It is often regarded almost as a matter of admission, on the part of the cultivators of social and political philosophy, that their subjects defy scientific treatment; and that, when they talk of tracing out laws of social wellbeing or progress, they use words which indicate, at most, a very faint analogy between the methods which they affect to follow, and those really employed in the physical sciences. The reproach to which they are exposed, on this ground, would never have arisen, or would not have been merited, had they habituated themselves and others to regard their subject, as a science, in the ordinary sense of an inquiry into nature, and not as a series of random observations, in which the contingent and the necessary, the permanent and the accidental, were hopelessly and inextricably mixed up.