570 LOGIC OF THE MORAL SCIENCES. 



economy, for instance, empirical laws of human nature are tacitly 

 assumed by English thinkers, which are calculated only for Great 

 Britain and the United States. Among other things, an intensity of 

 competition is constantly supposed, which, as a general mercantile tact, 

 exists in no country in the world except those two. An English political 

 economist, like his countrymen in general, has seldom learned that it 

 is possible that men, in conducting the business of selling their goods 

 over a counter, should care more about their ease or their vanity than 

 about their pecuniary gain. Yet those who know the habits of the 

 Continent of Eui'ope ai-e aware how apparently small a motive often 

 outweighs the desire of money-getting, even in the operations which 

 have money-getting for their direct object. The more highly the 

 science of ethology is cultivated, and the better the diversities of 

 national character are understood, the smaller, probably, will the 

 number of propositions become, which it will be considered safe to 

 build upon as universal principles of human nature. 



These considerations show that the process of dividing oflT the social 

 science into compartments, in order that each may be studied sepa- 

 rately, and its conclusions afterwards corrected for practice by the 

 modifications supplied by the others, must be subject to at least one 

 important limitation. Those portions alone of the social phenomena 

 can with advantage be made the subjects, even provisionally, of dis- 

 tinct branches of science, into which the diversities of character be- 

 tween different nations or different times enter as influencing causes 

 only in a secondary degree. Those phenomena, on the contrary, with 

 which the influences of the ethological state of the people are mixed 

 up at every step (so that the connexion of effects and causes cannot be 

 even rudely marked out without taking those influences into considera- 

 tion) could not with any advantage, nor without great disadvantage, 

 be treated independently of political ethology, nor, therefore, of all the 

 circumstances by which the qualities of a people are influenced. For 

 this reason (as well as for others which will hereafter appear) there 

 can be no separate Science of Government ; that being the fact which, 

 of all others, is most mixed up, both as cause and effect, with the 

 qualities of the particular people or of the particular age. All 

 questions respecting the tendencies of forms of government must 

 stand part of the general science of society, not of any separate branch 

 of it. 



This general Science of Society, as distinguished from the separate 

 departments of the science (each of which asserts its conclusions only 

 conditionally, subject to the paramount control of the laws of the 

 general science), it now remains for us to characterize. And, as will 

 be shown presently, nothing of a really scientific character is here 

 possible, except by the inverse deductive method. But befoj-e we 

 quit the subject of those sociological speculations which proceed by 

 way of direct deduction, we must examine in what relation they stand 

 to that indispensable element in all deductive sciences. Verification by 

 Specific Experience — the comparison between the conclusions of 

 reasoning and the results of observation. 



§ 5. We have seen that, in most deductive sciences, and among the 

 rest in Ethology itself, which is the immediate foundation of the Social 

 Science, a preliminary work of preparation is performed upon the 



