Sociological theories of History 539 
painters. But for Giotto and Charles VIII, French painting might 
have been very different. It may be said that “if Giotto had not 
appeared, some other great initiator would have played a role 
analogous to his, and that without Charles VIII there would have 
been the commerce with Italy, which in the long run would have 
sufficed to place France in relation with Italian artists. But the 
equivalent of Giotto might have been deferred for a century and 
probably would have been different ; and commercial relations would 
have required ages to produce the rayonnement imitatif of Italian 
art in France, which the expedition of the royal adventurer provoked 
in a few years’.” Instances furnished by political history are simply 
endless. Can we conjecture how events would have moved if the son 
of Philip of Macedon had been an incompetent? The aggressive 
action of Prussia which astonished Europe in 1740 determined the 
subsequent history of Germany; but that action was anything but 
inevitable ; it depended entirely on the personality of Frederick the 
Great. 
Hence it may be argued that the action of individual wills is a 
determining and disturbing factor, too significant and effective to 
allow history to be grasped by sociological formulae. The types and 
general forms of development which the sociologist attempts to 
disengage can only assist the historian in understanding the actual 
course of events. It is in the special domains of economic history 
and Culturgeschichte which have come to the front in modern times 
that generalisation is most fruitful, but even in these it may be con- 
tended that it furnishes only partial explanations. 
17. The truth is that Darwinism itself offers the best illustration 
of the insufficiency of general laws to account for historical develop- 
ment. The part played by coincidence, and the part played by 
individuals—limited by, and related to, general social conditions— 
render it impossible to deduce the course of the past history of man 
or to predict the future. But it is just the same with organic 
development. Darwin (or any other zoologist) could not deduce the 
actual course of evolution from general principles. Given an 
organism and its environment, he could not show that it must evolve 
into a more complex organism of a definite pre-determined type ; 
knowing what it has evolved into, he could attempt to discover and 
assign the determining causes. General principles do not account 
for a particular sequence ; they embody necessary conditions ; but 
there is a chapter of accidents too. It is the same in the case of 
history. 
1 I have taken this example from G. Tarde’s La logique sociale? (p. 403), Paris, 1904, 
where it is used for quite a different purpose. 
