Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/637

Rh 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? ...

As fast as crude conceptions of diseases and remedial measures grow up into Pathology and Therapeutics, we find increasing caution, along with increasing proof that evil is often done instead of good. This contrast is traceable not only as we pass from popular ignorance to professional knowledge, but as we pass from the smaller professional knowledge of early times to the greater professional knowledge of our own. The question with the modern physician is not as with the ancient—shall the treatment be blood-letting? shall cathartics, or shall diaphoretics be given? or shall mercurials be administered? But there rises the previous question shall there be any treatment beyond a wholesome regimen? And even among existing physicians it happens that, in proportion as the judgment is most cultivated, there is the least yielding to the "must-do-something" impulse.

Is it not possible, then—is it not even probable, that this supposed necessity for immediate action, which is put in as an excuse for drawing quick conclusions from few data, is the concomitant of deficient knowledge? Is it not probable that as in Biology so in Sociology, the accumulation of more facts, the more critical comparison of them, and the drawing of conclusions on scientific methods, will be accompanied by increasing doubt about the benefits to be secured, and increasing fear of the mischiefs which may be worked? Is it not probable that what in the individual organism is improperly, though conveniently, called the vis medicatrix naturæ, may be found to have its analogue in the social organism? and will there not very likely come along with the recognition of this, the consciousness that in both cases the one thing needful is to maintain the conditions under which the natural actions have fair play?—The Study of Sociology, pp. 15-21.

Manifestly if, instead of saying that I proposed to treat the diseases of this complex social organism by the aid of deductions from "abstract ethical assumptions," Prof. Huxley had, contrariwise, said that I am so over-cautious that I dare not treat them at all, save by maintaining the conditions to health, he would have had ground for his statement. As early as 1853 ("Over-Legislation," pp. 62, 63) I dwelt on the involved structure of a society and the consequent difficulty and danger of dealing with it. Since then I have more than once insisted on these facts. And now that which I have been teaching for a generation is put before me as a lesson to be learned!

Replies will, I suppose, be made to some of the things said in the foregoing pages. Always there are collateral questions on which debates may be raised. I see, for instance, that one of my remarks may have given to it a meaning quite different to that which I intended. After the ascription to me of the belief that treatment of diseases should be dictated by physiological principles, rightly enough regarded by Prof. Huxley as absurd, there came from me the remark that, according to him, "the principles of physiology, as at present known, are of no use whatever for