some other quarter, the Italians will not take advantage of the situation. And, on the other hand, Italy can spare, in the event of a French aggression, all her forces in the Valley of Aosta, being fully reassured with regard to the intentions of Austria. But a nation situated as Italy is, has no reason to fear isolation. Nay, under certain circumstances, momentary isolation may prove more advantageous than alliances which compromise a nation's liberty of action. The Austro-Italian Alliance was a political necessity, and it is only too natural that its solemn confirmation at Vienna should have been welcomed by the peoples of the two countries with demonstrations of joy. But, while Italy will stand still, the advance of Austria eastward may be followed by the advance of German influence and preponderance on the way to Vienna. Italy will not wait to see the Germans at Trieste, to perceive that the policy traced by Count Cavour has been disgracefully obliterated by the statesmen who, in Italy, pretended to be his disciples and followers.

ROBERTO STUART.

A MISSING SCIENCE.

IN

N the October number of this Review, I sought to direct attention to what I said was a missing science. I pointed out what this science would deal with, and the kind of results that would arise from a proper study of it: but I did so in a general way only. I now return to the subject, and I propose to be more explicit.

The science in question, as I said in the place referred to, is a science of human action. This, however, is a very ambiguous phrase: we require far stricter language. A science of human action, in some sense or other, has been often declared possible; but never, to my knowledge, in the sense I am about to attach to it. It has been declared possible in kindred senses, but never in the same sense and though the likeness here implied is important, it is important mainly because it will help us to see the difference. I shall be best able, perhaps, to explain my own sense, by referring to the writer who has, I think, come most near to it. That writer is Buckle. Let us briefly reconsider his position, his aim, and methods.

The science Buckle sought to establish, he called the Science of History; and that such a science was at least conceivably possible, must, he argued, be plain to every one who assented to the following propositions:-"That when we perform an action, we perform it in consequence of some motive or motives; that those motives are the result of some antecedents; and that therefore if we are acquainted with the whole of the antecedents and with all the laws of their movements, we could, with unerring certainty, predict the whole of their immediate results." If we believe thus much, he urged, we must see that the science is possible conceivably: if we turn to the materials to our hand, we shall see that it is possible actually; and that we shall be able in the end-the following are his own words-" to discover the principles which govern the character and the destiny of nations."

There is

The me ́erials in question he discusses at great length; and they are many in kind and character: but there is one class on which he dwells especially; and which alone gives meaning to the others. This is the class of material supplied to us by statistics. Statistics, he points out, afford a new kind of evidence; and they put us in possession of a new order of facts. They have completely revolutionized our conception of human conduct. They have shown us what we might else have dreamt about, but could never have hoped to prove-the sameness of human conduct, when under the same circumstances. This holds good apparently of even the smallest matters. Thus there is a startling regularity, every year, in the number of letters posted without any direction. Marriages and murders recur in the same way; so does the proportion between male and female births. another example more striking still. "Among public and registered crimes," writes Buckle, "there is none which seems so completely dependent on the individual as suicide. . . . . It may therefore very naturally be thought impracticable to refer suicide to general principles, or to detect anything like regularity in an offence which is so eccentric, so solitary, so impossible to control by legislation, and which the most vigilant police can do nothing to diminish. . . . . These being the peculiarities of this singular crime, it is surely an astonishing fact that all the evidence we possess respecting it, points to one great conclusion. . . . that suicide is merely the product of the general condition of society. . . . . In a given state of society, a certain number of persons must put an end to their own life. This is the general law; and the special question as to who shall commit the crime, depends, of course, upon special laws; which however, in their total action, must obey the larger social law to which they are all subordinate."

Such was the method of observation, and such was the first great inference, on which Buckle sought to base the study of the science of history. Statistics of human actions were, of course, not to be our only materials. We were to study them in connection with numerous other conditions, such as climate, culture, and politics. That, however, we may take for granted: it is not to the point here. What is to the point is his treatment of the actions themselves, and his celebrated contention as to the scientific way of observing them. This, as we have seen, amounts to the following doctrine; that nothing is to be done by observing individual cases, whether of events or of a mental process. Such a method he calls the "Metaphysical," and hardly any conclusion, he says, has ever been arrived at by it, that is not either trivial, or else uncertain. Nor is the reason of this, he thinks, far to seek. "Everything," he writes, "we at present know, has been ascertained by studying phenomena, from which all casual disturbances having been removed, the law remains as a conspicuous residue. And this can only be done by observations so numerous as to eliminate the disturbances, or else by experiments so delicate as to isolate the

phenomena. One of these conditions is essential to all in luctive science; but neither of them does the metaphysician obey: . . . . so that while he, on the one hand, is unable to isolate his observations from disturbances, he, on the other hand, refuses to adopt the only remaining precaution—he refuses so to enlarge his survey as to eliminate the disturbances by which his observations are troubled."

Buckle applies these words, in the place from which I quote them, to metaphysical studies commonly so called; but he uses such studies as a passing illustration only: he is really aiming at the study of action and of history. What he urges comes to this just as the philosopher makes no solid discoveries by merely studying a single mind, so the student of history makes no solid discoveries by merely studying single lives, single events, or even single periods.

Such is the outline of the argument in Buckle's opening chapters; and I venture here to remind the reader of it, not that I may criticize the method which it advocates, but that I may point out a want in the materials, and, above all, in the subject matter, to which that method is to be applied. The science of history, Buckle says, is based upon many other sciences; they alone make it possible. What I shall try to make clear is, that of those other sciences, there is one that has been completely missed by him. He has grazed it, he has touched it, but he has never laid his hands upon it. It is still to the world as much a missing science, as was Political Economy at the beginning of the last century. The best name I can give to this science is, I think, the science of human character.

:

Let us

return to the passage There is no act, he

I will explain my meaning further. just quoted, in which Buckle speaks of suicide. says, "which seems so completely dependent on the individual." That, however, is only seeming what it is really dependent on, is "the general condition of society;" and, consequently, what the man of science must study, is not the private history of any individual suicide, but the number of such men in recurring periods, and the relation of this number to general social conditions. Now here, it seems to me, we have a piece of slovenly thinking, which underlies and vitiates the whole of Buckle's system. It may be quite true, or at least we may suppose it to be, that between the particular act, and the general social conditions, there does exist the strict relation that he says there does. But if this be so, why is it? The relation exists in virtue of a chain of events or facts, the last link in which is the private character of the individual; and were this character different, the act would be different also. Given a bold man instead of a timid one, a sanguine man instead of a phlegmatic one, we might see resulting from the very same external causes, not suicide, but a fresh start in life. Indeed, Buckle himself has pointed out at length what a complex internal process, on the part of the agent, is involved in the commission of the act-what a nice balancing of motion, what a conflict of thoughts and

Surely

passions and the same is the case with any act whatever. then one would think that this internal process-this process in the consciousness of the individual, was a thing requiring study. It may be wholly dependent on external causes, certainly: but still, in producing their result, the external causes depend equally upon it. Buckle, however, has failed to note this. He has overlooked a truth, whilst busy in exposing a fallacy. We shall never, he says, understand an act by the most careful study possible of the character of the man committing it. And in this he is quite right; but he leaps from this truth to a most strangely illogical conclusion. Because we shall never understand an act by studying only its immediate antecedents or conditions, therefore, he says, these antecedents or conditions are not to be studied at all. His contention, as we have seen, is, that when dealing with biographical details, such as a man's own conscious emotions on any given occasion, we cannot, as he says, "isolate the phenomena," or rise from our observations to any scientific generalization. And of course this is true; there can be no science of any single character, just as there can be no science of any single mind. But it is surely strange that Buckle, with all his materials before him, did not rise from this truth to another, which is next door to it :that though there can be no science of any character in particular there can be a science of human character in general.

Let us take, for instance, the case of a vast mob of enthusiasts, inspired like one man, with a single purpose, such as the destruction of the Bastille, we will say, or the condemning the arrest of Mr. Parnell. Now it is plain that no member of either of the mobs in question, could completely explain his presence in it, by any personal confessions of his own. The Bastille fell from causes which its direct destroyers were unconscious of. Mr. Gladstone is cheered or hissed under exactly the same conditions. Events and circumstances are involved in each case, which may perhaps be traced out by the scientific historian, but which are utterly invisible and unknown to the actors. Indeed, these last, in their joint action, may be exemplifying a recondite law, whose very existence is yet undreamed of. But though in looking at such events in a broad scientific light, the confession of a single mobsman would be of very little use to us, there are two points to remember.

A mob collects and acts, we say, owing to certain remote causes, and in obedience to a certain law. Let us admit that. But in the first place, be the law never so general, and the causes never so minute, the law exists, and the effect follows the causes, only in virtue of each. mobsman being a man of certain character. In a mob of twenty thousand men, there are twenty thousand characters, twenty thousand sets of motives working; and the conduct of the mob is the exact resultant of these. We are accustomed, it is true, to ignore this fact in language. We speak of a mob as though it were really a single animal. that it got exicited, that it was appeased, or that it did this or that.

We say