494 CORRESPONDING SOCIETIES. 
Where there is ignorance of natural laws all physical phenomena are referred 
to supernatural causes. Disease is accepted as Divine punishment to be met 
by prayer and fasting, or the act of a secret enemy in communion with evil 
spirits. Because of these beliefs thousands of innocent people were formerly 
burnt and tortured as witches and sorcerers, while many thousands more paid 
in devastating pestilences the penalty which Nature inevitably exacts for 
crimes against her. In one sense it may be said that the human race gets 
the diseases it deserves; but the sins are those of ignorance and neglect of 
physical laws rather than against spiritual ordinances. Plague is not now 
explained by supposed iniquities of the Jews or conjunctions of particular planets, 
but by the presence of an organism conveyed by fleas from rats; malaria and 
yellow fever are conquered by destroying the breeding places of mosquitoes; 
typhus fever by getting rid of lice; typhoid by cleanliness; tuberculosis by 
improved housing; and most like diseases by following the teachings of science 
concerning them. Though the mind does undoubtedly influence the resistance 
of the body to invasion by microbes, it cannot create the specific organism of 
any disease, and the responsibility of showing how to keep such germs under 
control, and prevent, therefore, the poverty and distress due to them, is a 
scientific rather than a spiritual duty. 
The methods of science are pursued whenever observations are made criti- 
cally, recorded faithfully, and tested rigidly, with the object of using conclu- 
sions based upon them as stepping-stones to further progress. They demand 
an impartial attitude towards evidence and fearless judgment upon it. These 
are the principles by which the foundations of science have been laid, and a 
noble structure of natural knowledge erected upon them. A scientific inquiry 
is understood to be one undertaken solely with the view of arriving at the 
truth, and this disinterested motive will always command public confidence. 
It is poles apart from the spirit in which social and political subjects are 
discussed : it is the rock against which waves of emotion and storms of rhetoric 
lash themselves in vain. If political science were guided by the same methods 
it would present an open mind to all sides of a question, weighing objections 
to proposals as justly as reasons in support of them, whereas usually it sees 
only the views of a particular class or party, and cannot be trusted, therefore, 
to strike a judicial balance. The methods of science should be the methods 
applied to social problems if sound principles of progress are to be determined. 
When they are so used a statesman will be judged, as a scientific man is 
judged, by correct observation, just inference, and verified prediction; in 
their absence politics will remain stranded on the shifting sands of barter, 
concession, and expediency. 
Democracy may be politically an irrational force, but that is all the more 
reason why those who direct it should have full knowledge of the possibilities 
offered by science for construction as well as for destruction. In a chemical 
research an experiment is not the haphazard mixture of substances made in 
the hope that something good will come from it, but the deliberate test of 
consequences which ought to follow if certain ideas are true. So with all 
scientific experiment : reason is the source of action, and principles are tested 
by results. Social problems are perhaps more complicated than those of the 
laboratory, yet the only way to discover solutions of them is to apply scientific 
standards to the methods used and results obtained. Laws of Nature are 
merely expressions of our knowledge at a particular epoch, and they are 
more precise than those of political economy because they are investigated purely 
from the point of view of progress. If the general laws which constitute the 
science of sociology are to be discovered and accepted, their. study must be 
