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Proceedings of the Royal Society 
psycliology, and ethics, — the economist alone remains behind, and 
although long ago armed with the purely biological ideas of com- 
petition and co-operation, delays to modernise his theories by the 
aid of the new learning, and treats them as if they were inde- 
pendent of such general conceptions of struggle for existence, of 
functional differentiation and change, of polymorphism, and the 
like, of which they are really special cases. 
§ 6. We see, too, that theories of the mental and moral nature of 
man hold a large place in the constructive attempts of many econo- 
mists, yet probably no one will -seriously maintain that these exten- 
sive psychological postulates have much in common with any 
school of psychology now extant. Nor do the ordinary economic 
postulates as to the structure of society and the origin of its insti- 
tutions contain much which Mr Spencer, Mr Tylor, or Sir Henry 
Maine would recognise as pertaining to modern sociology, but 
rather exhibit a closer affinity (suggestive of direct descent) with 
the “ Contrat Social.” 
§ 7. Enough, then, has probably been said to show that even the 
economic systematists who seek to apply scientific conceptions at 
all are unfortunately provided for the most part with archaic or 
incomplete ones, when indeed they are hot wholly erroneous ; and 
political economy is thus seen to present in a marked degree that 
lagging behind the general advance of knowledge which not unfre- 
quently occurs even in the ranks of the preliminary sciences — 
witness the obsolete chemical notation conserved by mineralogists. 
§ 8. Political economy must therefore be treated as a crude 
science, standing to sociology much as the psychology of the last 
century to that now in process of evolution. Criticism of such 
provisional syntheses must be (1) appreciative of them as embryonic 
stages of true science, and for their historical services ; but (2) 
destructive where they claim vitality and impede progress. The 
former is a branch of history proper, the latter of what we may 
call intellectual palaeontology. This criticism by means of the pre- 
liminary sciences is therefore really conservative, since it affords a 
touchstone for assaying the whole literature of the subject, sentence 
by sentence, if need be. 
Even though the reader may feel contented that the particular 
system to which he happens to have been trained or attached is 
