manifested, and, therefore, not till later in life. Or suppose, again, that the character is known, and the environment the same as others of which we have had experience, yet even here the question arises, Are you able to generalize laws of the action and reaction of character and circumstances, when character does not mean disposition or temperament (the man is more than these)? If you can not class characters, so as to deduce particulars from them, then even the premises we have supposed you to possess are useless to you.
But if, turning from suppositions, which we can not here discuss, but which we believe to be at the mercy of criticism, we hold, as the only conclusion possible, that the character of the man is not what is made, but what makes itself, out of and from the disposition and environment; and if, again, we suppose that everything, which exists outside the self, must, to make that definite self which we know, be fused together in the self, in such manner as to be one thing or another thing, or well-nigh anything, according to the quality of the whole individuality; if every part is in the whole, and determines that whole—if the whole is in every part, and informs each part with the nature of the whole—then it does seem mere thoughtlessness to imagine that by ‘compounding’ and ‘deducing’ we are likely to do much. The whole question lies in a nutshell. If the man is made by what answers to your theoretical deduction, then you can deduce him in anticipation; but if he is not, then you can not. And so with society. If a stage in history is the result of what corresponds to your intellectual putting together of conclusions from premises, then you may calculate it; but if it is not, then you can not. If the individual self and society are ‘compositions’ of that order, that a knowledge of their elements gives you, apart from experience, a knowledge of the individuals, then you can ‘compound’ them, and construe them à priori; but if they are not, you can not.
To ‘understand’ (the word is used in the loosest sense) a result when you have it before you or in you, is one thing; to construe it by the intellect beforehand, altogether and absolutely another thing. I do not say, that is never done; everybody knows that, in certain spheres, you can and do deduce from laws and data: but I do say that the fact that, in respect of one subject-
