588 SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



With the scientific treatment of the phenomena of 

 human society, the name of Adolphe Quetelet will 

 always be associated; yet the mathematical or exact 

 school was not the only one which in the course of 

 the first half of the century had approached the subject. 

 25. Notably in Germany, under the ruling influence of 

 criticism, philosophical, historical, and critical studies, a school 

 of research had grown up calling itself the his- 

 torical. If the centre of gravity of the mathematical 

 view lies in the conception of a certain uniformity 

 and stability of social phenomena, the other school 

 looked more to historical changes and developments, 

 opposing the doctrine of the movement or of the 

 dynamics to that of the statics of society. Its in- 

 spiration came from a different quarter, and will 

 occupy us in a later portion of this work. For the 

 moment it suffices to remark how here also, in the 

 study of economics and social phenomena, the develop- 

 mental or genetic view has gradually dispelled the 

 earlier search for recurrent forms and regularities, 

 which we may term the morphological aspect : the 

 physiology has succeeded the anatomy of society. 



But statistical methods, with the accompanying doc- 

 trines of probability and averages and the theory of 

 error, have not only been extensively and usefully 

 employed where large numbers of similar facts and 

 events crowd in upon our observation, and, as it were, 

 overwhelm us by their multitudes, as in astronomy, 

 meteorology, economics, and political arithmetic : they 

 have also shown themselves applicable by what we 

 may term the inverse method. Quetelet, when deal- 



