THE CHEMICAL METHOD. 545 



times produced without it; but not that, when pre- 

 sent, it does not contribute its part. 



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 upon one cause, peace upon another, a third 

 made a 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 in- 

 fluenced by innumerable 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 indirectly. 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- 

 nortear any uniform proportion to those of any one 

 of its component parts. 



5. There remains the Method of Residues; which 

 appears, on the first view, less foreign to this kind of 

 inquiry than the three other methods, because it only 

 requires that we should accurately note the circum- 

 stances 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 remainder of the circumstances 

 which are known to have existed in the case. Some- 

 thing similar to this is the method which Coleridge* 



* Biographia Literaria, i. 214. 

 VOL. II. 2 N 



