Now, without deciding whether the ultimate laws of our mental nature are

few or many, it is at least certain that they are of the above

description. It is certain that our mental states, and our mental

capacities and susceptibilities, are modified, either for a time or

permanently, by every thing which happens to us in life. Considering,

therefore, how much these modifying causes differ in the case of any two

individuals, it would be unreasonable to expect that the empirical laws of

the human mind, the generalizations which can be made respecting the

feelings or actions of mankind without reference to the causes that

determine them, should be any thing but approximate generalizations. They

are the common wisdom of common life, and as such are invaluable;

especially as they are mostly to be applied to cases not very dissimilar

to those from which they were collected. But when maxims of this sort,

collected from Englishmen, come to be applied to Frenchmen, or when those

collected from the present day are applied to past or future generations,

they are apt to be very much at fault. Unless we have resolved the

empirical law into the laws of the causes on which it depends, and

ascertained that those causes extend to the case which we have in view,

there can be no reliance placed in our inferences. For every individual is

surrounded by circumstances different from those of every other

individual; every nation or generation of mankind from every other nation

or generation: and none of these differences are without their influence

in forming a different type of character. There is, indeed, also a certain

general resemblance; but peculiarities of circumstances are continually

constituting exceptions even to the propositions which are true in the

great majority of cases.

Although, however, there is scarcely any mode of feeling or conduct which

is, in the absolute sense, common to all mankind; and though the

generalizations which assert that any given variety of conduct or feeling

will be found universally (however nearly they may approximate to truth

within given limits of observation), will be considered as scientific

propositions by no one who is at all familiar with scientific

investigation; yet all modes of feeling and conduct met with among mankind

have causes which produce them; and in the propositions which assign those

causes will be found the explanation of the empirical laws, and the

limiting principle of our reliance on them. Human beings do not all feel

and act alike in the same circumstances; but it is possible to determine

what makes one person, in a given position, feel or act in one way,

another in another; how any given mode of feeling and conduct, compatible

with the general laws (physical and mental) of human nature, has been, or

may be, formed. In other words, mankind have not one universal character,

but there exist universal laws of the Formation of Character. And since it

is by these laws, combined with the facts of each particular case, that

the whole of the phenomena of human action and feeling are produced, it is

on these that every rational attempt to construct the science of human

nature in the concrete, and for practical purposes, must proceed.

§ 3. The laws, then, of the formation of character being the principal

object of scientific inquiry into human nature, it remains to determine

the method of investigation best fitted for ascertaining them. And the

logical principles according to which this question is to be decided, must

be those which preside over every other attempt to investigate the laws of

very complex phenomena. For it is evident that both the character of any

human being, and the aggregate of the circumstances by which that

character has been formed, are facts of a high order of complexity. Now to

such cases we have seen that the Deductive Method, setting out from

general laws, and verifying their consequences by specific experience, is

alone applicable. The grounds of this great logical doctrine have formerly

been stated; and its truth will derive additional support from a brief

examination of the specialties of the present case.

There are only two modes in which laws of nature can be

ascertained—deductively and experimentally; including under the

denomination of experimental inquiry, observation as well as artificial

experiment. Are the laws of the formation of character susceptible of a

satisfactory investigation by the method of experimentation? Evidently

not; because, even if we suppose unlimited power of varying the experiment

(which is abstractedly possible, though no one but an Oriental despot has

that power, or, if he had, would probably be disposed to exercise it), a

still more essential condition is wanting—the power of performing any of

the experiments with scientific accuracy.

The instances requisite for the prosecution of a directly experimental

inquiry into the formation of character, would be a number of human beings

to bring up and educate, from infancy to mature age. And to perform any

one of these experiments with scientific propriety, it would be necessary

to know and record every sensation or impression received by the young

pupil from a period long before it could speak; including its own notions

respecting the sources of all those sensations and impressions. It is not

only impossible to do this completely, but even to do so much of it as

should constitute a tolerable approximation. One apparently trivial

circumstance which eluded our vigilance might let in a train of

impressions and associations sufficient to vitiate the experiment as an

authentic exhibition of the effects flowing from given causes. No one who

has sufficiently reflected on education is ignorant of this truth; and

whoever has not, will find it most instructively illustrated in the

writings of Rousseau and Helvetius on that great subject.

Under this impossibility of studying the laws of the formation of

character by experiments purposely contrived to elucidate them, there

remains the resource of simple observation. But if it be impossible to

ascertain the influencing circumstances with any approach to completeness

even when we have the shaping of them ourselves, much more impossible is

it when the cases are further removed from our observation, and altogether

out of our control. Consider the difficulty of the very first step—of

ascertaining what actually is the character of the individual, in each

particular case that we examine. There is hardly any person living

concerning some essential part of whose character there are not

differences of opinion even among his intimate acquaintances; and a single

action, or conduct continued only for a short time, goes a very little way

toward ascertaining it. We can only make our observations in a rough way

and _en masse_; not attempting to ascertain completely in any given

instance, what character has been formed, and still less by what causes;

but only observing in what state of previous circumstances it is found

that certain marked mental qualities or deficiencies _oftenest_ exist.

These conclusions, besides that they are mere approximate generalizations,

deserve no reliance, even as such, unless the instances are sufficiently

numerous to eliminate not only chance, but every assignable circumstance

in which a number of the cases examined may happen to have resembled one

another. So numerous and various, too, are the circumstances which form

individual character, that the consequence of any particular combination

is hardly ever some definite and strongly marked character, always found

where that combination exists, and not otherwise. What is obtained, even

after the most extensive and accurate observation, is merely a comparative

result; as, for example, that in a given number of Frenchmen, taken

indiscriminately, there will be found more persons of a particular mental

tendency, and fewer of the contrary tendency, than among an equal number

of Italians or English, similarly taken; or thus: of a hundred Frenchmen

and an equal number of Englishmen, fairly selected, and arranged according

to the degree in which they possess a particular mental characteristic,

each number, 1, 2, 3, etc., of the one series, will be found to possess

more of that characteristic than the corresponding number of the other.

Since, therefore, the comparison is not one of kinds, but of ratios and

degrees; and since, in proportion as the differences are slight, it

requires a greater number of instances to eliminate chance, it can not

often happen to any one to know a sufficient number of cases with the

accuracy requisite for making the sort of comparison last mentioned; less

than which, however, would not constitute a real induction. Accordingly,

there is hardly one current opinion respecting the characters of nations,

classes, or descriptions of persons, which is universally acknowledged as

indisputable.(272)

And finally, if we could even obtain by way of experiment a much more

satisfactory assurance of these generalizations than is really possible,

they would still be only empirical laws. They would show, indeed, that

there was some connection between the type of character formed and the

circumstances existing in the case; but not what the precise connection

was, nor to which of the peculiarities of those circumstances the effect

was really owing. They could only, therefore, be received as results of

causation, requiring to be resolved into the general laws of the causes:

until the determination of which, we could not judge within what limits

the derivative laws might serve as presumptions in cases yet unknown, or

even be depended on as permanent in the very cases from which they were

collected. The French people had, or were supposed to have, a certain

national character; but they drive out their royal family and aristocracy,

alter their institutions, pass through a series of extraordinary events

for the greater part of a century, and at the end of that time their

character is found to have undergone important changes. A long list of

mental and moral differences are observed, or supposed to exist between

men and women; but at some future and, it may be hoped, not distant

period, equal freedom and an equally independent social position come to

be possessed by both, and their differences of character are either

removed or totally altered.

But if the differences which we think we observe between French and

English, or between men and women, can be connected with more general

laws; if they be such as might be expected to be produced by the

differences of government, former customs, and physical peculiarities in

the two nations, and by the diversities of education, occupations,

personal independence, and social privileges, and whatever original

differences there may be in bodily strength and nervous sensibility

between the two sexes; then, indeed, the coincidence of the two kinds of

evidence justifies us in believing that we have both reasoned rightly and

observed rightly. Our observation, though not sufficient as proof, is

ample as verification. And having ascertained not only the empirical laws,

but the causes, of the peculiarities, we need be under no difficulty in

judging how far they may be expected to be permanent, or by what

circumstances they would be modified or destroyed.

§ 4. Since then it is impossible to obtain really accurate propositions

respecting the formation of character from observation and experiment

alone, we are driven perforce to that which, even if it had not been the

indispensable, would have been the most perfect, mode of investigation,

and which it is one of the principal aims of philosophy to extend; namely,

that which tries its experiments not on the complex facts, but on the

simple ones of which they are compounded; and after ascertaining the laws

of the causes, the composition of which gives rise to the complex

phenomena, then considers whether these will not explain and account for

the approximate generalizations which have been framed empirically

respecting the sequences of those complex phenomena. The laws of the

formation of character are, in short, derivative laws, resulting from the

general laws of mind, and are to be obtained by deducing them from those

general laws by supposing any given set of circumstances, and then

considering what, according to the laws of mind, will be the influence of

those circumstances on the formation of character.

A science is thus formed, to which I would propose to give the name of

Ethology, or the Science of Character, from ἦθος, a word more nearly

corresponding to the term “character” as I here use it, than any other

word in the same language. The name is perhaps etymologically applicable

to the entire science of our mental and moral nature; but if, as is usual

and convenient, we employ the name Psychology for the science of the

elementary laws of mind, Ethology will serve for the ulterior science

which determines the kind of character produced in conformity to those

general laws by any set of circumstances, physical and moral. According to

this definition, Ethology is the science which corresponds to the art of

education in the widest sense of the term, including the formation of

national or collective character as well as individual. It would indeed be

vain to expect (however completely the laws of the formation of character

might be ascertained) that we could know so accurately the circumstances

of any given case as to be able positively to predict the character that

would be produced in that case. But we must remember that a degree of

knowledge far short of the power of actual prediction is often of much

practical value. There may be great power of influencing phenomena, with a

very imperfect knowledge of the causes by which they are in any given

instance determined. It is enough that we know that certain means have a

_tendency_ to produce a given effect, and that others have a tendency to

frustrate it. When the circumstances of an individual or of a nation are

in any considerable degree under our control, we may, by our knowledge of

tendencies, be enabled to shape those circumstances in a manner much more

favorable to the ends we desire, than the shape which they would of

themselves assume. This is the limit of our power; but within this limit

the power is a most important one.

This science of Ethology may be called the Exact Science of Human Nature;

for its truths are not, like the empirical laws which depend on them,

approximate generalizations, but real laws. It is, however (as in all

cases of complex phenomena), necessary to the exactness of the

propositions, that they should be hypothetical only, and affirm

tendencies, not facts. They must not assert that something will always, or

certainly, happen; but only that such and such will be the effect of a

given cause, so far as it operates uncounteracted. It is a scientific

proposition, that bodily strength tends to make men courageous; not that

it always makes them so: that an interest on one side of a question tends

to bias the judgment; not that it invariably does so: that experience

tends to give wisdom; not that such is always its effect. These

propositions, being assertive only of tendencies, are not the less

universally true because the tendencies may be frustrated.

§ 5. While, on the one hand, Psychology is altogether, or principally, a

science of observation and experiment, Ethology, as I have conceived it,

is, as I have already remarked, altogether deductive. The one ascertains

the simple laws of Mind in general, the other traces their operation in

complex combinations of circumstances. Ethology stands to Psychology in a

relation very similar to that in which the various branches of natural

philosophy stand to mechanics. The principles of Ethology are properly the

middle principles, the _axiomata media_ (as Bacon would have said) of the

science of mind: as distinguished, on the one hand, from the empirical

laws resulting from simple observation, and, on the other, from the

highest generalizations.

And this seems a suitable place for a logical remark, which, though of

general application, is of peculiar importance in reference to the present

subject. Bacon has judiciously observed that the _axiomata media_ of every

science principally constitute its value. The lowest generalizations,

until explained by and resolved into the middle principles of which they

are the consequences, have only the imperfect accuracy of empirical laws;

while the most general laws are _too_ general, and include too few

circumstances, to give sufficient indication of what happens in individual

cases, where the circumstances are almost always immensely numerous. In

the importance, therefore, which Bacon assigns, in every science, to the

middle principles, it is impossible not to agree with him. But I conceive

him to have been radically wrong in his doctrine respecting the mode in

which these _axiomata media_ should be arrived at; though there is no one

proposition laid down in his works for which he has been more

extravagantly eulogized. He enunciates as a universal rule that induction

should proceed from the lowest to the middle principles, and from those to

the highest, never reversing that order, and, consequently, leaving no

room for the discovery of new principles by way of deduction at all. It is

not to be conceived that a man of his sagacity could have fallen into this

mistake if there had existed in his time, among the sciences which treat

of successive phenomena, one single instance of a deductive science, such

as mechanics, astronomy, optics, acoustics, etc., now are. In those

sciences it is evident that the higher and middle principles are by no

means derived from the lowest, but the reverse. In some of them the very

highest generalizations were those earliest ascertained with any

scientific exactness; as, for example (in mechanics), the laws of motion.

Those general laws had not, indeed, at first the acknowledged universality

which they acquired after having been successfully employed to explain

many classes of phenomena to which they were not originally seen to be

applicable; as when the laws of motion were employed, in conjunction with

other laws, to explain deductively the celestial phenomena. Still, the

fact remains, that the propositions which were afterward recognized as the

most general truths of the science were, of all its accurate

generalizations, those earliest arrived at. Bacon’s greatest merit can not

therefore consist, as we are so often told that it did, in exploding the

vicious method pursued by the ancients of flying to the highest

generalizations first, and deducing the middle principles from them; since

this is neither a vicious nor an exploded, but the universally accredited

method of modern science, and that to which it owes its greatest triumphs.

The error of ancient speculation did not consist in making the largest

generalizations first, but in making them without the aid or warrant of

rigorous inductive methods, and applying them deductively without the

needful use of that important part of the Deductive Method termed

Verification.

The order in which truths of the various degrees of generality should be

ascertained can not, I apprehend, be prescribed by any unbending rule. I

know of no maxim which can be laid down on the subject, but to obtain

those first in respect to which the conditions of a real induction can be

first and most completely realized. Now, wherever our means of

investigation can reach causes, without stopping at the empirical laws of

the effects, the simplest cases, being those in which fewest causes are

simultaneously concerned, will be most amenable to the inductive process;

and these are the cases which elicit laws of the greatest

comprehensiveness. In every science, therefore, which has reached the

stage at which it becomes a science of causes, it will be usual as well as

desirable first to obtain the highest generalizations, and then deduce the

more special ones from them. Nor can I discover any foundation for the

Baconian maxim, so much extolled by subsequent writers, except this: That

before we attempt to explain deductively from more general laws any new

class of phenomena, it is desirable to have gone as far as is practicable

in ascertaining the empirical laws of those phenomena; so as to compare

the results of deduction, not with one individual instance after another,

but with general propositions expressive of the points of agreement which

have been found among many instances. For if Newton had been obliged to

verify the theory of gravitation, not by deducing from it Kepler’s laws,

but by deducing all the observed planetary positions which had served

Kepler to establish those laws, the Newtonian theory would probably never

have emerged from the state of an hypothesis.(273)

The applicability of these remarks to the special case under consideration

can not admit of question. The science of the formation of character is a

science of causes. The subject is one to which those among the canons of

induction, by which laws of causation are ascertained, can be rigorously

applied. It is, therefore, both natural and advisable to ascertain the

simplest, which are necessarily the most general, laws of causation first,

and to deduce the middle principles from them. In other words, Ethology,

the deductive science, is a system of corollaries from Psychology, the

experimental science.

§ 6. Of these, the earlier alone has been, as yet, really conceived or

studied as a science; the other, Ethology, is still to be created. But its

creation has at length become practicable. The empirical laws, destined to

verify its deductions, have been formed in abundance by every successive

age of humanity; and the premises for the deductions are now sufficiently

complete. Excepting the degree of uncertainty which still exists as to the

extent of the natural differences of individual minds, and the physical

circumstances on which these may be dependent (considerations which are of

secondary importance when we are considering mankind in the average, or

_en masse_), I believe most competent judges will agree that the general

laws of the different constituent elements of human nature are even now

sufficiently understood to render it possible for a competent thinker to

deduce from those laws, with a considerable approach to certainty, the

particular type of character which would be formed in mankind generally by

any assumed set of circumstances. A science of Ethology, founded on the

laws of Psychology, is therefore possible; though little has yet been

done, and that little not at all systematically, toward forming it. The

progress of this important but most imperfect science will depend on a

double process: first, that of deducing theoretically the ethological

consequences of particular circumstances of position, and comparing them

with the recognized results of common experience; and, secondly, the

reverse operation; increased study of the various types of human nature

that are to be found in the world; conducted by persons not only capable

of analyzing and recording the circumstances in which these types

severally prevail, but also sufficiently acquainted with psychological

laws to be able to explain and account for the characteristics of the

type, by the peculiarities of the circumstances: the residuum alone, when

there proves to be any, being set down to the account of congenital

predispositions.

For the experimental or _a posteriori_ part of this process, the materials

are continually accumulating by the observation of mankind. So far as

thought is concerned, the great problem of Ethology is to deduce the

requisite middle principles from the general laws of Psychology. The

subject to be studied is, the origin and sources of all those qualities in

human beings which are interesting to us, either as facts to be produced,

to be avoided, or merely to be understood; and the object is, to

determine, from the general laws of mind, combined with the general

position of our species in the universe, what actual or possible

combinations of circumstances are capable of promoting or of preventing

the production of those qualities. A science which possesses middle

principles of this kind, arranged in the order, not of causes, but of the

effects which it is desirable to produce or to prevent, is duly prepared

to be the foundation of the corresponding Art. And when Ethology shall be

thus prepared, practical education will be the mere transformation of

those principles into a parallel system of precepts, and the adaptation of

these to the sum total of the individual circumstances which exist in each

particular case.

It is hardly necessary again to repeat that, as in every other deductive

science, verification _a posteriori_ must proceed _pari passu_ with

deduction _a priori_. The inference given by theory as to the type of

character which would be formed by any given circumstances must be tested

by specific experience of those circumstances whenever obtainable; and the

conclusions of the science as a whole must undergo a perpetual

verification and correction from the general remarks afforded by common

experience respecting human nature in our own age, and by history

respecting times gone by. The conclusions of theory can not be trusted,

unless confirmed by observation; nor those of observation, unless they can

be affiliated to theory, by deducing them from the laws of human nature,

and from a close analysis of the circumstances of the particular

situation. It is the accordance of these two kinds of evidence separately

taken—the consilience of _a priori_ reasoning and specific

experience—which forms the only sufficient ground for the principles of

any science so “immersed in matter,” dealing with such complex and

concrete phenomena, as Ethology.

Chapter VI.

General Considerations On The Social Science.

§ 1. Next after the science of individual man comes the science of man in

society—of the actions of collective masses of mankind, and the various

phenomena which constitute social life.

If the formation of individual character is already a complex subject of

study, this subject must be, in appearance at least, still more complex;

because the number of concurrent causes, all exercising more or less

influence on the total effect, is greater, in the proportion in which a

nation, or the species at large, exposes a larger surface to the operation

of agents, psychological and physical, than any single individual. If it

was necessary to prove, in opposition to an existing prejudice, that the

simpler of the two is capable of being a subject of science, the prejudice

is likely to be yet stronger against the possibility of giving a

scientific character to the study of Politics, and of the phenomena of

Society. It is, accordingly, but of yesterday that the conception of a

political or social science has existed anywhere but in the mind of here

and there an insulated thinker, generally very ill prepared for its

realization: though the subject itself has of all others engaged the most

general attention, and been a theme of interested and earnest discussions,

almost from the beginning of recorded time.

The condition, indeed, of politics as a branch of knowledge was, until

very lately, and has scarcely even yet ceased to be, that which Bacon

animadverted on, as the natural state of the sciences while their

cultivation is abandoned to practitioners; not being carried on as a

branch of speculative inquiry, but only with a view to the exigencies of

daily practice, and the _fructifera experimenta_, therefore, being aimed

at, almost to the exclusion of the _lucifera_. Such was medical

investigation, before physiology and natural history began to be

cultivated as branches of general knowledge. The only questions examined

were, what diet is wholesome, or what medicine will cure some given

disease; without any previous systematic inquiry into the laws of

nutrition, and of the healthy and morbid action of the different organs,

on which laws the effect of any diet or medicine must evidently depend.

And in politics the questions which engaged general attention were

similar: Is such an enactment, or such a form of government, beneficial or

the reverse—either universally, or to some particular community? without

any previous inquiry into the general conditions by which the operation of

legislative measures, or the effects produced by forms of government, are

determined. Students in politics thus attempted to study the pathology and

therapeutics of the social body, before they had laid the necessary

foundation in its physiology; to cure disease without understanding the

laws of health. And the result was such as it must always be when persons,

even of ability, attempt to deal with the complex questions of a science

before its simpler and more elementary truths have been established.

No wonder that, when the phenomena of society have so rarely been

contemplated in the point of view characteristic of science, the

philosophy of society should have made little progress; should contain few

general propositions sufficiently precise and certain for common inquirers

to recognize in them a scientific character. The vulgar notion accordingly

is, that all pretension to lay down general truths on politics and society

is quackery; that no universality and no certainty are attainable in such

matters. What partly excuses this common notion is, that it is really not

without foundation in one particular sense. A large proportion of those

who have laid claim to the character of philosophic politicians have

attempted not to ascertain universal sequences, but to frame universal

precepts. They have imagined some one form of government, or system of

laws, to fit all cases—a pretension well meriting the ridicule with which

it is treated by practitioners, and wholly unsupported by the analogy of

the art to which, from the nature of its subject, that of politics must be

the most nearly allied. No one now supposes it possible that one remedy

can cure all diseases, or even the same disease in all constitutions and

habits of body.

It is not necessary even to the perfection of a science, that the

corresponding art should possess universal, or even general, rules. The

phenomena of society might not only be completely dependent on known

causes, but the mode of action of all those causes might be reducible to

laws of considerable simplicity, and yet no two cases might admit of being

treated in precisely the same manner. So great might be the variety of

circumstances on which the results in different cases depend, that the art

might not have a single general precept to give, except that of watching

the circumstances of the particular case, and adapting our measures to the

effects which, according to the principles of the science, result from

those circumstances. But although, in so complicated a class of subjects,

it is impossible to lay down practical maxims of universal application, it

does not follow that the phenomena do not conform to universal laws.

§ 2. All phenomena of society are phenomena of human nature, generated by

the action of outward circumstances upon masses of human beings; and if,

therefore, the phenomena of human thought, feeling, and action are subject

to fixed laws, the phenomena of society can not but conform to fixed laws,

the consequence of the preceding. There is, indeed, no hope that these

laws, though our knowledge of them were as certain and as complete as it

is in astronomy, would enable us to predict the history of society, like

that of the celestial appearances, for thousands of years to come. But the

difference of certainty is not in the laws themselves, it is in the data

to which these laws are to be applied. In astronomy the causes influencing

the result are few, and change little, and that little according to known

laws; we can ascertain what they are now, and thence determine what they

will be at any epoch of a distant future. The data, therefore, in

astronomy are as certain as the laws themselves. The circumstances, on the

contrary, which influence the condition and progress of society are

innumerable, and perpetually changing; and though they all change in

obedience to causes, and therefore to laws, the multitude of the causes is

so great as to defy our limited powers of calculation. Not to say that the

impossibility of applying precise numbers to facts of such a description

would set an impassable limit to the possibility of calculating them

beforehand, even if the powers of the human intellect were otherwise

adequate to the task.

But, as before remarked, an amount of knowledge quite insufficient for

prediction, may be most valuable for guidance. The science of society

would have attained a very high point of perfection if it enabled us, in

any given condition of social affairs, in the condition, for instance, of

Europe or any European country at the present time, to understand by what

causes it had, in any and every particular, been made what it was; whether

it was tending to any, and to what, changes; what effects each feature of

its existing state was likely to produce in the future; and by what means

any of those effects might be prevented, modified, or accelerated, or a

different class of effects superinduced. There is nothing chimerical in

the hope that general laws, sufficient to enable us to answer these

various questions for any country or time with the individual

circumstances of which we are well acquainted, do really admit of being

ascertained; and that the other branches of human knowledge, which this

undertaking presupposes, are so far advanced that the time is ripe for its

commencement. Such is the object of the Social Science.

That the nature of what I consider the true method of the science may be

made more palpable, by first showing what that method is not, it will be

expedient to characterize briefly two radical misconceptions of the proper

mode of philosophizing on society and government, one or other of which

is, either explicitly or more often unconsciously, entertained by almost

all who have meditated or argued respecting the logic of politics, since

the notion of treating it by strict rules, and on Baconian principles, has

been current among the more advanced thinkers. These erroneous methods, if

the word method can be applied to erroneous tendencies arising from the

absence of any sufficiently distinct conception of method, may be termed

the Experimental, or Chemical, mode of investigation, and the Abstract, or

Geometrical, mode. We shall begin with the former.

Chapter VII.

Of The Chemical, Or Experimental, Method In The Social Science.

§ 1. The laws of the phenomena of society are, and can be, nothing but the

laws of the actions and passions of human beings united together in the

social state. Men, however, in a state of society are still men; their

actions and passions are obedient to the laws of individual human nature.

Men are not, when brought together, converted into another kind of

substance, with different properties; as hydrogen and oxygen are different

from water, or as hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and azote, are different from

nerves, muscles, and tendons. Human beings in society have no properties

but those which are derived from, and may be resolved into, the laws of

the nature of individual man. In social phenomena the Composition of

Causes is the universal law.

Now, the method of philosophizing which may be termed chemical overlooks

this fact, and proceeds as if the nature of man as an individual were not

concerned at all, or were concerned in a very inferior degree, in the

operations of human beings in society. All reasoning in political or

social affairs, grounded on principles of human nature, is objected to by

reasoners of this sort, under such names as “abstract theory.” For the

direction of their opinions and conduct, they profess to demand, in all

cases without exception, specific experience.

This mode of thinking is not only general with practitioners in politics,

and with that very numerous class who (on a subject which no one, however

ignorant, thinks himself incompetent to discuss) profess to guide

themselves by common sense rather than by science; but is often

countenanced by persons with greater pretensions to instruction—persons

who, having sufficient acquaintance with books and with the current ideas

to have heard that Bacon taught mankind to follow experience, and to

ground their conclusions on facts instead of metaphysical dogmas, think

that, by treating political facts in as directly experimental a method as

chemical facts, they are showing themselves true Baconians, and proving

their adversaries to be mere syllogizers and school-men. As, however, the

notion of the applicability of experimental methods to political

philosophy can not co-exist with any just conception of these methods

themselves, the kind of arguments from experience which the chemical

theory brings forth as its fruits (and which form the staple, in this

country especially, of parliamentary and hustings oratory), are such as,

at no time since Bacon, would have been admitted to be valid in chemistry

itself, or in any other branch of experimental science. They are such as

these: that the prohibition of foreign commodities must conduce to

national wealth, because England has flourished under it, or because

countries in general which have adopted it have flourished; that our laws,

or our internal administration, or our constitution, are excellent for a

similar reason; and the eternal arguments from historical examples, from

Athens or Rome, from the fires in Smithfield or the French Revolution.

I will not waste time in contending against modes of argumentation which

no person with the smallest practice in estimating evidence could possibly

be betrayed into; which draw conclusions of general application from a

single unanalyzed instance, or arbitrarily refer an effect to some one

among its antecedents, without any process of elimination or comparison of

instances. It is a rule both of justice and of good sense to grapple not

with the absurdest, but with the most reasonable form of a wrong opinion.

We shall suppose our inquirer acquainted with the true conditions of

experimental investigation, and competent in point of acquirements for

realizing them, so far as they can be realized. He shall know as much of

the facts of history as mere erudition can teach—as much as can be proved

by testimony, without the assistance of any theory; and if those mere

facts, properly collated, can fulfill the conditions of a real induction,

he shall be qualified for the task.

But that no such attempt can have the smallest chance of success, has been

abundantly shown in the tenth chapter of the Third Book.(274) We there

examined whether effects which depend on a complication of causes can be

made the subject of a true induction by observation and experiment; and

concluded, on the most convincing grounds, that they can not. Since, of

all effects, none depend on so great a complication of causes as social

phenomena, we might leave our case to rest in safety on that previous

showing. But a logical principle as yet so little familiar to the ordinary

run of thinkers, requires to be insisted on more than once, in order to

make the due impression; and the present being the case which of all

others exemplifies it the most strongly, there will be advantage in

re-stating the grounds of the general maxim, as applied to the specialties

of the class of inquiries now under consideration.

§ 2. The first difficulty which meets us in the attempt to apply

experimental methods for ascertaining the laws of social phenomena, is

that we are without the means of making artificial experiments. Even if we

could contrive experiments at leisure, and try them without limit, we

should do so under immense disadvantage; both from the impossibility of

ascertaining and taking note of all the facts of each case, and because

(those facts being in a perpetual state of change), before sufficient time

had elapsed to ascertain the result of the experiment, some material

circumstances would always have ceased to be the same. But it is

unnecessary to consider the logical objections which would exist to the

conclusiveness of our experiments, since we palpably never have the power

of trying any. We can only watch those which nature produces, or which are

produced for other reasons. We can not adapt our logical means to our

wants, by varying the circumstances as the exigencies of elimination may

require. If the spontaneous instances, formed by contemporary events and

by the successions of phenomena recorded in history, afford a sufficient

variation of circumstances, an induction from specific experience is

attainable; otherwise not. The question to be resolved is, therefore,

whether the requisites for induction respecting the causes of political

effects or the properties of political agents, are to be met with in

history? including under the term, contemporary history. And in order to

give fixity to our conceptions, it will be advisable to suppose this

question asked in reference to some special subject of political inquiry

or controversy; such as that frequent topic of debate in the present

century, the operation of restrictive and prohibitory commercial

legislation upon national wealth. Let this, then, be the scientific

question to be investigated by specific experience.

§ 3. In order to apply to the case the most perfect of the methods of

experimental inquiry, the Method of Difference, we require to find two

instances which tally in every particular except the one which is the

subject of inquiry. If two nations can be found which are alike in all

natural advantages and disadvantages; whose people resemble each other in

every quality, physical and moral, spontaneous and acquired; whose habits,

usages, opinions, laws, and institutions are the same in all respects,

except that one of them has a more protective tariff, or in other respects

interferes more with the freedom of industry; if one of these nations is

found to be rich and the other poor, or one richer than the other, this

will be an _experimentum crucis_: a real proof by experience, which of the

two systems is most favorable to national riches. But the supposition that

two such instances can be met with is manifestly absurd. Nor is such a

concurrence even abstractedly possible. Two nations which agreed in every

thing except their commercial policy would agree also in that. Differences

of legislation are not inherent and ultimate diversities; are not

properties of Kinds. They are effects of pre-existing causes. If the two

nations differ in this portion of their institutions, it is from some

difference in their position, and thence in their apparent interests, or

in some portion or other of their opinions, habits, and tendencies; which

opens a view of further differences without any assignable limit, capable

of operating on their industrial prosperity, as well as on every other

feature of their condition, in more ways than can be enumerated or

imagined. There is thus a demonstrated impossibility of obtaining, in the

investigations of the social science, the conditions required for the most

conclusive form of inquiry by specific experience.

In the absence of the direct, we may next try, as in other cases, the

supplementary resource, called in a former place the Indirect Method of

Difference; which, instead of two instances differing in nothing but the

presence or absence of a given circumstance, compares two _classes_ of

instances respectively agreeing in nothing but the presence of a

circumstance on the one side and its absence on the other. To choose the

most advantageous case conceivable (a case far too advantageous to be ever

obtained), suppose that we compare one nation which has a restrictive

policy with two or more nations agreeing in nothing but in permitting free

trade. We need not now suppose that either of these nations agrees with

the first in all its circumstances; one may agree with it in some of its

circumstances, and another in the remainder. And it may be argued, that if

these nations remain poorer than the restrictive nation, it can not be for

want either of the first or of the second set of circumstances, but it

must be for want of the protective system. If (we might say) the

restrictive nation had prospered from the one set of causes, the first of

the free-trade nations would have prospered equally; if by reason of the

other, the second would; but neither has; therefore the prosperity was

owing to the restrictions. This will be allowed to be a very favorable

specimen of an argument from specific experience in politics, and if this

be inconclusive, it would not be easy to find another preferable to it.

Yet, that it is inconclusive, scarcely requires to be pointed out. Why

must the prosperous nation have prospered from one cause exclusively?

National prosperity is always the collective result of a multitude of

favorable circumstances; and of these, the restrictive nation may unite a

greater number than either of the others, though it may have all of those

circumstances in common with either one or the other of them. Its

prosperity may be partly owing to circumstances common to it with one of

those nations, and partly with the other, while they, having each of them

only half the number of favorable circumstances, have remained inferior.

So that the closest imitation which can be made, in the social science, of

a legitimate induction from direct experience, gives but a specious

semblance of conclusiveness, without any real value.

§ 4. The Method of Difference in either of its forms being thus completely

out of the question, there remains the Method of Agreement. But we are

already aware of how little value this method is, in cases admitting

Plurality of Causes; and social phenomena are those in which the plurality

prevails in the utmost possible extent.

Suppose that the observer makes the luckiest hit which could be given by

any conceivable combination of chances; that he finds two nations which

agree in no circumstance whatever, except in having a restrictive system,

and in being prosperous; or a number of nations, all prosperous, which

have no antecedent circumstances common to them all but that of having a

restrictive policy. It is unnecessary to go into the consideration of the

impossibility of ascertaining from history, or even from contemporary

observation, that such is really the fact; that the nations agree in no

other circumstance capable of influencing the case. Let us suppose this

impossibility vanquished, and the fact ascertained that they agree only in

a restrictive system as an antecedent, and industrial prosperity as a

consequent. What degree of presumption does this raise that the

restrictive system caused the prosperity? One so trifling as to be

equivalent to none at all. That some one antecedent is the cause of a

given effect, because all other antecedents have been found capable of

being eliminated, is a just inference, only if the effect can have but one

cause. If it admits of several, nothing is more natural than that each of

these should separately admit of being eliminated. Now, in the case of

political phenomena, the supposition of unity of cause is not only wide of

the truth, but at an immeasurable distance from it. The causes of every

social phenomenon which we are particularly interested about, security,

wealth, freedom, good government, public virtue, general intelligence, or

their opposites, are infinitely numerous, especially the external or

remote causes, which alone are, for the most part, accessible to direct

observation. No one cause suffices of itself to produce any of these

phenomena; while there are countless causes which have some influence over

them, and may co-operate either in their production or in their

prevention. From the mere fact, therefore, of our having been able to

eliminate some circumstance, we can by no means infer that this

circumstance was not instrumental to the effect in some of the very

instances from which we have eliminated it. We can conclude that the

effect is sometimes produced without it; but not that, when present, it

does not contribute its share.

Similar objections will be found to apply to the Method of Concomitant

Variations. If the causes which act upon the state of any society produced

effects differing from one another in kind; if wealth depended on one

cause, peace on another, a third made people virtuous, a fourth

intelligent; we might, though unable to sever the causes from one another,

refer to each of them that property of the effect which waxed as it waxed,

and which waned as it waned. But every attribute of the social body is

influenced by innumerable causes; and such is the mutual action of the

co-existing elements of society, that whatever affects any one of the more

important of them, will by that alone, if it does not affect the others

directly, affect them indirectly. The effects, therefore, of different

agents not being different in quality, while the quantity of each is the

mixed result of all the agents, the variations of the aggregate can not

bear a uniform proportion to those of any one of its component parts.

§ 5. There remains the Method of Residues; which appears, on the first

view, less foreign to this kind of inquiry than the three other methods,

because it only requires that we should accurately note the circumstances

of some one country, or state of society. Making allowance, thereupon, for

the effect of all causes whose tendencies are known, the residue which

those causes are inadequate to explain may plausibly be imputed to the

remainder of the circumstances which are known to have existed in the

case. Something similar to this is the method which Coleridge(275)

describes himself as having followed in his political essays in the

_Morning Post_. “On every great occurrence I endeavored to discover in

past history the event that most nearly resembled it. I procured, whenever

it was possible, the contemporary historians, memorialists, and

pamphleteers. Then fairly subtracting the points of difference from those

of likeness, as the balance favored the former or the latter, I

conjectured that the result would be the same or different. As, for

instance, in the series of essays entitled ‘A Comparison of France under

Napoleon with Rome under the first Cæsars,’ and in those which followed,

‘on the probable final restoration of the Bourbons.’ The same plan I

pursued at the commencement of the Spanish Revolution, and with the same

success, taking the war of the United Provinces with Philip II. as the

groundwork of the comparison.” In this inquiry he no doubt employed the

Method of Residues; for, in “subtracting the points of difference from

those of likeness,” he doubtless weighed, and did not content himself with

numbering, them: he doubtless took those points of agreement only which he

presumed from their own nature to be capable of influencing the effect,

and, allowing for that influence, concluded that the remainder of the

result would be referable to the points of difference.

Whatever may be the efficacy of this method, it is, as we long ago

remarked, not a method of pure observation and experiment; it concludes,

not from a comparison of instances, but from the comparison of an instance

with the result of a previous deduction. Applied to social phenomena, it

presupposes that the causes from which part of the effect proceeded are

already known; and as we have shown that these can not have been known by

specific experience, they must have been learned by deduction from

principles of human nature; experience being called in only as a

supplementary resource, to determine the causes which produced an

unexplained residue. But if the principles of human nature may be had

recourse to for the establishment of some political truths, they may for

all. If it be admissible to say, England must have prospered by reason of

the prohibitory system, because after allowing for all the other

tendencies which have been operating, there is a portion of prosperity

still to be accounted for; it must be admissible to go to the same source

for the effect of the prohibitory system, and examine what account the

laws of human motives and actions will enable us to give of _its_

tendencies. Nor, in fact, will the experimental argument amount to any

thing, except in verification of a conclusion drawn from those general

laws. For we may subtract the effect of one, two, three, or four causes,

but we shall never succeed in subtracting the effect of all causes except

one; while it would be a curious instance of the dangers of too much

caution if, to avoid depending on _a priori_ reasoning concerning the

effect of a single cause, we should oblige ourselves to depend on as many

separate _a priori_ reasonings as there are causes operating concurrently

with that particular cause in some given instance.

We have now sufficiently characterized the gross misconception of the mode

of investigation proper to political phenomena, which I have termed the

Chemical Method. So lengthened a discussion would not have been necessary,

if the claim to decide authoritatively on political doctrines were

confined to persons who had competently studied any one of the higher

departments of physical science. But since the generality of those who

reason on political subjects, satisfactorily to themselves and to a more

or less numerous body of admirers, know nothing whatever of the methods of

physical investigation beyond a few precepts which they continue to parrot

after Bacon, being entirely unaware that Bacon’s conception of scientific

inquiry has done its work, and that science has now advanced into a higher

stage, there are probably many to whom such remarks as the foregoing may

still be useful. In an age in which chemistry itself, when attempting to

deal with the more complex chemical sequences—those of the animal or even

the vegetable organism—has found it necessary to become, and has succeeded

in becoming, a Deductive Science, it is not to be apprehended that any

person of scientific habits, who has kept pace with the general progress

of the knowledge of nature, can be in danger of applying the methods of

elementary chemistry to explore the sequences of the most complex order of

phenomena in existence.

Chapter VIII.

Of The Geometrical, Or Abstract, Method.

§ 1. The misconception discussed in the preceding chapter is, as we said,

chiefly committed by persons not much accustomed to scientific

investigation: practitioners in politics, who rather employ the

commonplaces of philosophy to justify their practice than seek to guide

their practice by philosophic principles; or imperfectly educated persons,

who, in ignorance of the careful selection and elaborate comparison of

instances required for the formation of a sound theory, attempt to found

one upon a few coincidences which they have casually noticed.

The erroneous method of which we are now to treat is, on the contrary,

peculiar to thinking and studious minds. It never could have suggested

itself but to persons of some familiarity with the nature of scientific

research; who, being aware of the impossibility of establishing, by casual

observation or direct experimentation, a true theory of sequences so

complex as are those of the social phenomena, have recourse to the simpler

laws which are immediately operative in those phenomena, and which are no

other than the laws of the nature of the human beings therein concerned,

These thinkers perceive (what the partisans of the chemical or

experimental theory do not) that the science of society must necessarily

be deductive. But, from an insufficient consideration of the specific

nature of the subject-matter—and often because (their own scientific

education having stopped short in too early a stage) geometry stands in

their minds as the type of all deductive science—it is to geometry, rather

than to astronomy and natural philosophy, that they unconsciously

assimilate the deductive science of society.

Among the differences between geometry (a science of co-existent facts,

altogether independent of the laws of the succession of phenomena), and

those physical Sciences of Causation which have been rendered deductive,

the following is one of the most conspicuous: That geometry affords no

room for what so constantly occurs in mechanics and its applications, the

case of conflicting forces; of causes which counteract or modify one

another. In mechanics we continually find two or more moving forces

producing, not motion, but rest; or motion in a different direction from

that which would have been produced by either of the generating forces. It

is true that the effect of the joint forces is the same when they act

simultaneously, as if they had acted one after another, or by turns; and

it is in this that the difference between mechanical and chemical laws

consists. But still the effects, whether produced by successive or by

simultaneous action, do, wholly or in part, cancel one another: what the

one force does, the other, partly, or altogether undoes. There is no

similar state of things in geometry. The result which follows from one

geometrical principle has nothing that conflicts with the result which

follows from another. What is proved true from one geometrical theorem,

what would be true if no other geometrical principles existed, can not be

altered and made no longer true by reason of some other geometrical

principle. What is once proved true is true in all cases, whatever

supposition may be made in regard to any other matter.

Now a conception similar to this last would appear to have been formed of

the social science, in the minds of the earlier of those who have

attempted to cultivate it by a deductive method. Mechanics would be a

science very similar to geometry, if every motion resulted from one force

alone, and not from a conflict of forces. In the geometrical theory of

society, it seems to be supposed that this is really the case with the

social phenomena; that each of them results always from only one force,

one single property of human nature.

At the point which we have now reached, it can not be necessary to say any

thing either in proof or in illustration of the assertion that such is not

the true character of the social phenomena. There is not, among these most

complex and (for that reason) most modifiable of all phenomena, any one

over which innumerable forces do not exercise influence; which does not

depend on a conjunction of very many causes. We have not, therefore, to

prove the notion in question to be an error, but to prove that the error

has been committed; that so mistaken a conception of the mode in which the

phenomena of society are produced has actually been ascertained.

§ 2. One numerous division of the reasoners who have treated social facts

according to geometrical methods, not admitting any modification of one

law by another, must for the present be left out of consideration, because

in them this error is complicated with, and is the effect of, another

fundamental misconception, of which we have already taken some notice, and

which will be further treated of before we conclude. I speak of those who

deduce political conclusions not from laws of nature, not from sequences

of phenomena, real or imaginary, but from unbending practical maxims.

Such, for example, are all who found their theory of politics on what is

called abstract right, that is to say, on universal precepts; a pretension

of which we have already noticed the chimerical nature. Such, in like

manner, are those who make the assumption of a social contract, or any

other kind of original obligation, and apply it to particular cases by

mere interpretation. But in this the fundamental error is the attempt to

treat an art like a science, and to have a deductive art; the

irrationality of which will be shown in a future chapter. It will be

proper to take our exemplification of the geometrical theory from those

thinkers who have avoided this additional error, and who entertain, so

far, a juster idea of the nature of political inquiry.

We may cite, in the first instance, those who assume as the principle of

their political philosophy that government is founded on fear; that the

dread of each other is the one motive by which human beings were

originally brought into a state of society, and are still held in it. Some

of the earlier scientific inquirers into politics, in particular Hobbes,

assumed this proposition, not by implication, but avowedly, as the

foundation of their doctrine, and attempted to build a complete philosophy

of politics thereupon. It is true that Hobbes did not find this one maxim

sufficient to carry him through the whole of his subject, but was obliged

to eke it out by the double sophism of an original contract. I call this a

double sophism; first, as passing off a fiction for a fact, and, secondly,

assuming a practical principle, or precept, as the basis of a theory;

which is a _petitio principii_, since (as we noticed in treating of that

Fallacy) every rule of conduct, even though it be so binding a one as the

observance of a promise, must rest its own foundations on the theory of

the subject; and the theory, therefore, can not rest upon it.

§ 3. Passing over less important instances, I shall come at once to the

most remarkable example afforded by our own times of the geometrical

method in politics; emanating from persons who are well aware of the

distinction between science and art; who knew that rules of conduct must

follow, not precede, the ascertainment of laws of nature, and that the

latter, not the former, is the legitimate field for the application of the

deductive method. I allude to the interest-philosophy of the Bentham

school.

The profound and original thinkers who are commonly known under this

description, founded their general theory of government on one

comprehensive premise, namely, that men’s actions are always determined by

their interests. There is an ambiguity in this last expression; for, as

the same philosophers, especially Bentham, gave the name of an interest to

any thing which a person likes, the proposition may be understood to mean

only this, that men’s actions are always determined by their wishes. In

this sense, however, it would not bear out any of the consequences which

these writers drew from it; and the word, therefore, in their political

reasonings, must be understood to mean (which is also the explanation they

themselves, on such occasions gave of it) what is commonly termed private,

or worldly, interest.

Taking the doctrine, then, in this sense, an objection presents itself _in

limine_ which might be deemed a fatal one, namely, that so sweeping a

proposition is far from being universally true. Human beings are not

governed in all their actions by their worldly interests. This, however,

is by no means so conclusive an objection as it at first appears; because

in politics we are for the most part concerned with the conduct, not of

individual persons, but either of a series of persons (as a succession of

kings), or a body or mass of persons, as a nation, an aristocracy, or a

representative assembly. And whatever is true of a large majority of

mankind, may without much error be taken for true of any succession of

persons, considered as a whole, or of any collection of persons in which

the act of the majority becomes the act of the whole body. Although,

therefore, the maxim is sometimes expressed in a manner unnecessarily

paradoxical, the consequences drawn from it will hold equally good if the

assertion be limited as follows: Any succession of persons, or the

majority of any body of persons, will be governed in the bulk of their

conduct by their personal interests. We are bound to allow to this school

of thinkers the benefit of this more rational statement of their

fundamental maxim, which is also in strict conformity to the explanations

which, when considered to be called for, have been given by themselves.

The theory goes on to infer, quite correctly, that if the actions of

mankind are determined in the main by their selfish interests, the only

rulers who will govern according to the interest of the governed, are

those whose selfish interests are in accordance with it. And to this is

added a third proposition, namely, that no rulers have their selfish

interest identical with that of the governed, unless it be rendered so by

accountability, that is, by dependence on the will of the governed. In

other words (and as the result of the whole), that the desire of retaining

or the fear of losing their power, and whatever is thereon consequent, is

the sole motive which can be relied on for producing on the part of rulers

a course of conduct in accordance with the general interest.

We have thus a fundamental theorem of political science, consisting of

three syllogisms, and depending chiefly on two general premises, in each

of which a certain effect is considered as determined only by one cause,

not by a concurrence of causes. In the one, it is assumed that the actions

of average rulers are determined solely by self-interest; in the other,

that the sense of identity of interest with the governed, is produced and

producible by no other cause than responsibility.

Neither of these propositions is by any means true; the last is extremely

wide of the truth.

It is not true that the actions even of average rulers are wholly, or any

thing approaching to wholly, determined by their personal interest, or

even by their own opinion of their personal interest. I do not speak of

the influence of a sense of duty, or feelings of philanthropy, motives

never to be mainly relied on, though (except in countries or during

periods of great moral debasement) they influence almost all rulers in

some degree, and some rulers in a very great degree. But I insist only on

what is true of all rulers, viz., that the character and course of their

actions is largely influenced (independently of personal calculation) by

the habitual sentiments and feelings, the general modes of thinking and

acting, which prevail throughout the community of which they are members;

as well as by the feelings, habits, and modes of thought which

characterize the particular class in that community to which they

themselves belong. And no one will understand or be able to decipher their

system of conduct, who does not take all these things into account. They

are also much influenced by the maxims and traditions which have descended

to them from other rulers, their predecessors; which maxims and traditions

have been known to retain an ascendancy during long periods, even in

opposition to the private interests of the rulers for the time being. I

put aside the influence of other less general causes. Although, therefore,

the private interest of the rulers or of the ruling class is a very

powerful force, constantly in action, and exercising the most important

influence upon their conduct, there is also, in what they do, a large

portion which that private interest by no means affords a sufficient

explanation of; and even the particulars which constitute the goodness or

badness of their government, are in some, and no small degree, influenced

by those among the circumstances acting upon them, which can not, with any

propriety, be included in the term self-interest.

Turning now to the other proposition, that responsibility to the governed

is the only cause capable of producing in the rulers a sense of identity

of interest with the community, this is still less admissible as a

universal truth, than even the former. I am not speaking of perfect

identity of interest, which is an impracticable chimera; which, most

assuredly, responsibility to the people does not give. I speak of identity

in essentials; and the essentials are different at different places and

times. There are a large number of cases in which those things which it is

most for the general interest that the rulers should do, are also those

which they are prompted to do by their strongest personal interest, the

consolidation of their power. The suppression, for instance, of anarchy

and resistance to law—the complete establishment of the authority of the

central government, in a state of society like that of Europe in the

Middle Ages—is one of the strongest interests of the people, and also of

the rulers simply because they are the rulers; and responsibility on their

part could not strengthen, though in many conceivable ways it might

weaken, the motives prompting them to pursue this object. During the

greater part, of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and of many other monarchs

who might be named, the sense of identity of interest between the

sovereign and the majority of the people was probably stronger than it

usually is in responsible governments; every thing that the people had

most at heart, the monarch had at heart too. Had Peter the Great, or the

rugged savages whom he began to civilize, the truest inclination toward

the things which were for the real interest of those savages?

I am not here attempting to establish a theory of government, and am not

called upon to determine the proportional weight which ought to be given

to the circumstances which this school of geometrical politicians left out

of their system, and those which they took into it. I am only concerned to

show that their method was unscientific; not to measure the amount of

error which may have affected their practical conclusions.

It is but justice to them, however, to remark, that their mistake was not

so much one of substance as of form, and consisted in presenting in a

systematic shape, and as the scientific treatment of a great philosophical

question, what should have passed for that which it really was, the mere

polemics of the day. Although the actions of rulers are by no means wholly

determined by their selfish interests, it is chiefly as a security against

those selfish interests that constitutional checks are required; and for

that purpose such checks, in England, and the other nations of modern

Europe, can in no manner be dispensed with. It is likewise true, that in

these same nations, and in the present age, responsibility to the governed

is the only means practically available to create a feeling of identity of

interest, in the cases, and on the points, where that feeling does not

sufficiently exist. To all this, and to the arguments which may be founded

on it in favor of measures for the correction of our representative

system, I have nothing to object; but I confess my regret, that the small

though highly important portion of the philosophy of government, which was

wanted for the immediate purpose of serving the cause of parliamentary

reform, should have been held forth by thinkers of such eminence as a

complete theory.

It is not to be imagined possible, nor is it true in point of fact, that

these philosophers regarded the few premises of their theory as including

all that is required for explaining social phenomena, or for determining

the choice of forms of government and measures of legislation and

administration. They were too highly instructed, of too comprehensive

intellect, and some of them of too sober and practical a character, for

such an error. They would have applied, and did apply, their principles

with innumerable allowances. But it is not allowances that are wanted.

There is little chance of making due amends in the superstructure of a

theory for the want of sufficient breadth in its foundations. It is

unphilosophical to construct a science out of a few of the agencies by

which the phenomena are determined, and leave the rest to the routine of

practice or the sagacity of conjecture. We either ought not to pretend to

scientific forms, or we ought to study all the determining agencies

equally, and endeavor, so far as it can be done, to include all of them

within the pale of the science; else we shall infallibly bestow a

disproportionate attention upon those which our theory takes into account,

while we misestimate the rest, and probably underrate their importance.

That the deductions should be from the whole and not from a part only of

the laws of nature that are concerned, would be desirable even if those

omitted were so insignificant in comparison with the others, that they

might, for most purposes and on most occasions, be left out of the

account. But this is far indeed from being true in the social science. The

phenomena of society do not depend, in essentials, on some one agency or

law of human nature, with only inconsiderable modifications from others.

The whole of the qualities of human nature influence those phenomena, and

there is not one which influences them in a small degree. There is not

one, the removal or any great alteration of which would not materially

affect the whole aspect of society, and change more or less the sequences

of social phenomena generally.

The theory which has been the subject of these remarks is, in this country

at least, the principal contemporary example of what I have styled the

geometrical method of philosophizing in the social science; and our

examination of it has, for this reason, been more detailed than would

otherwise have been suitable to a work like the present. Having now

sufficiently illustrated the two erroneous methods, we shall pass without

further preliminary to the true method; that which proceeds (conformably

to the practice of the more complex physical sciences) deductively indeed,

but by deduction from many, not from one or a very few, original premises;

considering each effect as (what it really is) an aggregate result of many

causes, operating sometimes through the same, sometimes through different

mental agencies, or laws of human nature.

Chapter IX.

Of The Physical, Or Concrete Deductive, Method.

§ 1. After what has been said to illustrate the nature of the inquiry into

social phenomena, the general character of the method proper to that

inquiry is sufficiently evident, and needs only to be recapitulated, not

proved. However complex the phenomena, all their sequences and

co-existences result from the laws of the separate elements. The effect

produced, in social phenomena, by any complex set of circumstances,

amounts precisely to the sum of the effects of the circumstances taken

singly; and the complexity does not arise from the number of the laws

themselves, which is not remarkably great, but from the extraordinary

number and variety of the data or elements—of the agents which, in

obedience to that small number of laws, co-operate toward the effect. The

Social Science, therefore (which, by a convenient barbarism, has been

termed Sociology), is a deductive science; not, indeed, after the model of

geometry, but after that of the more complex physical sciences. It infers

the law of each effect from the laws of causation on which that effect

depends; not, however, from the law merely of one cause, as in the

geometrical method, but by considering all the causes which conjunctly

influence the effect, and compounding their laws with one another. Its

method, in short, is the Concrete Deductive Method: that of which

astronomy furnishes the most perfect, natural philosophy a somewhat less

perfect, example, and the employment of which, with the adaptations and

precautions required by the subject, is beginning to regenerate

physiology.

Nor does it admit of doubt, that similar adaptations and precautions are

indispensable in sociology. In applying to that most complex of all

studies what is demonstrably the sole method capable of throwing the light

of science even upon phenomena of a far inferior degree of complication,

we ought to be aware that the same superior complexity which renders the

instrument of Deduction more necessary, renders it also more precarious;

and we must be prepared to meet, by appropriate contrivances, this

increase of difficulty.

The actions and feelings of human beings in the social state, are, no

doubt, entirely governed by psychological and ethological laws: whatever

influence any cause exercises upon the social phenomena, it exercises

through those laws. Supposing therefore the laws of human actions and

feelings to be sufficiently known, there is no extraordinary difficulty in

determining from those laws, the nature of the social effects which any

given cause tends to produce. But when the question is that of compounding

several tendencies together, and computing the aggregate result of many

co-existent causes; and especially when, by attempting to predict what

will actually occur in a given case, we incur the obligation of estimating

and compounding the influences of all the causes which happen to exist in

that case, we attempt a task to proceed far in which, surpasses the

compass of the human faculties.

If all the resources of science are not sufficient to enable us to

calculate, _a priori_, with complete precision, the mutual action of three

bodies gravitating toward one another, it may be judged with what prospect

of success we should endeavor to calculate the result of the conflicting

tendencies which are acting in a thousand different directions and

promoting a thousand different changes at a given instant in a given

society; although we might and ought to be able, from the laws of human

nature, to distinguish correctly enough the tendencies themselves, so far

as they depend on causes accessible to our observation; and to determine

the direction which each of them, if acting alone, would impress upon

society, as well as, in a general way at least, to pronounce that some of

these tendencies are more powerful than others.

But, without dissembling the necessary imperfections of the _a priori_

method when applied to such a subject, neither ought we, on the other

hand; to exaggerate them. The same objections which apply to the Method of

Deduction in this its most difficult employment, apply to it, as we

formerly showed,(276) in its easiest; and would even there have been

insuperable, if there had not existed, as was then fully explained, an

appropriate remedy. This remedy consists in the process which, under the

name of Verification, we have characterized as the third essential

constituent part of the Deductive Method; that of collating the

conclusions of the ratiocination either with the concrete phenomena

themselves, or, when such are obtainable, with their empirical laws. The

ground of confidence in any concrete deductive science is not the _a

priori_ reasoning itself, but the accordance between its results and those

of observation _a posteriori_. Either of these processes, apart from the

other, diminishes in value as the subject increases in complication, and

this is in so rapid a ratio as soon to become entirely worthless; but the

reliance to be placed in the concurrence of the two sorts of evidence, not

only does not diminish in any thing like the same proportion, but is not

necessarily much diminished at all. Nothing more results than a

disturbance in the order of precedency of the two processes, sometimes

amounting to its actual inversion: insomuch that instead of deducing our

conclusions by reasoning, and verifying them by observation, we in some

cases begin by obtaining them provisionally from specific experience, and

afterward connect them with the principles of human nature by _a priori_

reasonings, which reasonings are thus a real Verification.

The only thinker who, with a competent knowledge of scientific methods in

general, has attempted to characterize the Method of Sociology, M. Comte,

considers this inverse order as inseparably inherent in the nature of

sociological speculation. He looks upon the social science as essentially

consisting of generalizations from history, verified, not originally

suggested, by deduction from the laws of human nature. Though there is a

truth contained in this opinion, of which I shall presently endeavor to

show the importance, I can not but think that this truth is enunciated in

too unlimited a manner, and that there is considerable scope in

sociological inquiry for the direct, as well as for the inverse, Deductive

Method.

It will, in fact, be shown in the next chapter, that there is a kind of

sociological inquiries to which, from their prodigious complication, the

method of direct deduction is altogether inapplicable, while by a happy

compensation it is precisely in these cases that we are able to obtain the

best empirical laws: to these inquiries, therefore, the Inverse Method is

exclusively adapted. But there are also, as will presently appear, other

cases in which it is impossible to obtain from direct observation any

thing worthy the name of an empirical law; and it fortunately happens that

these are the very cases in which the Direct Method is least affected by

the objection which undoubtedly must always affect it in a certain degree.

We shall begin, then, by looking at the Social Science as a science of

direct Deduction, and considering what can be accomplished in it, and

under what limitations, by that mode of investigation. We shall, then, in

a separate chapter, examine and endeavor to characterize the inverse

process.

§ 2. It is evident, in the first place, that Sociology, considered as a

system of deductions _a priori_, can not be a science of positive

predictions, but only of tendencies. We may be able to conclude, from the

laws of human nature applied to the circumstances of a given state of

society, that a particular cause will operate in a certain manner unless

counteracted; but we can never be assured to what extent or amount it will

so operate, or affirm with certainty that it will not be counteracted;

because we can seldom know, even approximately, all the agencies which may

co-exist with it, and still less calculate the “collective result” of so

many combined elements. The remark, however, must here be once more

repeated, that knowledge insufficient for prediction may be most valuable

for guidance. It is not necessary for the wise conduct of the affairs of

society, no more than of any one’s private concerns, that we should be

able to foresee infallibly the results of what we do. We must seek our

objects by means which may perhaps be defeated, and take precautions

against dangers which possibly may never be realized. The aim of practical

politics is to surround any given society with the greatest possible

number of circumstances of which the tendencies are beneficial, and to

remove or counteract, as far as practicable, those of which the tendencies

are injurious. A knowledge of the tendencies only, though without the

power of accurately predicting their conjunct result, gives us to a

considerable extent this power.

It would, however, be an error to suppose that even with respect to

tendencies we could arrive in this manner at any great number of

propositions which will be true in all societies without exception. Such a

supposition would be inconsistent with the eminently modifiable nature of

the social phenomena, and the multitude and variety of the circumstances

by which they are modified—circumstances never the same, or even nearly

the same, in two different societies, or in two different periods of the

same society. This would not be so serious an obstacle if, though the

causes acting upon society in general are numerous, those which influence

any one feature of society were limited in number; for we might then

insulate any particular social phenomenon, and investigate its laws

without disturbance from the rest. But the truth is the very opposite of

this. Whatever affects, in an appreciable degree, any one element of the

social state, affects through it all the other elements. The mode of

production of all social phenomena is one great case of Intermixture of

Laws. We can never either understand in theory or command in practice the

condition of a society in any one respect, without taking into

consideration its condition in all other respects. There is no social

phenomenon which is not more or less influenced by every other part of the

condition of the same society, and therefore by every cause which is

influencing any other of the contemporaneous social phenomena. There is,

in short, what physiologists term a _consensus_, similar to that existing

among the various organs and functions of the physical frame of man and

the more perfect animals; and constituting one of the many analogies which

have rendered universal such expressions as the “body politic” and “body

natural.” It follows from this _consensus_, that unless two societies

could be alike in all the circumstances which surround and influence them

(which would imply their being alike in their previous history), no

portion whatever of the phenomena will, unless by accident, precisely

correspond; no one cause will produce exactly the same effects in both.

Every cause, as its effect spreads through society, comes somewhere in

contact with different sets of agencies, and thus has its effects on some

of the social phenomena differently modified; and these differences, by

their reaction, produce a difference even in those of the effects which

would otherwise have been the same. We can never, therefore, affirm with

certainty that a cause which has a particular tendency in one people or in

one age will have exactly the same tendency in another, without referring

back to our premises, and performing over again for the second age or

nation, that analysis of the whole of its influencing circumstances which

we had already performed for the first. The deductive science of society

will not lay down a theorem, asserting in a universal manner the effect of

any cause; but will rather teach us how to frame the proper theorem for

the circumstances of any given case. It will not give the laws of society

in general, but the means of determining the phenomena of any given

society from the particular elements or data of that society.

All the general propositions which can be framed by the deductive science,

are therefore, in the strictest sense of the word, hypothetical. They are

grounded on some suppositious set of circumstances, and declare how some

given cause would operate in those circumstances, supposing that no others

were combined with them. If the set of circumstances supposed have been

copied from those of any existing society, the conclusions will be true of

that society, provided, and in as far as, the effect of those

circumstances shall not be modified by others which have not been taken

into the account. If we desire a nearer approach to concrete truth, we can

only aim at it by taking, or endeavoring to take, a greater number of

individualizing circumstances into the computation.

Considering, however, in how accelerating a ratio the uncertainty of our

conclusions increases as we attempt to take the effect of a greater number

of concurrent causes into our calculations, the hypothetical combinations

of circumstances on which we construct the general theorems of the

science, can not be made very complex, without so rapidly accumulating a

liability to error as must soon deprive our conclusions of all value. This

mode of inquiry, considered as a means of obtaining general propositions,

must, therefore, on pain of frivolity, be limited to those classes of

social facts which, though influenced like the rest by all sociological

agents, are under the _immediate_ influence, principally at least, of a

few only.

§ 3. Notwithstanding the universal _consensus_ of the social phenomena,

whereby nothing which takes place in any part of the operations of society

is without its share of influence on every other part; and notwithstanding

the paramount ascendancy which the general state of civilization and

social progress in any given society must hence exercise over all the

partial and subordinate phenomena; it is not the less true that different

species of social facts are in the main dependent, immediately and in the

first resort, on different kinds of causes; and therefore not only may

with advantage, but must, be studied apart: just as in the natural body we

study separately the physiology and pathology of each of the principal

organs and tissues, though every one is acted upon by the state of all the

others; and though the peculiar constitution and general state of health

of the organism co-operates with, and often preponderates over, the local

causes, in determining the state of any particular organ.

On these considerations is grounded the existence of distinct and

separate, though not independent, branches or departments of sociological

speculation.

There is, for example, one large class of social phenomena in which the

immediately determining causes are principally those which act through the

desire of wealth, and in which the psychological law mainly concerned is

the familiar one, that a greater gain is preferred to a smaller. I mean,

of course, that portion of the phenomena of society which emanate from the

industrial, or productive, operations of mankind; and from those of their

acts through which the distribution of the products of those industrial

operations takes place, in so far as not effected by force, or modified by

voluntary gift. By reasoning from that one law of human nature, and from

the principal outward circumstances (whether universal or confined to

particular states of society) which operate upon the human mind through

that law, we may be enabled to explain and predict this portion of the

phenomena of society, so far as they depend on that class of circumstances

only; overlooking the influence of any other of the circumstances of

society; and therefore neither tracing back the circumstances which we do

take into account, to their possible origin in some other facts in the

social state, nor making allowance for the manner in which any of those

other circumstances may interfere with, and counteract or modify, the

effect of the former. A department of science may thus be constructed,

which has received the name of Political Economy.

The motive which suggests the separation of this portion of the social

phenomena from the rest, and the creation of a distinct branch of science

relating to them is—that they do _mainly_ depend, at least in the first

resort, on one class of circumstances only; and that even when other

circumstances interfere, the ascertainment of the effect due to the one

class of circumstances alone, is a sufficiently intricate and difficult

business to make it expedient to perform it once for all, and then allow

for the effect of the modifying circumstances; especially as certain fixed

combinations of the former are apt to recur often, in conjunction with

ever-varying circumstances of the latter class.

Political Economy, as I have said on another occasion, concerns itself

only with “such of the phenomena of the social state as take place in

consequence of the pursuit of wealth. It makes entire abstraction of every

other human passion or motive; except those which may be regarded as

perpetually antagonizing principles to the desire of wealth, namely,

aversion to labor, and desire of the present enjoyment of costly

indulgences. These it takes, to a certain extent, into its calculations,

because these do not merely, like our other desires, occasionally conflict

with the pursuit of wealth, but accompany it always as a drag or

impediment, and are therefore inseparably mixed up in the consideration of

it. Political Economy considers mankind as occupied solely in acquiring

and consuming wealth; and aims at showing what is the course of action

into which mankind, living in a state of society, would be impelled, if

that motive, except in the degree in which it is checked by the two

perpetual counter-motives above adverted to, were absolute ruler of all

their actions. Under the influence of this desire, it shows mankind

accumulating wealth, and employing that wealth in the production of other

wealth; sanctioning by mutual agreement the institution of property;

establishing laws to prevent individuals from encroaching upon the

property of others by force or fraud; adopting various contrivances for

increasing the productiveness of their labor; settling the division of the

produce by agreement, under the influence of competition (competition

itself being governed by certain laws, which laws are therefore the

ultimate regulators of the division of the produce); and employing certain

expedients (as money, credit, etc.) to facilitate the distribution. All

these operations, though many of them are really the result of a plurality

of motives, are considered by political economy as flowing solely from the

desire of wealth. The science then proceeds to investigate the laws which

govern these several operations, under the supposition that man is a being

who is determined, by the necessity of his nature, to prefer a greater

portion of wealth to a smaller, in all cases, without any other exception

than that constituted by the two counter-motives already specified. Not

that any political economist was ever so absurd as to suppose that mankind

are really thus constituted, but because this is the mode in which science

must necessarily proceed. When an effect depends on a concurrence of

causes, these causes must be studied one at a time, and their laws

separately investigated, if we wish, through the causes, to obtain the

power of either predicting or controlling the effect; since the law of the

effect is compounded of the laws of all the causes which determine it. The

law of the centripetal and that of the projectile force must have been

known, before the motions of the earth and planets could be explained, or

many of them predicted. The same is the case with the conduct of man in

society. In order to judge how he will act under the variety of desires

and aversions which are concurrently operating upon him, we must know how

he would act under the exclusive influence of each one in particular.

There is, perhaps, no action of a man’s life in which he is neither under

the immediate nor under the remote influence of any impulse but the mere

desire of wealth. With respect to those parts of human conduct of which

wealth is not even the principal object, to these political economy does

not pretend that its conclusions are applicable. But there are also

certain departments of human affairs, in which the acquisition of wealth

is the main and acknowledged end. It is only of these that political

economy takes notice. The manner in which it necessarily proceeds is that

of treating the main and acknowledged end as if it were the sole end;

which, of all hypotheses equally simple, is the nearest to the truth. The

political economist inquires, what are the actions which would be produced

by this desire, if within the departments in question it were unimpeded by

any other. In this way a nearer approximation is obtained than would

otherwise be practicable to the real order of human affairs in those

departments. This approximation has then to be corrected by making proper

allowance for the effects of any impulses of a different description,

which can be shown to interfere with the result in any particular case.

Only in a few of the most striking cases (such as the important one of the

principle of population) are these corrections interpolated into the

expositions of political economy itself; the strictness of purely

scientific arrangement being thereby somewhat departed from, for the sake

of practical utility. So far as it is known, or may be presumed, that the

conduct of mankind in the pursuit of wealth is under the collateral

influence of any other of the properties of our nature than the desire of

obtaining the greatest quantity of wealth with the least labor and

self-denial, the conclusions of political economy will so far fail of

being applicable to the explanation or prediction of real events, until

they are modified by a correct allowance for the degree of influence

exercised by the other cause.”(277)

Extensive and important practical guidance may be derived, in any given

state of society, from general propositions such as those above indicated;

even though the modifying influence of the miscellaneous causes which the

theory does not take into account, as well as the effect of the general

social changes in progress, be provisionally overlooked. And though it has

been a very common error of political economists to draw conclusions from

the elements of one state of society, and apply them to other states in

which many of the elements are not the same, it is even then not

difficult, by tracing back the demonstrations, and introducing the new

premises in their proper places, to make the same general course of

argument which served for the one case, serve for the others too.

For example, it has been greatly the custom of English political

economists to discuss the laws of the distribution of the produce of

industry, on a supposition which is scarcely realized anywhere out of

England and Scotland, namely, that the produce is “shared among three

classes, altogether distinct from one another, laborers, capitalists, and

landlords; and that all these are free agents, permitted in law and in

fact to set upon their labor, their capital, and their land, whatever

price they are able to get for it. The conclusions of the science, being

all adapted to a society thus constituted, require to be revised whenever

they are applied to any other. They are inapplicable where the only

capitalists are the landlords, and the laborers are their property, as in

slave countries. They are inapplicable where the almost universal landlord

is the state, as in India. They are inapplicable where the agricultural

laborer is generally the owner both of the land itself and of the capital,

as frequently in France, or of the capital only, as in Ireland.” But

though it may often be very justly objected to the existing race of

political economists “that they attempt to construct a permanent fabric

out of transitory materials; that they take for granted the immutability

of arrangements of society, many of which are in their nature fluctuating

or progressive, and enunciate with as little qualification as if they were

universal and absolute truths, propositions which are perhaps applicable

to no state of society except the particular one in which the writer

happened to live;” this does not take away the value of the propositions,

considered with reference to the state of society from which they were

drawn. And even as applicable to other states of society, “it must not be

supposed that the science is so incomplete and unsatisfactory as this

might seem to prove. Though many of its conclusions are only locally true,

its method of investigation is applicable universally; and as whoever has

solved a certain number of algebraic equations, can without difficulty

solve all others of the same kind, so whoever knows the political economy

of England, or even of Yorkshire, knows that of all nations, actual or

possible, provided he have good sense enough not to expect the same

conclusion to issue from varying premises.” Whoever has mastered with the

degree of precision which is attainable the laws which, under free

competition, determine the rent, profits, and wages, received by

landlords, capitalists, and laborers, in a state of society in which the

three classes are completely separate, will have no difficulty in

determining the very different laws which regulate the distribution of the

produce among the classes interested in it in any of the states of

cultivation and landed property set forth in the foregoing extract.(278)

§ 4. I would not here undertake to decide what other hypothetical or

abstract sciences similar to Political Economy, may admit of being carved

out of the general body of the social science; what other portions of the

social phenomena are in a sufficiently close and complete dependence, in

the first resort, on a peculiar class of causes, to make it convenient to

create a preliminary science of those causes; postponing the consideration

of the causes which act through them, or in concurrence with them, to a

later period of the inquiry. There is, however, among these separate

departments one which can not be passed over in silence, being of a more

comprehensive and commanding character than any of the other branches into

which the social science may admit of being divided. Like them, it is

directly conversant with the causes of only one class of social facts, but

a class which exercises, immediately or remotely, a paramount influence

over the test. I allude to what may be termed Political Ethology, or the

theory of the causes which determine the type of character belonging to a

people or to an age. Of all the subordinate branches of the social

science, this is the most completely in its infancy. The causes of

national character are scarcely at all understood, and the effect of

institutions or social arrangements upon the character of the people is

generally that portion of their effects which is least attended to, and

least comprehended. Nor is this wonderful, when we consider the infant

state of the science of Ethology itself, from whence the laws must be

drawn, of which the truths of political ethology can be but results and

exemplifications.

Yet, to whoever well considers the matter, it must appear that the laws of

national (or collective) character are by far the most important class of

sociological laws. In the first place, the character which is formed by

any state of social circumstances is in itself the most interesting

phenomenon which that state of society can possibly present. Secondly, it

is also a fact which enters largely into the production of all the other

phenomena. And above all, the character, that is, the opinions, feelings,

and habits, of the people, though greatly the results of the state of

society which precedes them, are also greatly the causes of the state of

society which follows them; and are the power by which all those of the

circumstances of society which are artificial, laws and customs for

instance, are altogether moulded: customs evidently, laws no less really,

either by the direct influence of public sentiment upon the ruling powers,

or by the effect which the state of national opinion and feeling has in

determining the form of government and shaping the character of the

governors.

As might be expected, the most imperfect part of those branches of social

inquiry which have been cultivated as separate sciences, is the theory of

the manner in which their conclusions are affected by ethological

considerations. The omission is no defect in them as abstract or

hypothetical sciences, but it vitiates them in their practical application

as branches of a comprehensive social science. In political economy, for

instance, empirical laws of human nature are tacitly assumed by English

thinkers, which are calculated only for Great Britain and the United

States. Among other things, an intensity of competition is constantly

supposed, which, as a general mercantile fact, exists in no country in the

world except those two. An English political economist, like his

countrymen in general, has seldom learned that it is possible that men, in

conducting the business of selling their goods over a counter, should care

more about their ease or their vanity than about their pecuniary gain. Yet

those who know the habits of the continent of Europe are aware how

apparently small a motive often outweighs the desire of money getting,

even in the operations which have money getting for their direct object.

The more highly the science of ethology is cultivated, and the better the

diversities of individual and national character are understood, the

smaller, probably, will the number of propositions become, which it will

be considered safe to build on as universal principles of human nature.

These considerations show that the process of dividing off the social

science into compartments, in order that each may be studied separately,

and its conclusions afterward corrected for practice by the modifications

supplied by the others, must be subject to at least one important

limitation. Those portions alone of the social phenomena can with

advantage be made the subjects, even provisionally, of distinct branches

of science, into which the diversities of character between different

nations or different times enter as influencing causes only in a secondary

degree. Those phenomena, on the contrary, with which the influences of the

ethological state of the people are mixed up at every step (so that the

connection of effects and causes can not be even rudely marked out without

taking those influences into consideration) could not with any advantage,

nor without great disadvantage, be treated independently of political

ethology, nor, therefore, of all the circumstances by which the qualities

of a people are influenced. For this reason (as well as for others which

will hereafter appear) there can be no separate Science of Government;

that being the fact which, of all others, is most mixed up, both as cause

and effect, with the qualities of the particular people or of the

particular age. All questions respecting the tendencies of forms of

government must stand part of the general science of society, not of any

separate branch of it.

This general Science of Society, as distinguished from the separate

departments of the science (each of which asserts its conclusions only

conditionally, subject to the paramount control of the laws of the general

science) now remains to be characterized. And as will be shown presently,

nothing of a really scientific character is here possible, except by the

inverse deductive method. But before we quit the subject of those

sociological speculations which proceed by way of direct deduction, we

must examine in what relation they stand to that indispensable element in

all deductive sciences, Verification by Specific Experience—comparison

between the conclusions of reasoning and the results of observation.

§ 5. We have seen that, in most deductive sciences, and among the rest in

Ethology itself, which is the immediate foundation of the Social Science,

a preliminary work of preparation is performed on the observed facts, to

fit them for being rapidly and accurately collated (sometimes even for

being collated at all) with the conclusions of theory. This preparatory

treatment consists in finding general propositions which express concisely

what is common to large classes of observed facts; and these are called

the empirical laws of the phenomena. We have, therefore, to inquire,

whether any similar preparatory process can be performed on the facts of

the social science; whether there are any empirical laws in history or

statistics.

In statistics, it is evident that empirical laws may sometimes be traced;

and the tracing them forms an important part of that system of indirect

observation on which we must often rely for the data of the Deductive

Science. The process of the science consists in inferring effects from

their causes; but we have often no means of observing the causes, except

through the medium of their effects. In such cases the deductive science

is unable to predict the effects, for want of the necessary data; it can

determine what causes are capable of producing any given effect, but not

with what frequency and in what quantities those causes exist. An instance

in point is afforded by a newspaper now lying before me. A statement was

furnished by one of the official assignees in bankruptcy showing among the

various bankruptcies which it had been his duty to investigate, in how

many cases the losses had been caused by misconduct of different kinds,

and in how many by unavoidable misfortunes. The result was, that the

number of failures caused by misconduct greatly preponderated over those

arising from all other causes whatever. Nothing but specific experience

could have given sufficient ground for a conclusion to this purport. To

collect, therefore, such empirical laws (which are never more than

approximate generalizations) from direct observation, is an important part

of the process of sociological inquiry.

The experimental process is not here to be regarded as a distinct road to

the truth, but as a means (happening accidentally to be the only, or the

best, available) for obtaining the necessary data for the deductive

science. When the immediate causes of social facts are not open to direct

observation, the empirical law of the effects gives us the empirical law

(which in that case is all that we can obtain) of the causes likewise. But

those immediate causes depend on remote causes; and the empirical law,

obtained by this indirect mode of observation, can only be relied on as

applicable to unobserved cases, so long as there is reason to think that

no change has taken place in any of the remote causes on which the

immediate causes depend. In making use, therefore, of even the best

statistical generalizations for the purpose of inferring (though it be

only conjecturally) that the same empirical laws will hold in any new

case, it is necessary that we be well acquainted with the remoter causes,

in order that we may avoid applying the empirical law to cases which

differ in any of the circumstances on which the truth of the law

ultimately depends. And thus, even where conclusions derived from specific

observation are available for practical inferences in new cases, it is

necessary that the deductive science should stand sentinel over the whole

process; that it should be constantly referred to, and its sanction

obtained to every inference.

The same thing holds true of all generalizations which can be grounded on

history. Not only there are such generalizations, but it will presently be

shown that the general science of society, which inquires into the laws of

succession and co-existence of the great facts constituting the state of

society and civilization at any time, can proceed in no other manner than

by making such generalizations—afterward to be confirmed by connecting

them with the psychological and ethological laws on which they must really

depend.

§ 6. But (reserving this question for its proper place) in those more

special inquiries which form the subject of the separate branches of the

social science, this twofold logical process and reciprocal verification

is not possible; specific experience affords nothing amounting to

empirical laws. This is particularly the case where the object is to

determine the effect of any one social cause among a great number acting

simultaneously; the effect, for example, of corn laws, or of a prohibitive

commercial system generally. Though it may be perfectly certain, from

theory, what _kind_ of effects corn laws must produce, and in what general

direction their influence must tell upon industrial prosperity, their

effect is yet of necessity so much disguised by the similar or contrary

effects of other influencing agents, that specific experience can at most

only show that on the average of some great number of instances, the cases

where there were corn laws exhibited the effect in a greater degree than

those where there were not. Now the number of instances necessary to

exhaust the whole round of combinations of the various influential

circumstances, and thus afford a fair average, never can be obtained. Not

only we can never learn with sufficient authenticity the facts of so many

instances, but the world itself does not afford them in sufficient

numbers, within the limits of the given state of society and civilization

which such inquiries always presuppose. Having thus no previous empirical

generalizations with which to collate the conclusions of theory, the only

mode of direct verification which remains is to compare those conclusions

with the result of an individual experiment or instance. But here the

difficulty is equally great. For in order to verify a theory by an

experiment, the circumstances of the experiment must be exactly the same

with those contemplated in the theory. But in social phenomena the

circumstances of no two cases are exactly alike. A trial of corn laws in

another country, or in a former generation, would go a very little way

toward verifying a conclusion drawn respecting their effect in this

generation and in this country. It thus happens, in most cases, that the

only individual instance really fitted to verify the predictions of theory

is the very instance for which the predictions were made; and the

verification comes too late to be of any avail for practical guidance.

Although, however, direct verification is impossible, there is an indirect

verification, which is scarcely of less value, and which is always

practicable. The conclusion drawn as to the individual case can only be

directly verified in that case; but it is verified indirectly, by the

verification of other conclusions, drawn in other individual cases from

the same laws. The experience which comes too late to verify the

particular proposition to which it refers, is not too late to help toward

verifying the general sufficiency of the theory. The test of the degree in

which the science affords safe ground for predicting (and consequently for

practically dealing with) what has not yet happened, is the degree in

which it would have enabled us to predict what has actually occurred.

Before our theory of the influence of a particular cause, in a given state

of circumstances, can be entirely trusted, we must be able to explain and

account for the existing state of all that portion of the social phenomena

which that cause has a tendency to influence. If, for instance, we would

apply our speculations in political economy to the prediction or guidance

of the phenomena of any country, we must be able to explain all the

mercantile or industrial facts of a general character, appertaining to the

present state of that country; to point out causes sufficient to account

for all of them, and prove, or show good ground for supposing, that these

causes have really existed. If we can not do this, it is a proof either

that the facts which ought to be taken into account are not yet completely

known to us, or that although we know the facts, we are not masters of a

sufficiently perfect theory to enable us to assign their consequences. In

either case we are not, in the present state of our knowledge, fully

competent to draw conclusions, speculative or practical, for that country.

In like manner, if we would attempt to judge of the effect which any

political institution would have, supposing that it could be introduced

into any given country, we must be able to show that the existing state of

the practical government of that country, and of whatever else depends

thereon, together with the particular character and tendencies of the

people, and their state in respect to the various elements of social

well-being, are such as the institutions they have lived under, in

conjunction with the other circumstances of their nature or of their

position, were calculated to produce.

To prove, in short, that our science, and our knowledge of the particular

case, render us competent to predict the future, we must show that they

would have enabled us to predict the present and the past. If there be any

thing which we could not have predicted, this constitutes a residual

phenomenon, requiring further study for the purpose of explanation; and we

must either search among the circumstances of the particular case until we

find one which, on the principles of our existing theory, accounts for the

unexplained phenomenon, or we must turn back, and seek the explanation by

an extension and improvement of the theory itself.