LAWS OF NATURE IN PRIVATE AFFAIRS 221
tory, had come to be commonplaces of latter-day Western business
activity. One of these two sources of profit from predictions based on
past statistics was the business of catering for divers markets for goods
and services; the other was the insurance business. Catering was, no
doubt, coeval with Civilization itself, though the scale on which it had
come to be practised in the Western World, and the narrowness to which
the margins of error and profit had been reduced part passu, in this
Western social milieu, by the competitiveness of Western capitalistic
enterprise in its adolescence, may have been without precedent in other
civilizations' histories. As for the insurance business, the insurance of
commercially valuable commodities other than merchant ships and their
cargoes seems to have been a Late Modern Western innovation; and,
when we glance at the divers ramifications of a latter-day Western in-
surance business, we find in them as many demonstrations that 'laws of
Nature', operating regularly enough to afford possibilities of making
financial profits from statistical predictions with narrow margins, were
in force, not only in the realm of Non-Human Nature in which the risks
of damage or destruction by the blind fury of storm or tempest were run
by sailors in ships at sea, but also in fields in which a waywardly purpose-
ful human intelligence and human will had some power arbitrarily to
interfere with a Non-Human Nature's course.1

The proven profitability of the insurance business in quoting pre-
miums for accepting risks on storm-damage to ships and crops, light-
ning-damage to ricks and buildings, frost-damage to waterpipes, and
pest-damage to fruit-trees and livestock was neither so remarkable nor so
significant as the likewise proven profitability of insurance policies into
which the human factors of intelligence and will did enter in divers
measures. The death, for example, that was the subject of the wager in
a life policy3 was an event which the human intelligence and will were

1 This latter-day Western insurance business was conducted on the assumption that
God, if He existed, was the god of the eighteenth-century deists, who could be counted
upon to be content to reign, while leaving it to Nature to govern and leaving it to Man
to harness Nature by exerting his intellectual ingenuity upon her. In the technical
terminology of this business, "an act of God' was an event which, in the business rela-
tions between the two parties to an insurance policy, was the counterpart of a miracle in
the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim meaning of that term, because it was something that
had not been foreseen or provided for in the policy, as a miracle was something incon-
gruous with what had come to be taken as being the normal course of Nature. An earth-
quake, for example, would be 'an act of God' in the construing of a policy on the structure
of a building which gave cover only against the risk of damage or destruction by fore; but
it would not be 'an act of God' in the construing of a policy which did cover the risk of
damage or destruction by earthquake as well. It will be seen that the sphere of God's
operation, in the meaning of this quaint professional jargon, would be perpetually
expanding or contracting in accordance with the variations in the terms of the contracts
negotiated between underwriters and their clients.

2 The latter-day Western life insurance business could never have been launched if
the pioneer entrepreneurs in this field had not been able to lay hands on data for statistics
that were both abundant enough and accurate enough to enable them, from the outset,
to quote rates of premium in which the margin of allowance for the element of statistical
uncertainty would be narrow enough to make it possible for^the transaction to fulfil
simultaneously the two commercially requisite conditions of being neither prohibitively
expensive for the party seeking to be insured nor prohibitively hazardous for the party
proposing to invest capital in covering the acceptance of risks.

This statistical stock-in-trade with which the pioneer Western life insurance companies
started business consisted of the statistical patterns discernible in three sets of data: 'the
Breslau Table' (editum A.D. 1693) compiled by Dr. Edmund Halley from records of
deaths in the Silesian city of Breslau in the years A.D. 1687-91; 'the Northampton, Table1