SOCIAL SCIENCE. 549 



cannot but conform to fixed laws, the consequences of the procedinp. 

 There is, indeed, no hope that those laws, though our knowledire of 

 them were as certain and a.s coin])leto as it is in astronomy, would 

 enable us to predict the history of society, like that of the celestial 

 appearances, for thousands of years to come. But the difierence of 

 certainty is not in the laws themselves, it is in the data to which these 

 laws are to be applied. In astronomy the causes iuHueucing the result 

 are few, and change little, and that little according to known laws : we 

 can ascertain what they are now, and thence determine what they will 

 be at any epoch of a distant future. The data, therefore, in astronomy, 

 are as certain as the laws themselves. The circumstances, on the con- 

 trary, which influence the condition and progress of society, are in- 

 numerable, and perpetually changing; and though they all change in 

 obedience to causes, and therefore to laws, the multitude of the causes 

 is so great as to defy our limited powers of calculation. Not to say 

 that the impossibility of applying precise numbers to facts of such a 

 description, would set an impassable limit to the possibility of calcu- 

 lating them beforehand, even if the powers of the human intellect 

 were otherwise adequate to the task. 



But, as we before remarked, an amount of knowledge quite insuffi- 

 cient for prediction, may be most valuable for guidance. The science 

 of society would have attained a very high point of perfection, if it 

 enabled us, in any given condition of social aflairs, in the condition for 

 instance of Europe or any European country at the present time, to 

 understand by what causes it had, in any and every particular, been 

 made what it was ; whether it was tending to any, and to what, 

 changes ; what effects each feature of its existing state was likely to 

 produce in the future ; and by what means any of those effects might 

 be prevented, modified, or accelerated, or a different cla-ss of effects 

 superinduced. There is nothing chimerical in the hope that general 

 laws, sufficient to enable us to answer these various questions for any 

 country or time with the individual circumstances of which we are 

 well acquainted, do really admit of being ascertained ; and moreover, 

 that the other branches of human knowledge, which this undertaking 

 presupposes, are so far advanced that the time is ripe for its accom- 

 plishment. Such is the object of the Social Scituice. 



That the nature of what I consider the true method of the science 

 may be made more palpable, by first .showing what that method is not; 

 it will be expedient to characterize briefly two radical misconceptions 

 of the proper mode of philosophizing on society and government, one 

 or other of which is, either explicitly or more often unconsciously, 

 entertained by almost all who have meditated or argued resjiecting the 

 logic of politics since the notion of treating it by strict rules, and on 

 Baconian principles, has been current among the more advanced 

 thinkers. These erroneous methods, if the word method can be 

 applied to erroneous tendencies arising from the absence of any suf- 

 ficiently distinct conception of method, may be aptly termed the 

 Experimental, or Chemical, mode of investigation, and the Abstract, 

 dj Geometrical mode. We shall begin with the former. 



