Because there exists no natural law that you leaving your...

Because there exists no natural law that you leaving your house will essentially be followed by such a meeting or else such a meeting would have taken place every day. However, it is also true that such a meeting is an essential consequence of this particular departure at a particular moment in specific circumstances. When we see that no binding and invariable sequence exists between a cause and its effect we call the resulting event an accident.

Accidental occurrences are not governed by any universal or general rule, nor do they come within the purview of any scientific law, for a scientific law is concerned only with an invariable sequence between specific conditions and a specific phenomenon. One may say that the historical developments are nothing more than a series of accidental occurrences, not governed by any universal or general rule. To support his view, he may argue that a society is a mere collection of individuals.

Every one of them has his own personal traits and individual character. Personal whims and individual motives produce a set of incidents, which lead to a series of accidental occurrences and it is these happenings which constitute a historical development. But that is not the real story. According to another point of view a society has its own personality, independent of the individuals, and it acts as demanded by its own nature.

The personality of the society is not identical with that of the individuals. It comes into being through the combination of individuals and their cultural actions and reactions. Thus, the society has its own nature, its own character and its own rules. It acts according to its own genius and its actions and reactions can be explained through a set of universal and general laws.

We have to admit that a society has its own independent personality, because only then can we say that history has a philosophy and is governed by norms And rules. It is only then that history can be a subject worthy of deep study and a source for learning lessons. On the contrary, if it is assumed that history has no personality then only the life of the individuals can be studied and not the collective life of nations and peoples.

In that case the scope of taking lessons and drawing morals will also become limited to the individual's life. As mentioned above, there are two contrary notions of history and historical developments, which, in fact, revolve around the main question whether a society has a personality or not.