Burke, then, has well said that “without the guide and light of sound, well-understood principles all our reasoning in politics, as in everything else, would be only a confused jumble of particular facts and details without the means of drawing any sort of theoretical or practical conclusion”; but that, on the other hand, the statesman, who does not take account of circumstances, infinite and infinitely combined, “is not erroneous, but stark mad—­he is metaphysically mad” (On the Petition of the Unitarians).  There is, or ought to be, no logical difference between the evidence required by a statesman and that appealed to by a philosopher; and since, as we have seen, the combination of principles with circumstances cannot, in solving problems of social science, be made with the demonstrative precision that belongs to astronomical and physical investigations, there remains the Historical Method as above described.

Examples of the empirical laws from which this method begins abound in histories, newspapers, and political discussions, and are of all shades of truth or half-truth:  as that ’History consists in the biographies of great men’; in other words, that the movements of society are due to exceptional personal powers, not to general causes; That at certain epochs great men occur in groups; That every Fine Art passes through periods of development, culmination and decline; That Democracies tend to change into Despotisms; That the possession of power, whether by classes or despots, corrupts the possessor:  That ’the governments most distinguished for sustained vigour and abilities have generally been aristocracies’; That ‘revolutions always begin in hunger’; That civilisation is inimical to individuality; That the civilisation of the country proceeds from the town; That ’the movement of progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract (i.e., from a condition in which the individual’s rights and duties depend on his caste, or position in his family as slave, child, or patriarch, to a condition in which his rights and duties are largely determined by the voluntary agreements he enters into)’; and this last is treated by H. Spencer as one aspect of the law first stated by Comte, that the progress of societies is from the military to the industrial state.

The deductive process we may illustrate by Spencer’s explanation of the co-existence in the military state of those specific characters, the inductive proof of which furnished an illustration of the method of Agreement (ch. xvi.  Sec. 1).  The type of the military State involves the growth of the warrior class, and the treatment of labourers as existing solely to support the warriors; the complete subordination of all individuals to the will of the despotic soldier-king, their property, liberty and life being at the service of the State; the regimentation of society, not only for military, but also for civil purposes; the suppression