TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION F. 653 



the ' Wealth of Nations,' and in doing so has verified all the references ; and what 

 strikes him is the extraordinary wideness of the reading from which Smith drew 

 his inferences. The work, he says, is full of facts. It is interesting to observe 

 that David Hume made just the same remark on the book at the time of its 

 publication :—" It has depth," he said, "and solidity, and acuteness, and is so 

 much illustrated with curious facts, that it must take the public attention." 



Of the two views thus advanced by Mr. Lowe and Mr. Rogers the latter 

 seems to me much the more correct. That the master tendency of Smith's 

 intellect was the deductive, or that it is at the deductive point of view that he 

 habitually places himself, seems to me plainly at variance with fact. Open his 

 book anywhere, and read a few pages ; then do the same with Ricardo's principal 

 work, and observe the difference of the impression produced. Under the Guidance 

 of Ricardo you are constantly, not without misgivings, following certainabstract 

 assumptions to their logical residts. In Smith you feel yourself in contact with 

 real life, observing human acts and their consequences by the light of experience. 

 Of course deduction is not wanting ; but it is in the way of explanation ; the facts' 

 are interpi-eted from the nature and circumstances of men in general, or particular 

 groups of men. Sagacious observation and shrewd comment go hand in hand. 



Adam Smith, besides giving generally a large place to induction, opened 

 several lines of interesting historical investigation, as notably in his Third Book 

 which contains a view of the economic progress of modern Europe as shaped by 

 political causes. _ But historic inquiry was neglected by his successors, with 

 a partial exception in the case of Malthus, and the a p>-iori method became 

 dominant chiefly by the influence of Ricardo. Professor Price objects to 

 this method as too_ scientific ; but, as Mr . Leslie has said, what ou°-kt to be 

 alleged respecting it is that it is unscientific, because ill adapted for the Successful 

 investigation of the class of phenomena with which it deals. Settino- out from 

 propositions involving the loose abstractions of which I have spoken, it arrives at 

 conclusions which are seldom corrected by the consideration of conditions which 

 were at first, for simplicity, omitted in the premises. And these conclusions can in 

 general not be directly confronted with experience for the purpose of verification, 

 for they are hypothetical only ; they give us, not the resultant phenomenon, but 

 only a tendency of a certain character, which will be one component of the 

 resultant. 



I am not concerned nor disposed to deny that useful general indications have 

 been gathered by inference of this kind. But it is evidently a very unsafe process 

 even in purely economic matters, especially when consequences are pushed into' 

 any degree of detail. Careful thinkers have a profound distrust of lengthened 

 deductions in economic inquiries. When it is argued that A must lead to B and 

 B again to C, and so on through a long chain of results, they assume in 'self- 

 defence a sceptical attitude of mind, and often feel more than half convinced that 

 what is going on is a feat of logical sleight of hand. And this suspiciousness is, I 

 think, reasonable ; for we are not here on the same ground as in mathematics 

 where protracted deductions are always safe, because we can be sure that we have' 

 before us at every step all the determining data, and each proposition successively 

 used is universally true. But as the most that the economist can affirm is a set 

 of tendencies, the certainty of his conclusions is plainly weakened in a rapidly 

 increasing ratio by the multiplication of links, there being always a possibility that 

 the theorems applied in the course of the demonstration may be subject to special 

 counteractions or limitations in the case we are considering. 



I observed before that Mill betrayed some uncertainty of view as to the precise 

 relation of economic inquiries to general sociology. As to the proper method 

 of the social science also, he appears to me not strictly consistent with him- 

 self. That method he declares, in so many words, to be the direct deductive 

 Yet elsewhere he as plainly agrees with Oomte, that in the general science of 

 society, as distinguished from its separate departments, nothing of a scientific 

 character is possible except by the inverse deductive— as he chooses to call the his- 

 torical—method. In one place he seems to assert that the general course of 

 economic evolution could be predicted from the single consideration of the desire 



