ining causes. We can see more or less
what were the general causes which have led to various forms of
associations, to the old guilds, or the modern factory system, to the
trades unions or the co-operative societies; and correcting and
verifying our general results by a careful examination of the
particular instances, approximate, vaguely it may be and distantly, to
some such conception of the laws of development of different social
tissues as, if not properly scientific, may yet belong to the
scientific order of thought. Thus, when distracted by this or that
particular demand, by promises of the millennium to be inaugurated
to-morrow by an Act of Parliament, or threats of some social cataclysm
to overwhelm us if we concede an inch to wicked agitators, we may
succeed in placing ourselves at a higher point of view, from which it
is possible to look over wider horizons, to regard what is happening
to-day in its relations to slow processes of elaboration, and to form
judgments based upon wide and systematic inquiry, which, if they do not
entitle us to predict particular events, as an astronomer predicts an
eclipse, will at least be a guide to sane and sober minds, and suggest
at once a humbler appreciation of what is within our power, and--I
think also--a more really hopeful anticipation of genuine progress in
the future.

All scientific inquiry is an interrogation of nature. We have, in
Bacon's grand sententious phrase, to command nature by obeying. We
learn what are the laws of social growth by living them. The great
difficulty of the interrogation is to know what questions we are to
put. Under the guidance of metaphysicians, we have too often asked
questions to which no answer is conceivable, like children, who in
first trying to think, ask, why are we living in the nineteenth
century, why is England an island, or why does pain hurt, or why do two
and two make four? The only answer is by giving the same facts in a
different set of words, and that is a kind of answer to which
metaphysical dexterity sometimes gives an air of plausibility. More
frequently our ingenuity takes the form of sanctioning preconceived
prejudices, by wrapping up our conclusion in our premisses, and then
bringing it out triumphantly with the air of a rigorous deduction. The
progress of social science implies, in the first place, the abandonment
of the weary system of hunting for fruitful truths in the region of
chimeras, and trying to make empty l