PHYSICAL METHOD. QIQ 



siderable modifications from others. The whole of the qualities of human 

 nature influence those phenomena, and there is not one which influences 

 tliem in a small degree. There is not one, the removal or any great alter- 

 ation of which would not materially affect the whole aspect of society, 

 and change more or less the sequences of social phenomena generally. 



The theory which has been the subject of these remarks is, in this coun- 

 try at least, the principal contemporary example of what I have styled the 

 geometrical method of philosophizing in the social science ; and our ex- 

 amination of it has, for this reason, been more detailed than would other- 

 wise have been suitable to a work like the present. Having now sufii- 

 ciently illustrated the two erroneous methods, we shall pass without fur- 

 ther preliminary to the true method ; that which proceeds (conformably 

 to the practice 'of the more complex physical sciences) deductively indeed, 

 but by deduction from many, not from one or a very few, original prem- 

 ises ; considering each effect as (what it really is) an aggregate result of 

 many causes, operating sometimes through the same, sometimes through 

 different mental agencies, or laws of human nature. 



CHAPTER IX. 



OF THE PHYSICAL, OR CONCRETE DEDUCTIVE, METHOD. 



§ 1. After whnt has been said to illustrate the nature of the inquiry 

 into social phenomena, the general character of the method proper to that 

 inquiry is sufficiently evident, and needs only to be recapitulated, not 

 proved. However complex the phenomena, all their sequences and co-ex- 

 istences result from the laws of the separate elements. The effect pro- 

 duced, in social phenomena, by any complex set of circumstances, amounts 

 precisely to the sum of the effects of the circumstances taken singly ; and 

 the complexity does not arise from the number of the laws themselves, 

 which is not remarkably great, but from the extraordinary number and 

 variety of the data or elements — of the agents which, in obedience to that 

 small number of laws, co-opei'ate toward the effect. The Social Science, 

 therefore (which, by a convenient barbarism, has been termed Sociology), 

 is a deductive science ; not, indeed, after the model of geom'etry, but after 

 that of the more complex physical sciences. It infers the law of each ef- 

 fect from the laws of causation on which that effect depends; not, how- 

 ever, from the law merely of one cause, as in the geometrical method, but 

 by considering all the causes which conjunctly influence the effect, and 

 compounding their laws with one another. Its method, in short, is the 

 Concrete Deductive Method: that of which astronomy furnishes the most 

 perfect, natural philosophy a somewhat less perfect, example, and the em- 

 ployment of which, with the adaptations and precautions required by the 

 subject, is beginning to regenerate physiology. 



Nor does it admit of doubt, that similar adaptations and pi'ecautions are 

 indispensable in sociology. In applying to that most complex of all stud- 

 ies what is demonstrably the sole method capable of throwing the light 

 of science even upon phenomena of a far inferior degree of complication, 

 we ought to be aware that the same superior complexity which renders the 

 instrument of Deduction more necessary, renders it also more precarious; 

 and we must be prepared to meet, by appropriate contrivances, this in- 

 crease of difficulty. 



