Chapter 61

GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS ON THE SOCIAL SCIENCE.

Political and social phenomena have been thought too complex for scientific treatment. Practitioners hitherto have been the only students; and so, as in medicine, before the rise of Physiology and Natural History, _experimenta fructifera_, and not _lucifera_, have been sought. The scheme of such a science has even been thought quackery, through the vain attempts of some theorists to frame universal precepts, as though their failure (arising from the variety of human circumstances) proved that the phenomena do not conform to universal laws. Social phenomena, however, being phenomena of human nature in masses, must, as human nature is itself subject to fixed laws, obey fixed laws resulting from the fixed laws of human nature. The number and changefulness of the data (unlike those of Astronomy) will prevent our ever predicting the far future of society. But, when general laws have been ascertained, an application of them to the individual circumstances of a given age and country will show us the causes and tendencies of, and the means of modifying, its actual condition. A consideration of two methods, erroneously used for this science, viz. the Experimental or Chemical, and the Abstract or Geometrical, will introduce us to the true one.