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CHAPTER VIII. 

 OF THE GEOMETRICAL, OR ABSTRACT METHOD. 



1. THE misconception discussed in the preceding 

 chapter is, as we said, chiefly committed by persons 

 not much accustomed to scientific investigation: prac- 

 titioners in politics, who rather employ the common- 

 places of philosophy to justify ' their practice, than 

 seek to guide their practice by any philosophic 

 views ; or imperfectly educated men, who, in ignorance 

 of the careful selection and .elaborate comparison of 

 instances required for the formation of a sound theory, 

 attempt to found one upon a few coincidences which 

 they have casually noticed. 



The erroneous method of which we are now to 

 treat is, on the contrary, peculiar to thinking and 

 studious minds. It never could have suggested itself 

 but to persons of some familiarity with the nature of 

 scientific research ; who, being aware of the impossi- 

 bility of establishing, by casual observation or direct 

 experimentation, a true theory of sequences so com- 

 plex as are those of the social phenomena, have 

 recourse to the simpler laws which are immediately 

 operative in those phenomena, and which are no other 

 than the laws of the nature of the human beings 

 therein concerned. These thinkers perceive (what 

 the partisans of the chemical or experimental theory 

 do not) that the philosophy of society is a deductive 

 science. But, from an insufficient consideration of the 

 specific nature of the subject matter, and often because 

 (their own scientific education having stopped short 

 in too early a stage) geometry stands in their minds 



