24 ECONOMICS 



content to present things as causally related in a material sequence. 

 Helped on by the evolutionary concept of process and the notion of 

 cumulative causation, a large part of the discipline of the material 

 sciences has been devoted to purifying the scientific mind of the 

 metaphysical animus. Genetic coherence is sought where formerly 

 a spiritual tie was wanted. 



How far our science has adopted the new conceptions is a matter 

 of such vital interest as properly to suggest the course of the review 

 to be undertaken. It must be admitted at the outset that it can 

 give no more than a partial view. An alternative course has much in 

 its favor. But with the echoes of controversy still sounding around 

 us, touching the character, province, and method of economic 

 science, it seems best to ask how the science has proceeded, rather 

 than what , in point of doctrine, it has taught. Until a science attains 

 a relatively high degree of maturity, a subordinate interest attaches 

 to the development of its particular theories, for development of this 

 sort may take place within, while the progress of the science as a 

 whole is arrested. It is only those developments of theory that 

 correspond to a change of front of the science that can be of conse- 

 quence when we are trying to measure its advance. It seems best, 

 therefore, in reviewing the science with this purpose, where brevity 

 is necessary, to treat the viewpoint as the paramount concern, and to 

 reach it by the shortest route. Progress in science means more than 

 one thing, but it means no one thing more than the successive con- 

 quest of viewpoints that afford a fuller and finer knowledge of the 

 conditions or processes with which the given science is occupied. 

 Just as the history of a country may be read in its highways, and the 

 progress of a people is written in their tools, so the history of a 

 science is most clearly revealed in the paths it has followed and the 

 methods it has used. In such a view of the matter, it is the lower 

 levels rather than the upper levels of the structure of the science 

 that are to be brought under notice. Economics has changed its 

 theoretic constitution from time to time in the course of its modern 

 history, and it will not be a misappropriation of time to inquire under 

 the pressure of what exigencies or the stimulus of what impulses the 

 modifications have taken place, and whether they have been in the 

 direction of progress. It is the foundation, framework, and outfit of 

 the science rather than its specific output that will need to be noticed, 

 the bases of its theoretical formulations rather than the formulations 

 themselves, what is sometimes called the external history of a 

 science in distinction from its internal history. 



For the purpose of understanding the theoretical constitution that 

 economics has had during the greater part of the nineteenth century, 

 it is necessary to go back to some of its eighteenth century ante- 

 cedents. To the Physiocrats belongs the credit of having attempted 



