SOCIAL SCIENCE. 463 



well meriting the ridicule with which it is treated by practi- 

 tioners, and wholly unsupported by the analogy of the art to 

 which, from the nature of its subject, that of politics must be 

 the most nearly allied. No one now supposes it possible that 

 one remedy can cure all diseases, or even the same disease in 

 all constitutions and habits of body. 



It is not necessary even to the perfection of a science, 

 that the corresponding art should possess universal, or even 

 general, rules. The phenomena of society might not only be 

 completely dependent on known causes, but the mode of 

 action of all those causes might be reducible to laws of con- 

 siderable simplicity, and yet no two cases might admit of 

 being treated in precisely the same manner. So great might 

 be the variety of circumstances on which the results in 

 different cases depend, that the art might not have a single 

 general precept to give, except that of watching the circum- 

 stances of the particular case, and adapting our measures to 

 the effects which, according to the principles of the science, 

 result from those circumstances. But although, in so compli- 

 cated a class of subjects, it is impossible to lay down practical 

 maxims of universal application, it does not follow that the 

 phenomena do not conform to universal laws. 



2. All phenomena of society are phenomena of human 

 nature, generated by the action of outward circumstances 

 upon masses of human beings : and if, therefore, the pheno- 

 mena of human thought, feeling, and action, are subject to 

 fixed laws, the phenomena of society cannot but conform to 

 fixed laws, the consequence of the preceding. There is, 

 indeed, no hope that these laws, though our knowledge of 

 them were as certain and as complete as it is in astronomy, 

 would enable us to predict the history of society, like that of 

 the celestial appearances, for thousands of years to come. But 

 the difference of certainty is not in the laws themselves, it is 

 in the data to which these laws are to be applied. In astro- 

 nomy the causes influencing the result are few, and change 

 little, and that little according to known laws ; we can ascer- 

 tain what they are now, and thence determine what they will 



