362 FALLACIES. 



society merely because it has never yet been witnessed, cannot 

 possess this higher degree of validity even as empirical laws. 

 What is more, the minuter examination which that higher 

 order of empirical laws presupposes, being applied to the 

 subject-matter of these, not only does not confirm but actually 

 refutes them. For in reality the past history of Man and 

 Society, instead of exhibiting them as immovable, unchange 

 able, incapable of ever presenting new phenomena, shows 

 them on the contrary to be, in many most important parti 

 culars, not only changeable, but actually undergoing a pro 

 gressive change. The empirical law, therefore, best expressive, 

 in most cases, of the genuine result of observation, would be, 

 not that such and such a phenomenon will continue un 

 changed, but that it will continue to change in some parti 

 cular manner. 



Accordingly, while almost all generalizations relating to 

 Man and Society, antecedent to the last fifty years, have erred 

 in the gross way which we have attempted to characterize, 

 namely, by implicitly assuming that human nature and society 

 will for ever revolve in the same orbit, and exhibit essentially 

 the same phenomena ; which is also the vulgar error of the 

 ostentatiously practical, the votaries of so-called common 

 sense, in our day, especially in Great Britain ; the more 

 thinking minds of the present age, having applied a more 

 minute analysis to the past records of our race, have for the 

 most part adopted a contrary opinion, that the human species 

 is in a state of necessary progression, and that from the terms 

 of the series which are past we may infer positively those which 

 are yet to come. Of this doctrine, considered as a philosophical 

 tenet, we shall have occasion to speak more fully in the con 

 cluding Book. If not, in all its forms, free from error, it is 

 at least free from the gross and stupid error which we pre 

 viously exemplified. But, in all except the most eminently 

 philosophical minds, it is infected with precisely the same kind 

 of fallacy as that is. For we must remember that even this 

 other and better generalization, the progressive change in the 

 condition of the human species, is, after all, but an empirical 

 law : to which, too, it is not difficult to point out exceedingly 



