prediction, may be most valuable for guidance. The science of society would have attained a very high point of perfection if it enabled us, in any given condition of social affairs, in the condition, for instance, of Europe or any European country at the present time, to understand by what causes it had, in any and every particular, been made what it was; whether it was tending to any, and to what, changes; what effects each feature of its existing state was likely to produce in the future; and by what means any of those effects might be prevented, modified, or accelerated, or a different class of effects superinduced. There is nothing chimerical in the hope that general laws, sufficient to enable us to answer these various questions for any country or time with the individual circumstances of which we are well acquainted, do really admit of being ascertained; and that the other branches of human knowledge, which this undertaking presupposes, are so far advanced that the time is ripe for its commencement. Such is the object of the Social Science.
That the nature of what I consider the true method of the science may be made more palpable, by first showing what that method is not, it will be expedient to characterize briefly two radical misconceptions of the proper mode of philosophizing on society and government, one or other of which is, either explicitly or more often unconsciously, entertained by almost all who have meditated or argued respecting the logic of politics, since the notion of treating it by strict rules, and on Baconian principles, has been current among the more advanced thinkers. These erroneous methods, if the word method can be applied to erroneous tendencies arising from the absence of any sufficiently distinct conception of method, may be termed the Experimental, or Chemical, mode of investigation, and the Abstract, or Geometrical, mode. We shall begin with the former.
{c|Chapter VII.}}
Of The Chemical, Or Experimental, Method In The Social Science.
§ 1. The laws of the phenomena of society are, and can be, nothing but the
laws of the actions and passions of human beings united together in the
social state. Men, however, in a state of society are still men; their
actions and passions are obedient to the laws of individual human nature.
Men are not, when brought together, converted into another kind of
substance, with different properties; as hydrogen and oxygen are different
from water, or as hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, and azote, are different from
nerves, muscles, and tendons. Human beings in society have no properties
but those which are derived from, and may be resolved into, the laws of
the nature of individual man. In social phenomena the Composition of
Causes is the universal law.
Now, the method of philosophizing which may be termed chemical overlooks this fact, and proceeds as if the nature of man as an individual were not concerned at all, or were concerned in a very inferior degree, in the operations of human beings in society. All reasoning in political or social affairs, grounded on principles of human nature, is objected to by reasoners of this sort, under such names as "abstract theory." For the direction of their opinions and conduct, they profess to demand, in all cases without exception, specific experience.
