THE PHYSICAL METHOD. 



591 



hienon which that state of society can 

 possibly present. Secondly, it is also 

 a fact which enters largely into the 

 production of all the other phenomena. 

 And above all, the character, that is, 

 the opinions, feelings, and habits of 

 the people, though greatly the results 

 of the state of society which precedes 

 them, are also greatly the causes of 

 the state of society which follows 

 them ; and are the power by which 

 all those of the circumstances of 

 society which are artificial — laws and 

 customs, for instance — are altogether 

 moulded : customs evidently, laws no 

 less really, either by the direct influ- 

 ence of public sentiment upon the 

 ruling powers, or by the effect which 

 the state of national opinion and feel- 

 ing has in determining the form of 

 government, and shaping the char- 

 acter of the governors. 



As might be expected, the most 

 imperfect part of those branches of 

 social inquiry which have been culti- 

 vated as separate sciences is the 

 theory of the manner in which their 

 conclusions are affected by ethological 

 considerations. The omission is no 

 defect in them as abstract or hypo- 

 thetical sciences, but it vitiates them 

 in their practical application as 

 branches of a comprehensive social 

 science. In political economy, for 

 instance, empirical laws of human 

 nature are tacitly assmned by English 

 thinkers, which are calculated only 

 for Great Britain and the United 

 States. Among other things, an in- 

 tensity of competition is constantly 

 supposed, which, as a general mercan- 

 tile fact, exists in no country in the 

 world except these two. An English 

 political economist, like his country- 

 men in general, has seldom learned 

 that it is possible that men, in con- 

 ducting 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 Europe are aware how apparently 

 small a motive often outweighs the 

 desire of money-gettin3, even in the 



operations which have money-getting 

 for their direct object. The more 

 highly the science of ethology is culti- 

 vated, and the better the diversities 

 of individual and national character 

 are understood, the smaller, probably, 

 will the number of propositions be- 

 come which it will be considered safe 

 to build on as universal principles of 

 human nature. 



These considerations show that the 

 process of dividingoff the social science 

 into compartments, in order that each 

 may be studied separately, 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 sub- 

 jects, even provisionally, of distinct 

 branches of science, into which the 

 diversities of character between dif- 

 ferent nations or different times enter 

 as influencing causes only in a secon- 

 dary 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 connection of effects and causes 

 cannot be even rudely marked out 

 without taking those influences into 

 consideration) could not with any 

 advantage, nor without great dis- 

 advantage, 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 Govern- 

 ment ; 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 par- 

 ticular 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 de- 

 partments of the science (each of which 

 asserts its conclusions only condi- 



