Mar. 7, 1872 J 



NATURE 



359 



action, M. Ouetelet gives a table of the ages of marriage 

 in Belgium (Phys. Soc. i. p. 275). Here the numbers of 

 what may be called normal marriages, those between men 

 under 45 with women under 30, as well as of the less usual 

 unions where the women are between 30 and 45, show the 

 sort of general regularity which one would expect from 

 mere consideration of the circumstances. The astonishing 

 feature of the table is the regularity of the unusual mar- 

 riages. Disregarding decimals, and calculating the 

 approximate whole numbers in their proportion to 10,000 

 marriages, the table shows in each of five five-year periods 

 from 1 84 1 to 1S65, 6 men aged from 30 to 45 who married 

 women aged 60 or more, and i to 2 men aged 30 or less 

 who married women aged 60 or more. M. Ouetelet may 

 well speak of this as the most curious and suggestive 

 statistical document he has met with. These young hus- 

 bands had their liberty of choice, yet their sexagenarian 

 brides brought them up one after the other in periodical 

 succession, as sacrifices to the occult tendencies of the 

 social system. The statistician's comment is, " it is curious 

 to see man, proudly entitling himself King of Nature and 

 fancying himself controlling all things by his free-will, 

 yet submitting, unknown to himself, more rigorously than 

 any other being in creation, to the laws he is under sub- 

 jection to. These laws are co-ordinated with such wisdom 

 that they even escape his attention." 



The admission of evidence Hke this, however, is not 

 always followed by the same philosophical explanation of 

 it. Buckle finds his solution by simply discarding the 

 idea that human action "depends on some capricious and 

 personal principle peculiar to each man, as free-will or 

 the like ; " on the contrary, he asserts " the great truth 

 that the actions of men, being guided by their antecedents, 

 are in reality never inconsistent, but, however capricious 

 they may appear, only form part of one vast scheme of 

 universal order, of which we, in the present state of know- 

 ledge, can barely see the outline." M. Ouetelet's argu- 

 ment from the same evidence differs remarkably from 

 this. His expedient for accounting for the regularity of 

 social events without throwing over the notion of arbitrary 

 action, is to admit the existence of free-will, but to confine 

 its effects within very narrow bounds. He holds that arbi- 

 trary will does not act beyond the limits at which science 

 begins, and that its effects, though apparently so great, 

 may, if taken collectively, be reckoned as null, experience 

 proving that individual wills are neutralised in the midst 

 of general wills (p. 100). Free-will, though of sufficient 

 power to prevent our predicting the actions of the indivi- 

 dual, disappears in the collective action of large bodies of 

 men, which results from general social laws, which can 

 accordingly be predicted like other results regulated by 

 natural laws. We may perhaps apprehend the meaning 

 of Ouetelet's views more clearly from another passage, 

 where, to show how apparently isolated events may be 

 really connected under some wide law, he compares single 

 facts to a number of scattered points, which seem not re- 

 lated to one another till the observer, commanding a 

 view of a series of them from, a distance, loses sight 

 of their little accidents of arrangement, and at the same 

 time perceives that they are really arranged along a con- 

 necting curve. Then the writer goes on to imagine, still 

 more suggestively, that these points might actually be 

 tiny animated creatures, capable of free action within a 



very narrow range, while nevertheless their spontaneous 

 movements would not be discernible from a distance 

 (p. 94), where only their laws of mutual relation would ap- 

 pear. M. Quetelet can thus conciliate received opinions 

 by recognising the doctrine of arbitrary volition, while 

 depriving it of its injurious power.* His defence of 

 the existence of free-will is perhaps too much like the 

 famous excuse of the personage who was blamed for 

 going out shooting on the day he had received the 

 news of his father's death, and who defended himself 

 on the ground that he only shot very small birds. But 

 it is evident that the statistics of social regularity have 

 driven the popular notion of free-will into the narrow 

 space included between Ouetelet's restriction and Buckle's 

 abohtion of it. In fact, no one who studies the temper of 

 our time will deny the increasing prevalence of the ten- 

 dency of the scientific world to reject the use of the term 

 free-will in its vulgar sense, that of unmotived spontaneous 

 election, and even to discourage its use in any other sense 

 as apt to mislead, while its defenders draw their weapons 

 not so much from observation of facts as from speculative 

 and dogmatic philosophy. 



To those who accept the extreme principle that similar 

 men under similar circumstances must necessarily do 

 similar acts ; and to those, also, who adopt the notion of 

 free-will as a small disturbing cause which disappears in 

 the large result of social law, the regularity of civilised 

 life carries its own explanation. Society is roughly homo- 

 geneous from year to year. Individuals are born, pass 

 on through stage after stage of life, and die ; but at each 

 move one drops into another's place, and the shifting of 

 individuals only brings change into the social system, so 

 far as those great general causes have been at work which 

 diff'erence one age from another, the introduction of 

 different knowledge, different principles, different arts, 

 different industrial materials and outlets. The modern 

 sociologist, whatever his metaphysical prepossessions, looks 

 at society as a system amenable to direct cause and effect. 

 To a great extent his accurate reckonings serve to give 

 more force and point to the conclusions of rough ex- 

 perience ; to a great extent, also, they correct old ideas 

 and introduce new aspects of social law. What gives to 

 the statistical method its greatest scope and power is that 

 its evidence and proof of law applies indiscriminately to 

 what we call physical, biological, and ethical products of 

 society, these various effects acting and re-acting on one 

 another. A few instances may be given to show the 

 existence of the relations in question, without attempting 

 to show their precise nature, nor to trace the operation of 

 other determining causes. 



Thus, for instance, the mode of life affects its length 

 Statistics show that the mortality of the very poor is 

 about half as much again as the mortality of the very rich ; 

 while as to the influence of professions, it appears that in 

 German)- only twenty-four doctors reach the age of seventy 

 as against thirty-two military men and forty-two theolo- 

 gians. The propensity to theft bears a distinct rela- 

 tion to age ; thus the French criminal statistics esti- 

 mate the propensity to theft between the ages of 

 twenty-one and twenty-five, as being five-thirds as much 

 as between the ages of thirty-five and forty. The 



* In regard to the relation of statistics to the doctrine of fatalism, see Dr 

 Farre s " Report on the Programme of the Fourth Session of the Statistical 

 Congress. 



