46 ADAPTATION AND PROGRESS 
such. Indeed he went so far as to hold that “les phénoménes 
sociaux, influencés par le libre arbitrare de ’homme, procédent, 
d’année en année, avec plus de régularité que les phénoménes 
purement influencés par des causes matérielles et fortuites.” } 
The fallacies in Quételet’s argument are all ascribable to two 
sources, first, his belief in the stability of types, and second, his too 
rigid application of the organic analogy toa social group. Never- 
theless, he shares with Comte, Spencer, and Darwin the honor 
of being pillars in the building of the new social science. 
The statistical method, of utmost value when used with scien- 
tific insight, has been misused more than has any other, for its 
fallacies are less easily observed by the uninitiated. As has been 
frequently pointed out this method gives us at best only correla- 
tions and conditions, not causes; and too often the phenomena 
compared are not sufficiently alike to warrant the conclusions 
drawn from the comparison. The results obtained by this 
method are valid only in proportion as all other things are equal 
save in the one point of comparison, and this is difficult to obtain 
in social phenomena. 
The advent of Darwin’s Origin of Species marks a new epoch in 
sociological methodology and since his day the pure deductive 
reasoning of the mediaeval philosophers has constantly waned, 
so too, of late, the endeavor to ground social philosophy on a 
classification of social phenomena or formulate its principles by 
analogy. Observation, comparison, compilation of statistics, 
correct interpretation of the data, experiment, these are 
emphasized with increasing vigor, with a proper use, to be sure, 
of deduction, classification, and analogy. 
Before passing to a consideration of Darwin and his successors 
as representatives of the inductive method and as furnishing the 
biological background for the theory of adaptation, it will be 
necessary to consider the importance of the material environment 
in biological evolution and the contributions of Lamarck. 
1 Du Systéme Social, p. 97. 
