On any theory of free will, he says, human actions are as completely under the control of universal-laws of nature as any other physical phenomena.

This is illustrated by statistics.

Registers of births, deaths, and marriages show that these events occur with as much conformity to laws of nature as the oscillations of the weather.
It is the same with the great sequence of historical events.

Taken alone and individually, they seem incoherent and lawless; but viewed in their connection, as due to the action not of individuals but of the human species, they do not fail to reveal "a regular stream of tendency." Pursuing their own often contradictory purposes, individual nations and individual men are unconsciously promoting a process to which if they perceived it they would pay little regard.
Individual men do not obey a law.

They do not obey the laws of instinct like animals, nor do they obey, as rational citizens of the world would do, the laws of a preconcerted plan.