612 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



antecedents have been found capable of being eliminated, is a just inference, 

 only if the effect can have but one cause. If it admits of several, nothing 

 is more natural than that each of these should separately admit of being 

 eliminated. Now, in the case of political phenomena, the supposition of 

 unity of cause is not only wide of the truth, but at an immeasurable dis- 

 tance from it. The causes of every social phenomenon which we are par- 

 ticularly interested about, security, wealth, freedom, good government, pub- 

 lic virtue, general intelligence, or their opposites, are infinitely numerous, 

 especially the external or remote causes, which alone are, for the most part, 

 accessible to direct observation. No one cause suffices of itself to produce 

 any of these phenomena ; while there are countless causes which have some- 

 influence over them, and may co-operate either in their production or in their 

 prevention. From the mere fact, therefore, of our having been able to elimi- 

 nate some circumstance, we can by no means infer that this circumstance 

 was not instrumental to the effect in some of the very instances from which 

 we have eliminated it. We can conclude that the effect is sometimes pro- 

 duced without it ; but not that, when present, it does not contribute its share. 

 Similar objections will be found to apply to the Method of Concomitant 

 Variations, If the causes which act upon the state of any society produced 

 effects differing from one another in kind ; if wealth depended on one cause, 

 peace on another, a third made people virtuous, a fourth intelligent; we 

 might, though unable to sever the causes from one another, refer to each of 

 them that property of the effect which waxed as it waxed, and which waned 

 as it waned. But every attribute of the social body is influenced by in- 

 numerable causes ; and such is the mutual action of the co-existing elements 

 of society, that whatever affects any one of the more important of them, 

 will by that alone, if it does not affect the others directly, affect them in- 

 directly. The effects, therefore, of different agents not being different in 

 quality, while the quantity of each is the mixed result of all the agents, the 

 variations of the aggregate can not bear a uniform proportion to those of 

 any one of its component parts, 



§ 6. There remains the Method of Residues ; which appears, on the first 

 view, less foreign to this kind of inquiry than the three other methods, be- 

 cause it only requires that we should accurately note the circumstances of 

 some one country, or state of society. Making allowance, thereupon, for 

 the effect of all causes whose tendencies are known, the residue which those 

 causes are inadequate to explain may plausibly be imputed to the remain- 

 der of the circumstances which are known to have existed in the case. 

 Something similar to this is the method which Coleridge* describes him- 

 self as having followed in his political essays in the Morning Post, " On 

 every great occurrence I endeavored to discover in past history the event 

 that most nearly resembled it. I procured, whenever it was possible, the 

 contemporary historians, memorialists, and pamphleteers. Then fairly sub- 

 tracting the points of difference from those of likeness, as the balance fa- 

 vored the former or the latter, I conjectured that the result would be the 

 same or different. As, for instance, in the series of essays entitled 'A Com- 

 parison of France under Napoleon with Rome under the first Caesars,' and 

 in those which followed, ' on the probable final restoration of the Bourbons,' 

 The same p^an I pursued at the commencement of the Spanish Revolution, 

 and with the same success, taking the war of the United Provinces with 



* Biographia Literaria, i. , 214, 



