532 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



upon, as the natural state of the sciences while their 

 cultivation is abandoned to practitioners ; not being 

 carried on as a branch of speculative inquiry, but only 

 with a view to the exigencies of daily practice, and the 

 fructifera experimenta, therefore, being aimed at, almost 

 to the exclusion of the lucifera. Such was medical 

 science, before physiology and natural history began 

 to be cultivated as branches of general knowledge. 

 The only questions examined were, what diet is whole- 

 some, or what medicine will cure some given disease; 

 without any previous systematic inquiry into the laws 

 of nutrition, and of the healthy and morbid action of 

 the different organs, on which laws the effect of any 

 diet or medicine must evidently depend. And in 

 politics, the questions which engaged general attention 

 were similar. Is such an enactment, or such a form 

 of government, beneficial or the reverse either uni- 

 versally, or to some particular community? without 

 inquiry into the general conditions by which the 

 operation of legislative measures, or the effects pro- 

 duced by forms of government, are determined.! 



And even among the few who did carry' their 

 speculations to that greater length, it is only at a still 

 more recent date that social phenomena, properly so 

 called, have begun to be looked upon as having any 

 natural tendencies of their own. It is hardly an 

 exaggeration to say that society has usually, both by 

 practitioners in politics and by philosophical specula- 

 tors on forms of government, from Plato to Bentham, 

 been deemed to be whatever the men who compose it 

 choose to make it. The only questions which people 

 thought of proposing to themselves were, Would such 

 and such a law or institution be beneficial? and, if so, 

 can legislators or the public be persuaded, or other- 

 wise induced, to adopt it? For hardly any notion was 



