508 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



late the succession between one state of society and another : 

 for the proximate cause of every state of society is the state 

 of society immediately preceding it. The fundamental pro- 

 blem, therefore, of the social science, is to find the laws accord- 

 ing to which any state of society produces the state which 

 succeeds it and takes its place. This opens the great and 

 vexed question of the progressiveness of man and society ; an 

 idea involved in every just conception of social phenomena as 

 the subject of a science. 



3. It is one of the characters, not absolutely peculiar 

 to the sciences of human nature and society, but belonging to 

 them in a peculiar degree, to be conversant with a subject- 

 matter whose properties are changeable. I do not mean 

 changeable from day to day, but from age to age ; so that not 

 only the qualities of individuals vary, but those of the majority 

 are not the same in one age as in another. 



The principal cause of this peculiarity is the extensive and 

 constant reaction of the effects upon their causes. The circum- 

 stances in which mankind are placed, operating according to 

 their own laws and to the laws of human nature, form the 

 characters of the human beings ; but the human beings, in 

 their turn, mould and shape the circumstances, for themselves 

 and for those who come after them. From this reciprocal 

 action there must necessarily result either a cycle or a progress. 

 In astronomy also, every fact is at once effect and cause ; the 

 successive positions of the various heavenly bodies produce 

 changes both in the direction and in the intensity of the forces 

 by which those positions are determined. But in the case of 

 the solar system, these mutual actions bring round again, after 

 a certain number of changes, the former state of circum- 

 stances ; which of course leads to the perpetual recurrence of 

 the same series in an unvarying order. Those bodies, in 

 short, revolve in orbits : but there are (or, conformably to the 

 laws of astronomy, there might be) others which, instead of 

 an orbit, describe a trajectory a course not returning into 

 itself. One or other of these must be the type to which human 

 affairs must conform. 



