Science and Industry 



beginning had been made in social psychology, 

 and in a nation where social science is still almost 

 without meaning for the multitude, and is derided 

 as a charlatan or pretender by most devotees of the 

 physical sciences, social psychology is the least cul- 

 tivated of all studies. Industrial power, as modern 

 science exhibits it, cannot be properly utilised with- 

 out human direction, and this direction depends 

 not merely upon knowledge but upon motive. The 

 waste of actual industrial power and the retardation 

 of industrial progress, which are admitted facts, are 

 principally due to an uneconomical direction of 

 human motives. The nearest approach which 

 current political economy makes towards a recog- 

 nition of this vital truth is in some loose allusions 

 to a " standard of comfort " conceived from the 

 standpoint of the consumption of a single worker 

 or a single family. Now until the central theme of 

 economic science, Value, is resolved into its two 

 sets of psychical determinants, subjective cost and 

 subjective utility, and these treated in terms not 

 merely of individual but of social psychology, an 

 art of social control over the physics of industrial 

 powers, so as to utilise these powers in the service 

 of mankind, is impracticable. The slender, con- 

 fused, and often fallacious reasoning, borrowed 

 largely from German and Austrian sources, which 

 in this country and America sometimes ranks as 

 subjective political economy, has not advanced far 

 enough to throw much light upon the reforms of 

 economic structure which are essential in order to 

 get for industry the full fruits of science. 



201 



