questions, and the collection and diffusion of information concerning them, is, beyond doubt, a most useful work, and, in doing it, the Association should have the sympathy and God-speed of the community.
But, while recognizing that the aim of this organization is excellent, and much of its work highly commendable, we are of opinion that it falls short of what should be its chief duty. It fails to do that for which, judging by its title, it was specifically instituted. So far from promoting social science, we should rather say that social science is just the subject which it particularly avoids. It might rather be considered as a general reform convention. It is an organization for public action, and most of its members, hot with the impulses of philanthropy, are full of projects of social relief, amelioration, and improvement. Of pure investigation, or the strict and passionless study of society from a scientific point of view, we hear but very little. The President announced its leading object to be the promotion of the civil-service reform, and, if so, of course its leading object is not the determination of the natural laws by which society is constituted and regulated—that is, not scientific. If we remember rightly, at the establishment of the organization, the question, what Social Science is, became a matter of discussion, when the most extraordinary and conflicting views were propounded, and nobody seemed for a moment to suspect that social science is but a branch of general science, having similar objects, and to be pursued by the same methods, as the other sciences. Social science is a knowledge of the phenomena of society, as chemical science is a knowledge of the phenomena of the elemental changes of matter. And as the generalization of chemical facts gives us chemical laws, so the generalization of social facts must give us social laws. Social science is possible just to the degree in which these are arrived at. All the proceedings of the late meeting imply that there are such things as social laws, for, if there are not facts that can be known and compared, and effects that are traceable to causes, and an order of relations which makes it possible to calculate results, then the whole work of such an association is futile. Every project of social amendment which proposes that this thing shall be done rather than that, or that one course of action will result in evil, and another in good, presupposes facts, principles, and a method in the natural constitution of society which it is the legitimate province of science to investigate and determine. And, if this be so, it is obvious that the first and most imperative thing to be done is to trace these principles out, so as to arrive at a system of elementary truths that may be taken as the starting-point and foundation of all active measures of social improvement. The working out of something like a definite and authoritative basis of scientific principles, we say, Is the first thing to be done, and this view is sustained by all that we know of the past history of science. All the arts were but blind, and arbitrary, and ineffectual processes, until the sciences upon which they depended were worked out in their fundamental principles as pure questions of research. Not until the laws of physics, chemistry, anatomy, and physiology, were determined by a long course of patient and assiduous observation and experiment, pursued with no reference to any thing but the simple establishment of the truth, did the various arts become settled in their practice, so that they could be pursued with efficiency, economy, and success. Much useful work was undoubtedly done while artisans were still blindly groping without rational guidance, cutting, and trying, and wasting power, time, and materials, in following empirical rules. And so, as we have already recognized, much
