578 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



gain. Yet those who know the habits of the Con- 

 tinent 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 

 national character are understood, the smaller, pro- 

 bably, will the number of propositions become, which 

 it will be considered safe to build upon as universal 

 principles of human nature. 



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 afterwards 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 cha- 

 racter between different nations or different times 

 enter 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 connexion of 

 effects and causes cannot be even rudely marked out 

 without taking those influences into consideration) 

 could not with any advantage, nor without great 

 disadvantage, be treated independently of political 

 ethology, nor, therefore, of all the circumstances by 

 1 which the qualities of a people are influenced. For 

 this reason (as well as for others which will hereafter 

 appear) there can be no separate Science of Govern- 

 ment; that being the fact which, of all others, is most 

 mixed up, both as cause and effect, with the qualities 

 of the particular people or of the particular age. All 



