678 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



drawn from it; as, for example, from the 134 public acts passed in 

 1856-'57, of which all but 68 are wholly or partially repealed. And 

 thus it happens that, as every autumn shows us, even the strongest 

 men, finding their lives during the recess overtaxed with the needful 

 study, are obliged so to locate themselves that by an occasional day's 

 hard riding after the hounds, or a long walk over the moors with gun 

 in hand, they may be enabled to bear the excessive strain on their ner- 

 vous systems. Of course, therefore, I am not so unreasonable as to 

 deny that judgments, even empirical, which are guided by such care- 

 fully-amassed experiences, must be of much worth. 



But, fully recognizing the vast amount of information which the 

 legislator has laboriously gathered from the accounts of institutions 

 and laws, past and present, here and elsewhere, and admitting that, 

 before thus instructing himself, he would no more think of enforcing a 

 new law than would a medical student think of plunging an operating- 

 knife into the human body before learning where the arteries ran, the 

 remarkable anomaly here demanding our attention is, that he objects 

 to any thing like analysis of these phenomena he has so diligently 

 collected, and has no faith in conclusions drawn from the ensemble of 

 them. Not discriminating very correctly between the word " gen- 

 eral " and the word " abstract," and regarding as abstract principles 

 what are in nearly all cases general principles, he speaks contemptu- 

 ously of these as belonging to the region of theory, and as not con- 

 cerning the law-maker. Any wide truth that is insisted upon as being 

 implied in many narrow truths, seems to him remote from reality and 

 unimportant for guidance. The results of recent experiments in legis- 

 lation he thinks worth attending to ; and, if any one reminds him of 

 the experiments he has read so much about, that were made in other 

 times and other places, he regards these also, separately taken, as de- 

 serving of consideration. But, if, instead of studying special classes 

 of legislative experiments, some one compares many classes together, 

 generalizes the results, and proposes to be guided by the generaliza- 

 tion, he shakes his head skeptically. And his skepticism passes into 

 ridicule if it is proposed to affiliate such generalized results on the 

 laws of Mind. To prescribe for society on the strength of countless 

 unclassified observations, appears to him a sensible course ; but, to 

 colligate and systematize the observations so as to educe tendencies 

 of human behavior displayed throughout cases of numerous kinds, to 

 trace these tendencies to their sources in the mental natures of men, 

 and thence to draw conclusions for guidance, appears to him a vision- 

 ary course. 



Let us look at some of the fundamental facts he ignores, and at 

 the results of ignoring them. 



Rational legislation, based as it can only be on a true theory of 

 conduct, which is derivable only from a true theory of mind, must 



