A Manual of Political Economy (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from A Manual of Political Economy

IN the following pages the writer has made the attempt to construct a skeleton of Political Economy upon the basis of purely physical laws, and thus to obtain for its conclusions that absolute certainty which belongs to the positive sciences. The casual association of its teaching with moral philosophy, is the circumstance to which is to be attributed that metaphysical bias, manifested by almost all Eco nomical writers, in their method of investigation, and which has con ducted them to such vague, hypothetical, and unsatisfactory results. It has, indeed, been made matter of set purpose to confine its exami nation of the laws of the production of the objects which constitute wealth, to such of them as are laws of the human mind, as may be seen by consulting the Essay of Mr. J. S. Mill On the Defini tion of Political Economy, and the method of Investigation proper to it. The issue, nevertheless, has been, that grossly material estimation of man, which disregards all that is truly human in his nature, and has brought upon Political Economy, thus worked out, the name of the Dismal Science.

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