iful a comparison, it may be observed that all assemblies of human
beings may be contrasted in respect of being numerous or select, and
have certain properties in consequence. We may therefore make some true
and general propositions about the contrasts between the action of
small and large consultative bodies which will apply to many widely
different cases. A good many, and, I think, some really valuable
observations of this kind have been made, and form the substance of
many generalisations laid down as to the relative advantages of
democracy and aristocracy. Now I should be disposed to say that such
remarks belong rather to the morphology than the physiology of the
social organism. They indicate external resemblances between bodies of
which the intimate constitution and the whole mode of growth and
conditions of vitality, may be entirely different. Such analogies,
then, though not without their value, are far from being properly
scientific.

What remains? There is, shall we say, no science of sociology--merely a
heap of vague, empirical observations, too flimsy to be useful in
strict logical inference? I should, I confess, be apt to say so myself.
Then, you may proceed, is it not idle to attempt to introduce a
scientific method? And to that I should emphatically reply, No! it is
of the highest importance. The question, then, will follow, how I can
maintain these two positions at once. And to that I make, in the first
place, this general answer: Sociology is still of necessity a very
vague body of approximate truths. We have not the data necessary for
obtaining anything like precise laws. A mathematician can tell you
precisely what he means when he speaks of bodies moving under the
influence of an attraction which varies inversely as the square of the
distance. But what are the attractive forces which hold together the
body politic? They are a number of human passions, which even the
acutest psychologists are as yet quite unable to analyse or to
classify: they act according to laws of which we have hardly the
vaguest inkling; and, even if we possessed any definite laws, the facts
to which they have to be applied are so amazingly complex as to defy
any attempt at assigning results. There is, so far as I can see, no
ground for supposing that there is or ever can be a body of precise
truths at all capable of comparison with the exact sciences. But this
obvious truth, though it implies very narrow limits to our hopes of
s