Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/599

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concerned only with calculations of probabilities, with tables of mortality which were to serve as the basis of loans in the form of life annuities. With Halley (1693), and especially with Buffon, it was for the time applied to all the phenomena of life and death. Finally, by the end of the eighteenth century, and especially in the beginning of the nineteenth, with La Place and Joseph Fourier, it was extended to social phenomena, especially to social mechanics and statics. The same movement took place in France, England, Holland, Germany, and Italy. Nothing proves better than this fact the organic character of this scientific movement, as I have shown in the numerous lectures which I have devoted to the critical expose of the theories of this school, of which Ad. Quetelet was one of the most eminent representatives (i 796-1874). x

Quetelet is to be associated with these immediate precursors, the majority of whom, like himself, were mathematicians, astrono- mers, natural philosophers. They belong in a common group because of the same atomistic and mechanical conception of society ; and by this conception they are also connected with the principal founders of political economy. Quetelet did not distinguish society from the state. According to him, all devia- tions result from natural or artificial disturbances ; progress con- sists in following the average of these deviations ; the social structure is the most complete equilibrium possible. The center of this equilibrium is the average man. "The average man is to a nation what the center of gravity is to a body ; it is by this consideration that we are led to an understanding of all the phenomena of equilibrium and of movement."

In antiquity, Aristotle and Archimedes were the precursors of this conception ; the former extended it from mechanics to the moral and political sciences. Quetelet, however and it is this which distinguishes scientific determinism in general from fatalism considered social phenomena as modifiable and per- fectible. In the first place, he likened society to an immense

1 The critical essays on the static theories of Ad. Quetelet, A. Comte, and Herbert Spencer should have formed part of the present work ; but, as the latter is already somewhat long, I am obliged to publish the essays separately.