Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/636

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

wholly inductive. Inductive reasoning in support of the same views occupies the greater part of the essay on "Representative Government," much of the essay on "Parliamentary Reform: the Dangers and the Safeguards," and half of the essay on "Specialized Administration." In the "Study of Sociology," again, several masses of facts are brought in support of the same views (pp. 3, 4, 161-169, and 270-273); and once more in "The Man versus the State" (pp. 48-60 and 62-64) a like course is pursued. I count, in different places, eight inductive arguments, not in defense of proposals for curing the diseases of the body politic, but in reprobation of proposals for doing this. "But do not the books and essays named contain deductive arguments?" it may be asked. Certainly they do; and I should be ashamed of them if they did not. But everywhere there has been pursued what I have above said is the method of developed science—deduction verified by induction. I shall think it time to reconsider the deductions when I find the masses of facts which support them met by larger masses of facts which do the reverse. "Careful observation and experience" have not yet furnished these.

To make clear the use of an ideal for guidance in dealing with the real, I had recourse to the familiar comparison between the individual body and the body politic. I remarked that "before there can be rational treatment of a disordered state of the bodily functions, there must be a conception of what constitutes their ordered state." The guidance contemplated as derivable from such knowledge consists in exclusion of what is wrong to be done, not in directions concerning what is right to be done. This is clearly shown by the context. There is an imaginary warning against the excesses of a supposed empiric as being "at variance with physiological principles"; that is, negatived by them or forbidden by them. There is no trace whatever of any proposed treatment conforming to physiological principles, but merely an interdict against a treatment. Yet on the strength of these passages, Prof. Huxley ascribes to me the monstrous belief that the practitioner should "treat his patients by deduction from physiological principles"! Similarly with the body politic. While I have alleged that "a system of limits and restraints on conduct" may be deduced from the primary conditions of social co-operation, Prof. Huxley represents me as proposing to seek guidance in healing "the diseases of an organism vastly more complicated than the human body" by "deduction from abstract ethical assumptions!" "While in both cases the guiding inferences indicated by me all come under the blank form—"Thou shalt not do this," they are represented as coming under the blank form—"Thou shalt do that." How utterly at variance is the view thus ascribed to me with the view I have myself expressed, will be seen in the following passage: