464 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



be at any epoch of a distant future. The data, therefore, in 

 astronomy, are as certain as the laws themselves. The cir- 

 cumstances, on the contrary, which influence the condition 

 and progress of society, are innumerable, and perpetually 

 changing ; and though they all change in obedience to causes, 

 and therefore to laws, the multitude of the causes is so great 

 as to defy our limited powers of calculation. Not to say that 

 the impossibility of applying precise numbers to facts of such 

 a description, would set an impassable limit to the possibility 

 of calculating them beforehand, even if the powers of the 

 human intellect were otherwise adequate to the task. 



But, as before remarked, an amount of knowledge quite 

 insufficient for prediction, may be most valuable for guidance. 

 The science of society would have attained a very high 

 point of perfection, if it enabled us, in any given condition 

 of social affairs, in the condition for instance of Europe or 

 any European country at the present time, to understand by 

 what causes it had, in any and every particular, been made 

 what it was; whether it was tending to any, and to what, 

 changes; what effects each feature of its existing state was 

 likely to produce in the future ; and by what means any of 

 those effects might be prevented, modified, or accelerated, or 

 a different class of effects superinduced. There is nothing 

 chimerical in the hope that general laws, sufficient to enable 

 us to answer these various questions for any country or time 

 with the individual circumstances of which we are well 

 acquainted, do really admit of being ascertained ; and that 

 the other branches of human knowledge, which this under- 

 taking presupposes, are so far advanced that the time is 

 ripe for its commencement. Such is the object of the Social 

 Science. 



That the nature of what I consider the true method of 

 the science may be made more palpable, by first showing 

 what that method is not ; it will be expedient to characterize 

 briefly two radical misconceptions of the proper mode of 

 philosophizing on society and government, one or other of 

 which is, either explicitly or more often unconsciously, enter- 

 tained by almost all who have meditated or argued respecting 



