ON THE COMTIST CRITICISM OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE. 469 



Nicholas Orcsrae, the clearest, because the simplest, illustrations of tho 

 accruing evils ; the difficult problems of foreign trade and tho foreign 

 exchanges were set in their simplest forms when English trade was forced 

 into narrow channels, and consisted chiefly of the export of wool and 

 import of wine. Modern society is the field to which the advanced 

 student will be attracted in the hope of carrying our knowledge farther 

 by his investigations, but the simpler transactions of early times afford a 

 field where the beginner can find instruction, not from abstract principles 

 and fancy illustrations, but in the phenomena of actual life. 



IV. 



To return to M. Comte : there is another dictum of his to which I 

 must allude, though I shall be forced to trench on dangerous ground. 

 The President last year referred to it, and dismissed it with the scorn he 

 felt justified in bestowing on something which, as he said, lie did not 

 understand.' Comte denied to poHtical economy an independent place 

 in the hierarchy of science. This is a hard saying, especially here, since 

 the frequenters of Section F are always nervously anxious to maintain 

 that their science is as good a science as any other, and better too. But, 

 after all, Comte never disparaged the importance of the economic and 

 industrial analysis of society : his dictum referred to his own classification 

 of the principal departments of knowledge. Other branches of learning 

 share a similar fate. Theology, which some of us regard as the scientia 

 scientiarum, has no place in his scheme ; geography, and geology, and 

 anthropology, and mechanical engineering are not included in the 

 list ; Sections C, and B, and G, and H share the fate of F. But though 

 political economy is not treated as a science in this classification, it may 

 still be regarded as a study which deals with an important group of 

 social phenomena, and which may certainly deal with them in a scientific 

 fashion. For the progress of this study two distinct processes arc required, 

 as in the case of all other empirical sciences^ — the accurate description and 

 the subsequent explanation of phenomena. 



1. Economists have not always recognised the great importance and 

 difficulty of the work of description ; it is specially requisite in order that 

 we may pay proper attention to the earlier economic organisms which are 

 found among primitive peoples, or estimate their actual importance so far 

 as they survive among ourselves. It is in this way that account may be 

 taken — and the more methodically the better — of the sociological consider, 

 ations which underlie any economic problem ; it is merely idle to excuse 

 ourselves from putting tbem in the foreground because sociological laws 

 are not yet formulated and tho information has not been satisfactorily sys- 

 tematised. Wbether formulated or not, the sociology of each country must 

 be examined before the economic problems it presents can be attacked. 

 Mr. Mill justifies his attitude in ignoring early and surviving economic 

 forms by saying that it is only through ' the principle of competition that 

 political economy has any pretensions to be called a science ' ; "^ and he 

 thus excludes a vast mass of economic phenomena from the sphere of 

 scientific investigation. Piofessor ^Marshall, instead of accepting the 

 description of mediaeval or Indian economic forms as they actually occur, 



' Rrport of British Association, 1888, p. 749. 

 ' Political Economy, II. iv. 1, 2. 



