A mathematician who had agreed or disagreed with the view of Professor Tait respecting the value of Quaternions for pursuing researches in Physics, would listen with raised eye brows were one without mathematical culture to express a decided opinion on the matter. Or, if the subject discussed was the doctrine of Helmholtz, that hypothetical beings oc cupying space of two dimensions, might be so conditioned that the axioms of our geometry would prove untrue, the mathe matician would marvel if an affirmation or a negation came from a man who knew no more of the properties of space than is to be gained by daily converse with things around, and no more of the principles of reasoning than the course of business taught him. And yet, were we to take members of the Mathe matical Society, who, having severally devoted themselves to the laws of quantitative relations, know that, simple as these are intrinsically, a life's study is required for the full comprehension of them — were we to ask each of these his opinion on some point of social policy, the readiness with which he answered would seem to imply that in these cases, where the factors of the phenomena are so numerous and so much involved, a general survey of men and things gives data for trustworthy judgments.
Or, to contrast more fully the mode of reaching a conclu sion which the man of science uses in his own department, with that which he regards as satisfactory in the department of politics, let us take a case from a concrete science: say, the qiiestion— What are the solar spots, and what constitution of the Sun is implied by them? Of tentative answers to this question there is first Wilson's, adopted by Sir William OUR NEED OF IT. 7 Herschel, that the visible surface of the Sun is a luminous en velope, within which there are cloudy envelopes covering a dark central body; and that when, by some disturbance, the luminous envelope is broken through, portions of the cloudy envelope and of the dark central body, become visible as the penumbra and umbra respectively. This hypothesis, at one time received with favour mainly because it seemed to permit that teleological interpretation which required that the Sun should be habitable, accounted tolerably well for certain of the appearances — more especially the appearance of concavity which the spots have when near the limb of the Sun. But though Sir John Herscliel supported his father's hypothesis, pointing out that cyclonic action would account for local dis persions of the photosphere, there has of late years become more and more manifest the fatal objection that the genesis of light and heat remained unexplained, and that no supposition of auroral discharges did more than remove the difficulty a step back; since, unless light and heat could be perpetually generated out of nothing, there must be a store of force per petually being expended in producing them. A counter-hy pothesis, following naturally from the hypothesis of nebular origin, is that the mass of the Sun must be incandescent; that its incandescence has been produced, and is maintained, by progressing aggregation of its once widely-diffused matter; and that surrounding its molten surface there is an atmos phere of metallic gases continually rising, condensing to form the visible photosphere, and thence precipitating. What, in this case, are the solar spots? Kirchhoff, proceeding upon the hypothesis just indicated, which had been set forth before he made his discoveries by the aid of the spectroscope, contended that the solar spots are simply clouds, formed of these con densed metallic gases, so large as to be relatively opaque; and he endeavoured to account for their changing forms as the Sun's rotation carries them away, in correspondence with this view. But the appearances as known to astronomers, are quite irreconcilable with the belief that the spots are simply drift ing clouds. Do these appearances, then, conform to the sup position of M. Faye, that the photosphere encloses matter which is wholly gaseous and non-luminous; and that the spots are produced when occasional up-rushes from the in- 8 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.
terior burst through the photosphere? This supposition, while it may be held to account for certain traits of the spots, and to be justified by the observed fact that there are up-rushes of gas, presents difficulties not readily disposed of. It does not explain the manifest rotation of many spots; nor, indeed, does it seem really to account for that darkness which constitutes them spots; since a non-luminous gaseous nucleus would be permeable by light from the remoter side of the photosphere, and hence holes through the near side of the photosphere would not look dark. There is, however, another hypothesis which more nearly reconciles the facts. Assuming the incan descent molten surface, the ascending metallic gases, and the formation of a photosphere at that outer limit where the gases condense; accepting the suggestion of Sir John Herschel, so amply supported by evidence, that zones north and south of the Sun's equator are subject to violent cyclones; this hy pothesis is, that if a cyclone occurs within the atmosphere of metallic gases between the molten surface and the photo sphere, its vortex will become a region of rarefaction, of re frigeration, and therefore of precipitation. There will be formed in it a dense cloud extending far down towards the body of the Sun, and obstructing the greater part of the light radiating from below. Here we have an adequate cause for the formation of an opaque vaporous mass — a cause which also accounts for the frequently observed vortical motion; for the greater blackness of the central part of the umbra; for the formation of a penumbra by the drawing-in of the adjacent photosphere; for the elongation of the luminous masses form ing the photosphere, and the turning of their longer axes towards the centre of the spot; and for the occasional drift ing of them over the spot towards its centre. Still, there is the difficulty that vortical motion is by no means always ob servable; and it remains to be considered whether its non- visibility in many cases is reconcilable with the hypothesis. At present none of the interpretations can be regarded as established. See, then, the rigour of the inquiry. Here are sundry suppositions which the man of science severally tests by observations and necessary inferences. In this, as in other cases, he rejects such as unquestionably disagree with unquestionable truths. Continually excluding untenable hy- OUR NEED OF IT. 9 OUR NEED OF IT. 9 potheses, he waits to decide among the more tenable ones until further evidence discloses further congruities or incon gruities. Checking every statement of fact and every conclu sion drawn, he keeps his judgment suspended until no anom aly remains unexplained. Not only is he thus careful to shut out all possible error from inadequacy in the number and variety of data, but he is careful to shut out all possible error caused by idiosyncrasy in himself. Though not perhaps in astronomical observations such as those above implied, yet in all astronomical observations where the element of time is important, he makes allowance for the intervals occupied by his nervous actions. To fix the exact moment at which a cer tain change occurred, his perception of it has to be corrected for the "personal equation." As the speed of the nervous dis charge varies, according to the constitution, from thirty to ninety metres per second, and is somewhat greater in summer than in winter; and as between seeing a change and register ing it with the finger, there is an interval which is thus ap preciably different in different persons; the particular amount of this error in the particular observer has to be taken into account.
Suppose now that to a man of science, thus careful in test ing all possible hypotheses and excluding all possible sources of error, we put a sociological question — say, whether some proposed institution will be beneficial. An answer, and often a very decided one, is forthcoming at once. It is not thought needful, proceeding by deliberate induction, to ascertain what has happened in each nation where an identical institution, or an institution of allied kind, has been established. It is not thought needful to look back in our own history to see whether kindred agencies have done what they were expected to do. It is not thought needful to ask the more general question — how far institutions at large, among all nations and in all times, have justified the theories of those who set them up. Nor is it thought needful to infer from analogous cases, what is likely to happen if the proposed appliance is not set up— to ascertain, inductively, whether in its absence some equivalent appliance will arise. And still less is it thought needful to inquire what will be the indirect actions and reactions of the proposed or ganization — how far it will retard other social agencies, and 10 THE STUDY OP SOCIOLOGY.
how far it will prevent the spontaneous growth of agencies having like ends. I do not mean that none of these questions are recognized as questions to be asked; but I mean that no attempts are made after a scientific manner to get together materials for answering them. True, some data have been gathered from newspapers, periodicals, foreign correspondence, books of travel; and there have been read sundry histories, which, besides copious accounts of royal misdemeanours, con tain minute details of every military campaign, and careful disentariglings of diplomatic trickeries. And on information thus acquired a confident opinion is based. Most remarkable of all, however, is the fact that no allowance is made for the personal equation. In political observations and judgments, the qualities of the individual, natural and acquired, are by far the most important factors. The bias of education, the bias of class-relationships, the bias of nationality, the political bias, the theological bias— these, added to the constitutional sympathies and antipathies, have much more influence in de termining beliefs on social questions than has the small amount of evidence collected. Yet, though in his search after a physical truth, the man of science allows for minute errors of perception due to his own nature, he makes no allowance for the enormous errors which his own nature variously mod ified and distorted by his conditions of life, is sure to intro duce into his perceptions of political truth. Here, where cor rection for the personal equation is all-essential, it does not occur to him that there is any personal equation to be allowed for.
This immense incongruity between the attitude in which the most disciplined minds approach other orders of natural phenomena, and the attitude in which they approach the phe nomena presented by societies, will be best illustrated by a series of antitheses thus: — The material media through which we see things, always more or less falsify the facts: making, for example, the appar ent direction of a star slightly different from its real direction, and sometimes, as when a fish is seen in the water, the appar ent place is so far from the real place, that great misconcep tion results unless large allowance is made for refraction; but OUR NEED OF IT. H sociological observations are not thus falsified: through the daily press light comes without any bending of its rays, and in studying past ages it is easy to make allowance for the re fraction due to the historic medium. The motions of gases, though they conform to mechanical laws which are well understood, are nevertheless so involved, that the art of controlling currents of air in a house is not yet mastered; but the waves and currents of feeling running through a society, and the consequent directions and amounts of social activities, may be readily known beforehand. Though molecules of inorganic substances are very simple, yet prolonged study is required to understand their modes of behaviour to one another, and even the most instructed frequently meet with interactions of them producing consequences they never antic ipated; but where the interacting bodies are not molecules but living beings of highly-complex natures, it is easy to foresee all results which will arise. Physical phenomena are so connected that between seeming probability and actual truth, there is apt to be a wide difference, even where but two bodies are acting: instance the natural supposition that dur ing our northern summer the Earth is nearer to the Sun than during the winter, which is just the reverse of the fact; but among sociological phenomena, where the bodies are so multi tudinous, and the forces by which they act on one another so many, and so multiform, and so variable, the probability and the actuality will of course correspond. Matter often be haves paradoxically, as when two cold liquids added together become boiling hot, or as when the mixing of two clear liquids produces an opaque mud, or as when water immersed in sul phurous acid freezes on a hot iron plate; but what we dis tinguish as Mind, especially when massed together in the way which causes social action, evolves no' paradoxical results — always such results come from it as seem likely to come.
The acceptance of contradictions like these, tacitly implied in the beliefs of the scientifically cultivated, is the more re markable when we consider how abundant are the proofs that human nature is difficult to manipulate; that methods appar ently the most rational disappoint expectation; and that the best results frequently arise from courses which common sense thinks unpractical. Even individual human nature shows us 12 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.
these startling anomalies. A man of leisure is the man natu rally fixed upon if something has to be done; but your man of leisure cannot find time, and the man most likely to do what is wanted, is the man who is already busy. That the boy who studies longest will learn most, and that a man will become wise in proportion as he reads much, are propositions which look true but are quite untrue; as teachers are now-a-days finding out in the one case, and as Hobbes long ago found out in the other. How obvious it appears that when minds go de ranged, there is no remedy but replacing the weak internal control by a strong external control. Yet the " non-restraint system " has had far more success than the system of strait- ' waistcoats. Dr. Batty Tuke, a physician of much experience in treating the insane, has lately testified that the desire to es cape is great when locks and keys are used, but almost disap pears when they are disused: the policy of unlocked doors has had 95 per cent, of success arid 5 per cent, of failure." And in further evidence of the mischief often done by measures supposed to be curative, here is Dr. Maudsley, also an author ity on such questions, speaking of "asylum-made lunatics." Again, is it not clear that the repression of crime wrill be effectual in proportion as the punishment is severe? Yet the great amelioration in our penal code, initiated by Romilly, has not been followed by increased criminality but by decreased criminality; and the testimonies of those who have had most experience — Maconochie in Norfolk Island, Dickson in West ern Australia, Obermier in Germany, Montesinos in Spain — unite to show that in proportion as the criminal is left to suffer no other penalty than that of maintaining himself under such restraints only as are needful for social safety, the reformation is great: exceeding, indeed, all anticipation. French school masters, never questioning the belief that boys can be made to behave well only by rigid discipline and spies to aid in carry ing it out, are astonished on visiting England to find IIOAV much better boys behave when they are less governed: nay more — among English boys themselves, Dr. Arnold has shown that more trust is followed by improved conduct. Similarly with the anomalies of incorporated human nature. We habit ually assume that only by legal restraints are men to be kept from aggressing on their neighbours; and yet there are facts OUR NEED OF IT. 13 which should lead us to qualify our assumption. So-called debts of honour, for the non-payment of which there is no legal penalty, are held more sacred than debts that can be legally enforced; and on the Stock-Exchange, where only pencil memoranda in the respective note-books of two brokers guarantee the sale and purchase of many thousands, contracts are safer than those which, in the outside world, are formally registered in signed and sealed parchments.
Multitudes of cases might be accumulated showing how, in other directions, men's thoughts and feelings produce kinds of conduct which, a priori, would be judged very improbable. And if, going beyond our own society and our own time, we observe what has happened among other races, and among the earlier generations of our own race, we meet, at every step, workings-out of human nature utterly unlike those which we assume when making political forecasts. Who, generalizing the experiences of his daily life, would suppose that men, to please their gods, would swing for hours from hooks drawn through the muscles of their backs, or let their nails grow through the palms of their clenched hands, or roll over and over hundreds of miles to visit a shrine? Who would have thought it possible that a public sentiment and a private feel ing might be as in China, where a criminal can buy a substi tute to be executed in his stead: the substitute's family having the money? Or, to take historical cases more nearly concern ing ourselves — Who foresaw that the beliefs in purgatory and priestly intercession would cause one-half of England to lapse into the hands of the Church? or who foresaw that a defect in the law of mortmain would lead to bequests of large estates consecrated as graveyards? Who could have imagined that robber-kings and bandit-barons, with vassals to match, would, generation after generation, have traversed all Europe through hardships and dangers to risk their lives in getting possession of the reputed burial place of one whose injunction was to turn the left cheek when the right was smitten? Or who, again, would have anticipated that when, in Jerusalem, this same teacher disclaimed political aims, and repudiated political instrumentalities, the professed successors of his disciples would by and by become rulers dominating over all the kings of Europe? Such a result could be as little foreseen as it 14 THE STUDY OF SOCIOLOGY.
could be foreseen that an instrument of torture used by the Jews would give the ground-plans to Christian temples throughout Europe; and as little as it could be foreseen that the process of this torture, recounted in Christian narratives, might come to be mistaken for a Christian institution, as it was by the Malay chief who, being expostulated with for cru cifying some rebels, replied that he was following " the Eng lish practice," which he read in "their sacred books." 7 Look where we will at the genesis of social phenomena, we shall similarly find that while the particular ends contem plated and arranged for have commonly not been more than temporarily attained if attained at all, the changes actually brought about have arisen from causes of which the very ex istence was unknown.
How, indeed, can any man, and how more especially can any man of scientific culture, think that special results of special political acts can be calculated, when he contemplates the incalculable complexity of the influences under which each individual, and a fortiori each society, develops, lives, and decays? The multiplicity of the factors is illustrated even in the material composition of a man's body. Every one who watches closely the course of things, must have observed that at a single meal he may take in bread made from Russian wheat, beef from Scotland, potatoes from the midland coun ties, sugar from the Mauritius, salt from Cheshire, pepper.from Jamaica, curry-powder from India, wine from France or Ger many, currants from Greece, oranges from Spain, as well as various spices and condiments from other places; and if he considers whence came the draught of water he swallows, tracing it back from the reservoir through the stream and the brook and the rill, to the separate rain-drops which fell wide apart, and these again to the eddying vapours which had been mingling and parting in endless ways as they drifted over the Atlantic, he sees that this single mouthful of water contains molecules which, a little time ago, were dispersed over hun dreds of square miles of ocean swell. Similarly tracing back the history of each solid he has eaten, he finds that his body is made up of elements which have lately come from all parts of the Earth's surface.
OUR NEED OF IT. 15 And what thus holds of the substance of the body, holds no less of the influences, physical and moral, which modify its actions. You break your tooth with a small pebble among the currants, because the industrial organization, in Zante is so imperfect. A derangement of your digestion goes back for its cause to the bungling management in a vineyard on the Rhine several years ago; or to the dishonesty of the mer chants at Cette, where imitation wines are produced. Because there happened a squabble between a consul and a king in Abyssinia, an increased income-tax obliges you to abridge your autumn holiday; or because slave-owners in North America try to extend the u peculiar institution " further west, there re sults here a party dissension which perhaps entails on you loss of friends. If from these remote causes you turn to causes at home, you find that your doings are controlled by a plexus of influences too involved to be traced beyond its first meshes. Your hours of business are pre-determined by the general hab its of the community, which have been slowly established no one knows how. Your meals have to be taken at intervals which do not suit your health; but under existing social ar rangements you must submit. Such intercourse with friends as you can get, is at hours and under regulations which everybody adopts, but for which nobody is responsible; and you have to yield to a ceremonial which substitutes trouble for pleasure. Your opinions, political and religious, are ready moulded for you; and unless your individual ity is very decided, your social surroundings will prove too strong for it. Nay, even such an insignificant event as the coming-of-age of grouse affects your goings and comings throughout life. For has not the dissolution of Parliament direct reference to the 12th of August? and does not the dis solution end the London season? and does not the London season determine the times for business and relaxation, and so affect the making of arrangements throughout the year? If from co-existing influences we turn to influences that have been working through past time, the same general truth be comes still more conspicuous. Ask how it happens that men in England do not work every seventh day, and you have to seek through thousands of past years to find the initial cause.
Ask why in England, and still more in Scotland, there is not