I am less desirous to explain phenomena than to establish their existence. - Adolphe Quetelet

Hitherto, the science of Man has been limited to researches... respecting some of its laws, to results deduced from single or insulated observations, and to theories often based on mere glimpses; and these constitute pretty nearly all the materials it possesses.

Social physics never can pretend to discover laws which will verify themselves in every particular, in the case of isolated individuals. The science will have rendered a service sufficiently vast, in giving more precise views upon a host of points, of which vague glimpses only were before possessed.

Moral phenomena, when observed on a great scale, are found to resemble physical phenomena; and we thus arrive... at the fundamental principle, that the greater the number of individuals observed, the more do individual peculiarities, whether physical or moral, become effaced, and leave in a prominent point of view the general facts, by virtue of which society exists and is preserved.