420 HENRY CHARLES CARET. 



Closely connected with this proposed substitute for Ricardo's doc- 

 trine was Mr, Carey's rejection of the Malthusian law of population. 

 His attack upon that celebrated dogma was renewed at every oppor- 

 tunity and with every rhetorical weapon at command. And as the 

 doctrines of Ricardo and Malthus are in a sense complementary, so 

 Mr. Carey's own law of distribution and his theory of production 

 from land seemed to carry with them as a natural deduction an anti- 

 Malthusian conclusion of continually-increasing ability to support 

 increasing numbers. Logical necessity, however, forced him to seek 

 for some ultimate limiting principle, and this he at last found in Her- 

 bert Spencer's conjectured physiological law of the diminution of 

 human fertility. 



But, after all, Mr. Carey declares, " the great and really fundamen- 

 tal law of the science . . . still remained to be discovered." For a 

 statement of this crowning discovery he refers to the second chapter 

 of his " Social Science," in which is ingeniously developed " the great 

 law of molecular gravitation as the indispensable condition of the 

 existence of the being known as man." This law may be better com- 

 prehended from the summary statement made elsewhere, that " the 

 laws of being [are] the same in matter, man, and communities ; " 

 that " in the solar world attraction and motion [are] in the ratio of 

 the mass and the proximity ; " and that " in the social world asso- 

 ciation, individuality, responsibility, development, and progress [are] 

 directly proportionate to each other." That there is, not analogy, 

 but absolute identity of law in the physical and in the social world, is 

 indeed laid down in a multitude of passages of the " Social Science," 

 and is maintained with great vigor in Mr. Carey's latest volume, "The 

 Unity of Law," published when the author was in his seventy-ninth 

 year. It is clear that the author might well regard the discovery of a 

 law that should be common to the material world and to human so- 

 ciety as opening to view fundamental relations never before reached. 

 Few would now be found to maintain, however, that any such discov- 

 ery was really made, or that Mr. Carey did more than select from 

 physical science certain striking analogies, often tending to illustrate 

 social phenomena, but not proving any law common to subjects so 

 diverse as mind and matter. 



Finally, it must be remarked that while Mr. Carey's conception of 

 social science, like Mill's, is that of a broad field, only a part of which 

 is occupied by political economy, he fiiiled even in his " Principles of 

 Social Science " to do much more tlian discuss economic forces, and 

 especially failed to apply his conclusions coustructi\ely in settlement 



