niyaicAL method. 507 



sidered by political economy as flowing solely from tlie desire of wealtli. 

 The science then proceeds to investigate the laws which govern these 

 several operations, under th<' supposition that man is a being who is 

 determined, by the necessity of his nature, to prefer a gi-eater portion 

 of wealth to a smaller, in all cases, without any other exception than 

 that cotistituted by the two counter-motives already specified. Not 

 that any political economist was ever so absurd as to suppose that 

 mankind are really thus constituted, but because this is the mode in 

 which science must necessarily proceed. When an cflt'ct depends 

 upon a concurrence of causes, these causes must be studied ouc, at a 

 time, and their laws separately investigated, if we wish, through the 

 causes, to obtain the j)ower of either predicting or controlling the 

 effect; since the law of the effect is compounded of the laws of all 

 the causes which determine it. The law of the centripetal and that of 

 the tangential force must have been known, before the motions of the 

 earth and planets could be explained, or many of them predicted. 

 The same is the case with the conduct of man in society. In order to 

 judge how he will act under the variety of desires and aversions which 

 are concurrently operating upon him, we must know how he would act 

 under the exclusive influence of each one in particular. There is, 

 perhaps, no action of a man's life in which he is neither under the 

 immediate nor under the remote influence of any impulse but the mere 

 desire of wealth. There are many parts of human conduct of which 

 wealth is not even the principal object, and to these political economy 

 does not pretend that its conclusions are applicable. But there are 

 also certain departments of human affairs, in which the acquisition of 

 wealth is the main and acknowledged end. It is only of these that 

 political economy takes notice. The manner in which it necessarily 

 proceeds is that of treating the main and acknowledged end as if it 

 were the sole end; which, of all hypotheses equally simple, is the 

 nearest to the truth. The political eccmomist inquires, what are the 

 actions which would be produced by this desire, if within the depart- 

 ments in question it were unimpeded by any other. In this way a 

 nearer approximation is obtained than would otherwise be practicable 

 to the real oi'der of human affairs in those dcjiartmcnts. This approxi- 

 mation has then to be corrected by making proper allowance for the 

 effects of any impulses of a different description, which can be shown 

 to interfere with the result in any particular case. Only in a few of 

 the most striking cases (such as the important one of the principle of 

 population) are these corrections interpolated into the expositions of 

 political economy itself; the strictness of purely scientific anangement 

 being thereby somewhat departed from, fur the sake of j)ractical utility. 

 So far as it is known, or may be presumed, that the conduct of man- 

 kind in the pursuit of wealth is under the collateral influence of any 

 other of the properties of our nature, than the desire of obtaining the 

 greatest quantity of wealth with the least labor and self-denial, the 

 conclusions of political economy will so far fail of being applicable to 

 the explanation or pnjdiction of real evt-nts, utitil tliey are modified by 

 a correct allowance for the; degree of influence exercised by the other 

 cause." 



When M. Comte (for of the objections raised by inferior thinkers it 

 is unnecessary here to take account) pronounces the attempt to treat 

 political economy, even provisionally, as a science apart, to be a mia- 



