average. Now it is clear that when a thing has an average, it has an average ; you may call this a fixed law if you please ; but use your terms in such a way that we may not be led into the mistake of concluding that fixed law means a necessity inherent in the essence of the thing, and that therefore whatever has an average is necessary, and could not be otherwise. So, again, the word necessary. Common thinkers mean by it that which cannot be thought to be otherwise without self-contradiction ; thus it is necessary that two and two make four, that the three angles of a triangle equal two right angles, and the like. Now, is there any necessity of this kind in averages ? Clearly not, or they would not be averages, but identical numbers. If there were any fixed law, or necessity of murder, the annual number of murders would not be merely approximate, but identical, or varying directly as the population. As they are not thus identical, there clearly is no fixed law in the usual sense, no necessary average of murder ; and Mr. Buckle has no right to mislead his readers by using the word in his sense.
And now let us see what Mr. Buckle says on these points.
Rejecting the metaphysical doctrine of free-will, and the theological dogma of predestined events, we are driven to the conclusion that the actions of men, being determined solely by their antecedents, must have a character of uniformity, that is to say, must, under precisely the same circumstances, always issue in precisely the same results.
Here, we observe, Mr. Buckle contradicts himself; for though he expresses so confidently that the law of individual action is, that it is "necessarily determined by antecedents," he concedes in another place that the variation in human conduct is "owing to causes of which we are ignorant." But let us proceed : —
To state some of the most decisive proofs we now possess of the regularity with which mental phenomena succeed each other, . . . murder, one of the most arbitrary and irregular of crimes, is committed with as much regularity, and bears as uniform a relation to certain known circumstances as do the movements of the tides and the rotations of the seasons.
