Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 1.djvu/57

Rh wills are neutralized in the midst of general wills (p. 100). Free will, though of sufficient power to prevent our predicting the actions of the individual, disappears in the collective action of large bodies of men, which results from general social laws, which can accordingly be predicted like other results regulated by natural laws. We may perhaps apprehend the meaning of Quetelet's views more clearly from another passage, where, to show how apparently isolated events may be really connected under some wide law, he compares single facts to a number of scattered points, which seem not related to one another till the observer, commanding a view of a series of them from a distance, loses sight of their little accidents of arrangement, and at the same time perceives that they are really arranged along a connecting curve. Then the writer goes on to imagine, still more suggestively, that these points might actually be tiny animated creatures, capable of free action within a very narrow range, while nevertheless their spontaneous movements would not be discernible from a distance (p. 94), where only their laws of mutual relation would appear. M. Quetelet can thus conciliate received opinions by recognizing the doctrine of arbitrary volition, while depriving it of its injurious power. His defence of the existence of free will is perhaps too much like the famous excuse of the personage who was blamed for going out shooting on the day he had received the news of his father's death, and who defended himself on the ground that he only shot very small birds. But it is evident that the statistics of social regularity have driven the popular notion of free will into the narrow space included between Quetelet's restriction and Buckle's abolition of it. In fact, no one who studies the temper of our time will deny the increasing prevalence of the tendency of the scientific world to reject the use of the term free will in its vulgar sense—that of unmotived spontaneous election—and even to discourage its use in any other sense as apt to mislead, while its defenders draw their weapons not so much from observation of facts as from speculative and dogmatic philosophy.

To those who accept the extreme principle that similar men under similar circumstances must necessarily do similar acts; and to those, also, who adopt the notion of free will as a small disturbing cause which disappears in the large result of social law, the regularity of civilized life carries its own explanation. Society is roughly homogeneous from year to year. Individuals are born, pass on through stage after stage of life, and die; but at each move one drops into another's place, and the shifting of individuals only brings change into the social system, so far as those great general causes have been at work which difference one age from another the introduction of different knowledge, different principles, different arts, different industrial materials and outlets. The modern sociologist, whatever his