Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Remarks on the Use and Abuse of Some Political Terms
Lastly, it is a commonplace remark that authors are not always the best judges of the comparative excellence of their own works, and in this case there seem to be reasons which may well justify the preference which the public has certainly shown for the earlier and slighter treatise over the more mature and elaborate one. It is not unlikely to have been felt by many readers of the 'methods of Observation' that it is calculated to set public men on a false scent by encouraging premature and exaggerated expectations from inquiries into the laws of causation in politics; the fact being that in our present state of knowledge, and in any state that we are likely to attain for a long time to come, the difference between a good and a bad statesman depends far more upon the power and determination to get at what we call the rights of a case, to see how the elementary axioms of morality apply to a complicated state of facts, and to act and induce others to act accordingly, than upon their respective degrees of success, very slight at the best, in predicting specific consequences. The treatise now under considera tion, professing as it does to be a contribution only to one subordinate but indispensable object, namely, the forma tion of a convenient and consistent political terminology, is at least open to no objection on this score; its utility is quite independent of the truth or falsehood of any poli tical theory, and is undeniable so far as it goes. On this head I have nothing to add to the author's own intro ductory observations.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
