The Method of Analogy. Prof. Gilchrist suggests one more inductive method, that of analogy. This method has been made use of by Herbert Spencer, He says that both the State and an organism possess the sustaining, distributary and the regulating systems and both exhibit the same process of development. From this analogy, he concludes that the State is an organism. The method of analogy is, no doubt, good and it serves a useful purpose. But analogy is not proof. What analogy leads to is merely a hypothesis. It gives probability and not certainty and the farther the analogy is carried the more misleading it becomes. The difficulty of its application in Political Science is all the more marked because of the vast number of circumstances surrounding any given instance.