THE HYPOTHESIS OF EQUAL UNITS 53 



the quotation of one further passage. "A true Book i 

 social aggregate" he says ["as distinct from a mere 

 large family\ is a union of like individuals, in- 

 dependent of one another in parentage, and approxi- 

 mately equal in capacities." 



Here is the case stated with the most absolute 

 clearness. All congenital inequalities, as was said 

 just now, between the various individuals who 

 make up the aggregate are ignored ; and it is 

 upon this hypothesis of approximately equal units, 

 acted on by different external circumstances, that he 

 attempts to build up his whole system of sociology. 

 He is, indeed, little as he himself may suspect it, 

 reproducing in another form the error of Karl 

 Marx and the earlier of the so-called " scientific 

 socialists," who maintained that all wealth was the 

 product of common or average labour, measured 

 by time, and that hour for hour any one labourer 

 necessarily produced as much wealth as another. 

 The socialists of to-day are already beginning to see 

 that this monstrous, though ingeniously advocated, His failure, 

 doctrine is untenable as the foundation of economics ; others, a as 

 and yet, strange to say, a doctrine strictly equivalent ^Sogists, 

 to it forms the accepted foundation of con- a ^ ises / r "' 



their building 



temporary social science. That science starts with on this false 



i i 1 r , , , hypothesis. 



the hypothesis of approximately equal units, and 

 ignores the congenital differences between the 

 individuals who compose the aggregate. We shall 

 find it to be ultimately from differences of this kind 

 that all the practical problems which beset civilisa- 

 tion spring, and that the inability of the modern 



