582 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



affords nothing amounting to empirical laws. This is 

 particularly the case where the object is to determine 

 the effect of any one sociological cause among a great 

 number acting simultaneously; the effect, for example, 

 of corn laws, or of a prohibitive commercial system 

 generally. Although it may be perfectly certain, 

 from theory, what kind of effects corn laws must pro- 

 duce, and in what general direction their influence 

 must tell upon industrial prosperity; their effect is yet 

 of necessity so much disguised by the similar or con- 

 trary effects of other influencing agents, that specific 

 experience can at most only show that in the average 

 of some great number of instances, the cases where 

 there were corn laws exhibited the effect in a greater 

 degree than those where there were not. Now the 

 number of instances necessary to take in the whole 

 round of combinations of the various influential cir- 

 cumstances, and thus afford a fair average, never can 

 be obtained. Not only we can never learn with suffi- 

 cient authenticity the facts of so many instances, but 

 the world itself does not afford them in sufficient 

 numbers, within the limits of the given state of 

 society and civilisation which such inquiries always 

 presuppose. Having thus no previous empirical gene- 

 ralizations with which to collate the conclusions of 

 theory, the only mode of direct verification which 

 remains is to compare those conclusions with the result 

 of an individual experiment or instance. But here 

 the difficulty is equally great. For in order to verify 

 a theory by an experiment, the circumstances of the 

 experiment must be exactly the same with those con- 

 templated in the theory. But in social phenomena 

 the circumstances of no two experiments are exactly 

 alike. A trial of corn laws in another country, or in 

 a former generation, would go a very little way towards 



