488 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



ought we, on the other hand, to exaggerate them. The same 

 objections, which apply to the Method of Deduction in this 

 its most difficult employment, apply to it, as we formerly 

 showed,* in its easiest; and would even there have been 

 insuperable, if there had not existed, as was then fully 

 explained, an appropriate remedy. This remedy consists in 

 the process which, under the name of Verification, we have 

 characterized as the third essential constituent part of the 

 Deductive Method ; that of collating the conclusions of the 

 ratiocination either with the concrete phenomena themselves, 

 or, when such are obtainable, with their empirical laws. The 

 ground of confidence in any concrete deductive science is 

 not the a priori reasoning itself, but the accordance between 

 its results and those of observation a posteriori. Either of 

 these processes, apart from the other, diminishes in value as 

 the subject increases in complication, and this in so rapid a 

 ratio as soon to become entirely worthless ; but the reliance 

 to be placed in the concurrence of the two sorts of evidence, 

 not only does not diminish in anything like the same propor- 

 tion, but is not necessarily much diminished at all. Nothing 

 more results than a disturbance in the order of precedency of 

 the two processes, sometimes amounting to its actual inver- 

 sion: insomuch that instead of deducing our conclusions 

 by reasoning, and verifying them by observation, we in some 

 cases begin by obtaining them conjecturally from specific 

 experience, and afterwards connect them with the principles 

 of human nature by <i priori reasonings, which reasonings are 

 thus a real Verification. 



The only thinker who, with a competent knowledge of 

 scientific methods in general, has attempted to characterize 

 the Method of Sociology, M. Comte, considers this inverse 

 order as inseparably inherent in the nature of sociological 

 speculation. He looks upon the social science as essentially 

 consisting of generalizations from history, verified, not origi- 

 nally suggested, by deduction from the laws of human nature. 

 Though there is a truth contained in this opinion, of which I 



* Supra, vol. i. p. 500. 



