its development, its phaenomena are
determined, more and more, not by the simple tendencies of universal
human nature, but by the accumulated influence of past generations over
the present. The human beings themselves, on the laws of whose nature
the facts of history depend, are not abstract or universal but
historical human beings, already shaped, and made what they are, by
human society. This being the case, no powers of deduction could enable
any one, starting from the mere conception of the Being Man, placed in a
world such as the earth may have been before the commencement of human
agency, to predict and calculate the phaenomena of his development such
as they have in fact proved. If the facts of history, empirically
considered, had not given rise to any generalizations, a deductive study
of history could never have reached higher than more or less plausible
conjecture. By good fortune (for the case might easily have been
otherwise) the history of our species, looked at as a comprehensive
whole, does exhibit a determinate course, a certain order of
development: though history alone cannot prove this to be a necessary
law, as distinguished from a temporary accident. Here, therefore, begins
the office of Biology (or, as we should say, of Psychology) in the
social science. The universal laws of human nature are part of the data
of sociology, but in using them we must reverse the method of the
deductive physical sciences: for while, in these, specific experience
commonly serves to verify laws arrived at by deduction, in sociology it
is specific experience which suggests the laws, and deduction which
verifies them. If a sociological theory, collected from historical
evidence, contradicts the established general laws of human nature; if
(to use M. Comte's instances) it implies, in the mass of mankind, any
very decided natural bent, either in a good or in a bad direction; if it
supposes that the reason, in average human beings, predominates over the
desires, or the disinterested desires over the personal; we may know
that history has been misinterpreted, and that the theory is false. On
the other hand, if laws of social phaenomena, empirically generalized
from history, can when once suggested be affiliated to the known laws of
human nature; if the direction actually taken by the developments and
changes of human society, can be seen to be such as the properties of
man and of his dwelling-place made antecedently probable, t