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Updated: May 15, 2025
When a review of all the cases in which compulsion has changed existing methods shows an almost invariable adaptation and a tendency toward better results after the level of competition is raised, a man of scientific training immediately asks the question, whether a fundamental law is not at work. A glance at social legislation during the last century reveals some interesting uniformities.
The first point, therefore, to be noted in regard to what is called the uniformity of the course of nature, is, that it is itself a complex fact, compounded of all the separate uniformities which exist in respect to single phenomena. These various uniformities, when ascertained by what is regarded as a sufficient induction, we call, in common parlance, Laws of Nature.
According as the science is occupied in ascertaining and verifying the former sort of uniformities or the latter, M. Comte gives it the title of Social Statics, or of Social Dynamics; conformably to the distinction in mechanics between the conditions of equilibrium and those of movement; or in biology, between the laws of organization and those of life.
Empirical laws must indeed be found; or a general Science of Society would be impossible: for, the character of any one generation is so much the result of the characters of all prior ones, that men could not compute so long a series from the elementary laws producing it. The empirical laws of society are uniformities, either of coexistence, or of succession.
And when we pass behind Olympian structures, and look into the cults which they served to federate, such uniformities as they present prove far too much. Leaving, then, these high works of the mind, Language and Religion, which have proved but blind guides, and 'of a short stay' in this labyrinth, let us turn to the material evidence of industrial and aesthetic activity.
The method affords no means of determining which of these uniformities are laws of causation, and which are merely derivative laws, resulting from those laws of causation and from the collocation of the causes. These empirical laws may be of greater or less authority, according as there is reason to presume that they are resolvable into laws only, or into laws and collocations together.
The first point, therefore, to be noted in regard to what is called the uniformity of the course of nature, is, that it is itself a complex fact, compounded of all the separate uniformities which exist in respect to single phenomena. These various uniformities, when ascertained by what is regarded as a sufficient induction, we call in common parlance, Laws of Nature.
If, then, a survey of the uniformities which have been ascertained to exist in nature, should point out some which, as far as any human purpose requires certainty, may be considered as quite certain and quite universal; then by means of these uniformities, we may be able to raise multitudes of other inductions to the same point in the scale.
We must reason from laws of nature; from the uniformities which are observable in the fact of likeness or unlikeness. Of these laws or uniformities, the most comprehensive are those supplied by mathematics; the axioms relating to equality, inequality, and proportionality, and the various theorems thereon founded.
All narrower inductions got by simple enumeration are unsafe, till, by the application to them of the four methods, the supposition of their falsity is shown to contradict this law, though it was itself arrived at by simple enumeration. Besides uniformities of succession, which always depend on causation, there are uniformities of coexistence.
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