GENERAL LAWS. 



they have been registered in public records entitled to confidence, 

 prove, however, that such is not the case ; and that although they 

 individually act with perfect freedom of will, yet their acts 

 collectively conform to laws scarcely less rigorous than that of 

 gravitation, and that, consequently, although the freedom of 

 individual will renders it impossible that the individual acts can 

 be predicted, the same impossibility is not at all applicable to collec- 

 tive acts. On the contrary, statistical records prove incontestably 

 that acts which, taken individually, cannot for a moment be 

 doubted to proceed from the impulses of a free and independent 

 will, taken collectively, recur with as much regularity and pre- 

 cision as the fall of a heavy body by gravitation. It is true that 

 such acts, when classified and generalised, give average results 

 from which the individual cases depart more or less on the one 

 side than on the other ; but this is no more than takes place with 

 the physical phenomena of inert matter, all of which oscillate 

 round a man state, the departures from which have received the 

 name of perturbations. In moral and intellectual, as well as in 

 physical and mechanical phenomena, there are also perturbations, 

 but, like the latter, these are also confined within narrow limits. 

 The sole difference in the two classes of natural effects being, that 

 in the one case the condition of bodies may be predicted indi- 

 vidually, while in the other it can only be predicted collectively. 



81. Those who have prosecuted their researches most exten- 

 sively in the modern science of Statistics, have proved that the 

 effects of the free will of individuals composing large societies 

 completely neutralise each other, and that such communities taken 

 collectively act as if the whole body had by common consent agreed 

 to follow a certain prescribed course of conduct, not only in 

 matters which might be imagined to be more or less of common 

 interest, but even in those in which no feeling could be imagined 

 to be engaged, save the will, taste, personal inclination, or even 

 caprice, of the individual. 



82. There is, perhaps, no act of our lives which so exclusively 

 concerns and interests us personally as that of marriage. Although 

 parents and friends must be admitted to exercise more or less 

 influence, yet, in the main, individuals of the different sexes are 

 united together by their personal choice and inclination. This 

 being the case, it might be imagined that the frequency of 

 marriages, and the relative ages of the parties contracting them, 

 would be as various as the tastes, feelings, inclinations, and 

 personal characters of the individuals composing the community. 

 Yet we find that such is not the case ; but that, on the contrary, 

 not only the frequency of marriages, but the relative ages of the 

 parties contracting them, are subject to laws quite as rigorous as 



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