cial phenomena of the world
that we may expect to obtain of the physical. This is the gradual and
incessant _developement_ which humanity has displayed, and is still
displaying. Who can tell us that that _experience_ on which a fixed and
positive theory of social man is to be formed, is all before us? From
age to age that experience is enlarging.

In all recognized branches of science nature remains the same, and
continually repeats herself; she admits of no novelty; and what appears
new to us, from our late discovery of it, is as old as the most palpable
sequence of facts that, generation after generation, catches the eye of
childhood. The new discovery may disturb our theories, it disturbs not
the condition of things. All is still the same as it ever was. What we
possessed of real knowledge is real knowledge still. We sit down before
a maze of things bewildering enough; but the vast mechanism,
notwithstanding all its labyrinthian movements, is constant to itself,
and presents always the same problem to the observer. But in this
department of humanity, in this sphere of social existence, the case is
otherwise. The human being, with hand, with intellect, is incessantly at
work--has a progressive movement--_grows_ from age to age. He discovers,
he invents, he speculates; his own inventions react upon the inventor;
his own thoughts, creeds, speculations, become agents in the scene. Here
_new facts_ are actually from time to time starting into existence; new
elements are introduced into society, which science could not have
foreseen; for if they could have been foreseen, they would already have
been there. A new creed, even a new machine, may confound the wisest of
speculations. Man is, in relation to the science that would survey
society, a _creator_. In short, that stability in the order of events,
that invariable recurrence of the same linked series, on which science
depends for its very existence, here, in some measure, fails us. In such
degree, therefore, as humanity can be described as progressive, or
developing itself, in such degree is it an untractable subject for the
scientific method. We have but one world, but one humanity before us,
but one specimen of this self developing creature, and that perhaps but
half grown, but half developed. How can we know whereabouts _we are_ in
our course, and what is coming next? We want the history of some
extinguished world in which a humanity has run its full career; we need
t