the instrument which executes it." From various other sources Buckle brought together other pieces of evidence, especially one which is now quoted by all who discuss the subject, the regularity from year to year of letters posted, whose writers forget to direct them. It may by this time be taken as proved by such facts that each particular class of human actions may be estimated, and, to a great extent, even predicted, as a regular product of a definite social body under definite conditions. To quote another luminous instance of this regularity of action, M. Quetelet gives a table of the ages of marriage in Belgium ("Phys. Soc," i., p. 275). Here the numbers of what may be called normal marriages, those between men under 45 with women under 30, as well as of the less usual unions where the women are between 30 and 45, show the sort of general regularity which one would expect from mere consideration of the circumstances. The astonishing: feature of the table is the regularity of the unusual marriages. Disregarding decimals, and calculating the approximate whole numbers in their proportion to 10,000 marriages, the table shows, in each of five five-year periods from 1841 to 1865, 6 men aged from 30 to 45 who married women aged 60 or more, and 1 to 2 men aged 30 or less who married women aged 60 or more. M. Quetelet may well speak of this as the most curious and suggestive statistical document he has met with. These young husbands had their liberty of choice, yet their sexagenarian brides brought them up one after the other in periodical succession, as sacrifices to the occult tendencies of the social system. The statistician's comment is: "It is curious to see man, proudly entitling himself King of Nature, and fancying himself controlling all things by his free will, yet submitting, unknown to himself, more rigorously than any other being in creation, to the laws he is under subjection to. These laws are coordinated with such wisdom that they even escape his attention."
The admission of evidence like this, however, is not always followed by the same philosophical explanation of it. Buckle finds his solution by simply discarding the idea that human action "depends on some capricious and personal principle peculiar to each man, as free will or the like;" on the contrary, he asserts "the great truth that the actions of men, being guided by their antecedents, are in reality never inconsistent, but, however capricious they may appear, only form part of one vast scheme of universal order, of which we, in the present state of knowledge, can barely see the outline." M. Quetelet's argument from the same evidence differs remarkably from this. His expedient for accounting for the regularity of social events, without throwing over the notion of arbitrary action, is to admit the existence of free will, but to confine its effects within very narrow bounds. He holds that arbitrary will does not act beyond the limits at which science begins, and that its effects, though apparently so great, may, if taken collectively, be reckoned as null, experience proving that indi-
