562 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



a somewhat less perfect example, and the employment of which, with 

 the adaptations and precautions required by the subject, is beginning 

 to regenerate physiology. 



Nor does it admit of doubt, that similar adaptations and precautions 

 are indispensable in sociology. In applying, to that most complex of 

 all studies, what is demonstrably the sole method capable of throwing 

 the light of science even upon phenomena of a far inferior degree of 

 complication, we ought to be aware that the same superior complexity 

 which renders the instrument of Deduction more necessary, renders 

 it also more precarious ; and we must be prepared to meet, by appro- 

 priate contrivances, this increase of difficulty. 



The actions and feelings of human beings in the social state, are, no 

 doubt, entirely governed by psychological and ethological laws : what- 

 ever influence any cause exercises upon the social phenomena, it exer- 

 cises through those laws. Supposing, therefore, the laws of human 

 actions and feelings to be sufficiently known, there is no extraordi- 

 nary difficulty in determining from those laws, the nature of the social 

 effects which any given cause tends to produce. But when the ques- 

 tion is that of compounding several tendencies together, and com- 

 puting the aggregate result of many coexistent causes ; and especially 

 when, by attempting to predict what will actually occur in a given 

 case, we incur the obligation of estimating and compounding together 

 the influences of all the causes which happen to exist in that case ; we 

 attempt a task, to proceed far in which, certainly surpasses the com- 

 pass of the human faculties. 



If all the resources of science are not sufficient to enable us to calcu- 

 late a priori, with complete precision, the mutual action of three 

 bodies gravitating towards one another; it may be judged with what 

 prospects of success we should endeavor, from the laws of human na- 

 ture only, to calculate the result of the conflicting tendencies which 

 are acting in a thousand different directions and promoting a thousand 

 different changes at a given instant in a given society : although we 

 might and ought to be able, from the laws of human nature, to distin- 

 guish correctly enough the tendencies themselves, so far as they de- 

 pend on causes accessible to our observation ; and to determine the 

 direction which each of them, if acting alone, would impress upon 

 society, as well as, in a general way at least, to pronounce that some 

 of these tendencies are more powerful than others. 



But, without dissembling the necessary imperfections of the d priori 

 method when applied to such a subject, neither ought we, on the other 

 hand, to exaggerate them. The same objections which apply to the 

 Method of Deduction in this its most difficult employment, apply to it, 

 as we formerly showed,* in its easiest ; and would even there have 

 been insuperable if there had not existed, as was then fully explained, 

 an appropriate remedy. This remedy consists in the process which, 

 under the name of Verification, we have characterized as the third 

 essential constituent part of the Deductive Method ; that of collating 

 the conclusions "of the ratiocination either with the concrete phenom- 

 ena themselves, or, when such are obtainable, with their empirical 

 laws. The ground of confidence in any concrete deductive science is 

 not the a priori reasoning, but the consilience between its results and 



• Supra, pp. 268-9. 



