TEANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 739 



doned many of its outworks : that it does not only concern itself with the produc- 

 tion and distribution of wealtii, regarding human beings as mere automata, or as 

 parts of a machine, each fulfilling its assigned function with undeviating and 

 passionless precision : but that rather 



Quidquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas, 

 Gaudia, discursus, — ' 



must be taken into account in that true statecraft to which political economy should 

 be our guide ? If the parties to an impending civil war between labour and capital, 

 to an international war of tariffs, or of arms, do not refer their differences to the 

 arbitrament of a professional economist, is it not less because scientific opinion or 

 expert common-sense could not be trusted to a sound and right decision, than 

 because 



Faciunt homines plerumque cupidine cjeci 



Et tribuunt ea quae non sunt his commoda vere ? - 



It is no reproach to economic science to have taken up wider ground, to 

 have recognised as matters within its proper scope considerations that the older 

 economists, concerning themselves with wealth in its narrow sense as the summum 

 bonum, and with the desire for its acquisition as the one mainspring of human 

 action, would have rejected as sentimental or philanthropic. Humanity is many- 

 sided, its units do not lend themselves to grouping or combination with the preci- 

 sion of mathematical symbols, and the experiments of the social philosopher are 

 subject to disturbances unknown in the laboratory of the chemist. The experi- 

 ments of physical science are difficult enough. ' In the spontaneous operation of 

 nature there is generally such complication and such obscurity, they are mostly 

 either on so overwhelmingly large or on so inaccessibly minute a scale, we are so 

 ignorant of a great part of the facts which really take place, and even those of 

 which we are not ignorant are so multitudinous, and therefore so seldom exactly 

 alike in any two cases, that a spontaneous experiment is commonly not to be 

 found.' * 



But experiment on the body social is a matter of yet greater complexity ; the 

 very conditions of man's being, and the prerogative of independent action based on 

 intelligent reasoning power, that form the basis of, and give rise to the study of 

 social science, render all experiments tentative, and their result rather a calculation 

 of grand average than an evolution of absolute law. Professor Marshall, in consider- 

 ing the functions and limits of the historic method, uses language similar to that 

 applied by Mill to experiment in the physical sciences : — 



' History never repeats itself. In economic or other social problems no event 

 has ever been an exact precedent for another. The conditions of life are so various : 

 every event is the complex result of so many causes, so closely interwoven that the 

 past can never throw a simple and direct light on the future.''' 



The attention of more than one ingenious inquirer has been occupied by the 

 harmonies and antagonisms between economic and natural science, and the former 

 may be shown to have its physical, its biological, and its psychological side.* It 

 is no reproach to the latter studies if they, too, depend on the accurate observation 

 and correct interpretation of facts for the determination of their truths and the 

 establishment of their general laws. The discovery of a footprint in some primeval 

 sandstone, of a flint weapon in the drift gravels of the Somme, of a human skull in 

 the caverns of the Meuse Valley, or in the auriferous drifts of California, may set 

 back the dial of geological time and revolutionise our conceptions of the duration 

 of animal or human life on our planet. If, then, our inquiries into the physical phe- 

 nomena that surround us compel us to admit that no finality has yet been reached, 

 need the economist hesitate to allow that the bases of his sphere of observation 

 are not immutably laid down, that his conclusions are not yet absolute ? 



The naturalist or biologist watches the infinite complexity of the opposing 

 forces of construction and destruction that make up the balance of animal and 



' Juv. Sat. i. 85. ' Mill, Logic, vol. i. Book iii., ch. viii. 



' Lucretms, iv. 1153-4. * Present Position of Economics, 1885, p. 41. 



* P. Geddes, ' Analysis of the Principles of Economics,' Lond. and Edin., 1883. 



3 B 2 



