UTILITARIAN SCIENCE 19 



industrial life. The stages of past development can be determined 

 and interpreted only in the light of this analysis. The lesson which 

 the historical economist has never learned, is the importance of 

 that principle, which lies at the bottom of the whole modern theory 

 of evolution, and which was made use of by Lyell and Darwin, 

 namely, the principle that historical changes of the past are to be 

 accounted for by the long continued action of causes which are 

 at this present moment in operation and can be observed and 

 measured at the present day." "This/' says my correspondent, 

 "needs saying and re-saying, until it is burned into the minds of 

 all students of economics." 



The recent progress of economics in America has lain in part in 

 the development of economic theory by critical and by construct- 

 ive methods. An important reason for welcoming the exact and 

 critical study of economic theory is this: In the promulgation of 

 imaginary economic principles the social and political charlatan 

 finds his choice field of operation, just as the medical charlatan 

 deals with some universal law of disease and its universal cure. 

 The progress of science in every field discredits these universal 

 principles with their mystical panaceas. There is all the more reason 

 why in politics, as in medicine, those generalizations which deal 

 with necessary laws or actually observed sequence of events should 

 be critically and constructively studied. 



In general, however, the progress of economics has followed the 

 same lines as progress in other sciences, through a " minute investi- 

 gation and the application of principles already discovered or out- 

 lined by painstaking inquiry as to facts." This method of work 

 has been especially fruitful in the study of monetary problems, 

 of finance, taxation, and insurance, in the study of labor problems 

 and conditions, in the study of commerce, and in the study of crime 

 and pauperism. In its development economics is, however, many 

 years behind the natural sciences, a condition due to reliance on 

 metaphysical methods and to the inherent difficulty in the use of 

 any other. 



"Economics," says a correspondent, "has been less successful 

 than the material sciences in getting rid of the apparatus of meta- 

 physical presumptions. The economist is still too eager to formu- 

 late laws that shall disclose the ultimate spiritual meaning of things 

 instead of trying to explain how these things came to pass. He 

 has profited in small degree by those lessons which the progressive 

 evolutionary sciences have driven home in the past in the methods 

 of thinking of workers in other fields. Our science is still sadly behind 

 the times in its way of handling its subject-matter. The greatest 

 and most important work of economic investigations is to make 

 students see things as they are, to fit young men for the more highly 



