113 
of Edinburgh , Session 1866-87. 
Report of Proceedings of International Horticultural Exhibition 
and Botanical Congress, held in London from 22d to 31st May 
1866. 8vo . — From the Acting Committee. 
Madras Journal of Literature and Science for October 1866. 8vo. 
— From the Society. 
Monday , 18 th March 1867. 
Sir DAYXB BREWSTER, President, in the Chair. 
The following Communications were read - 
1. On the Application of Relative, or Proportional, Equality 
to International Organisation. By Professor Lorimer. 
It is often regarded almost as a matter of admission, on the part 
of the cultivators of social and political philosophy, that their sub- 
jects defy scientific treatment; and that, when they talk of tracing 
out laws of social wellbeing or progress, they use words which 
indicate, at most, a very faint analogy between the methods which 
they affect to follow, and those really employed in the physical 
sciences. The reproach to which they are exposed, on this ground, 
would never have arisen, or would not have been merited, had they 
habituated themselves and others to regard their subject, as a 
science, in the ordinary sense of an 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. Political methodology, viewed as a branch 
of applied logic, has risen, in the hands of some of its recent culti- 
vators, almost to the dignity of a separate science. By eliminating 
impossible schemes, and thus circumscribing the sphere of political 
effort, it has already given evidence of its practical value. "Within 
the state, forms of government, after which the vulgar still aspire 
as the ideal forms of society, have been shown by its means to be 
permanently irreconcilable with order, and if with order, then with 
liberty, which is possible only through order, and so ultimately 
with civilisation itself. 
But all that can be attempted on the present occasion, is to 
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