ABSOLUTE POLITICAL ETHICS. 619 



How, indeed, can any man, and how more especially can any man of scientific 

 culture, think that special results of special political acts can be calculated, when 

 he contemplates the incalculable complexity of the influences under which each 

 individual, and a fortiori each society, develops, lives, and decays? . . . 



As fast as crude conceptions of diseases and remedial measures grow up into 

 Pathology and Therapeutics, we find increasing caution, along with increasing 

 proof that evil is often done instead of good. This contrast is traceable not only 

 as we pass from popular ignorance to professional knowledge, but as we pass from 

 the smaller professional knowledge of early times to the greater professional 

 knowledge of our own. The question with the modern physician is not as with 

 the ancient shall the treatment be blood- letting? shall cathartics, or shall dia- 

 phoretics be given ? or shall mercurials be administered ? But there rises the 

 previous question shall there be any treatment beyond a wholesome regimen ? 

 And even among existing physicians it happens that, in proportion as the judg- 

 ment is most cultivated, there is the least yielding to the " must-do-something " 

 impulse. 



Is it not possible, then is it not even probable, that this supposed necessity 

 for immediate action, which is put in as an excuse for drawing quick conclusions 

 from few data, is the concomitant of deficient knowledge ? Is it not probable that 

 as in Biology so in Sociology, the accumulation of more facts, the more critical 

 comparison of them, and the drawing of conclusions on scientific methods, will be 

 accompanied by increasing doubt about the benefits to be secured, and increasing 

 fear of the mischiefs which may be worked ? Is it not probable that what in the 

 individual organism is improperly, though conveniently, called the vis medicatrix 

 natures, may be found to have its analogue in the social organism ? and will there 

 not very likely come along with the recognition of this, the consciousness that in 

 both cases the one thing needful is to maintain the conditions under which the 

 natural actions have fair play? The Study of Sociology, pp. 15-21. 



Manifestly if, instead of saying that I proposed to treat the 

 diseases of this complex social organism by the aid of deductions 

 from " abstract ethical assumptions," Prof. Huxley had, contrari- 

 wise, said that I am so over-cautious that I dare not treat them at 

 all, save by maintaining the conditions to health, he would have 

 had ground for his statement. As early as 1853 (" Over-Legisla- 

 tion," pp. 62, 63) I dwelt on the involved structure of a society and 

 the consequent difficulty and danger of dealing with it. Since 

 then I have more than once insisted on these facts. And now that 

 which I have been teaching for a generation is put before me as a 

 lesson to be learned ! 



Replies will, I suppose, be made to some of the things said in 

 the foregoing pages. Always there are collateral questions on 

 which debates may be raised. I see, for instance, that one of my 

 remarks may have given to it a meaning quite different to that 

 which I intended. After the ascription to me of the belief that 

 treatment of diseases should be dictated by physiological princi- 

 ples, rightly enough regarded by Prof. Huxley as absurd, there 

 came from me the remark that, according to him, " the principles 

 of physiology, as at present known, are of no use whatever for 



