HISTORICAL METHOD. 513 



that a wrong empirical law will emerge instead of the right 

 one. Accordingly, the most erroneous generalizations are! 

 continually made from the course of history : not only in thisi 

 country, where history cannot yet be said to be at all culti 

 vated as a science, but in other countries, where it is so culti 

 vated, and by persons well versed in it. The only check 

 or corrective is, constant verification by psychological and 

 ethological laws. We may add to this, that no one but a 

 person competently skilled in those laws is capable of prepar 

 ing the materials for historical generalization, by analysing 

 the facts of history, or even by observing the social pheno 

 mena of his own time. No other will be aware of the com 

 parative importance of different facts, nor consequently know 

 what facts to look for, or to observe ; still less will he be 

 capable of estimating the evidence of facts which, as is 

 the case with most, cannot be ascertained by direct observa 

 tion or learnt from testimony, but must be inferred from 

 marks. 



J^-.-c x.^- f j:&amp;gt;Jj 



5. The Empirical Laws of Society are of two kinds ; 

 some are uniformities of coexistence, some of succession. 

 According as the science is occupied in ascertaining and veri 

 fying the former sort of uniformities or the latter, M. Comte 

 gives it the title of Social Statics, or of Social Dynamics ; 

 conformably to the distinction in mechanics between the con 

 ditions of equilibrium and those of movement ; or in biology, 

 between the laws of organization and those of life. The first 

 branch of the science ascertains the conditions of stability in 

 the social union : the second, the laws of progress. Social 

 Dynamics is the theory of Society considered in a state of 

 progressive movement ; while Social Statics is the theory of 

 the consensus already spoken of as existing among the different 

 parts of the social organism ; in other words, the theory of 

 the mutual actions and reactions of contemporaneous social 

 phenomena; &quot; making* provisionally, as far as possible, ab 

 straction, for scientific purposes, of the fundamental move- 



* Court de Philosophic Positive, iv. 325-9. 



VOL. ii. 33 



