individual acts, but their statistics engage his attention. It is not personal doings, but sums total, that he seeks. But here we will let him speak for himself: —
The actions of individuals are greatly affected by their moral feelings and by their passions, but these being antagonistic to the passions and feelings of other individuals, are balanced by them. So that their effect is, in the great average of human affairs, nowhere to be seen, and the total actions of mankind, considered as a whole, are left to be regulated by the total knowledge of which mankind is possessed. And of the way in which individual feeling and individual caprice are thus absorbed and neutralised, we find a clear illustration in the history of crime. For the amount of crime committed in a country is, year after year, reproduced with the most startling uniformity, not being in the least affected by those capricious and personal feelings to which human actions are too often referred. But if, instead of examining the history of crime year by year, we were to examine it month by month, we should find less regularity, and if we were to examine it hour by hour, we should find no regularity at all ; neither would its regularity be seen if, instead of the criminal records of a whole country, we only knew those of a single street, or of a single family. This is because the great social laws by which crime is governed can only be perceived after observing great numbers of long periods ; but in a small number, and a short period, the individual moral principle triumphs, and disturbs the operation of the larger and intellectual law. While, therefore, the moral feelings by which a man is urged to commit a crime, or to abstain from it, will produce an immense effect on the amount of his own crimes, they will produce no effect on the amount of crimes committed by the society to which he belongs ; because, in the long-run, they are sure to be neutralised by opposite moral feelings, which cause in other men an opposite conduct. Just in the same way, we are all sensible that moral principles do affect nearly the whole of our actions, but we have incontrovertible proof that they produce not the least effect on mankind in the aggregate, or even in men in very large masses, provided that we take the precaution of studying social phenomena for a period sufficiently long, and on a scale sufficiently great to enable the superior laws to come into uncontrolled operation.
The doings of individual men, of families, of the inhabitants of single streets, are nothing to Mr. Buckle ; they must be divested of all personality, of all reminiscences of personality, before they are of use to him. That is to say, in his view of civilisation, he looks at men not as persons, but as machines ; and the result he contemplates is not the action of these machines, but their productions.
