TKANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 643 



treatment. This I imagine the public at large are not disposed to doubt, 

 though they may not repose much confidence in the methods actually followed. 

 But, strangely enough, a professor of political economy has recently disputed the 

 possibility, or at least the utility, of a scientific handling of economic questions. 

 Professor Bonamy Price, of the University of Oxford, who has published a volume 

 in which several of those questions are handled with much ability and freshness of 

 treatment, not only repudiates a scientific character for his own inquiries, hut 

 alleges the scientific method to be a mistake. According to him, ordinary people 

 are right in believing that they can arrive at truth on these questions by the aid of 

 their natural lights, by their untrained sagacity, — that they can take a shorter 

 and far clearer path through their own observations, than through what he calls 

 " the tangled jungle of scientific refinements." In plain terms, he is in favour 

 of relegating the study of economic phenomena to the domain of empiricism — to 

 what is called the common sense of practical men. 



A more fatal suggestion coidd not, in my judgment, be made. I shall have to 

 express the opinion, that the prevalent methods of economic research and exposition 

 are open to grave criticism ; but how can this be remedied by throwing ourselves on 

 the undisciplined and random inspirations of so-called common sense ? It was " com- 

 mon sense " that long upheld the mercantile system ; and indeed there is scarcely 

 any error that it lias not, at different times, accepted and propagated. What 

 security can there be in this as in other branches of inquiry against endless aberra- 

 tions and confusions, but systematic observation and analysis of the phenomena, 

 resulting in a body of ascertained and reasoned truth ; and what is this but science ? 

 I am forced to say that Professor Price seems to me to labour under radical mis- 

 conception as to the nature and conditions of science. Because the facts of the 

 production and distribution of wealth have always gone on spontaneously amongst 

 mankind, and definite modes of social action with respect to them have progres- 

 sively established themselves, economic investigation, he argues, adding nothing to 

 ■what men have with more or less sagacity and intelligence always practised, can- 

 not be regarded as having the nature of a science. But it might be similarly shown 

 that there is no science of human nature, for the intellectual processes, the feelings, 

 and the practical tendencies of man have always been similar; they have not 

 waited for science to develop themselves and pass into action; rather their long 

 continued spontaneous action was the necessary condition of the science that studies 

 them. So, too, with respect to all human action on external nature — practice 

 always must precede theory ; art, more or less intelligent, must precede science. 

 Science is simply the ascertainment and co-ordination of laws ; a law is the state- 

 ment of a general fact ; we explain a particular fact by showing that it is a case of 

 a more general fact. Now, from the beginning to the end of his own book, Pro- 

 fessor Price is endeavouring to ascertain such general facts, and to explain particular 

 facts by means of them — in other words, he is busied upon science without knowing 

 it. He rests much of the importance of economic studies, which he regards as 

 essentially practical, on their efficacy for uprooting the evil weed of false theory ; 

 but theory of some sort will always be necessary. On ne detruit que ce qiCon rem- 

 place ; and the only way of extinguishing false theory is to establish the true. 



I therefore repudiate the doctrine of Professor Price, and I hold by the truth, 

 which has indeed now become a philosophic commonplace, that social phenomena 

 generally, and amongst them the economic phenomena of society, do admit of 

 scientific treatment. But I believe, though on different grounds from his, that the 

 mode in which the study of these phenomena has been conceived and prosecuted in 

 the hitherto reigning school, is open to serious objections ; and the decline in the 

 credit and influence of political economy, of which I have spoken, appears to me 

 to be in a large measure due to the vicious methods followed by its teachers. The 

 distrust of its doctrines manifested by the working classes is no doubt in a great 

 degree owing to the not altogether imfounded belief, that it has tended to justify too 

 absolutely existing social arrangements, and that its study is often recommended with 

 the real, though disguised, object of repressing popular aspirations after a better 

 order of things. And it is doubtless true that some of the opposition which political 

 •economy encounters, is founded on the hostility of selfish interests, marshalled 



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