500 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



into which the diversities of character between different nations 

 or different times enter as influencing causes only in a se- 

 condary degree. Those phenomena, on the contrary, with 

 which the influences of the ethological state of the people are 

 mixed up at every step (so that the connexion of effects and 

 causes cannot he even rudely marked out without taking those 

 influences into consideration) could not with any advantage, 

 nor without great disadvantage, he treated independently of 

 political ethology, nor, therefore, of all the circumstances by 

 which the qualities of a people are influenced. For this reason 

 (as well as for others which will hereafter appear) there can be 

 no separate Science of Government ; that being the fact which, 

 of all others, is most mixed up, both as cause and effect, with 

 the qualities of the particular people or of the particular age. 

 All questions respecting the tendencies of forms of government 

 must stand part of the general science of society, not of any 

 separate branch of it. 



This general Science of Society, as distinguished from the 

 separate departments of the science (each of which asserts its 

 conclusions only conditionally, subject to the paramount 

 control of the laws of the general science) now remains to be 

 characterized. And as will be shown presently, nothing of a 

 really scientific character is here possible, except by the inverse 

 deductive method. But before we quit the subject of those 

 sociological speculations which proceed by way of direct de- 

 duction, we must examine in what relation they stand to that 

 indispensable element in all deductive sciences, Verification by 

 Specific Experience comparison between the conclusions of 

 reasoning and the results of observation. 



5. We have seen that, in most deductive sciences, and 

 among the rest in Ethology itself, which is the immediate 

 foundation of the Social Science, a preliminary work of pre- 

 paration is performed on the observed facts, to fit them for 

 being rapidly and accurately collated (sometimes even for 

 being collated at all) with the conclusions of theory. This 

 preparatory treatment consists in finding general propositions 

 which express concisely what is common to large classes of 



