he rayonnement
imitatif of Italian art in France, which the expedition of the royal
adventurer provoked in a few years." (I have taken this example from G.
Tarde's "La logique sociale" 2 (page 403), Paris, 1904, where it is used
for quite a different purpose.) Instances furnished by political history
are simply endless. Can we conjecture how events would have moved if the
son of Philip of Macedon had been an incompetent? The aggressive action
of Prussia which astonished Europe in 1740 determined the subsequent
history of Germany; but that action was anything but inevitable; it
depended entirely on the personality of Frederick the Great.

Hence it may be argued that the action of individual wills is a
determining and disturbing factor, too significant and effective to
allow history to be grasped by sociological formulae. The types and
general forms of development which the sociologist attempts to disengage
can only assist the historian in understanding the actual course
of events. It is in the special domains of economic history and
Culturgeschichte which have come to the front in modern times that
generalisation is most fruitful, but even in these it may be contended
that it furnishes only partial explanations.

17. The truth is that Darwinism itself offers the best illustration of
the insufficiency of general laws to account for historical
development. The part played by coincidence, and the part played
by individuals--limited by, and related to, general social
conditions--render it impossible to deduce the course of the past
history of man or to predict the future. But it is just the same with
organic development. Darwin (or any other zoologist) could not deduce
the actual course of evolution from general principles. Given an
organism and its environment, he could not show that it must evolve into
a more complex organism of a definite pre-determined type; knowing
what it has evolved into, he could attempt to discover and assign the
determining causes. General principles do not account for a particular
sequence; they embody necessary conditions; but there is a chapter of
accidents too. It is the same in the case of history.

18. Among the evolutional attempts to subsume the course of history
under general syntheses, perhaps the most important is that of
Lamprecht, whose "kulturhistorische Methode," which he has deduced from
and applied to German history, exhibits the (indirect) influence of the
Comtist school. It is