PHYSICAL METHOD. 627 



them, are also greatly the causes of the state of society which follows them; 

 and are the power by which all those of the circumstances of society which 

 are artificial, laws and customs for instance, are altogether moulded : cus- 

 toms evidently, laws no less really, either by the direct influence of public 

 sentiment upon the ruling powers, or by the effect which the state of na- 

 tional opinion and feeling has in determining the form of government and 

 shaping the character of the governors. 



As might be expected, the most imperfect part of those branches of social 

 inquiry which have been cultivated as separate sciences, is the theory of the 

 manner in which their conclusions are affected by ethological considerations. 

 The omission is no defect in them as abstract or hypothetical sciences, but 

 it vitiates them in their practical application as branches of a comprehen- 

 sive social science. In political economy, for instance, empirical laws of hu- 

 man nature are tacitly assumed by English thinkers, which are calculated 

 only for Great Britain and the United States. Among other things, an in- 

 tensity of competition is constantly supposed, which, as a general mercan- 

 tile fact, exists in no country in the world except those two. An English 

 political economist, like his countrymen in general, has seldom learned that 

 it is possible that men, in conducting the business of selling their goods 

 over a counter, should care more about their ease or their vanity than about 

 their pecuniary gain. Yet those who know the habits of the continent of 

 Europe are aware how apparently small a motive often outweighs the desire 

 of money getting, even in the operations which have money getting for their 

 direct object. The more highly the science of ethology is cultivated, and 

 the better the diversities of individual and national character are under- 

 stood, the smaller, probably, will the number of propositions become, which 

 it will be considered safe to build on as universal principles of human na- 

 ture. 



These considerations show that the process of dividing off the social 

 science into compartments, in order that each may be studied separately, 

 and its conclusions afterward corrected for practice by the modifications 

 supplied by the others, must be subject to at least one important limitation. 

 Those portions alone of the social phenomena can with advantage be made 

 the subjects, even provisionally, of distinct branches of science, into which 

 the diversities of character between different nations or different times en- 

 ter as influencing causes only in a secondary degree. Those phenomena, 

 on the contrary, with which the influences of the ethological state of the 

 people are mixed up at every step (so that the connection of effects and 

 causes can not be even rudely marked out without taking those influences 

 into consideration) could not with any advantage, nor without great disad- 

 vantage, be treated independently of political ethology, nor, therefore, of all 

 the circumstances by which the qualities of a people are influenced. For 

 this reason (as well as for othei's which will hereafter appear) there can be 

 no separate Science of Government ; that being the fact which, of all oth- 

 ers, is most mixed up, both as cause and effect, with the qualities of the par- 

 ticular people or of the particular age. All questions respecting the tend- 

 encies of forms of government must stand part of the general science of 

 society, not of any separate branch of it. 



This general Science of Society, as distinguished from the separate de- 

 partments of the science (each of which asserts its conclusions only con- 

 ditionally, subject to the paramount control of the laws of the general sci- 

 ence) now remains to be characterized. And as will be shown presently, 

 nothing of a really scientific character is here possible, except by the inverse 



