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IX

Before we cast a glance on the direct influence of Comte's main work we must briefly consider certain simultaneous and in a sense parallel efforts which, from the same intellectual background, but by a different route, produced an impression which tended to strengthen the tendencies of which Comte's work is the main representative. The Belgian astronomer and statistician Quetelet, who must be mentioned here in the first place, differs from Comte not only by being a great scientist in his own field but also by the great contributions which he has made to the methods of social study. He did this precisely by that application of mathematics to social study which Comte condemned. Though his application of the ``Gaussian'' normal curve of error to the analysis of statistical data he became, more than any other single person, the founder of mordern statistics and particularly of its application to social phenomena. The value of this achievement is undisputed and indisputable. But in the general atmosphere in which Quetelet's work became known the belief was bound to arise that the statistical methods, which he had so successfully applied to some problems of social life, were destined to become the sole method of study. And Quetelet himself contributed not a little to create that belief.

The intellectual environment out of which Quetelet rose16.87 is exactly the same as that of Comte: it was the French mathematicians of the circle of the Ecole polytechnique,16.88 above all Laplace and Fourier, from whom he drew the inspiration for the application of the theory of probability to the problem of social statistics, and in most respects he, much more than Comte, must be regarded as the true continuer of their work and of that of Condorcet. His statistical work proper is not our concern. It was the general effect of his demonstration that something like the methods of the natural sciences could be applied to certain mass phenomena of society and of his implied and even explicit demand that all problems of social science should be treated in a similar fashion, which operated in a direction parallel to Comte's teaching. Nothing fascinated the ensuing generation so much as Quetelet's ``average man'' and the celebrated conclusion of his studies of moral statistics that ``we pass from one year to another with the sad perspective of seeing the same crimes reproduced in the same order and calling down the same punishments in the same proportions. Sad conditions of humanity! ... We might enumerate in advance how many individuals will stain their hands in the blood of their fellows, how many will be forgers, how many will be poisoners, almost we can enumerate in advance how many births and deaths there should occur. There is a budget which we pay with a frightful regularity; it is that of prisons, chains and the scaffold.''16.89 His views on the application of the mathematical methods have become more characteristic of later positivist method than anything deriving directly from Comte: ``The more advanced the sciences have become, the more they have tended to enter the domain of mathematics, which is a sort of center toward which they converge. We can judge of the perfection to which a science has come by the facility, more or less great, with which it may be approached by calculation. ''16.90

Although Comte had condemned this view and particularly all attempts to find social laws by means of statistics, his and Quetelet's general endeavors to find natural laws of the development of the human race as a whole, to extend the Laplacean conception of universal determinism to cultural phenomena, and to make mass phenomena the sole object of the science of society were sufficiently akin to lead to a gradual fusion of their doctrines.

In the same category of contemporary efforts with similar methodological tendencies we must at least briefly mention the work of F. Le Play, polytechnician and ex-Saint-Simonian, whose descriptive social surveys became the model of much later sociological work. Though differing from Comte as well as Quetelet in more respects than they have in common, he contributed like them to the reaction against theoretical individualism, classical economics, and political liberalism, thus strengthening the particular effects of the scientistic influences with which we are here concerned.16.91


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