Is it Possible to Prove any General Statements about Historical Fact?

The article examines the possibility to prove any general statements about historical facts. The absurdity of counting incongruous things is brought out in the old story of the army contractor who offered to supply pies composed in equal proportions of rabbit and horse. On the contrary a valuable method of counting unequal objects, namely stars, was introduced by the ancient astronomers, Ptolemy and Al Sufi. They first graded the stars into six classes according to their conspicuousness and afterwards counted the number of stars in each class. Modern astronomers still use refinements of Ptolemy's method. Sorokin's measure of an internal disturbance, such as a civil war, is a geometric mean of four estimates of its importance depending severally on its social area, its duration, its intensity as indicated by the amount of violence and the number of sociopolitical changes and the numbers of people actively engaged. When a student, unfamiliar with the detailed events and discussions, has read an authoritative summary of why any particular war occurred, he is likely to feel that events could not have happened otherwise. On the contrary, when one takes a comprehensive list of wars and analyzes it by a suitable technique, a familiar statistical distribution appears and thereby calls attention to the random and chance aspect of events. The method of analysis can be explained by its application to Wright's list. Wright lists four of the largest wars both as wholes and as parts. The parts were preferred, because that choice made the wars less unequal in size. A list of calendar years was prepared. Each war was taken in turn and a mark was placed against the year in which it began. This distribution of years can be fitted with a formula named after S. D. Poisson, a French mathematician who published it in A.D. 1837.