626 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



applicable to no state of society except the particular one in which the 

 writer happened to live;" this does not take away the value of the proposi- 

 tions, considered with reference to the state of society from which they 

 were drawn. And even as applicable to other states of society, " it must 

 not be supposed that the science is so incomplete and unsatisfactory as this 

 might seem to prove. .Though many of its conclusions are only locally 

 true, its method of investigation is applicable universally ; and as whoever 

 has solved a certain number of algebraic equations, can without difficulty 

 solve all others of the same kind, so whoever knows the political economy 

 of England, or even of Yorkshire, knows that of all nations, actual or pos- 

 sible, provided he have good sense enough not to expect the same conclu- 

 sion to issue from varying premises." Whoever has mastered with the 

 degree of precision which is attainable the laws which, under free competi- 

 tion, determine the rent, profits, and wages, received by landlords, capital- 

 ists, and laborers, in a state of society in which the three classes are com- 

 pletely separate, will have no difficulty in determining the very different 

 laws which regulate the distribution of the produce among the classes in- 

 terested in it in any of the states of cultivation and landed property set 

 forth in the foregoing extract.* 



§ 4. I would not here undertake to decide what other hypothetical or 

 abstract sciences similar to Political Economy, may admit of being carved 

 out of the general body of the social science ; what other portions of the 

 social phenomena are in a sufficiently close and complete dependence, in the 

 first resort, on a peculiar class of causes, to make it convenient to create a 

 preliminary science of those causes ; postponing the consideration of the 

 causes which act through them, or in concurrence with them, to a later 

 period of the inquiry. There is, however, among these separate depart- 

 ments one which can not be passed over in silence, being of a more com- 

 prehensive and commanding character than any of the other branches into 

 which the social science may admit of being divided. Like them, it is di- 

 rectly conversant with the causes of only one class of social facts, but a class 

 which exercises, immediately or remotely, a paramount influence over the 

 test. I allude to what may be termed Political Ethology, or the theory of 

 the causes which determine the type of character belonging to a people or 

 to an age. Of all the subordinate branches of the social science, this is 

 the most completely in its infancy. The causes of national character are 

 scarcely at all understood, and the effect of institutions or social arrange- 

 ments upon the character of the people is generally that portion of their 

 effects which is least attended to, and least comprehended. Nor is this 

 wonderful, when we consider the infant state of the science of Ethology 

 itself, from whence the laws must be drawn, of which the truths of polit- 

 ical ethology can be but I'esults and exemplifications. 



Yet, to whoever well considers the matter, it must appear that the laws 

 of national (or collective) character are by far the most important class of 

 sociological laws. In the first place, the character which is formed by any 

 state of social cii'cumstances is in itself the most interesting phenomenon 

 which that state of society can possibly present. Secondly, it is also a fact 

 which enters largely into the j)roduction of all the other phenomena. And 

 above all, the character, that is, the opinions, feelings, and habits, of the 

 people, though greatly the results of the state of society which precedes 



* The quotations in this paragraph are from a paper written by the author, and published 

 in a periodical in 1834. 



