Now, to Mr. Ruskin these defects of Political Economy, its materialism, its faith in competition and enlightened selfishness, its monetary standard of value, were primarily moral defects, and his crusade against the current teaching was inspired by moral energy. It is this moral character which has led many to discount the value of his criticism as "sentimental." We have already seen that sentiments and the ideals which they imply are essential to any orderly interpretation of economic phenomena, and that in this sense Mr. Ruskin's Political Economy is "scientific."

§ 17. I have dwelt at some length upon Mr. Ruskin's criticism of the unscientific basis of current "Political Economy" because defenders of that study have often accused Mr. Ruskin of attacking not the "science" but an art which, they say, he has wrongly foisted upon them. This accusation derives a certain speciousness from the fact that his fiercest resentment is aimed against the practical support which he holds to be given by "economists" to the iniquity and inhumanity of competitive industry. But even here, it will be seen later on1 his attack is in reality directed against certain dogmatic "principles" of the science, and not primarily against the art.

The partition between science and art in Political Economy has always been peculiarly thin, and writers from Adam Smith onwards have been as much concerned with the application of their theories to free trade, taxation, money, and the maintenance of individual bargaining, as with the construction of those theories.

Mr. Ruskin did not, as is sometimes alleged, mistake

1 Chapter V.

the indicative for the imperative mood in the "economists;" the confusion was chiefly their own. It is true that in his proposals for a wider "Political Economy" he himself was more directly concerned with the art than with the science. But for all that it must not be supposed that he ignored the need of scientific basis. Doubtless the claim which he himself preferred was to have laid an ethical basis of the art of social life rather than a "scientific" basis. He would probably have repudiated "a science of ethics." a science of ethics." But in the stress laid upon the basis of "economic" conduct, we may not ignore the testimony which modern sociology accords to the scientific nature of his work.

Mr. Ruskin's statement of the end of "economic" activity as the production of "life," "souls of a good quality," furnishes the necessary hypothetical end or goal required to give meaning to Sociology as a science and to Social Progress as an art. The modern teaching of evolution, so far from dispensing with "final causes," is unintelligible, and falls into anarchy without them. However dimly conceived, the ordered movement of “evolution" requires the hypothetical goal just as it requires the hypothesis of efficient causes. Not only the practical reformer, but the student of social movements, must posit some such end as that which Mr. Ruskin sets before us in asserting the aim of Political Economy to be "the multiplication of human life at its highest standard." 1

Sociology requires the scientific imagination to leap over the interstices of known phenomena in order to construct out of a medley of ill-assorted facts a scientific

1 Munera Pulveris, § 7.

law of change in conformity with some idea which has been imposed upon phenomena before it is illustrated by them and explains them; as this scientific imagination transcends in its theory the phenomena of the past, so it produces the lines of progress discovered in the past, into the future, manufacturing ideals. This construction of ideals is an essential task of a truly scientific mind: all great discoveries come from such intellectual acts of faith.

Biologists and sociologists, correlating the processes of organic life in conformity with preconceived and wellverified laws of progress, are everywhere engaged in giving intellectual form to a science and art of life such as Mr. Ruskin conceived and foreshadowed in his Political Economy. His conception of wealth is what sociology requires for its ideal; his "value" is in substantial conformity to this same scientific purpose. Take the following testimony of a great living biologist:

"Let us . . . leave the inmates of the academic cloister walk out into the world, look about us, try to express loaf and diamond from the objective side in terms of actual fact, and we find that physical and physiological properties, or values,' can indeed indefinitely be assigned: the one as so much fuel, its heat-giving power measurable in calorimeter, or in actual units of work, the other a definite sensory stimulus, varying according to Fechner's law. This is precisely what our author means in such a passage as the following, which, however absurd to the orthodox, is now intelligible enough to us:

"Intrinsic value is the absolute power of anything to support life. A sheaf of wheat of given quantity and

weight has in it a measurable power of sustaining the substance of the body; a cubic foot of pure air, a fixed power of sustaining its warmth, and a cluster of flowers of given beauty, a fixed power of enlivening or animating the senses and heart.” 1

Our claim is not that Mr. Ruskin has formed a system of sociology, or that he has advanced far towards such a system, but that he has pointed the way to such a science, and has laid down certain hypotheses of fact and terminology such as are consistent with advances made independently by other scientific men. By insisting upon the reduction of all economic terms, such as value, cost, utility, etc., to terms of "vitality," by insisting upon the organic integrity and unity of all human activities, and the organic nature of the co-operation of the social units, and finally by furnishing a social ideal of reasonable humanity, Mr. Ruskin has amply justified his claim as a pioneer in the theory of Social Economics.

1 "John Ruskin," by Patrick Geddes (Round Table Series),

p. 26.

66

CHAPTER IV.

MR. RUSKIN'S THEORY OF SOCIAL ECONOMICS.

§ 1. The literary method of social teaching. § 2. The problem of wealth stated in "Munera Pulveris"- A partial analysis. § 3. Intrinsic value the essence of wealth. § 4. The capacity of the user as a condition of wealth. § 5. Distribution as a determinant of wealth. § 6. A corresponding analysis of 99 cost required. § 7. Incompleteness of formal analysis in Mr. Ruskin's theory. § 8. Relations of industrial to nonindustrial wealth not treated. § 9. Defective grasp of social evolution. § 10. Huxley's false distinction of "cosmic" and "ethical"- A statical conception of society. § 11. Summary of Mr. Ruskin's contribution to Social Economics.

§ 1. IT is not unnatural that the term "criticism" should have acquired a censorious or condemnatory meaning which does not rightly belong to it; for a judge may often with propriety leave the virtues of a man or a thing to stand upon their own patent merits, and devote his time and attention chiefly to exposure of faults, which, either by escaping notice for what they are, or by some semblance of goodness or utility, may remain as hidden dangers. Such criticism will always be a special function of reformers; but it is only a shortsighted and partial view of their work of criticism which will regard it as negative and destructive merely: all criticism in the hands of such men will be reformatory in purpose, the distinctively critical work only serving