ON THE STATISTICAL VIEW OF NATURE. 603 



as besides the purely mechanical movements and their 

 summation, it must contain a reference to the nature of 

 our own faculties a principle which indicates to what 

 extent the elementary movements come under our control 

 or escape it. There must be a principle which measures 

 the availability and usefulness for our powers of natural 

 processes, marking off what is orderly for our senses and 

 accessible to our powers, from what is disorderly and in- 

 accessible. This principle the founders of the science of 

 Thermodynamics Rankine, Clausius, and Thomson had 

 empirically established ; Thomson having foreseen its 

 far-reaching importance in the economy of nature and 

 the applications of industry. The statistical view of 

 natural phenomena forced upon us by atomism and 

 kinetics has shown us that it is not a purely me- iedge. now 

 chanical 1 principle. It is one belonging to the theory 

 of averages and probability. The scientific view of 

 nature is thus, as Clerk-Maxwell says, neither purely 

 historical nor purely mechanical it is statistical. 2 



To this view of the scientific treatment of natural 

 phenomena Clerk-Maxwell has attached a further con- 



34. 



As opposed 

 to historical 



1 Clerk-Maxwell, in a review of 

 Tait's "Thermodynamics" ('Scien- 

 tific Papers,' vol. ii. p. 670) : "The 

 truth of the second law is therefore 

 a statistical, not a mathematical, 

 truth, for it depends on the fact 

 that the bodies we deal with consist 

 of millions of molecules, and that 

 we never can get hold of single 

 molecules." 



2 Any one who has had occasion 

 to observe the internal work of any 

 large industrial or manufacturing 

 organisation, will have noticed the 

 twofold way in which important 

 occurrences are looked at by the 



commercial and the technical 

 chiefs. As regularity is in many 

 instances the condition of success, 

 any break of its routine is care- 

 fully examined and criticised. In 

 such cases the technical man will 

 look to the proximate mechanical 

 causes for an explanation, whereas 

 the commercial man, unable to 

 reflect on the technical and mechani- 

 cal conditions of the special case, 

 will always refer to his statistics of 

 the past as a guide in judging the 

 immediate difficulty that is before 

 him. 



