Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/85

 other, of law, custom and religion. To show the law controlling this, means nothing else than to bring technics into a causal connection with the legal, moral, and religious conceptions without the help of extraordinary individuals or events.

This connection was, however, discovered almost simultaneously from another side, namely statistics.

So long as the parish was the most important economic institution statistics were hardly required. In the parish it was easy to get a view of the state of affairs. But even if statistics were made then, they could scarcely suggest scientific observations, as with such small figures the law had no chance of showing itself. That was bound to alter as the capitalist method of production created the modern states, which were not, like the earlier ones, simple groups of communes or parishes and provinces, but unitary bodies with important economic functions.

Besides that, however, the capitalist method of production developed not simply the inner market but, in addition, created the world market. This produced highly complicated connections which could not be controlled without the means of statistics. Founded for the practical purpose of tax-gathering and raising of recruits, for customs, and finally for the insurance societies, it gradually embraced wider and wider spheres, and produced a mass of observations on a large scale, revealing laws which were bound to impress themselves on observant workers-up of the material. In England they had already, towards the end of the seventeenth century, since Petty, arrived at a political arithmetic, in which, however, "estimates" played a very big rôle. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the method of statistical inquiries was so complete and its sphere so varied that it was possible to discover with the greatest certainty the laws governing the actions of great masses of men. The Belgian Guelelet made an attempt, in the thirties, to describe in this manner the physiology of human society.

It was seen that the determining element in the alterations of human action was always a material, as a