and that surrounding its molten surface there is an atmos phere of metallic gases continually rising, condensing to form the visible photosphere, and thence precipitating. What, in this case, are the solar spots? Kirchhoff, proceeding upon the hypothesis just indicated, which had been set forth before he made his discoveries by the aid of the spectroscope, contended that the solar spots are simply clouds, formed of these con densed metallic gases, so large as to be relatively opaque; and he endeavoured to account for their changing forms as the Sun's rotation carries them away, in correspondence with this view. But the appearances as known to astronomers, are quite irreconcilable with the belief that the spots are simply drift ing clouds. Do these appearances, then, conform to the sup position of M. Faye, that the photosphere encloses matter which is wholly gaseous and non-luminous; and that the spots are produced when occasional up-rushes from the interior burst through the photosphere? This supposition, while it may be held to account for certain traits of the spots, and to be justified by the observed fact that there are up-rushes of gas, presents difficulties not readily disposed of. It does not explain the manifest rotation of many spots; nor, indeed, does it seem really to account for that darkness which constitutes them spots; since a non-luminous gaseous nucleus would be permeable by light from the remoter side of the photosphere, and hence holes through the near side of the photosphere would not look dark. There is, however, another hypothesis which more nearly reconciles the facts. Assuming the incan descent molten surface, the ascending metallic gases, and the formation of a photosphere at that outer limit where the gases condense; accepting the suggestion of Sir John Herschel, so amply supported by evidence, that zones north and south of the Sun's equator are subject to violent cyclones; this hy pothesis is, that if a cyclone occurs within the atmosphere of metallic gases between the molten surface and the photo sphere, its vortex will become a region of rarefaction, of re frigeration, and therefore of precipitation. There will be formed in it a dense cloud extending far down towards the body of the Sun, and obstructing the greater part of the light radiating from below. Here we have an adequate cause for the formation of an opaque vaporous mass — a cause which also accounts for the frequently observed vortical motion; for the greater blackness of the central part of the umbra; for the formation of a penumbra by the drawing-in of the adjacent photosphere; for the elongation of the luminous masses form ing the photosphere, and the turning of their longer axes towards the centre of the spot; and for the occasional drift ing of them over the spot towards its centre. Still, there is the difficulty that vortical motion is by no means always ob servable; and it remains to be considered whether its nonvisibility in many cases is reconcilable with the hypothesis.
At present none of the interpretations can be regarded as established. See, then, the rigour of the inquiry. Here are sundry suppositions which the man of science severally tests by observations and necessary inferences. In this, as in other cases, he rejects such as unquestionably disagree with unquestionable truths. Continually excluding untenable hypotheses, he waits to decide among the more tenable ones until further evidence discloses further congruities or incon gruities. Checking every statement of fact and every conclu sion drawn, he keeps his judgment suspended until no anom aly remains unexplained. Not only is he thus careful to shut out all possible error from inadequacy in the number and variety of data, but he is careful to shut out all possible error caused by idiosyncrasy in himself. Though not perhaps in astronomical observations such as those above implied, yet in all astronomical observations where the element of time is important, he makes allowance for the intervals occupied by his nervous actions. To fix the exact moment at which a cer tain change occurred, his perception of it has to be corrected for the "personal equation." As the speed of the nervous dis charge varies, according to the constitution, from thirty to ninety metres per second, and is somewhat greater in summer than in winter; and as between seeing a change and register ing it with the finger, there is an interval which is thus ap preciably different in different persons; the particular amount of this error in the particular observer has to be taken into account.
Suppose now that to a man of science, thus careful in test ing all possible hypotheses and excluding all possible sources of error, we put a sociological question — say, whether some proposed institution will be beneficial. An answer, and often a very decided one, is forthcoming at once. It is not thought needful, proceeding by deliberate induction, to ascertain what has happened in each nation where an identical institution, or an institution of allied kind, has been established. It is not thought needful to look back in our own history to see whether kindred agencies have done what they were expected to do. It is not thought needful to ask the more general question — how far institutions at large, among all nations and in all times, have justified the theories of those who set them up. Nor is it thought needful to infer from analogous cases, what is likely to happen if the proposed appliance is not set up— to ascertain, inductively, whether in its absence some equivalent appliance will arise. And still less is it thought needful to inquire what will be the indirect actions and reactions of the proposed or ganization — how far it will retard other social agencies, and how far it will prevent the spontaneous growth of agencies having like ends. I do not mean that none of these questions are recognized as questions to be asked; but I mean that no attempts are made after a scientific manner to get together materials for answering them. True, some data have been gathered from newspapers, periodicals, foreign correspondence, books of travel; and there have been read sundry histories, which, besides copious accounts of royal misdemeanours, con tain minute details of every military campaign, and careful disentariglings of diplomatic trickeries. And on information thus acquired a confident opinion is based. Most remarkable of all, however, is the fact that no allowance is made for the personal equation. In political observations and judgments, the qualities of the individual, natural and acquired, are by far the most important factors. The bias of education, the bias of class-relationships, the bias of nationality, the political bias, the theological bias— these, added to the constitutional sympathies and antipathies, have much more influence in de termining beliefs on social questions than has the small amount of evidence collected. Yet, though in his search after a physical truth, the man of science allows for minute errors of perception due to his own nature, he makes no allowance for the enormous errors which his own nature variously mod ified and distorted by his conditions of life, is sure to intro duce into his perceptions of political truth. Here, where cor rection for the personal equation is all-essential, it does not occur to him that there is any personal equation to be allowed for.
This immense incongruity between the attitude in which the most disciplined minds approach other orders of natural phenomena, and the attitude in which they approach the phe nomena presented by societies, will be best illustrated by a series of antitheses thus: — The material media through which we see things, always more or less falsify the facts: making, for example, the appar ent direction of a star slightly different from its real direction, and sometimes, as when a fish is seen in the water, the appar ent place is so far from the real place, that great misconcep tion results unless large allowance is made for refraction; but OUR NEED OF IT. H sociological observations are not thus falsified: through the daily press light comes without any bending of its rays, and in studying past ages it is easy to make allowance for the re fraction due to the historic medium. The motions of gases, though they conform to mechanical laws which are well understood, are nevertheless so involved, that the art of controlling currents of air in a house is not yet mastered; but the waves and currents of feeling running through a society, and the consequent directions and amounts of social activities, may be readily known beforehand. Though molecules of inorganic substances are very simple, yet prolonged study is required to understand their modes of behaviour to one another, and even the most instructed frequently meet with interactions of them producing consequences they never antic ipated; but where the interacting bodies are not molecules but living beings of highly-complex natures, it is easy to foresee all results which will arise. Physical phenomena are so connected that between seeming probability and actual truth, there is apt to be a wide difference, even where but two bodies are acting: instance the natural supposition that dur ing our northern summer the Earth is nearer to the Sun than during the winter, which is just the reverse of the fact; but among sociological phenomena, where the bodies are so multi tudinous, and the forces by which they act on one another so many, and so multiform, and so variable, the probability and the actuality will of course correspond. Matter often be haves paradoxically, as when two cold liquids added together become boiling hot, or as when the mixing of two clear liquids produces an opaque mud, or as when water immersed in sul phurous acid freezes on a hot iron plate; but what we dis tinguish as Mind, especially when massed together in the way which causes social action, evolves no' paradoxical results — always such results come from it as seem likely to come.
The acceptance of contradictions like these, tacitly implied in the beliefs of the scientifically cultivated, is the more re markable when we consider how abundant are the proofs that human nature is difficult to manipulate; that methods appar ently the most rational disappoint expectation; and that the best results frequently arise from courses which common sense thinks unpractical. Even individual human nature shows us these startling anomalies. A man of leisure is the man natu rally fixed upon if something has to be done; but your man of leisure cannot find time, and the man most likely to do what is wanted, is the man who is already busy. That the boy who studies longest will learn most, and that a man will become wise in proportion as he reads much, are propositions which look true but are quite untrue; as teachers are now-a-days finding out in the one case, and as Hobbes long ago found out in the other. How obvious it appears that when minds go de ranged, there is no remedy but replacing the weak internal control by a strong external control. Yet the " non-restraint system " has had far more success than the system of strait-' waistcoats. Dr. Batty Tuke, a physician of much experience in treating the insane, has lately testified that the desire to es cape is great when locks and keys are used, but almost disap pears when they are disused: the policy of unlocked doors has had 95 per cent, of success arid 5 per cent, of failure." And in further evidence of the mischief often done by measures supposed to be curative, here is Dr. Maudsley, also an author ity on such questions, speaking of "asylum-made lunatics."
Again, is it not clear that the repression of crime wrill be effectual in proportion as the punishment is severe? Yet the great amelioration in our penal code, initiated by Romilly, has not been followed by increased criminality but by decreased criminality; and the testimonies of those who have had most experience — Maconochie in Norfolk Island, Dickson in West ern Australia, Obermier in Germany, Montesinos in Spain — unite to show that in proportion as the criminal is left to suffer no other penalty than that of maintaining himself under such restraints only as are needful for social safety, the reformation is great: exceeding, indeed, all anticipation. French school masters, never questioning the belief that boys can be made to behave well only by rigid discipline and spies to aid in carry ing it out, are astonished on visiting England to find IIOAV much better boys behave when they are less governed: nay more — among English boys themselves, Dr. Arnold has shown that more trust is followed by improved conduct. Similarly with the anomalies of incorporated human nature. We habit ually assume that only by legal restraints are men to be kept from aggressing on their neighbours; and yet there are facts which should lead us to qualify our assumption. So-called debts of honour, for the non-payment of which there is no legal penalty, are held more sacred than debts that can be legally enforced; and on the Stock-Exchange, where only pencil memoranda in the respective note-books of two brokers guarantee the sale and purchase of many thousands, contracts are safer than those which, in the outside world, are formally registered in signed and sealed parchments.
Multitudes of cases might be accumulated showing how, in other directions, men's thoughts and feelings produce kinds of conduct which, a priori, would be judged very improbable.
And if, going beyond our own society and our own time, we observe what has happened among other races, and among the earlier generations of our own race, we meet, at every step, workings-out of human nature utterly unlike those which we assume when making political forecasts. Who, generalizing the experiences of his daily life, would suppose that men, to please their gods, would swing for hours from hooks drawn through the muscles of their backs, or let their nails grow through the palms of their clenched hands, or roll over and over hundreds of miles to visit a shrine? Who would have thought it possible that a public sentiment and a private feel ing might be as in China, where a criminal can buy a substi tute to be executed in his stead: the substitute's family having the money? Or, to take historical cases more nearly concern ing ourselves — Who foresaw that the beliefs in purgatory and priestly intercession would cause one-half of England to lapse into the hands of the Church? or who foresaw that a defect in the law of mortmain would lead to bequests of large estates consecrated as graveyards? Who could have imagined that robber-kings and bandit-barons, with vassals to match, would, generation after generation, have traversed all Europe through hardships and dangers to risk their lives in getting possession of the reputed burial place of one whose injunction was to turn the left cheek when the right was smitten? Or who, again, would have anticipated that when, in Jerusalem, this same teacher disclaimed political aims, and repudiated political instrumentalities, the professed successors of his disciples would by and by become rulers dominating over all the kings of Europe? Such a result could be as little foreseen as it could be foreseen that an instrument of torture used by the Jews would give the ground-plans to Christian temples throughout Europe; and as little as it could be foreseen that the process of this torture, recounted in Christian narratives, might come to be mistaken for a Christian institution, as it was by the Malay chief who, being expostulated with for cru cifying some rebels, replied that he was following " the Eng lish practice," which he read in "their sacred books." 7 Look where we will at the genesis of social phenomena, we shall similarly find that while the particular ends contem plated and arranged for have commonly not been more than temporarily attained if attained at all, the changes actually brought about have arisen from causes of which the very ex istence was unknown.
How, indeed, can any man, and how more especially can any man of scientific culture, think that special results of special political acts can be calculated, when he contemplates the incalculable complexity of the influences under which each individual, and a fortiori each society, develops, lives, and decays? The multiplicity of the factors is illustrated even in the material composition of a man's body. Every one who watches closely the course of things, must have observed that at a single meal he may take in bread made from Russian wheat, beef from Scotland, potatoes from the midland coun ties, sugar from the Mauritius, salt from Cheshire, pepper.from Jamaica, curry-powder from India, wine from France or Ger many, currants from Greece, oranges from Spain, as well as various spices and condiments from other places; and if he considers whence came the draught of water he swallows, tracing it back from the reservoir through the stream and the brook and the rill, to the separate rain-drops which fell wide apart, and these again to the eddying vapours which had been mingling and parting in endless ways as they drifted over the Atlantic, he sees that this single mouthful of water contains molecules which, a little time ago, were dispersed over hun dreds of square miles of ocean swell. Similarly tracing back the history of each solid he has eaten, he finds that his body is made up of elements which have lately come from all parts of the Earth's surface.
And what thus holds of the substance of the body, holds no less of the influences, physical and moral, which modify its actions. You break your tooth with a small pebble among the currants, because the industrial organization, in Zante is so imperfect. A derangement of your digestion goes back for its cause to the bungling management in a vineyard on the Rhine several years ago; or to the dishonesty of the mer chants at Cette, where imitation wines are produced. Because there happened a squabble between a consul and a king in Abyssinia, an increased income-tax obliges you to abridge your autumn holiday; or because slave-owners in North America try to extend the u peculiar institution " further west, there re sults here a party dissension which perhaps entails on you loss of friends. If from these remote causes you turn to causes at home, you find that your doings are controlled by a plexus of influences too involved to be traced beyond its first meshes. Your hours of business are pre-determined by the general hab its of the community, which have been slowly established no one knows how. Your meals have to be taken at intervals which do not suit your health; but under existing social ar rangements you must submit. Such intercourse with friends as you can get, is at hours and under regulations which everybody adopts, but for which nobody is responsible; and you have to yield to a ceremonial which substitutes trouble for pleasure. Your opinions, political and religious, are ready moulded for you; and unless your individual ity is very decided, your social surroundings will prove too strong for it. Nay, even such an insignificant event as the coming-of-age of grouse affects your goings and comings throughout life. For has not the dissolution of Parliament direct reference to the 12th of August? and does not the dis solution end the London season? and does not the London season determine the times for business and relaxation, and so affect the making of arrangements throughout the year? If from co-existing influences we turn to influences that have been working through past time, the same general truth be comes still more conspicuous. Ask how it happens that men in England do not work every seventh day, and you have to seek through thousands of past years to find the initial cause. Ask why in England, and still more in Scotland, there is not only a cessation from work, which the creed interdicts, but also a cessation from amusement, which it does not interdict; and for an explanation you must go back to successive waves of ascetic fanaticism in generations long dead. And what thus holds of religious ideas and usages, holds of all others, political and social. Even the industrial activities are often permanently turned out of their normal directions by social states that passed away many ages ago:.witness what has hap pened throughout the East, or in Italy, where towns and vil lages are still perched on hills and eminences chosen for de fensive purposes in turbulent times, and where the lives of the inhabitants are now made laborious by having daily to carry themselves and all the necessaries of life from a low level to a high level.
The extreme complexity of social actions, and the tran scendent difficulty which hence arises of counting on special results, will be still better seen if we enumerate the factors which determine one simple phenomenon, as the price of a commodity, — say, cotton. A manufacturer of calicoes has to decide whether he will increase his stock of raw material at its current price. Before doing this, he must ascertain, as well as he can, the following data: — Whether the stocks of calico in the hands of manufacturers and wholesalers at home, are large or small; whether by recent prices retailers have been led to lay in stocks or not; whether the colonial and foreign markets are glutted or otherwise; and what is now, and is likely to be, the production of calico by foreign manufacturers.
Having formed some idea of the probable demand for calico, he has to ask what other manufacturers have done, and are doing, as buyers of cotton — whether they have been waiting for the price to fall, or have been buying in anticipation of a rise. From cotton-brokers' circulars he has to judge what is the state of speculation at Liverpool — whether the stocks there are large or small, and whether many or few cargoes >are on their way. The stocks and prices at New Orleans, and at other cotton-ports throughout the world, have also to be taken^note of; and then there come questions respecting forthcoming crops in the Southern States, in India, in Egypt, and else where. Here are sufficiently-numerous factors, but these are by no means all. The consumption of calico, and therefore the consumption of cotton, and therefore the price of cotton, depends in part on the supplies and prices of other textile fab rics. If, as happened during the American Civil War, calico rises in price because its raw material becomes scarce, linen comes into more general use, and so a further rise in price is checked. Woollen fabrics, also, may to some extent compete.
And, besides the competition caused by relative prices, there is the competition caused by fashion, which may or may not pres ently change. Surely the factors are now all enumerated? By no means. There is the estimation of mercantile opinion. The views of buyers and sellers respecting future prices, never more than approximations to the truth, often diverge from it very widely. Waves of opinion, now in excess now in defect of the fact, rise and fall daily, and larger ones weekly and monthly, tending, every now and then, to run into mania or panic; for it is among men of business as among other men, that they stand hesitating until some one sets the example, and then rush all one way, like a flock of sheep after a leader. These characteristics in human nature, leading to these perturbations, the far-seeing buyer takes into account — judging how far existing influences have made opinion deviate from the truth, and how far im pending influences are likely to do it. Nor has he got to the end of the matter even when he has considered all these things. He has still to ask what are the general mercantile conditions of the country, and what the imm_ediate future of the money market will be; since the course of speculation in every commodity must be affected by the rate of discount. See, then, the enormous complication of causes which deter mine so simple a thing as the rise or fall of a farthing per pound in cotton some months hence!
If the genesis of social phenomena is so involved in cases like this, where the effect produced has no concrete persistence but very soon dissipates, judge what it must be where there is produced something which continues thereafter to be an in creasing agency, capable of self -propagation. Not only has a society as a whole a power of growth and development, but each institution set up in it has the like — draws to itself units of the society and nutriment for them, and tends ever to mul tiply and ramify. Indeed, the instinct of self-preservation in each institution soon becomes dominant over everything else; and maintains it when it performs some quite other function than that intended, or no function at all. See, for instance, what has come of the " Society of Jesus," Loyola set up; or see what grew out of the company of traders who got a foot ing on the coast of Hiiidostaii.
To such considerations as these, set down to show the in consistency of those who think that prevision of social phenom ena is possible without much study, though much study is needed for prevision of other phenomena, it will doubtless be replied that time does not allow of systematic inquiry. From the scientific, as from the unscientific, there w;ill come the plea that, in his capacity of citizen, each man has to act — must vote, and must decide before he votes — must conclude to the best of his ability on such information as he has.
In this plea there is some truth, mingled with a good deal more that looks like truth. It is a product of that " must-dosomething1' impulse which is the origin of much mischief, individual and social. An amiable anxiety to undo or neutral ize an evil, often prompts to rash courses, as you may see in the hurry with which one who has fallen is snatched up by those at hand; just as though there were danger in letting him lie, which there is not, and no danger in incautiously raising him, which there is. Always you find among people in proportion as they are ignorant, a belief in specifics, and a great confidence in pressing the adoption of them. Has some one a pain in the side, or in the chest, or in the bowels? Then, before any careful inquiry as to its probable cause, there comes an urgent recommendation of a never-failing remedy, joined probably with the remark that if it does no good it can do no harm. There still prevails in the average mind a large amount of the fetishistic conception clearly shown by a butler to some friends of mine, who, having been found to drain the halfemptied medicine-bottles, explained that he thought it a pity good physic should be wasted, and that wTIiat benefited his master would benefit him. But as fast as crude conceptions of diseases and remedial measures grow up into Pathology and Therapeutics, we find increasing caution, along with increas ing proof that evil is often done instead of good. This con trast is traceable not only as we pass from popular ignorance