history and social life of the American settlers. “Gold in the ground is a cipher for a study of society so long as we are doing nothing and not tending to do anything in connection with it. Gold that does not exist is an important factor when we are in a turmoil of chasing for it.”[1]
The subject matter of historical law, since it concerns the relations of groups of socially organized human beings to each other, involves reference to human behaviour that can be often described by psychological laws. But these psychological laws alone can never explain historical or social events. For historical and social events are determined by the way human beings interact with the physical elements of their environment. Before we can have knowledge of history and society we must have some prior knowledge of Nature. Before we can say that it was Brutus who slew Cæsar, we must understand something about the biology of death and the physics of the instruments of death. The variable historical and social behaviour of men, who are subject to the same psychological laws, indicates that the latter cannot explain the former. Such laws are relevant in history only when they are taken together with physical and cultural conditions. “Let desires, skills, purposes, beliefs be what they will, what happens is the product of the interacting intervention of physical conditions like soil, sea, mountains, climate, tools, and machines, in all their vast variety, with the human factor.”[2]
Having won the right to consider social and historical laws as relatively autonomous, it remains to ask to what extent they are conditions of human action and to what extent they are modifiable by human action. Let us consider a few typical situations. We present them as purely illustrative of the position to be developed.
1. Suppose a political organization has before it a proposal to nominate a man of Catholic or Jewish faith for the office of President of the United States. It is objected that, although there are no constitutional bars to his election, the history of the country reveals a law of American political behaviour that “dooms” him to defeat, despite the fact that in every other respect he is an ideal candidate. This law states that “no Catholic or Jew can be successful in a race for the highest political office in the United States.” It is presented as an induction from experience and fortified by social and psychological generalizations about
- ↑ Bentley, op. cit., p. 193.
- ↑ John Dewey, Logic: Theory of Inquiry, p. 492, New York, 1939.
