Tables of statistics, also, are said to establish laws of averages respecting the most uncertain of human actions: a certain percentage of letters put in the post-office will be misdirected; suicides and murders from year to year will bear the same ratio to the population. II. These laws of averages are too indefinite to be the basis of any science of the uniformity of human action. At the most they determine nothing as to individual action. A certain number in a thousand misdirect letters or commit murders in a year. But this does not enable any one to foresee that a particular person will misdirect a letter or commit a murder next year. It would hardly be accepted as science to say that six per cent. of all unsup ported stones will fall, while it remains impossible to designate the individual stones which will fall. The laws of averages do not determine anything even as to communities. The average that is true of a population of millions is not true of the hundreds and the thousands; nor is any line of demarkation established defining how great the population in question must be. It is asserted, for example, that in the United States the murders annually will be a specified number in a thousand. But I know a township settled more than a hundred years ago and now containing some five thousand inhabitants, in which no murder was ever known to be committed. Of what scientific significance is an average true of masses of millions, when there is no certainty that among the thousands in any particular town or county there will be one murder in a century? Also, the annual average of crimes in New York city is greater than the average in an equal population in any contiguous rural counties in the State. And the average percentage of crimes in the last decade may be widely different from the percentage in the same territory in the first decade of the century. Cosmic agencies do not change. Why then does human action vary? And the same outward actions do not have the same significance as revealing the springs and laws of human action. The law distinguishes various kinds of homicide. A murder incited by covetousness is of widely different significance from a murder incited by lust or revenge, and must be the result of widely different influences. The two cannot be grouped together as of the same import or as proving that man acts necessarily under external agencies. On similar grounds Mr. R. A. Proctor has pointed out the insufficiency of the argument from statistics supposed to prove that marriage is conducive to longevity. Statistical averages have sometimes been set forth as disproving free-will. They seem to prove just the contrary, that there are ele ments concerned in human action making it impossible to reduce it under exact scientific laws of nature. It may be added that in some cases we may question the correctness of the statistics, or else the fairness of the grouping and interpreting of the facts. Quételet, estimating the probability of the birth of males or females, says that once in a certain number of times we shall find the births of a given number of males happening successively. То ascertain the relative frequency of such an event he does not consult the registers of births, but resorts to a method which he 66 is says more expeditious and quite as conclusive;" he puts forty black and forty white balls in a bag and notes the succession of colors as he draws them out. One who is not an anthropologist may raise the question whether drawing balls from a bag involves all the conditions which influence the birth of children. It may be admitted that Mr. Buckle presents facts in discussing, in the second volume of his history, the influence of Christianity and the Christian ministry in Scotland. But every one acquainted with the history of that country knows that he has presented but a part of the facts and grouped them so as to falsify the real history. It is as if one should collect from the daily papers the accounts of all the crimes in New York city for a year and give these alone with comments arguing that these fully represent the civilization of that city. III. The uniformity actually existing in human action is compatible with freedom. Character itself is primarily a choice. Yet it is a choice which persists, which modifies the state of the sensibilities and the intellect, and both directly and indirectly influences the subsequent determinations. The choice itself is character and thus is the basis of uniformity of action. This gives confidence in character. A man long known to be honest, truthful, beneficent, high-minded, is trusted accordingly. He is expected to continue to be what he has been. In public life or private it is character which tells. The same is true of masses of men. One could have predicted the contrasted action of the Puritans and the Cavaliers in Great Britain in the seventeenth century, and of the Dutch Protestants and the Spanish Catholics in the days of Philip II. and the Duke of Alva. But the uniformity of action had its basis chiefly in character. Thus the free-will itself is a basis of the uniformity of human action. The entire conformity of will with reason would involve uniform right character and action. This uniformity and unchangeableness of right character exists in the highest degree in God, who is eternal and neverchanging love. But the uniformity which is involved in right character is compatible with freedom, for it includes freedom in its essence. Uniformity of action among men arises in part from their common constitution. When Mungo Park came one evening weary and ill to an African village, some of the negro women ministered to him, chanting a ditty the refrain of which as translated by him was: "Let us pity the poor white man; he has no mother to bring him milk; no wife to grind him corn." Men everywhere and in all ages have the common characteristics of human nature. They think, and feel, and act as men. "Skins may differ, but affection Uniformity of action among men arises, also, from the action of the same outward agencies on their common human nature. If an Esquimaux goes to the torrid zone he will cease to wear furs and to eat blubber. This is no argument against free-will; free-will does not control the weather, nor, directly and immediately, its effect on the physical system. Yet free-will does not therefore cease to act; for if the Esquimaux did not leave off his furs under the heat he would show that he was not a reasonable being. His arctic dog could not by an act of will throw off his hair nor adjust himself to meet the exigencies of the climate. Free-will does not create man's physical organization and strength, nor the action of cosmic forces on him. It exerts his physical and intellectual power and directs it to chosen ends. It determines him to exertion by which he subdues nature and makes it serve him; and while subduing nature he develops himself. Therefore the uniformity of man's action as it actually exists is no argument against free-will. 74. Sociology and Free-Will. A science of Sociology consistent with free-will is possible. I. An attempted sociology, founded on the denial of free-will, cannot be science. It has no right to call itself an inductive or empirical science; for it begins by arbitrarily denying or ignoring the most fundamental, important and certain of all the facts pertaining to humanity: free-will and personality, moral responsibility and character, and religion. It assumes some theory of knowledge which limits it to objects of sense; it assumes that man's action and character are caused by the same chemical and mechanical forces which cause the combinations and motions of bodies, and in accordance with the same chemical and mechanical laws. A sociology, which thus starts in dogmatic assumption refusing to take note of facts patent to the universal consciousness of man, must be vitiated with defect and error throughout, and its propagation and reception must hinder human progress and benumb the noblest powers of man. For example, an eminent professor of Social Science says: " It is incontestably plain that a man who accepts the dogmas about social living which are imposed by the authority of any religion must regard the subject of right social living as settled and closed, and he cannot enter on any investigation the first groundwork of which would be doubt of the authority which he recognizes as final. The human race has never done anything else but struggle with the problem of social welfare. That struggle embraces all minor problems which occupy human attention here, save those of religion, which reaches beyond this world and finds its objects beyond this life." According to the latest conclusions of anthropology religion has existed among all races and tribes of men. It is notorious, also, that instead of pertaining to the other world alone, it claims to regulate life to the deepest springs of character, and has been one of the most powerful factors in human history. It is itself a great sociological fact which all true sociology must recognize. As to the intimation that a belief in any religion disqualifies the believer for a candid investigation of sociology, we may ask, in view of the almost universal existence of religion, Who are to be the candid sociologists? Must all sociologists be atheists? And even an atheist, if he has no religion, is certainly a metaphysician and a theologian; and, as Comte has somewhere said, the most illogical of them all, because he busies himself about an insolvable problem and gives its least plausible solution. And the objection against religion is equally pertinent against morality. The law of universal love, the first principles of truthfulness, justice and benevolence are settled beyond dispute. "The primal duties shine aloft like stars." Do right moral convictions and character disqualify a man for the candid study of sociology? This writer's assertion respecting religion sweeps to the conclusion that fixed moral and religious convictions are incompatible with candid investigation. If a man would suffer death rather than do a dishonorable deed, that character would make him incompetent for a candid investigation of what constitutes the welfare of society and what are the most effective methods of promoting it. The fact is that a virtuous man's ineradicable conviction that the law of love is supreme is entirely consistent with continual progress in the knowledge of the significance and applications of the law and of the best methods of making its control in society effectual; it is consistent also with the correction and improvement of his own character, and his advance in the delicacy of his own moral discernment as well as in moral power. So the Christian's ineradicable faith in God is entirely consistent with increasing knowledge of him and of all reality, and of the applications of all known truth in promoting the welfare of man. There is no more inconsistency here than there is between an astrono mer's ineradicable belief in the law of gravitation and the revolution of the earth around the sun, and his correction of old errors and acquisition of new astronomical knowledge from year to year through his whole life. II. Sociology will never reduce human action to the exactness of mechanical laws. This is impossible for the simple reason that man is not a machine but a person. Free-will is a power above mechanism. The law to personal free-agents is the moral law, the law of love; not the uniform sequences of mechanism and chemical affinity. And it is inherent in the very essence of free-will that it can disobey law. Hence the actions of particular persons or communities cannot be foretold with unerring accuracy. The man who was a blasphemer in the morning may be a penitent at night. The young man who till yesterday has abstained from intoxicating drink may drink to drunkenness to-day. A community quiet under despotism this year may be in armed revolution the next. In the Duke of Alva's time a Protestant fleeing from an officer of the Inquisition crossed a frozen lake. His pursuer broke through the ice and was likely to be drowned; the fugitive, hearing his cries, returned and rescued him from death. Then the officer seized the unarmed and defenceless man and delivered him up to the Inquisition. No person, probably, would have predicted that a man would make this return to one who had voluntarily come back to him and saved him from death. In all calculations as to the probability of human action, the moral character of a person or a community, acquired by free choice, must be taken into account. The very same agencies and influences which move one person or community to righteous and benevolent action will move a person or community of different moral character to unrighteous and selfish action. III. There is a sphere for a sociology compatible with free-will in the uniformity actually found in human action and arising not merely from the common constitution and common outward conditions of men, but also from free choice itself as it forms moral character, determines the effect of outward agencies on the action, modifies the constitutional powers and susceptibilities, and guides and directs their development. By the study of man as he is and has been, sociology may ascertain what ends it is possible to attain for his welfare and what are impossible from the limitations of his being; what welfare can be realized for him directly by his own free choice, and what can be realized only by a gradual amelioration of his condition through a larger knowledge and control of the resources of nature and a further training and development of the man. It may open the way to wiser legislation and statesmanship by disclosing the immediate or proximate ends to be |