16 W. G. Langzvorthy Taylor 



and practice together. The distinct admission of' the limitations 

 of static theory is one of the greatest services to science, and 

 places such theory on stronger grounds and in a truer light. 

 However, formulation is one thing and appreciation quite a dif- 

 ferent one. Because one student is capable of feeling and experi- 

 encing with clear consciousness the progressive process, passing 

 the various social phenomena in triple ranks — static, kinetic, and 

 stato-kinetic — before his mind with such rapidity and certainty 

 that they produce but a single effect upon the self-conscious cen- 

 ter, it does not follow that any one else will be a*ble to visualize 

 the same picture upon the suggestion of a written or oral descrip- 

 tion. The progress of science depends on our own progress after 

 all. 1 



The result of our discussion is that there are habits of thought 

 that may properly be characterized respectively as static and 

 kinetic ; that the latter does not wholly supersede the former but 

 serves additional purposes ; and that the former is still especially 

 useful for education of the young and for exact thought of a not 

 very advanced type. Perhaps the chief characteristic of static 

 thought is its employment of contrasts. Ignoring the gradual 

 changes presented by nature, it seeks to cause clear ideas by accu- 

 mulation, as it were, of all the infinitesimal variations until a given 

 point (a point of satiety perhaps) and by then discharging the 

 accumulated suggestions like the shock of a Leyden jar upon the 

 self-conscious center. Tins method is especially observable in 

 the treatment the orthodox economics accorded to the assumed 

 unhomogeneous and discontinuous categories, land, labor, and 

 capital. While Professor Marshall has unquestionably succeeded 

 in substituting continuities for these discontinuities, the art and 

 the profundity of the achievement can hardly be appreciated by 

 a reader that has not studied the older writers. In the study of 

 progress, however, the older writers did not avail themselves of 

 the method of contrasts, except by drawing inferences from their 

 studies in distribution and exchange; and as they had no dis- 

 tinctively kinetic method, they were as badly off for exposition 



1 Professor Marshall touches the field of pure kinetic theory in various 

 places, but especially bk. V, ch. II, sec. 6, note 1, p. 521. 



16 



