34 ECONOMICS 



was not impeached and could not be impeached by any such attacks. 

 The time had not yet come. So long as utilitarianism was in the 

 ascendent, the public credentials of political economy must needs 

 be the best. But let the supremacy of utilitarianism once be 

 threatened, and troubles must begin for economics. The old con- 

 stitution would no longer avail; a change must follow. 



That change began about the middle of the century and, strangely 

 enough, was associated with the intellectual enterprise of the man 

 who frequently has been represented as having given to political 

 economy its most telling exposition from a clarified Bicardian 

 standpoint, so much so, that the English economics of this middle 

 period has sometimes been called the Ricardo-Mill political economy. 

 But seen in the fuller and truer perspective of time, Mill's Political 

 Economy is read to little advantage and his position is badly under- 

 stood, when he is represented as merely the "Secretaire de la Redac- 

 tion," keeping to his task with the "piety of a disciple." The truth 

 of the matter is that Mill was at a transition in British thinking in a 

 sense which neither he nor his following appreciated. In his hands 

 political economy was shifting its ground, insensibly perhaps, but 

 nevertheless unmistakably. Mill may have echoed the laws and 

 phrases of the earlier generation of thinkers, but he was inform- 

 ing them with a new spirit which reflects the presence of the new 

 influences that were affecting the thinking of his day. This is not 

 the place to attempt an enumeration of these influences. They 

 were several and diverse. It will answer the purpose to mention a 

 single one connected with the decline of utilitarianism and its psy- 

 chological counterpart. For this decline imported a considerable 

 change in the outlook and status of economic science. The change 

 in question is already foreshadowed in Mill's Logic (1843), where the 

 older view that individual conduct and character are but the mechan- 

 ical product of the molding circumstances of the environment is 

 qualified so far as to allow to the individual himself an influence 

 and responsibility in shaping those circumstances. That is to say, 

 a teleological trend is coming to be claimed for individual conduct 

 where formerly such a trend was looked for and found only in the 

 sequence of events in nature. In other words, the human nature, 

 into the workings of which the economist inquired, is being differ- 

 ently construed under the guidance of a changed psychology. The 

 psychology that was making its way in Mill's time was moving away 

 from the older associationist standpoint and approaching the posi- 

 tion of modern functional psychology. Centering its interest in the 

 process of attention, it teaches that cognition or perception as the 

 attentive process always implies the presence of a purpose or interest 

 that elicits and guides the attention; that attention is essentially 

 the process of examining a situation with the view to discovering 



