"It is in this marvellous power to do wrong .... that the impossibility stands of forming scientific calculations of what men will do before the fact, of scientific explanations of what they have done after the fact."[1]
Mr. Buckle "would deliver himself from the eccentricities of this and that individual by a doctrine of averages . . . . Unfortunately, the average of one generation need not be the average of the next . . . . No two generations are alike."[2]
"There" (in history) "the phenomena never repeat themselves. There we are dependent wholly on the record of things said to have happened once, but which never happen or can happen a second time. There no experiment is possible; we can watch for no recurring fact to test the worth of our conjectures."[3]
Here Mr. Froude chooses, as the ground on which to join issue, the old battle-ground of free-will versus necessity: declaring a Social Science to be incompatible with free-will. The first extract implies, not simply that individual volition is incalculable—that "there is no adequate science of" man, no science of Psychology; but it also asserts, by implication, that there are no causal relations among his states of mind: the volition by which "natural causes are liable to be set aside," being put in antithesis to natural, must be supernatural. Hence we are, in fact, carried back to that primitive form of interpretation contemplated at the outset.
A further comment is, that because volitions of some kinds cannot be foreseen, Mr. Froude concludes that no volitions can be foreseen: ignoring the fact that the simple volitions determining ordinary conduct are so regular that prevision having a high degree of probability is easy. If, in crossing a street, a man sees a carriage coming upon him, you may safely assert that, in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of a thousand, he will try to get out of the way. If, being pressed to catch a train, he knows that by one route it is a mile to the station and by another two miles, you may conclude with considerable confidence that he will take the one-mile route; and, should he be aware that losing the train will lose him a fortune, it is pretty certain that, if he has but ten minutes to do the mile in, he will either run or call a cab. If he can buy next door a commodity of daily consumption better and cheaper than at the other end of the town, we may affirm that, if he does not buy next door, some special relation between him and the remoter shopkeeper furnishes a strong reason for taking a worse commodity at greater cost of money and trouble. And though, if he has an estate to dispose of, it is within the limits of possibility that he will sell it to A for £1,000 though B has offered £2,000 for it; yet the unusual motives leading to such an act need scarcely be taken into account as qualifying the generalization that a man will habitually sell to the highest bidder. Now, since the predominant activities of citizens are determined by motives of this degree of regularity, there
