ABSTRACT
Historical knowledge is concerned with individual objects or events, with individual persons, nations, or institutions having a definite date or position in time. The conception of a statistical knowledge of nature was first clearly enunciated by C. Maxwell in connection with the law of entropy. The distinction between statistical and mechanical knowledge deserves even greater attention. The classical view held generally throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries regarded the principles of Newtonian mechanics, like those of Euclidean geometry, as self-evident or in some way necessary. Statistical laws or correlations do not take universal form, but assert rather certain frequencies, for example, that a little over 51 per cent, of all births are male. Statistical method has been closely associated with the belief in what is loosely called induction, and it is often asserted that the founders of statistical science were men who, like Sir William Petty and those who organized the Royal Society, were influenced by Francis Bacon.
