738 REPORT — 1886. 



sliould hardly look for siicli a legislator among the ranks of practical men, ' swarm- 

 ing with theories, with ideas built up with the greatest dogmatic confidence in his 

 knowledo"e of business. His common sense is the very last authority to which the 

 decision of what is right political economy ought to be referred.' From the 

 guidance of such untrained empiricism, as obnoxious to Professor Bonamy Price as 

 to Mr. Herbert Spencer, no right guidance is to be hoped, nothing but disaster can 

 be expected. In point of form the controversy was obscured by the difficulty that 

 exists in deciding the exact limits of art and science respectively, or of defining 

 either the one or the other of these. It is not for one whose training has been 

 strictly practical, whose conclusions have been derived rather from observation of 

 contemporary facts thau from academic teaching, and whose present object is not 

 to weary you with dialectic subtilties, but to insist that true social science is no- 

 thing if not practical, to refine on the shades of meaning that attach to words and 

 terms. It may be left to a more fitting time and place to reconcile or to decide 

 between the dictum of Mill that ' art necessarily presupposes knowledge ; art, in 

 any but its infant state, presupposes scientific knowledge,' '■ and that of Dr. Guy : — 

 ' An art so long as it continues to be a mere aftair of skilful handiwork, remains an 

 art • but directly it submits itself to the guidance of well-ascertained principles, it 

 may claim to be a science ; ' - or to reconcile the saying of Sir John Ilerschel, that 

 ' Science is the knowledge of many, orderly and methodically digested and ar- 

 ranged, so as to become attainable by one,' ^ with that of Professor Sedgwick, who 

 understood science as ' the consideration of all subjects, whether of a pure or 

 mixed nature, capable of being reduced to measurement and calculation.''^ Within 

 the boimds of one or other of these definitions we may arrive at the exclusion from 

 the domain of science of all but the registration of immutable laws, and lay down 

 as the 7ie plus ultra of science the statement of the simplest mathematical formula. 

 In this showing there can be no experimental science, for there can be no science 

 until the experimental process has evolved the knowledge of a law. Or, on the 

 other hand, we may easily claim a place among sciences for the objects of this 

 Section, namely, to investigate the laws which govern the individual and social 

 life of man, to examine causes which seem to be accountable for exceptions, real 

 or apparent, to such laws, and, in the words of Dr. George Mayr, ' from milliards of 

 facts obtam the grand average of the world.' 



It is perhaps in the sciences that have their origin in our knowledge of physio- 

 logical law that we can find the closest parallel to the position of economics as a 

 science. The sciences of medicine or of surgery are clearly based on our acquaintance 

 with the growth, the nutrition, and the decay of the body, the structure and pro- 

 perties of its component tissues. We Imow that ' if the brain be out, the man will 

 die ' ; that if we open an artery he will certaiidy bleed to death ; that a given 

 quantity of a certain drug will inevitably kill. But if medical science were no 

 more thau this, the physician would be no more than the veterinary, the surgeon 

 nothinf better than a joiner. In the application of medical knowledge, whether 

 to a particular case or to an epidemic, previous history, immediate environment, 

 even psychological considerations must certainly be taken into account. Mistakes 

 have arisen, and still arise ; we are amazed at the faulty inferences and analogies 

 that have been drawn by medical experts in the past, and we may doubt whether 

 finality has been in all cases attained even at the present ; but the phj'sical laws 

 remain, and are not discredited by the faulty interpretation of them by their 

 students. 



We need not, then, despair of the future of political economy, and acquiesce in 

 its relegation to a distant planet, because its teaching, based too often on a 23rion 

 reasoning, and too little on the experience of history, does not always square with 

 the actions of men, warped in their judgment of any particular problem of the day 

 by prejudice or self-interest. May we not claim that pohtical economy has rather 

 taken vip wider grovmd than, as has been said by a recent writer, that it has aban- 



' Lof/ic, Introduction, § 2, cf. also § 6. 



^ ' Meaning of term Statistics,' Joitrn. of Stat. Soc, Dec. 1865, p. 488. 



' Discourse on Xatural Pliilosojjhi/, p. 18. 



* Address to British Association, 1833. 



