558 PROFESSOR LORIMER ON THE APPLICATION OF THE PRINCIPLE OF 



cannot admit the propriety of prefacing with an apology any attempt to advance 

 them, however humble. They are the sciences of civilisation, in the first instance 

 — the sciences on the more or less successful cultivation and application of which 

 the physical sciences, which constitute so prominent a feature in the civilisation 

 of our day, ultimately depend ; for the physiologist or the entomologist, I fanc}% 

 would find himself just as much from home amongst a horde of savages as a 

 political philosopher ; and a botanist or a geologist would have very little chance 

 of pursuing his studies in peace, even in an old society that had fallen into 

 anarchy, or was a prey to chronic revolution. 



But if the cultivators of physical science, in place of asking the cultivators 

 of social science to apologise for their subject, were to ask them to apologise 

 for themselves, — not for the studies which they pursue, but for the manner in 

 which they pursue them, — the request would be difficult to put aside, however 

 bitter might be the sarcasm which it implied. And of all the consequences of 

 that despair of precision, to which Aristotle has been but too successful in 

 reconciling us, there is none which has brought greater reproach on our science 

 than the want of any proper criterion of truth or falsehood. From the inability 

 of its professors to distinguish between the difficult and the impossible, — between 

 schemes which ought never to be relinquished, and schemes which ought never to 

 have been entertained, — the faith of the thoughtful has been shaken, and in the 

 thoughtless practical world without, whilst men have wasted their energies and 

 shed their blood in wrestling with problems that were permanently insoluble, 

 they have tamely abandoned others of the gravest import which presented no 

 difficulties that were necessarily insuperable. 



I am strongly persuaded that this reproach would never have arisen, or 

 at all events would not have been merited, had we habituated ourselves and 

 others to regard our subject as a science, in the ordinary sense of a systematic 

 inquiry into nature ; and not as a series of random observations, in which the 

 contingent and the necessary, the permanent and the accidental, were hopelessly 

 and inextricably mixed up, and from which any conclusion, or no conclusion, 

 might equally have been deduced. Had a more absolute point of view been 

 occupied and steadily maintained, and a severer method been rigidly adhered to, 

 we should, long ere now, have got hold of canons of criticism which would have 

 enabled us to judge of the merits both of existing institutions and legislative 

 schemes, with a degree of confidence which no vague estimate of their supposed 

 utility, past or prospective, could possibly warrant. 



It is quite true that in political problems, as they present themselves in the 

 concrete, the contingent element is so large as to prevent us from almost ever 

 arriving at anything beyond a probable solution. The historical method, when 

 applied exclusively, is inadequate, because the past, even if our knowledge of it 

 were complete, does not exhaust the present, still less the future ; and when we 



