3658925934

the charm of theory? If history is on the way to become a science, is it not due to this point of view?
Something is likewise due to the statistician. The statistician, like the archaeologist, considers
human affairs from an entirely abstract and impersonal standpoint. He pays no attention to
individuals, to Peter or Paul; he concerns himself only with their works, or, rather, with those acts of
theirs which reveal their wants and ideas, with the act of buying or selling, of manufacturing, of
voting, of committing or repressing crime, of suing for judicial separation, and even with the acts of
being born, of marrying, of procreating, and of dying. All these individual acts are related on some of
their sides to social life, in as much as the spread of certain examples or prejudices seems to aid in
raising or lowering the rates of birth and marriage, and to affect the prolificness of marriages and the
mortality of infants.
If archaeology is the collection and classification of similar products where the highest possible
degree of similarity is the most important thing, Statistics is an enumeration of acts which are as much
alike as possible. Here the art is in the choice of units; the more alike and equal they are, the better
they are. What is the subject of Statistics unless, like that of archaeology, it is inventions and the
imitative editions of inventions? . . .
To be sure, the methods of these two sciences are precisely opposite to each other, but this is
because of the difference in the external conditions of their investigations. Archaeology studies the
scattered examples of the same art a long time before it is able to hazard a conjecture about the origin
or date of the primary process from which it has developed. For example, all the Indo-European
languages must be known before they can be related to a perhaps imaginary mother tongue, to Aryac,
or to their elder sister, Sanskrit. Archaeology laboriously travels back from imitations to their source.
The science of statistics, on the other hand, almost always knows the source of the expansions which
it is measuring; it goes from causes to effects, from discoveries to their more or less successful
development according to given years and countries. By means of its successive records, it will tell
you that, from the time that the invention of steam engines began to gradually spread and strengthen the
need for coal throughout France, the output of French coal increased at a perfectly regular rate and
that from 1759 to 1869 it multiplied sixty-two and one-half times. In the same way you may also learn
that after the discovery of beet sugar, or, rather, after the utility of the discovery was no longer
doubted, the manufacture of this commodity was increased at an equally regular rate from seven
millions of kilograms in 1828 (until then it was almost stationary for the reason implied above) to one
hundred and fifty millions of kilograms thirty years later (Maurice Block).
I have taken the less interesting examples, but do we not witness by means of even these dry figures
the birth and gradual establishment and progress of a new want or fashion in the community? In
general, there is nothing more instructive than the chronological tables of statisticians, in which they
show us the increasing rise or fall, year by year, of some special kind of consumption or production,
of some particular political opinion as it is expressed in the returns of the ballot box, or of some
specific desire for security that is embodied in fire-insurance premiums, in savings-bank accounts,
etc. These are all, at bottom, representations in the life of some desire or belief that has been
imported and copied. Every one of these tables, or, rather, every one of the graphical curves which
represent them, is, in a way, an historical monograph. Taken together they form the best historical
narrative that it is possible to have. Synchronous tables giving comparisons between provinces or
between countries are generally much less interesting. Let us contrast, as data for philosophic
reflection, a table of criminality in the departments of France with a curve showing the increase of
recidivists during the last fifty years; or, let us compare the proportion of the urban to the rural