ON THE STATISTICAL VIEW OF NATURE. 599 



that, after all, the whole of our knowledge of natural 

 phenomena and natural things may be only statistical, 

 not historical or individual. " In dealing," he says, 1 

 " with masses of matter, while we do not perceive the 

 individual molecules, we are compelled to adopt the 

 statistical method of calculation, and to abandon the 

 strict dynamical method in which we follow every 

 motion by the calculus. It would be interesting to 

 inquire how far those ideas about the nature and the 

 methods of science which have been derived from 

 examples of scientific investigation in which the 

 dynamical method is followed, are applicable to our 

 actual knowledge of concrete things, which, as we have 

 seen, is of an essentially statistical nature, because no 

 one has yet discovered any practical method of tracing 

 the path of a molecule, or of identifying it at different 

 times." And elsewhere 2 he says : " The statistical 

 method of investigating social questions has Laplace 

 for its most scientific and Buckle for its most popular 



1 'Theory of Heat,' 8th ed., p. 

 329 



2 'Life of Clerk - Maxwell by 

 Campbell and Garnett.' Chap. xiv. 

 contains a paper with the title, 

 ' ' Does the progress of Physical 

 Science tend to give any advantage 

 to the opinion of Necessity (or 

 Determinism) over that of the 

 Contingency of Events and the 

 Freedom of the Will?" In it (p. 

 435) there occurs the following 

 passage : " The doctrine of the 

 conservation of energy, when ap- 

 plied to living beings, leads to the 

 conclusion that the soul of an 

 animal is not, like the mainspring 

 of a watch, the motive power of 

 the body, but that its function is 



rather that of a steersman of a 

 vessel not to produce, but to 

 regulate and direct, the animal 

 powers." He then speaks of the 

 " powerful effect on the world of 

 thought" which the developments 

 of molecular science are likely to 

 have, considering the "most im- 

 portant effect on our way of think- 

 ing to be that it forces on our 

 attention the distinction between 

 two kinds of knowledge, which 

 we may call for convenience the 

 Dynamical and Statistical." The 

 paper from which the extracts in 

 the text are taken is dated 1873. 

 Clerk-Maxwell was then forty-one 

 years of age. 



