ion between the moral tendencies of men and the
social conditions they have inherited. The nature of European men has
its roots intertwined with the past, and can only be developed by
allowing those roots to remain undisturbed while the process of
development is going on, until that perfect ripeness of the seed which
carries with it a life independent of the root....

It has not been sufficiently insisted on, that in the various branches
of social science there is an advance from the general to the special,
from the simple to the complex, analogous with that which is found in
the series of the sciences, from mathematics to biology. To the laws of
quantity comprised in mathematics and physics are superadded, in
chemistry, laws of quality; to those again are added, in biology, laws
of life; and lastly, the conditions of life in general branch out into
its special conditions, or natural history, on the one hand, and into
its abnormal conditions, or pathology, on the other. And in this series
or ramification of the sciences, the more general science will not
suffice to solve the problems of the more special. Chemistry embraces
phenomena which are not explicable by physics; biology embraces
phenomena which are not explicable by chemistry; and no biological
generalization will enable us to predict the infinite specialties
produced by the complexity of vital conditions. So social science,
while it has departments which in their fundamental generality
correspond to mathematics and physics, namely, those grand and simple
generalizations which trace out the inevitable march of the human race
as a whole, and, as a ramification of these, the laws of economical
science, has also, in the departments of government and jurisprudence,
which embrace the conditions of social life in all their complexity,
what may be called its biology, carrying us on to innumerable special
phenomena which outlie the sphere of science, and belong to natural
history. And just as the most thorough acquaintance with physics, or
chemistry, or general physiology, will not enable you at once to
establish the balance of life in your private vivarium, so that your
particular society of zoophytes, molluscs and echinoderms may feel
themselves, as the Germans say, at ease in their skins; so the most
complete equipment of theory will no