608 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



prediction, may be most valuable for guidance. The science of society 

 would have attained a very high point of perfection if it enabled us, in 

 any given condition of social affairs, in the condition, for instance, of Eu- 

 rope or any European country at the present time, to understand by what 

 causes it had, in any and every particular, been made what it was ; wheth- 

 er it was tending to any, and to what, changes ; what effects each feature 

 of its existing state was likely to produce in the future; and by what 

 means any of those effects might be prevented, modified, or accelerated, or 

 a different class of effects superinduced. There is nothing chimerical in 

 the hope that general laws, sufficient to enable us to answer these various 

 questions for any country or time with the individual circumstances of 

 which we are well acquainted, do really admit of being ascertained ; and 

 that the other branches of human knowledge, which this undertaking pre- 

 supposes, are so far advanced that the time is ripe for its commencement. 

 Such is the object of the Social Science. 



That the nature of what I consider the true method of the science may 

 be made more palpable, by first showing what that method is not, it will 

 be expedient to characterize briefly two radical misconceptions of the 

 proper mode of philosophizing on society and government, one or other of 

 which is, either explicitly or more often unconsciously, entertained by al- 

 most all who have meditated or argued respecting the logic of politics, 

 since the notion of treating it by strict rules, and on Baconian principles, 

 has been current among the more advanced thinkers. These erroneous 

 methods, if the word method can be applied to erroneous tendencies aris- 

 ing from the absence of any sufficiently distinct conception of method, may 

 be termed the Experimental, or Chemical, mode of investigation, and the 

 Abstract, ov Geometrical, mode. We shall begin with the former. 



CHAPTER VII. 



OP THE CHEMICAL, OR EXPERIMENTAL, METHOD IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCE. 



§ 1. The laws of the phenomena of society are, and can be, nothing but 

 the laws of the actions and passions of human beings united together in 

 the social state. Men, however, in a state of society are still men ; their 

 actions and passions are obedient to the laws of individual human nature. 

 Men are not, when brought together, converted into another kind of sub- 

 stance, with different properties ; as hydrogen and oxygen ai-e different 

 from water, or as hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and azote, are different from 

 nerves, muscles, and tendons. Human beings in society have no proper- 

 ties but those which are derived from, and may be resolved into, the laws 

 of the nature of individual man. In social phenomena the Composition of 

 Causes is the universal law. 



Now, the method of philosophizing which may be termed chemical over- 

 looks this fact, and pi'oceeds as if the nature of man as an individual were 

 not concerned at all, or were concerned in a very inferior degree, in the 

 operations of human beings in society. All reasoning in political or social 

 affairs, grounded on principles of human nature, is objected to by reason- 

 ers of this sort, under such names as " absti'act theory." For the direc- 

 tiofi of their opinions and conduct, they profess to demand, in all cases 

 without exception, specific experience. 



