science.

Much has been said and written for centuries past, by the practical or
empirical school of politicians, in condemnation of theories founded on
principles of human nature, without an historical basis; and the
theorists, in their turn, have successfully retaliated on the
practicalists. But we know not any thinker who, before M. Comte, had
penetrated to the philosophy of the matter, and placed the necessity of
historical studies as the foundation of sociological speculation on the
true footing. From this time any political thinker who fancies himself
able to dispense with a connected view of the great facts of history, as
a chain of causes and effects, must be regarded as below the level of
the age; while the vulgar mode of using history, by looking in it for
parallel cases, as if any cases were parallel, or as if a single
instance, or even many instances not compared and analysed, could reveal
a law, will be more than ever, and irrevocably, discredited.

The inversion of the ordinary relation between Deduction and Induction
is not the only point in which, according to M. Comte, the Method proper
to Sociology differs from that of the sciences of inorganic nature. The
common order of science proceeds from the details to the whole. The
method of Sociology should proceed from the whole to the details. There
is no universal principle for the order of study, but that of proceeding
from the known to the unknown; finding our way to the facts at whatever
point is most open to our observation. In the phaenomena of the social
state, the collective phaenomenon is more accessible to us than the
parts of which it is composed. This is already, in a great degree, true
of the mere animal body. It is essential to the idea of an organism, and
it is even more true of the social organism than of the individual. The
state of every part of the social whole at any time, is intimately