this "science," which is concerned with man solely as a being who desires to possess wealth, and which makes abstraction of every other passion or motive, I have taken leave to call a pseudo-science. I will explain why.

What do we mean by "science"? We mean something more than a knowledge of phenomena. We mean a knowledge of the causes of phenomena and a reasoned exposition of those causes. I have elsewhere defined "science"-and I quote the definition because I do not know how to better it"the logical apprehension of the facts, as underlain by principles, which relate to any department of human knowledge." But the whole Smithian school of political economists affects a superiority to facts, just as the Emperor Sigismund held himself "super grammaticam." "Political economy," Mr. Senior says, "is not greedy of facts, it is independent of them." True indeed. It prefers abstractions. The man of its text books, viewed as under the dominion of one sole principle, the lust of lucre, is an idol of the den, as unreal as the Man of Rousseau's speculations. Mr. Mill tells us that Political Economy treats of the promotion and distribution of wealth only in the social state. Well, but if this be so, the sum of conditions of the social state ought to be taken into account. In no other

* Chapters in European History, vol. i. p. 292.

t Contra Professor Marshall: The economist must be greedy of facts." Principles of Economics, Book I. c. viii. § 1.

vn.]

SCIENCE OR PSEUDO-SCIENCE?

199

way, indeed, can the individual be really understood, for he is a social product, bearing about in his own mind-"under his own hat," in Thackeray's phrase the organized results of institutions, of laws, of the social experience embodied in language. He is "made and moulded of things past." He is a historical animal. Moreover, he is swayed by a number of impulses, passions, desires. He is not an industrial machine impelled solely by covetousness. And a science which considers him as such, is no less remote from reality than would be a science of human locomotion based on the postulate that man is a one-legged animal. No doubt the desire of wealth exists, more or less strongly, in most men. But it coexists with a vast number of other desires, which modify, restrain, or even efface it. And if we make abstraction of them, what remains is not man, but a "senseless, lifeless idol, void and vain." Consider the lover, gazing in adoration upon his mistress; willing to give

"all other bliss,

And all his worldly wealth, for this,
To waste his whole soul in one kiss
Upon those perfect lips."

The passion of desire has cast out the "auri sacra fames." Or look at "the Demerara nigger," as Mr. Carlyle has depicted him, his viscera full of pumpkin, his rum bottle in his hand, and no breeches on his body, declining to do a stroke of work for

the betterment of his condition. Nay, call to mind Shylock preferring his pound of flesh to his money:

"If every ducat in six thousand ducats,
Were in six parts, and every part a ducat,

I would not have them: I would have my bond."

These are spectacles which confound the calculations of the orthodox political economists. Their application of their deductive method to one isolated motive is radically vicious. The truth is, as Professor Marshall allows, that they worked out their theories "on the tacit supposition that the world was made up of city men": men of whom Mr. Podsnap may serve as the type. And Mr. Podsnap, as we are told, "settled that whatever he put behind him, he put out of existence. 'I don't want to know about it: I don't choose to discuss it: I don't admit it.' Thus, with a peculiar flourish of his right hand, would Mr. Podsnap clear the world of its most difficult problems." The procedure of the Smithian economists is similar. Well, we may, if we choose, put aside the other passions, ideas, aims, which sway the minds of men, and reason as if the desire of gain were the one motive power of human nature. But do not let us invest the conclusions reached by balancing abstract ideas, in this unreal world, with the name of economic science, which, ex vi termini, deals with the concrete.

"Abstract ideas." I use the words advisedly.

VII.]

ABSTRACT IDEAS AND PRINCIPLES. 201

For such are, to a large extent, the so-called principles of the school of Adam Smith. And there is, in truth, a vast difference between an abstract idea and a principle. An abstract idea is an a priori conception of the intellect, satisfying its mathematical needs, if I may so speak: its love of order, sequence, symmetry. A principle is the most concrete thing in the world. It is the quintessence of facts: their laws as they manifest themselves in succession and connection. There is nothing which requires more delicate tact, more anxious care, experience more ample, prudence more consummate, than the application of abstract ideas to the shifting and complex material of actual life: to mankind as they live and move, with their inveterate prejudices, their masterful passions, their hallucinative temperaments, their debilitated wills. The "science" which ignores these things, and which, isolating certain facts, imposes upon them laws a priori, instead of ascertaining, a posteriori, what their laws veritably are, is no more a true science than is alchemy or astrology. I seldom take up any work of its professors without thinking of Scarron's verses:

"Et je vis l'ombre d'un esprit
Qui traçait l'ombre d'un système
Avec l'ombre de l'ombre même."

Such is, in effect, the orthodox political economy

of the Smithian school: a doctrine, as Toynbee well observes, "remote, abstract, neutral, excluding from its consideration every aspect of human life but the economic, and dealing with that in isolation," which has "come to be looked upon and quoted as a complete philosophy of social and industrial life." * We are told, indeed, that its teachers did not so intend it: that they presented it as "a merely hypothetical science": and Mr. Mill's acknowledgment is cited that its conclusions. "will so far fail of being applicable to the explanation or prediction of real events, until they are modified by a correct allowance for the degree of influence exercised by the other causes." To the same effect Professor Marshall writes: "The laws of economics . . . are statements as to the effects produced by different causes, singly or in combination;" "effects which will be produced. . . subject to the condition that other things are equal, and that the causes are able to work out their effects undisturbed; ""they are not rules ready for immediate application in practical politics."‡ But, as a matter of fact, they have been so applied. The intense individualism of the age has seized eagerly upon them, and has erected them into a new gospel. Money the one end of action, self-interest

*Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England, &c., p. 2. Essays on some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy,

p. 140.

Principles of Economics, Book I. c. vii. § 2 & 3,