The Law of Demand 85 



" exact science." According to the view of the foremost 

 theorists, the development of the doctrines of utility 

 and value had laid the foundation of scientific economics 

 in exact concepts, and it would soon be possible to 

 erect upon the new foundation a firm structure of 

 interrelated parts which, in definiteness and cogency, 

 would be suggestive of the severe beauty of the 

 mathematico-physical sciences. But this expectation 

 has not been realized. On the contrary, faith in the 

 possibility of an adequate "exact" treatment of the 

 science has progressively diminished, and interest in 

 economic theory in general has decidedly lost ground. 

 There must have been something fundamentally wrong 

 with the traditional handling of the subject, for cer- 

 tainly it must be admitted that the parts of a science 

 most worthy of study are precisely those parts which are 

 concerned with the general and the universal. Why, 

 then, should there have been the gradual dissipation of 

 interest in theoretical economics? 



The explanation is found in the prejudiced point of 

 view from which economists regarded the possibilities of 

 the science and in the radically wrong method which 

 they pursued. It was assumed gratuitously that 

 economics was to be modeled on the simpler mathe- 

 matical, physical sciences, and this assumption created 

 a prejudice at the outset both in selecting the data to be 

 investigated and in conceiving of the types of laws that 

 were to be the object of research. Economics was 

 to be a "calculus of pleasure and pain," a "mechanics of 

 utility," a "social mechanics," a "physique sociale." 



