On Laws (1875-1899)

"If statistical graphics, although born just yesterday, extends its reach every day, it is because it replaces long tables of numbers and it allows one not only to embrace at glance the series of phenomena, but also to signal the correspondences or anomalies, to find the causes, to identify the laws." (Émile Cheysson, cca. 1877)

"[…] in the Law of Errors we are concerned only with the objective quantities about which mathematical reasoning is ordinarily exercised; whereas in the Method of Least Squares, as in the moral sciences, we are concerned with a psychical quantity - the greatest possible quantity of advantage." (Francis Y Edgeworth, "The method of least squares", 1883)

"This method not only has the advantage of appealing to the senses as well as to the intellect, and of illustrating facts and laws to the eye that would be difficult to uncover in long numerical tables. It also has the privilege of escaping the obstacles that hinder the easy dissemination of scientific work - obstacles arising from the diversity of languages and systems of weights and measures among different nations. These obstacles are unknown to drawing. A diagram is not German, English, or Italian; everyone immediately grasps its relationships of scale, area, or color. Graphical statistics are thus a kind of universal language, allowing scholars from all countries to freely exchange their ideas and research, to the great benefit of science itself." (Emile Cheysson, "Albume de statistique graphique", 1889)

"The history of thought should warn us against concluding that because the scientific theory of the world is the best that has yet been formulated, it is necessarily complete and final. We must remember that at bottom the generalizations of science or, in common parlance, the laws of nature are merely hypotheses devised to explain that ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thought which we dignify with the high-sounding names of the world and the universe." (Sir James G Frazer, "The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion", 1890)

"Even one well-made observation will be enough in many cases, just as one well-constructed experiment often suffices for the establishment of a law." (Émile Durkheim, "The Rules of Sociological Method", "The Rules of Sociological Method", 1895)