ON THE STATISTICAL VIEW OF NATURE. 553 



fjovern, regulate, and fashion the practical work of life 

 and society, become an instrument of personal use and 

 daily importance. Statesmen, legislators, organisers of 

 men, captains of industry, contractors, practical engineers, 

 colonisers, pioneers, and leaders of all kinds are still 

 mostly ignorant of these scientific ideas. They regard 

 them from a distance, themselves relying mainly on 

 common -sense, on personal experience, or on the innate 

 but indefinable impulses of individual genius ; pro- 

 fessional, scientific knowledge is only one, and hardly the 

 most important, of the many agencies with which they 

 deal and which they have to take into account. 



And yet, in spite of this fact that the ordinary routine 4. 



r. T e • 1 Scientific 



of life IS a very different process from the ways of spirit in 



" ^ •' business. 



science, we must admit that the scientific spirit very 

 largely pervades the business of to-day. You cannot 

 enter any commercial, shipping, or general trading office 

 without being struck with the number of carefully pre- 

 pared charts, tables, and statistical registers of all kinds 

 of curves showing the rise and fall of prices, the produc- 

 tion and consumption, the stocks and values of metals, 

 coal, grain, chemicals, cotton, and produce of every kind ; 

 and in quite recent years, not only material things of all 

 sorts, but the intangible thing called energy — after 

 supplanting the older term horse-power — has become the 

 subject of elaborate tabular and graphical registration. 

 The streets of even the smaller towns in every civilised 

 country show, besides the sign-boards of shops, otiices, 

 and banks, an increasing array of insurance firms, whose 

 whole business depends on elaborate calculations, based 

 on long tables of births, deaths, marriages, shipwrecks, 



