moulds _entirely_ customs and laws. The neglect of national diversities sometimes (as e.g. the assumption by our political economists, that in commercial populations everywhere, equally as in Great Britain and America, all motives yield to the desire of gain) vitiates only the practical application of a proposition; but when the national character is mixed up at every step with the phenomena (as is the case in questions respecting the tendencies of forms of government), the phenomena cannot properly be insulated in a separate branch of Sociology. As in Ethology and other deductive sciences, so in Statistics and History there are empirical laws. The immediate causes of social facts are often not open to direct observation; and the deductive science can determine only what causes produce a given effect, and not the frequency and quantities of them; in such cases, the empirical law of the causes (which, however, can be applied to new cases only if we know that the remoter causes, on which these latter causes depend, remain unchanged) must be found through that of the effects, the Deductive Science relying then for its data on indirect observation. But, in the separate branches of Sociology, we cannot obtain empirical laws by specific experience. It is so particularly (on account both of the number of the causes, and also the fewness of the instances to be compared with the one in point) when the effect of any one (e.g. Corn Laws) of many simultaneous social causes has to be determined. We can, however, in such cases, verify _indirectly_ a theory as to the influence of a particular cause in given circumstances, by seeing if the same theory accounts for the _existing_ state of actual social facts which that cause has a tendency to influence. CHAPTER X. THE INVERSE DEDUCTIVE, OR HISTORICAL, METHOD.