CHAPTER VIII. 



OF THE GEOMETRICAL, OR ABSTRACT METHOD. 



1. THE misconception discussed in the preceding chapter 

 is, as we said, chiefly committed by persons not much accus- 

 tomed to scientific investigation : practitioners in politics, who 

 rather employ the commonplaces of philosophy to justify their 

 practice, than seek to guide their practice by philosophic prin- 

 ciples : or imperfectly educated persons, who, in ignorance of 

 the careful selection and elaborate comparison of instances 

 required for the formation of a sound theory, attempt to 

 found one upon a few coincidences which they have casually 

 noticed. 



The erroneous method of which we are now to treat, is, on 

 the contrary, peculiar to thinking and studious minds. It 

 never could have suggested itself but to persons of some fami- 

 liarity with the nature of scientific research ; who, being 

 aware of the impossibility of establishing, by casual observa- 

 tion or direct experimentation, a true theory of sequences so 

 complex as are those of the social phenomena, have recourse 

 to the simpler laws which are immediately operative in those 

 phenomena, and which are no other than the laws of the 

 nature of the human beings therein concerned. These thinkers 

 perceive (what the partisans of the chemical or experimental 

 theory do not) that the science of society must necessarily be 

 deductive. But, from an insufficient consideration of the 

 specific nature of the subject matter, and often because (their 

 own scientific education having stopped short in too early a 

 stage) geometry stands in their minds as the type of all deduc- 

 tive science, it is to geometry rather than to astronomy and 

 natural philosophy, that they unconsciously assimilate the 

 deductive science of society. 



