The _general_ Science of Society, as contrasted with the branches, shows, not what effect will follow from a given cause under given circumstances, but what are the causes and characteristic phenomena of States of Society generally. A _State of Society_ is the simultaneous state of all the chief social facts (e.g. employments, beliefs, laws). It is a condition of the whole organism; and, when analysed, it exhibits uniformities of coexistence between its different elements. But, as this correlation between the phenomena is itself a law resulting from the laws which regulate the succession between one state of society and another, the fundamental problem of Social Science is to find these latter laws. The form of this succession, by which (on account of the exceptionally constant reaction, in social facts, of the effects, i.e. human character, on their causes, i.e. human circumstances) one social state is ever in process of changing into a different one, is now allowed to be, not, as in the solar system, a cycle, but a _progress_ (by which is not here _necessarily_ meant _improvement_, whatever the fact may be). In France it has been thought, that a law of progress, to be found by an analysis of the course of history, would enable us to predict the whole future. But such a law would be empirical, and not true beyond its own facts; for the succession of mental and social states cannot have an independent law. Empirical laws must indeed be found; or a _general_ Science of Society would be impossible: for, the character of any one generation is so much the result of the characters of all prior ones, that _men_ could not compute so long a series from the elementary laws producing it. But the empirical laws, when found (as they can be, since the series of the effects as a whole is ever growing in uniformity), must be shown by deductions to be, if not the only possible, or even the most probable, at least possible, consequences of the laws of human nature.