D. Replies to the Problems in the Development of Social Science
Problem: “It is a common notion, or at least, it is implied in may common modes of speech that the thoughts, feelings, and actions of sentient beings are not a subject of science in the same strict sense in which this is true of the objects of outward nature.”
Reply: “An facts are fitted, in themselves, to be a subject of science which follow one another according to constant laws, although those laws may not have been discovered nor even be discoverable by our existing resources.” Meteorology, tidology, and early astronomy provide examples.
Problem: Due to the inadequate date, viz, the absence of complete knowledge about every human being’s individual circumstances and about the diverse ways leading to the formation of human character, predictions matching those of a science such as astronomy are impossible.
Reply: “Inasmuch, however, as many of those effects which it is of most importance to render amenable to human foresight and control are determined like the tides, in an incomparably greater degree by general causes than by all partial causes taken together, depending in the main on those circumstances and qualities which are common to all mankind, or at least, to large bodies of them, and only in a small degree on the idiosyncrasies of organization or the peculiar history of individuals, it is evidently possible with regard to all such effects to make predictions which will almost always be verified and general propositions which are almost always true. And whenever it is sufficient to know how the great majority of the human race of some nation or class of persons will think, feel, and act, these propositions are equivalent to universal ones. For the purposes of political and social science this is sufficient.”
