86 Economic Cycles: Their Law and Cause 



The biased point of view implied in these descriptions 

 led to an undue stressing of those aspects of the science 

 which seemed to bear out the pretentious metaphors. 

 One would naturally suppose from this manner of 

 conceiving the science that the economic theorists 

 would at once have entered upon their task with the 

 methods that had proved themselves useful in the 

 physical sciences. But this they did not do. They 

 seemed to identify the method of physical sciences with 

 experimentation, and since, as they held, scientific 

 experimentation is impossible in social life, a special 

 method had to be devised. The invention was a dis- 

 guised form of the classical cceteris paribus, the method 

 of the static state. 



The point of view that has been exemplified in this 

 chapter is that the facts in their full concreteness must 

 never be lost from sight ; that the laws which are sought 

 are of necessity, at first, proximate laws, laws that 

 obtain in full empirical reality, and are means of arriv- 

 ing at laws of larger generality; that the method to be 

 followed is the method which makes progress from the 

 data to generalization by a progressive synthesis — 

 the method of statistics. 1 



1 With regard to the methodology of the social sciences, the 

 writings of Cournot are always helpful. The following quotatipn 

 is taken from a treatise published thirteen years after his epoch 

 making Recherches sur les principes math&matiques de la theorie des 

 richesses. 



Si nous restons dans l'ordre des causes secondaires et des faits 

 observables, le seul auquel la science puisse atteindre, la theorie 

 math£matique du hasard . . . nous apparait comme Fapplication 

 la plus vaste de la science des nombres, et celle qui Justine le mieux 



