PHYSICAL METHOD. 499 



society which are artificial, laws and customs for instance, are 

 altogether moulded : customs evidently, laws no less really, 

 either by the direct influence of public sentiment upon the 

 ruling powers, or by the effect which the state of national 

 opinion and feeling has in determining the form of government 

 and shaping the character of the governors. 



A.s might be expected, the most imperfect part of those 

 branches of social inquiry which have been cultivated as 

 separate sciences, is the theory of the manner in which their 

 conclusions are affected by ethological considerations. The 

 omission is no defect in them as abstract or hypothetical 

 sciences, but it vitiates them in their practical application as 

 branches of a comprehensive social science. In political eco- 

 nomy for instance, empirical laws of human nature are tacitly 

 assumed by English thinkers, which are calculated only for 

 Great Britain and the United States. Among other things, 

 an intensity of competition is constantly supposed, which, as a 

 general mercantile fact, exists in no country in the world 

 except those two. An English political economist, like his 

 countrymen in general, has seldom learned that it is possible 

 that men, in conducting the business of selling their goods 

 over a counter, should care more about their ease or their 

 vanity than about their pecuniary gain. Yet those who know 

 the habits of the Continent of Europe are aware how appa- 

 rently small a motive often outweighs the desire of money- 

 getting, even in the operations which have money-getting for 

 their direct object. The more highly the science of ethology 

 is cultivated, and the better the diversities of individual and 

 national character are understood, the smaller, probably, will 

 the number of propositions become, which it will be considered 

 safe to build on as universal principles of human nature. 



These considerations show that the process of dividing off 

 the social science into compartments, in order that each may 

 be studied separately, and its conclusions afterwards corrected 

 for practice by the modifications supplied by the others, must 

 be subject to at least one important limitation. Those portions 

 alone of the social phenomena can with advantage be made 

 the subjects, even provisionally, of distinct branches of science, 



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