SOCIOLOGICAL METHODOLOGY 45 
to be immutable. The normal frequency curve applied to each 
species revealed the type nature was aiming to produce. Varia- 
tions from the norm were considered to be due to accidental 
causes. This law he considered to be of universal application, 
and it furnished him the background for his doctrine of the 
“ average man ”’ which was one of his great original contributions 
to anthropology, although we find a similar conception in the 
writings of Father Buffier.2 The qualities of this typical man, 
moral and mental as well as physical, were obtained in the same 
way. He had not only a certain height, weight, complexion, 
color of hair and eyes, but a certain intellectual acuteness, tem- 
perament, sensitiveness, — in other words a “character,” which 
represented reaction power to physical and social stimuli. Under 
certain conditions this typical man would react in such a way 
that society would denominate the action crime or again, suicide, 
and he considered that the social conditions were on the whole so 
uniform as to produce regularity in such phenomena. He made 
no place for progress in either physical or intellectual capacity, 
but only in the acquirement of knowledge and power over nature. 
Quételet applied the same method to the study of society that 
he had to the study of the “ average man.” He is vague in his 
definition of society but considers it as a “body” in a sense 
almost as crude as in the use of the term by Hobbes. The nation- 
type, in his thought, was made up of physical, intellectual and 
moral factors. He recognized a complexity here, however, which 
had no analogy in man, for he showed that in stature, for example, 
sections of a people differed, as city and country dwellers, and also 
that there were various sectional types. 
The statistical method, especially as applied to moral phe- 
nomena, seems to some to eliminate arbitrary will; not so, how- 
ever, with Quételet who emphasized its importance in individual 
life2 but showed that the free will manifested itself in activities 
which were a part of the law-abiding order and that considering a 
group as a whole this element of arbitrariness did not appear as 
1 Du Systéme Social, pp. 257 f. 
* Quoted and adopted by A. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 318. 
3 Du Systéme Social, p. 96. 
