492 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



If we desire a nearer approach to concrete truth, we can only 

 aim at it by taking, or endeavouring to take, a greater number 

 of individualizing circumstances into the computation. 



Considering, however, in how accelerating a ratio the 

 uncertainty of our conclusions increases, as we attempt to take 

 the effect of a greater number of concurrent causes into our 

 calculations ; the hypothetical combinations of circumstances 

 on which we construct the general theorems of the science, 

 cannot be made very complex, without so rapidly-accumu 

 lating a liability to error as must soon deprive our conclusions 

 of all value. This mode of inquiry, considered as a means 

 of obtaining general propositions, must, therefore, on pain of 

 frivolity, be limited to those classes of social facts which, 

 though influenced like the rest by all sociological agents, 

 are under the immediate influence, principally at least, of a 

 few only. 



3. Notwithstanding the universal consensus of the 

 social phenomena, whereby nothing which takes place in any 

 part of the operations of society is without its share of in 

 fluence on every other part ; and notwithstanding the para 

 mount ascendancy which the general state of civilization and 

 social progress in any given society must hence exercise over 

 all the partial and subordinate phenomena ; it is not the less 

 true that different species of social facts are in the main 

 dependent, immediately and in the first resort, on different 

 kinds of causes ; and therefore not only may with advantage, 

 but must, be studied apart: just as in the natural body we 

 study separately the physiology and pathology of each of 

 the principal organs and tissues, though every one is acted 

 upon by the state of all the others : and though the peculiar 

 constitution and general state of health of the organism co 

 operates with, and often preponderates over, the local causes, 

 in determining the state of any particular organ. 



On these considerations is grounded the existence of dis 

 tinct and separate, though not independent, branches or 

 departments of sociological speculation. 



There is, for example, one large class of social phenomena, 



