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As in Ethology and other deductive sciences, so in Statistics and History there are empirical laws. But, in the separate branches of Sociology, we cannot obtain empirical laws by specific experience.
This science of Ethology may be called the Exact Science of Human Nature; for its truths are not, like the empirical laws which depend on them, approximate generalizations, but real laws. They must not assert that something will always, or certainly, happen; but only that such and such will be the effect of a given cause, so far as it operates uncounteracted.
In other words, Ethology, the deductive science, is a system of corollaries from Psychology, the experimental science. Of these, the earlier alone has been, as yet, really conceived or studied as a science; the other, Ethology, is still to be created. But its creation has at length become practicable.
According to this definition, Ethology is the science which corresponds to the art of education in the widest sense of the term, including the formation of national or collective character as well as individual. But we must remember that a degree of knowledge far short of the power of actual prediction is often of much practical value.
The one ascertains the simple laws of Mind in general, the other traces their operation in complex combinations of circumstances. Ethology stands to Psychology in a relation very similar to that in which the various branches of natural philosophy stand to mechanics.
Works, ii. 506. Works, ii. 401. Autobiography, p. 274. Dissertations, i. 375. I remark by anticipation that this expression implies a reference to Mill's Ethology, of which I shall have to speak. Works, ix. 96, 113. Dissertations, i. 376. 'Individualism' in the first place is generally mentioned in a different connection.
Nor is this wonderful, when we consider the infant state of the science of Ethology itself, from whence the laws must be drawn, of which the truths of political ethology can be but results and exemplifications. In the first place, the character which is formed by any state of social circumstances is in itself the most interesting phenomenon which that state of society can possibly present.
And when Ethology shall be thus prepared, practical education will be the mere transformation of those principles into a parallel system of precepts, and the adaptation of these to the sum total of the individual circumstances which exist in each particular case.
It is the accordance of these two kinds of evidence separately taken—the consilience of a priori reasoning and specific experience—which forms the only sufficient ground for the principles of any science so “immersed in matter,” dealing with such complex and concrete phenomena, as Ethology. General Considerations On The Social Science.
The name is perhaps etymologically applicable to the entire science of our mental and moral nature; but if, as is usual and convenient, we employ the name Psychology for the science of the elementary laws of mind, Ethology will serve for the ulterior science which determines the kind of character produced in conformity to those general laws by any set of circumstances, physical and moral.
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