HISTORICAL METHOD. 513 



that a wrong empirical law will emerge instead of the right 

 one. Accordingly, the most erroneous generalizations are 

 continually made from the course of history : not only in this 

 country, where history cannot yet be said to be at all culti- 

 vated as a science, but in other countries, where it is so culti- 

 vated, and by persons well versed in it. The only check 

 or corrective is, constant verification by psychological and 

 ethological laws. We may add to this, that no one but a 

 person competently skilled in those laws is capable of prepar- 

 ing the materials for historical generalization, by analysing 

 the facts of history, or even by observing the social pheno- 

 mena of his own time. No other will be aware of the com- 

 parative importance of different facts, nor consequently know 

 what facts to look for, or to observe; still less will he be 

 capable of estimating the evidence of facts which, as is 

 the case with most, cannot be ascertained by direct observa- 

 tion or learnt from testimony, but must be inferred from 

 marks. 



5. The Empirical Laws of Society are of two kinds ; 

 some are uniformities of coexistence, some of succession. 

 According as the science is occupied in ascertaining and veri- 

 fying the former sort of uniformities or the latter, M. Comte 

 gives it the title of Social Statics, or of Social Dynamics; 

 conformably to the distinction in mechanics between the con- 

 ditions of equilibrium and those of movement ; or in biology, 

 between the laws of organization and those of life. The first 

 branch of the science ascertains the conditions of stability in 

 the social union: the second, the laws of progress. Social 

 Dynamics is the theory of Society considered in a state of 

 progressive movement ; while Social Statics is the theory of 

 the consensus already spoken of as existing among the different 

 parts of the social organism ; in other words, the theory of 

 the mutual actions and reactions of contemporaneous social 

 phenomena ; " making* provisionally, as far as possible, ab- 

 straction, for scientific purposes, of the fundamental move- 



* Court de Philosophie Positive, iv. 325-9. 



VOL. ii. 33 



