vin DARWINISM AND DESIGN 147 



wealth-producing machine ; (2) he must be taken as 

 absolutely intelligent, as always using the best means to 

 his end, as knowing how to use his labour to best 

 advantage, and how to sell its products in the most 

 advantageous manner ; (3) he must be taken as absolutely 

 selfish, as absolutely disregardful of any consideration but 

 that of how he could acquire the largest possible amount 

 of wealth. Having thus simplified economic facts, let us 

 see what will happen. And they proceeded to build up 

 the science of abstract economics. When it was objected 

 to them that their methodological assumption, the economic 

 man, did not exist in reality, the wiser among them 

 replied : Of course we know that, but the conditions 

 of actual business are sufficiently close to what they 

 would be under our ideal conditions to have much light 

 thrown on them by the latter. And they gave thereby 

 a clue through the labyrinth of facts to the economists 

 who succeeded them, and were able by means of it to 

 calculate the effects in various departments of the 

 inaccuracy of the methodological assumption of the 

 economic man. 



Now the economic man is an exact parallel to the 

 accidental and indefinite variation of Darwin. They 

 are both methodological assumptions, travesties of the 

 truth, if taken as full and complete accounts of the actual 

 facts, epoch-making and indispensable organa of science, 

 if properly used. And the parallel extends still further. 

 As philosophers are well aware, there is everywhere in 

 the sciences a tendency to forget that methodological 

 assumptions are not necessarily true because they are 

 useful, 1 a tendency to assert as a fact what was at first 

 assumed as an abstraction and a fiction for greater 

 convenience in examining the facts. Alike in ordinary 

 life and in science we are almost without exception given 

 over, not to the adoration of an unknown god, but to the 

 worship of forgotten abstractions and methodological 



1 Even so excellent a thing as Pragmatism may be overdone ! In fact it 

 usually is, by its critics and in popular thinking, when methodological assumptions 

 of limited applicability are mistaken for absolute truths. 



