SCIENCE OF HISTORY. 



609 



This singular degree of regularity 

 en masse, combined with the extreme 

 of irregularity in the cases composing 

 the mass, is a felicitous verification d 

 jioderiori of the bw of causation in 

 its application to human conduct. 

 Assuming the truth of that law, 

 every human action, every murder, 

 for instance, is the concurrent result 

 of two sets of causes. On the one 

 part, the general circumstances of 

 tlie country and its inhabitants ; the 

 moral, educational, economical, and 

 other influences operating on the 

 whole people, and constituting what 

 we term the state of civilisation. On 

 the other part, the great variety of 

 influences special to the individual : 

 his temperament, and other peculia- 

 rities of organisation, his parentage, 

 habitual associates, temptations, and 

 so forth. If we now take the whole 

 of the instances which occur within a 

 sufficiently large field to exhaust all 

 the combinations of these special in- 

 fluences, or, in other words, to elimi- 

 nate chance; and if all these instances 

 have occurred within such narrow 

 limits of time that no material change 

 can have taken place in the general 

 influences constituting the state of 

 civilisation of the covmtry, we may 

 be certain that if human actions are 

 governed by invariable laws, the ag- 

 gregate result will be something like 

 a constant quantity. The number of 

 murders committed within that space 

 and time being the effect partly of 

 general causes which have not varied, 

 and partly of partial causes the whole 

 round of whose variations has been 

 included, will be, practically speak- 

 ing, invariable. 



Literally and mathematically in- 

 variable it is not, and could not be 

 expecte.' to be ; because the period 

 of a y is too short to include all 

 the possible combinations of partial 

 causes, while it is, at the same time, 

 sufficiently long to make it probable 

 that in some years, at least, of every 

 series, there will have been intro- 

 duced new influences of a more or 

 less general ch^acter; such as a 



more vigorous or a more relaxed 

 police ; some temporary excitement 

 from political or religious causes ; or 

 some incident generally notorious, of 

 a nature to act morbidly on the ima- 

 gination. That in spite of these un- 

 avoidable imperfections in the data, 

 there should be so very trifling a 

 margin of variation in the annual 

 results, is a brilliant confirmation of 

 the general theory. 



§ 2. The same considerations which 

 thus strikingly corroborate the evi- 

 dence of the doctrine that historical 

 facts are the invariable effects of 

 causes, tend equally to clear that 

 doctrine from various misapprehen- 

 sions, the existence of which has been 

 put in evidence by the recent discus- 

 sions. Some persons, for instance, 

 seemingly imagine the doctrine to 

 imply, not merely that the total 

 number of murders committed in a 

 given space and time is entirely the 

 effect of the general circumstances of 

 society, but that every particular 

 murder is so too ; that the individual 

 murderer is, so to speak, a mere in- 

 strument in the hands of general 

 causes ; that he himself has no op- 

 tion, or, if he has. and chose to exer- 

 cise it, some one else would be ne- 

 cessitated to take his place ; that if 

 any one of the actual murderers 

 had abstained from the crime, some 

 person who would otherwise have 

 remained innocent would have com- 

 mitted an extra murder to make up 

 the average. Such a corollary would 

 certainly convict any theory which 

 necessarily led to it of absurdity. It 

 is obvious, however, that each parti- 

 cular murder depends, not on the 

 •Jfeneral state of society only, but on 

 that combined with causes special 

 to the case, which are generally much 

 more powerful ; and if these special 

 causes, which have greater influence 

 than the general ones in causing every 

 particular murder, have no influence 

 on the number of murders in a given 

 period, it is because the field of obser- 

 vation is go extensive as to include 



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