tablish truth by
any means. Wherever the forces determining a phenomenon are too numerous
or too indefinite to be combined in a deductive demonstration, there the
Historical Method is likely to be useful; and this seems often to be the
case in Geology and Biology, as well as in the Science of History, or
Sociology, and its various subsidiary studies.

Consider upon what causes historical events depend: the customs,
character, and opinions of all the people concerned; the organisation of
their government, and the character of their religious institutions; the
development of industry among them, of the military art, of fine art,
literature and science; their relations, commercial, political and
social, with other nations; the physical conditions of climate and
geographical position amidst which they live. Hardly an event of
importance occurs in any nation that is not, directly or indirectly,
influenced by every one of these circumstances, and that does not react
upon them. Now, from the nature of the Canons of direct Induction, a
satisfactory employment of them in such a complex and tangled situation
as history presents, is rarely possible; for they all require the actual
or virtual isolation of the phenomenon under investigation. They also
require the greatest attainable immediacy of connection between cause
and effect; whereas the causes of social events may accumulate during
hundreds of years. In collecting empirical laws from history, therefore,
only very rough inductions can be hoped for, and we may have to be
content with simple enumeration. Hence the importance of supporting such
laws by deduction from the nature of the case, however faint a
probability of the asserted connection is thereby raised; and this even
if each law is valued merely for its own sake. Still more, if anything
worth the name of Historical Science is to be constructed, must a mere
collection of such empiricisms fail to content us; and the only way to
give them a scientific character is to show deductively their common
dependence upon various combinations of the same causes. Yet even those
who profess to employ the Historical Method often omit the deductive
half of it; and of course 'practical politicians' boast of their entire
contentment with what they call 'the facts.'

Sometimes, however, politicians, venturing upon deductive reasoning,
have fallen into the opposite error of omitting to test their results by
any comparison with the facts: a