain, and which in any individual case no attainable degree 

 of knowledge would enable us to foresee, occur, when considerable numbers 

 are taken into the account, with a degree of regularity approaching to math- 

 •ematical. What act is there which all would consider as more completely 

 dependent on individual character, and on the exercise of individual free 

 will, than that of slaying a fellow-creature ? Yet in any large country, the 

 number of murders, in proportion to the population, varies (it has been 

 found) very little from one year to another, and in its variations never de- 

 viates widely from a certain average. What is still more remarkable, there 

 is a similar approach to constanc}'" in the proportion of these murders an- 

 nually committed with every particular kind of instrument. There is a 

 like approximation to identity, as between one year and another, in the com- 

 parative number of legitimate and of illegitimate births. The same thing 

 is found true of suicides, accidents, and all other social phenomena of which 

 the registration is sufficiently perfect ; one of the most curiously illustrative 

 examples being the fact, ascertained by the registers of the London and 

 Paris post-offices, that the number of letters posted which the writers have 

 forgotten to direct, is nearly the same, in proportion to the whole number 

 of letters posted, in one year as in another. " Year after year," says Mr. 

 Buckle, " the same proportion of letter-writers forget this simple act ; so 

 that for each successive period we can actually foretell the number of per- 

 sons whose memory will fail them in regard to this trifling, and as it might 

 appear, accidental occurrence."* 



This singular degree of regularity en w«sse, combined Avith the extreme 

 of irregularity in the cases composing the mass, is a felicitous verification 

 a posteriori of the law of causation in its application to human conduct. 

 Assuming the truth of that law, every human action, every murder, for in- 

 stance, is the concurrent result of two sets of causes. On the one part, the 

 general circumstances of the country and its inhabitants; the moral, educa- 

 tional, economical, and other influences operating on the whole people, and 

 constituting what we term the state of civilization. On the other part, the 

 great variety of influences special to the individual : his temperament, and 

 other peculiarities of organization, his parentage, habitual associates, temp- 

 tations, and so forth. If we now take the whole of the instances which oc- 

 cur within a sufficiently large field to exhaust all the combinations of these 

 special influences, or, in other words, to eliminate chance ; and if all these 

 instances have occurred within such narrow limits of time, that no material 

 change can have taken place in the general influences constituting the state 

 of civilization of the country; we may be certain, that if human actions are 

 governed by invariable laws, the aggregate result Avill be something like a 

 constant quantity. The number of murders committed within that space 

 and time, being the effect partly of general causes which have not varied, 



* Buckle's History of Civilization, j., 30. 



