TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 649 



conceive and present, in a viciously abstract way, the conceptions with which they 

 deal. 



Abstraction is, indeed, necessary to all science, being implied in the search after 

 unity amidst variety. The criterion of true or false science lies precisely in the 

 right or wrong institution of the relation between the abstract and the concrete. 

 Now, in matters of human life especially, we have only to carry abstraction far 

 enough in order to lose all hold on realities, and present things quite other than they 

 in fact are ; and, if we use these abstractions in the premises of our reasonings, we 

 shall arrive at conclusions, either positively false, or useless for any practical purpose. 

 As Comte remarked, the most fundamental economic notions have been subtilized in 

 the ordinary treatises, till the discussions about them often wander away from any 

 relation to fact, and lose themselves in a region of nebulous metaphysics ; so that 

 exact thinkers have felt themselves obliged to abandon the use of some of the most 

 necessary terms, such as value, utility, production, and to express the ideas they 

 attach to them by circuitous phrases. I am far from condemning the effort after 

 accuracy of language and well-defined terms ; but the endless fluctuations of 

 economists in the use of words (of which numerous examples are given in Senior's 

 Appendix to Whately's ' Logic,' and in Professor Price's recent work) certainly indi- 

 cate a very general failure to apprehend and keep steadily in view the corresponding 

 realities. 



A vicious abstraction meets us on the very threshold of political economy. The 

 entire body of its doctrines, as usually taught, rests on the hypothesis that the sole 

 human passion or motive which has economic effects, is the desire of wealth. " It 

 aims," says Mill, " at showing what is the course of action into which mankind 

 living in a state of society would be impelled if that motive" — except so far as it is 

 checked by aversion to labour, and desire of present indulgence — "were absolute 

 master of all their actions." " So strictly is this its object/' he adds, " that even 

 the introduction of the principle of population interferes with the strictness of 

 scientific arrangement." But what is the desire of wealth ? It is, as Mr. Leslie 

 says in an article in ' Hermathena,' in which he urges the necessity for a new 

 method in political economy — it is a general name for a great variety of wants, 

 desires, and sentiments, widely differing in their economic character and effect, and 

 undergoing fundamental changes in some respects in the successive periods of 

 society. As moralists, viewing the same abstraction, not as a condition of well- 

 being, but as the root of all evd, "have denounced under the common name of love 

 of wealth, not only sensuality, avarice, and vanity, but the love of life, health, 

 cleanliness, decency, and art, so all the needs, appetites, tastes, aims and ideas 

 which the various things comprehended in the word ' wealth ' satisfy, are lumped 

 together in political economy as a principle of human nature, which is the source 

 of industry and the moving principle of the economic world." The motives 

 summed up in the phrase vary in different individuals, different classes, different 

 nations, different sexes, and especially in different states of society ; in these last, 

 indeed, the several desires comprehended under the general name follow definite 

 laws of succession. The point Mr. Leslie here insists on is, be it observed, not 

 merely — though that is also true — that the phrase desire of wealth represents a coarse 

 and crude generalization in the natural history of man ; but that the several im- 

 pulses comprised under the name assume altered forms and vary in their relative 

 strength, and so produce different economic consequences, in different states of 

 society ; and therefore that the abstraction embodied in the phrase is too vague and 

 unreal for use in economic investigations of a really scientific character. The special 

 desire for accumulation, apart from the immediate or particular uses of wealth, is 

 no doubt a principle of social growth which must not be overlooked ; but this, too, 

 takes different directions and works to different ends in different stages of social 

 development. All these economic motors require to be made the subjects of careful 

 and extensive observation ; and their several forms, instead of being rudely massed 

 together under a common name, should be discriminated as they in fact exist. The 

 consumption, or more correctly the use, of wealth, until lately neglected by econo- 

 mists, and declared by Mill to have no place in their science, must, as Professor 

 Jevons and others now see, be systematically studied in its relations to production 



