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 CHAPTEE IX. 



OP THE PHYSICAL, OR CONCRETE DEDUCTIVE METHOD. 



1. AFTER what has been said to illustrate the nature 

 of the inquiry into social phenomena, the general character of 

 the method proper to that inquiry is sufficiently evident, and 

 needs only to be recapitulated, not proved. However complex 

 the phenomena, all their sequences and coexistences result 

 from the laws of the separate elements. The effect produced, 

 in social phenomena, by any complex set of circumstances, 

 amounts precisely to the sum of the effects of the circumstances 

 taken singly : and the complexity does not arise from the 

 number of the laws themselves, which is not remarkably 

 great; but from the extraordinary number and variety of 

 the data or elements of the agents which, in obedience to 

 that small number of laws, co-operate towards the effect. The 

 Social Science, therefore (which, by a convenient barbarism, 

 has been termed Sociology,) is a deductive science; not, 

 indeed, after the model of geometry, but after that of the 

 more complex physical sciences. It infers the law of each 

 effect from the laws of causation on which that effect depends ; 

 not, however, from the law merely of one cause, as in the 

 geometrical method ; but by considering all the causes which 

 conjunctly influence the effect, and compounding their laws 

 with one another. Its method, in short, is the Concrete De 

 ductive Method ; that of which astronomy furnishes the most 

 perfect^ natural philosophy a somewhat less perfect example, 

 and the employment of which, with the adaptations and 

 precautions required by the subject, is beginning to regenerate 

 physiology. 



Nor does it admit of doubt, that similar adaptations and 

 precautions are indispensable in sociology. In applying, to 

 that most complex of all studies, what is demonstrably the 

 sole method capable of throwing the light of science even upon 



