300 ON THE NATURAL INEQUALITY OF T.IEN vii 



I do not suppose that any one is inclined to 

 doubt the usefulness of a political ideal as a goal 

 towards which social conduct should strive, whether 

 it can ever be completely realised or not ; any 

 more than any one will doubt that it is useful to 

 have a moral ideal towards which personal conduct 

 should tend, even though one may never reach it. 

 Certainly, I am the last person to question this, 

 or to doubt that politics is as susceptible of treat- 

 ment by scientific method as any other field of 

 natural knowledge. 1 But it will be admitted 

 that, great as are the advantages of having a 

 political ideal, fashioned by an absolute rule of 

 political conduct, it is perhaps better to do with- 

 out one, rather than to adopt the first phantasm, 

 bred of fallacious reasonings and born of the 

 unscientific imagination, which presents itself. 

 The benighted traveller, lost on a moor, who 

 refuses to follow a man with a lantern is surely 

 not to be commended. But suppose his hrsitatiou 

 arises from a well-grounded doubt as to whether 

 the seeming luminary is anything but a will o' the 

 wisp? And, unless I fail egregiously in attaining 



1 Jn the course of the correspondence in the Times to which 

 I have referred, I was earnestly cxhoited to lielieve that the, 

 world of polities does not lie outside of the province of science. 

 My impression is that I was trying to teach the public that 

 great truth, which I had learned from Mill and Comte, thirty- 

 live years a<;o ; when, if I mistake not, my well-meaning monitor 

 was more occupied with peg-tops than with polities. 

 lecture on the "Educational Value of the Natural History 

 Sciences " delivered in 1854 (Lay Strmoiis, p. 97). 



