12 W. G. Langworthy Taylor 



transportation, middlemen of commerce, and consumers of ar- 

 ticles produced more cheaply abroad. This naive assumption 

 that action which coincides with one's seeming interests is also 

 beneficial to all has tended to pervert scientific discussion. The 

 commodity and the labor standards of deferred payments reflect 

 current feeling of local self-interests. The history of econom- 

 ics, however, is the history of a persistent effort to eliminate 

 the personal equation. 



The public with which we have to deal can be none other 

 than the sum total of humanity. If, aided by statistics, wo 

 could somehow add toofether all the industriousness, inventive- 

 ness, patience, and power of individuals composing the exist- 

 ing community, into one total, and could then add all the ap- 

 preciativeness, and sense of gratification, worth, esteem, and 

 enjoyment, into another total, and so on for all categories in 

 which man moves and acts, then we could reason with coufi- 

 dence about our public. If found desirable, we might divide 

 these sum-totals of quality by the number of individuals, or 

 take the geometric or harmonic mean, and thus obtaiu au av- 

 erage man. If we coiild, further", place this average man in av- 

 erage circumstances, then his actions would be relatively right, 

 and we should be free to turn our attention to the study of the 

 ideal. It is not necessary, however, to be dogmatic as to the 

 characteristics of the normal man. We are here concerned 

 solely with his bare existence. Perl ^ps we should have to in- 

 clude corporate individuals and make allowances in each case 

 for a personal equation of some sort. 



The necessity to science of the relative conception of truth, 

 and of that conception for each period as a separate and uni- 

 fied expression, is shown by the fact that it is the point on 

 which sociologists lay stress, as well as economists. Sociolo- 

 gists are in search of standards of those characteristics which 

 generally belong to man as a social being; economists, of those 



174 



