468 EEPOKT — 1889. 



us as a usefal step in knowledge we are always entitled to ask what prin- 

 ciple it serves to enunciate. . . . When it has been clearly seen what 

 ought to be our definition, it must be pretty well known what truth we 

 have to state. The definition as well as the discovery supposes a decided 

 step in our knowledge to have been made. The writers on logic in the 

 Middle Ages made definition the last stage in the progress of knowledge, 

 and in' this arrangement at least the history of science and the philosophy 

 derived from the history confirm tlieir speculative views.' 



Thus Ricardo's doctrine as to the meaning of economic rent was not 

 mere verbiage, but the statement of a truth which had been acted on but 

 not explicitly recognised. 



Oomte's jealousy o£ the irregular pursuit of knowledge ' led him more 

 than once to adopt an attitude which many of his followers have been 

 forced to repudiate ; busy as he was in the systematisation of knowledge, 

 he did not sufficiently allow for its farther progress. In this way he had 

 little sympathy with those who were pushing their investigations farther 

 in special branches of knowledge ; besides, he apparently did not see that 

 careful definition was a necessary condition for further progress in eco- 

 nomic science. But anyone who has been forced to study the pamphlet 

 literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries must have felt how 

 often brilliant men went astray for want of more accurate economic 

 analysis. The argument between Locke and Lowndes about money and 

 recoinage would have gained immensely in clearness if they had better 

 understood the nature of — that is, if they had had a definition of — cost of 

 production and had seen how the cost of production affected the exchange 

 value of the precious metals. While we may hold with Comte that the 

 underlying sociological conditions are of the first importance in discussing 

 any economic problem, we may also hold that clear conceptions and accu- 

 rate analysis are necessary too ; and may feel that Malthus, and Ricardo, 

 and Jevons, not to mention the living economists at Cambridge, who are 

 ably carrying on their work, have made contributions to the progress of 

 economic knowledge which are of the first importance, and which we 

 should be foolish to slight. 



2. Another remark, which raises a side-issue, is not perhaps inappro- 

 priate here ; anyone who has been engaged in teaching the elements of 

 economic science must have found himself embarrassed by the complexity 

 of modern society, and the difficulty of finding simple instances to illus- 

 trate the principles laid down. Hence economists are driven to di'aw on 

 their imagination for examples. Who does not know of the man on Lake 

 Superior with a musical box ; and the other who gave over eating pine- 

 apples and paid men to dig him a fish-pond ; and how the Germans tried 

 to buy tons of iron with yards of linen ? They are as familiar as Robinson 

 Crusoe saving his corn to be capital, or Balbus building a wall. The 

 teaching of political economy would gain immensely if we could get rid 

 of these puerilities, and draw real instances from actual life ; and these 

 we can find in abundance if we will be content to seek them in earlier 

 and less complicated states of society, when industry and commerce 

 really were much simpler. Economic history is the best propEedeutic to 

 political economy. The sumptuary legislation of bygone days explains 

 the evils of unproductive consumption ; the story of the debasement of 

 the (French) currency in the fourteenth century gives now, as it did to 



' Politique Positive, i. 337. 



