BOOKS.
LEWIS'S TREATISE ON OBSERVATION AND REASONING IN POLITICS.* IN art, in literature, in ethics, in politics, in religion, the acknow- ledged want of our age is conviction—conviction upon which ac- tion, energetic, hearty, cheerful, and trusting, may proceed. It may be that other ages have suffered as much as ourselves from this want, but it can scarcely be asserted that any age has felt the want like our own, has bemoaned it as loudly, or yearned as long- ingly to supply it. And the reason is plain. In no other age has exact science extended its empire over such a proud domain; at no other time have its possessions been so ample and so noble, its in- heritance in prospect so glorious and so rich in promise. Side by side with it has material art strode on, gathering up the full- sheaved harvest that sprang beneath the feet of the Uranian Venus, as she marched sublime and abstracted from earthly interests, yet scattering her starry truths in the seed-field of time, and proving that wisdom and knowledge, like godliness, have a double blessing, and that to those who seek the higher the lower comes by divine ordinance of Nature. In presence of this substantial grandeur— this active, vigorous, and ever-growing might—the moral, metaphy- sical, and esthetic sciences have, by the testimony of all, made no visible continuous progress, and in the opinion of many are no forwarder than when Plato discoursed of truth, and Socrates of righteousness, and Aristotle formuled the organic laws of thought, poetry, and politics. So long as the whole region over which the mind of man flies to and fro lay half hidden in the same haze—so long as the sun of truth only gleamed pale and fitful rays upon any portion of the forlorn land, peopled in the dimness with phan- toms and chimeras and all monstrous births of fancy—so long men, unconscious of the splendour of the orb, or the definite beauty of the world that was to rise to life at the touch of those creative beams, rested equally content with all their traditionary teaching, accepted it without caring or knowing how to verify it, and could not at any rate institute disadvantageous comparisons between one object of belief and another. But the case was completely changed when in one direction, and over one increasing circle, the mists parted, the sunlight flashed in, and a world of wonder, beauty, and wealth, suddenly stood re- vealed. Eyes used to light could no longer endure darkness with- out pain ; feet accustomed to firm standing could no longer tread hesitating in the gloom without fear and dislike ; men rushed to the light and air, as suffocating people will. Meanwhile, the darker, closer portions of man's domain have been comparatively deserted ; a few patient long-sighted folks have stayed there work- ing quietly away, while the mob has rushed off to the newly-dis- covered gold-diggings : the remembrance of the region has been thus not wholly lost, and at length the gold has flowed in, and is at last beginning to fructify, and to restore the level of prosperity. Similes apart, the methods and the riches of physical science have at last begun to overflow into the region of moral science ; and the results are already such that prophetic and poetic souls can discern the dawning of the golden year, and patient men of science are daily working to realize the vision. The sum of the matter is, that the path to conviction—the great want, as we said, as all ac- knowledge, of our age—is at last opened. It is the path to positive knowledge. No lesson of Providence, of History, is more plain, than that these two paths are identical ; that so far as positive knowledge is practicable for us, so far is conviction and resolute action pos- sible, and no farther. Happily, there are many, labourers, and the harvest is ripe. In no department of knowledge or practice is it more important that the work be done speedily, than in Politics, which have long been chaotic among us, and call in an imperative manner for the coming Cosmos. Such a service Mr. Cornewall Lewis has in part attempted in the two volumes before us. His subject, as announced in his title- page, is Methods of Observation and Reasoning in Politics, but, as stated in the body of his work, is coextensive with what is com- monly called Social Science, or Sociology. His justification for thus identifying social and political science is, that human society, as investigated by the philosopher in search of positive knowledge, must necessarily be political society,—that is, society in which there exists a sovereign government. In the sense, therefore, in which Mr. Lewis uses the term, politics will treat of the acts and rela- tions of the sovereign government towards other sovereign govern- ments, and towards its own subjects; and of the acts and rela- tions of the subjects towards their government, or towards the community of which they are members. Mr. Lewis himself adds, or to any considerable portion of the community : but so vague an expression must have slipped from him incautiously, and he has failed to notice that acts or relations of individuals to other indi- viduals are political only when, by reason of being made subjects of positive law, they become really acts and relations of _the indi- viduals to the community at large. Herein lies, as it appears to us, the inconvenience of identifying political and social science— that many social phenomena, though arising in a society subject to a government, have really nothing to do with that government, and are not in the least modified by its operations, except in the vague sense that government is necessary to the preservation of society, and therefore to the origination of all phenomena which depend on its preservation. This, however, may be sufficient reason to Mr. Lewis for refusing to acknowledge any distinction between pOr • A Treatise on the Methods of Observation and Reasoning it PCnStCa, Bytteorge Coniewall Lewis, Esq. In two volumes. Published by Parker and Son.
litical and social science. At any rate, he does acknowledge none, and his book is a treatise on Sociological Method. As such, it divides the science into four departments,—the registration of po- litical facts, positive or descriptive politics, speculative politics, and maxims of political practice. Under each of these heads he gives the rules necessary for the attainment of the several objects in view, and the causes of liability to error by which the student is apt to be misled ; thus framing a manual of observation and reasoning for the historian, the philosopher, and the practical poli- tician. Under the first of these heads the reader will find the questions of what constitutes history, and what are the essential requisities of historical evidence, treated amply and ably, with the subtilty of an accomplished logician and the knowledge of an erudite scholar. The facts to which the historian directs his at- tention, the sources frolic which he derives his knowledge, and the mode of his investigation, form the divisions of this branch. The characteristic of historical observation is shown to lie in the fulness of the description which is its object,—a description of in- dividual facts, identified as to time, place, and person ; and in its aiming at a connected series of such facts, relating to the same sub- ject, whether it be a nation or any other community : thus being dis- tinguished on the one hand from the observation of the political philosopher, who observes only the common properties of phteno- mena, that he may upon them frame general propositions, and on the other from that of the practical politician, who observes coexisting phzenomena, or only short sequences of them, that he may be enabled to perform his operations successfully. Historical evidence is analyzed into the testimony, direct or indirect, of eye-witnesses of events: and the difference between the testimony that serves the historian and that which a court of justice demands is most satis- factorily discussed. A defect in the treatment of this branch, is the comparative neglect of that important element in all but contemporaneous history, inferential evidence from analogy, where from the presence of one phaanomenon in a social state others are inferred which are known to depend on or to be found in constant coexistence with the first. No reader of M. Comte or Mr. Mill will need to be told how supremely important this sort of evidence is in constructing the social state of any particular past period; and no reader of any modern history of repute will be at a loss for instances of its auxiliary power. It constitutes, in fact, the instru- ment by which historical imagination guides itself, the pier upon which it rests its substantial creations. With this exception, Mr. Lewis has shown himself thoroughly master of the methods of his- tory, considered both as a science and an art. His second head indicates a description of the essential and uni- versal attributes of a government, of the instruments by which it acts, of the relations between it and its subject, and between these latter among themselves ; being thus identical and coextensive with universal jurisprudence. To it would belong the determination of technical terms—of a nomenclature in politics. The essential of these is shown to be, that they should be such that general pro- positions about them may be possible ; either popular terms de- prived of their vagueness by a definition, or terms of art to which professional practice has given a definite meaning. The difficulties in the way of the formation of a technical terminology in political science are skilfully pointed out, and illustrated with judicious co- piousness.
It is of course under the third head of speculative politics that the methods of inferring political causation are treated ; and to this the first two are subsidiary, finding in it their meaning and value. Those who are familiar with the last book of Mr. Mill's Treatise on Logic will find here nothing absolutely new ; but the bony structure and the nervous centres only were laid down by Mr. Mill : an anatomist could make out the creature from its rudimentary form ; but the lay public will not be ill-pleased to have some hard work saved them, and will perhaps appreciate the methods of political science more fully, now that they are exhibited in ample detail, with plentiful illustration, and in language which, whatever be its faults, certainly makes no exorbitant demand from its compression upon the most indolent reader of moderate apprehension. Mr. Lewis throws clear light upon the conditions within which the four methods of the inductive logic are trustworthy in poli- ties, upon the processes of verification necessary to their safe applica- tion, and upon the causes, arising from the complex nature of politi- cal phtenomena and the fact of their non-recurrence in identical forms, of this necessity. He is particularly worth consulting on the, inapplicability of direct experimenta lucifera inpolitics, and on the compensation which the scientific investigator derives from the information voluntarily afforded by the intelligent beings who are the subjects of political acts and relations, from the experi- menta fructifera which governments do in fact institute every time they pass a law, and from the morbid states into which great crises throw whole political communities, or particular organs of those communities. The problem of political causation is minutely subdivided, and the application of the methods is pursued through each case, beginning with the simple historical problem of past causation in singulars, and ending with universal propositions of political causation. Mr. Lewis seems inclined to doubt whether universal propositions can be established in the region of specu- lative polities, as they undoubtedly may be in that of positive politics; whether the strict universality of any theorem respecting the effects of a particular institution would not be prevented by the modifying influence of national diversities, or at least whether such theorems must not be conveyed in so vague and abstract a form as to have little instructive value. The same reason has in- duced Mr. Mill to say that there can be no separate science of go-
vernment,—meaning, we presume, that there are no universal data on which to build inductive observation. Mr. Lewis will, we think, carry conviction with him in his attempt at modifying so sweeping an assertion of an undoubted truth if only not taken to be more exclusive than it really is. But the true region of specula- tive political science is not umversal humanity. Descend from it to classes of communities, having certain properties in common, and we are enabled to establish a vast number of true political theorems, and at the same time to give them fulness, life, and substance. It is thus in reality that M. Comte has proceeded, taking the development of the Greek, Grieco-Roman, and European nations, as the guide to his philosophy : it is an assumption that all other races and nations, had their development been allowed to culminate, would have followed exactly on anything like the same type. Such propositions both Mr. Mill and Mr. Lewis point out as being no longer bare, jejune, and hollow generalities, but as resembling the media axiomata of Bacon, fruitful in specula- tive truth, and admirable guides in the business of life. It will, perhaps, strike most of Mr. Lewis's readers as a defect, that throughout his chapters on the methods of inferring political causation, the longest and most important portion of his work, he has said nothing of that science on whose laws, after all, the deep foundations of political science rest, and to which Mr. Mill has given the name of ethology. It is assumed that political scienoe is not, like geometry, self-contained, supplying its own axioms and ultimate proofs : but to make a systematic treatise on the subject complete, needs, in our opinion, a reference much more explicit to the source or sources of such axioms and ultimate proofs.
The latter part of the second volume deals with the conversion of political theorems into rules of art, and with the application of them to practical cases. This is a process which has of course gone on empirically since the world began ; how empirically, the present condition of political doctrine and practice in the most ad- vanced communities rather terribly testifies. Nor do we expect that the study of this book, or of any other book, will make prac- tically wise statesmen and legislators. The value of such a trea- tise, and of treatises on method in general, is rather negative than positive—rather to preserve from error than to guide to truth. The instinct, the genius for political science, the energy, the am- bition, the capacity for political conduct, are given by nature, de- veloped and fostered by the circumstances of life, not to be caught from books, any more than one can learn to be a painter or a poet by poring over the Lectures of a Reynolds or the Artes Poeticte of a Horace or a Boileau. But by such treatises carefully studied, and borne in mind amid the confusion and din of public affairs, many a political genius, many a great popular leader, may be saved from errors damaging to his own reputation and ruinous to the country whose destinies he influences. Would any statesman whose poli- tical education had been scientific have dreamt of proposing the Corn-law of 1815 ? would any people whose political education had been scientific, into the training of whose aristocracy and edu- cated classes the careful study of such a treatise as this of Mr. Lewis entered as an essential element, have ever tolerated such an attempt, had the leaders, for interested or factious purposes, pro- posed it ? It is a bright omen for our future, and for the future of Europe, that among the leaders of public opinion here and abroad, scientific ideas on the subject of history and politics are beginning to prevail to an extent unknown before ; that the empire of em- piricism is shaken, and that its doom is pronounced with as sure a prophecy of fulfilment as hung suspended over the throne of phy- sical dogmatism from the time when Bacon first systematized the processes of induction, and raised the platform from which so many successive and successful assaults have been directed against igno- rance, superstition, and credulity. I Obviously enough, a work like this is only a necessary prelimina- ry to the accomplishment of that object of which we spoke at the beginning as the object of our age, the establishment of politics on a scientific basis. The science has yet to be constructed ; and he would be a very rash man who should venture to predict the rate of the building, or its form and appearance when complete. A stately edifice it will be ; but it will not rise like an exhalation, nor like that other temple without the clink of hammer or any sound of workman's tool: the stones which are to form it cannot be quarried and shaped apart ; the workmen who build the temple must labour at the materials with their own hands, and shape them for their destined ends. In other words, the task will not be one altogether of compilation, of fitting together results of special science ; but, on the contrary, the demands of the master science must modify and entirely rule the special results which form its confluents. Teleology is a necessary complement of political scienoe ; and be- cause he has not so considered. it, M. A. Comte will never be the prophet of the future which his merely analytic and constructive powers would have enabled him to be. Mr. Lewis has likewise left his treatise as imperfect at this end as he has at the other by the omission of ethology. But within the limits he has assigned . self, he has done his work with high ability : he has brought to it the resources of a scholarship very rare in our country, still rarer in the class of society to which he belongs, and scarcely ever found in combination, as in him, with Parliamentary and official expe- rience. Perhaps that Parliamentary life has done him harm as well as good. No man can sit night after night in the House of Commons, and hear the English language misused, with impunity. However pure his taste, however vigorous and manly his intel- lect, the taint of tediousness and twaddle is fatally sure to strike him sooner or later. We should imagine that the original fault of j Kr. Lewis's mind was to be scholastic, minute, and formal. To this, House of Commons familiarity with vicious English has added a looseness, a diffuseness of style, which render it difficult to concentrate attention upon his book. It is like flying in vacno. The human mind needs resistance in order to the tension of its -Towers. Hence the charm of a writer like Mill, of all writers -who are difficult without being obscure. Mr. Lewis gives no sign of mental tension himself, and excites none in his readers. But, per contra, for those who delight to be ever deviating from the straight path of continuous thought, a charming flowery land is /provided, in meadows of notes from all kinds of writers, and in many languages. Nor will the reader who is more intent upon his progress, and more economical of his time, be sorry to be fur- nished by one so widely read as Mr. Lewis with a guide to the literature of this most interesting and important subject.
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