Chapter 64

THE PHYSICAL, OR CONCRETE DEDUCTIVE, METHOD.

The complexity in social effects arises from the number, not of the laws, but of the data. Therefore, Sociology, i.e. Social Science, must use the Concrete Deductive Method, compounding with one another the laws of all the causes on which any one effect depends, and inferring its law from them all. As in the easiest case to which the Method of Deduction applies, so in this, the most difficult, the conclusions of ratiocination must be _verified_ by collation with the concrete phenomena, or, if possible, with their empirical laws; and then the only effect of an increase in the complication of the subject will be a tendency to a disturbance, and sometimes even to an inversion (which, indeed, M. Comte thinks inseparable from all Sociological enquiries) in the order of the two processes, obliging us, first, to conjecture the conclusions by specific experience, and then verify them by _à priori_ reasonings showing their connection with the principles of human nature.

Sociology is a system not of positive predictions, but of tendencies. Of tendencies themselves, not many can be laid down as true of all societies alike. Even in the case of any single feature of society, the _consensus_ which exists in the body politic, as in the body natural, makes it uncertain whether a cause with a special tendency in one age or country will have quite the same in another. General propositions, therefore, in this deductive science, as, to be true, they must be hypothetical, and state the operation of a given cause in _given circumstances_, so, to be of any utility, should be limited to those classes of facts, which, though influenced by all sociological agents, are yet influenced _immediately_ by a few only, certain fixed combinations of which are likely to recur often. Thus, Political Economy, taking the one psychological law that men prefer a greater gain to a smaller, and ignoring every other motive, except what are perpetually adverse principles to this, viz. men's aversion to labour and desire of present costly pleasures, assumes, in enquiring what acts this desire of gain will produce, that, within the department of human affairs, where it is actually the main end, it is the _sole_ end. Yet its general propositions are of great practical use, even though it thus provisionally overlooks as well miscellaneous concurrent causes (with some exceptions, as e.g. the principle of population), as also the fact of the non-existence elsewhere of the conditions of any one particular country (e.g. the peculiarly British mode of distribution of the produce of industry among three classes). Another hypothetical or abstract science, which can be carved out of Sociology, is the as yet unexplored Political Ethology, i.e. the theory of the causes which determine a people's, or age's, type of character, which collective character, besides being the most interesting phenomenon in the particular state of society, is the _main_ cause of the social state which follows, and moulds _entirely_ customs and laws. The neglect of national diversities sometimes (as e.g. the assumption by our political economists, that in commercial populations everywhere, equally as in Great Britain and America, all motives yield to the desire of gain) vitiates only the practical application of a proposition; but when the national character is mixed up at every step with the phenomena (as is the case in questions respecting the tendencies of forms of government), the phenomena cannot properly be insulated in a separate branch of Sociology.

As in Ethology and other deductive sciences, so in Statistics and History there are empirical laws. The immediate causes of social facts are often not open to direct observation; and the deductive science can determine only what causes produce a given effect, and not the frequency and quantities of them; in such cases, the empirical law of the causes (which, however, can be applied to new cases only if we know that the remoter causes, on which these latter causes depend, remain unchanged) must be found through that of the effects, the Deductive Science relying then for its data on indirect observation. But, in the separate branches of Sociology, we cannot obtain empirical laws by specific experience. It is so particularly (on account both of the number of the causes, and also the fewness of the instances to be compared with the one in point) when the effect of any one (e.g. Corn Laws) of many simultaneous social causes has to be determined. We can, however, in such cases, verify _indirectly_ a theory as to the influence of a particular cause in given circumstances, by seeing if the same theory accounts for the _existing_ state of actual social facts which that cause has a tendency to influence.