HISTORICAL METHOD. 599 



sites, which have been present in every society that 

 has held together; and on the cessation of which it 

 has ceased to be a society, or has reconstructed itself 

 as such upon some new basis, in which the condi- 

 tions were conformed to. Although these results, 

 obtained by comparing different forms and states of 

 society, amount in themselves only to empirical laws; 

 some of them, when once suggested, are found to 

 follow with so much probability from general laws of 

 human nature, that the consilience of the two pro- 

 cesses raises the evidence to complete proof, and the 

 generalizations to the rank of scientific truths. 



This seems to be amrmable (for instance) of the 

 conclusions arrived at in the following passage ; form- 

 ing part of a criticism on the negative philosophy of 

 the eighteenth century, and which I quote, although 

 (as in some former instances) from myself, because I 

 have no better way of illustrating the conception I 

 have formed of the kind of theorems of which socio- 

 logical statics would consist. 



" The very first element of the social union, 

 obedience to a government of some sort, has not been 

 found so easy a thing to establish in the world. 

 Among a timid and spiritless race, like the inhabitants 

 of the vast plains of tropical countries, passive obedi- 

 ence may be of natural growth ; though even there we 

 doubt whether it has ever been found among any 

 people with whom fatalism, or in other words, submis- 

 sion to the pressure of circumstances as the decree of 

 God, did not prevail as a religious doctrine. But the 

 difficulty of inducing a brave and warlike race to 

 submit their individual arbitrium to any commor/ 

 umpire, has always been felt to be so great, that 

 nothing short of supernatural power has been deemed 

 adequate to overcome it; and such tribes have always 



