refers to the scholarly discipline that uses statistical methods to ascertain the social contingency of moral and religiously relevant action. Having flourished in the second half of the 19th century, it soon declined in importance and occurs today, as a rule, only in the reduced form of criminal statistics.
In the late 17th century, studies linked to mortality (J. Graunt, Observations on the Bills of Mortality, 1662) led to the discovery that human behavior can be measured by statistics. This realization was soon theologically interpreted in t…