6 ARISTO CRA CY AND E VOL UTION 



Book i accurate science is, that it was thought doubtful 

 whether political economy could be called a science 

 at all. The doubt thus raised cannot be said to 

 have justified itself. In spite of all the attacks that 

 have been made against the earlier economists, their 

 principal doctrines survive to the present day, as 

 being, so far as they go, genuine scientific truths. 

 But whenever the thinker, who has been educated 

 in the school of modern physical science, betakes 

 himself now to the study of society and human 

 action, and begins to apply to these the developed 

 theory of evolution, though he does not reject the 

 doctrines of the earlier economists, he sees them in 

 a new light, by which their significance is profoundly 

 changed. The earlier economists took society as 

 they found it, and they reasoned as though what 

 was true of the economic life around them must 

 be absolutely and universally true of economic life 

 always. Here is the point as to which the thinker 

 what is new is of to-day differs from them. He does not dispute 

 the truth of the deductions drawn by them with 

 re g ai "d to society as it existed during their own 

 epoch ; but, educated by the methods and dis- 

 coveries of the physical and biological evolutionist, 

 he perceives that society itself is in process of 

 constant change, that many economic doctrines 

 which have been true during the present century 

 had little application to society during the Middle 

 Ages, and that centuries hence they may perhaps 

 have even less. Thus, though he does not repudiate 

 or disregard the economic science of the past, he 



