In the present and the following two Lectures, I shall consider whether
Political Economy is a physical or a mental study; whether it may be
more conveniently treated as a science or as an art; and whether its
premises are to be taken solely from observation and consciousness,
or rest, in part, on arbitrary assumptions. And I shall begin by
stating, at some length, the distinction between science and art,--not
with the hope of saying anything new, but because I believe that that
distinction, though it has been clearly drawn, may not be familiar to
all my hearers.
Shortly, it may be said that, as a history is a statement of past
facts, so a science is a statement of existing facts, and an art
a statement of the means by which future facts may be caused or
influenced, or, in other words, future events brought about. The first
two aim only at supplying materials for the memory and the judgment;
they do not presuppose any purpose beyond the acquisition of knowledge.
The third is intended to influence the will. It presupposes that some
object is to be attained, and points out the easiest, the safest, or
the most effectual conduct for that purpose. It is for this reason
that the collection of related facts which constitute a science is
generally a less complex thing than the collection of related precepts
which constitute an art. A single science may be complete in itself;--a
man may confine himself to chemistry, or to zoology, or to botany. He
may pursue any one of those sciences to the boundaries of existing
knowledge, and know nothing of the others. But an art must draw its
materials from many sciences. No man can teach or practise well the
art of agriculture unless he have some knowledge of chemistry, botany,
zoology, mechanics, and indeed of many other sciences.
In the progress of human knowledge art precedes science. The first
efforts of man are practical. He has an object in view, and tries
various means of accomplishing it. Some of these utterly fail, some
succeed imperfectly, and others are effectual, but at an unnecessary
expense of time and trouble. As his experience increases, he gradually
lays down for himself certain practical rules. If the business in which
he is engaged can be managed by a solitary individual, these rules may
be known only to himself, and be lost at his death. It is thus that we
have lost many of the secrets of the ancient painters. But if it be one
that requires co-operation, they become known to his assistants and to
his pupils, and gradually to all who are engaged in similar pursuits.
Many minds are employed in improving them and in adding to their
number, until at length they swell into a system. It may be long,
however, before they exist in any but a traditional form. The great
architects of the middle ages left behind them no written precepts.
They taught their pupils by oral instruction, and the rest of the world
and posterity by example. The desire, however, to communicate and
perpetuate information is one of the strongest passions of inventive
minds. As books multiply and become the principal means by which this
can be effected, those who are conscious of superior knowledge become
writers. They compose treatises in which the means which are supposed
to be productive of certain effects are arranged and preserved; and
the knowledge which previously rested on individual experience or
traditional routine becomes an art.
With the exception, however, of poetry, architecture, and generally
of the arts that are addressed to the taste and the imagination,
for which nations in an early stage of civilisation seem to have a
peculiar aptitude, the arts of an unscientific age contain many rules
ineffectual for their intended purposes, and many that are positively
opposed to them. Thus the medicine of the middle ages ordered plants
with yellow flowers to be used in cases of jaundice, and those with
red flowers in fevers, and directed fomentations and ointments to be
applied not to the wound but to the sword. At length a man arrives
with wider views or less docile habits of mind, who is not satisfied
to obey what often appear to him to be arbitrary rules, though he is
told that they are the results of experience. He endeavours to account
for the effects which he sees produced, that is to say, to refer them
to some general laws of matter or of mind. To do this is to create
a science. As soon as scientific habits of thought prevail, men are
teazed by any appearance for which they cannot account. Their first
motive is to question its reality. Evidence of mesmeric clairvoyance
has been produced enough to satisfy a sceptical inquirer, if the
phenomenon itself could be accounted for. But we cannot refer it to any
general law, and therefore the greater part of those who think about
it, deny its existence; many suspend their opinion, and scarcely any
are complete believers. If its existence should ever be thoroughly
established, the whole scientific world will be engaged in searching
for the general principles to which it is to be referred; for no one
will be satisfied with accepting it as an insulated unexplained fact.
I have said that a single art generally draws its premises from many
different sciences. So a single science generally affords premises to
many different arts. How numerous are the sciences which are applicable
to the art of war. How numerous are the arts which depend in part on
the principles of chemistry. And it is obvious that every increase of
human knowledge must increase the influence of science on art. Under
this influence many new rules are laid down, and many, which were
supposed to be founded on experience, are abandoned as unnecessary
or injurious. The art becomes in some respects more simple and in
others more complex: more complex because its precepts become more
diversified and more detailed; more simple because, instead of being
thrown together with little apparent connection, they are grouped under
the general principles supplied by science.
Sciences are divided into two great classes, differing both as to the
matters which they treat, and the sources from which they draw their
premises. These are the physical and the mental, or, as they are
sometimes called, the moral sciences. The proper subjects of the first
are the properties of matter; those of the second are the sensations,
faculties, and habits of the human mind. As we have no experience of
mind separated from matter (perhaps indeed are incapable of conceiving
its existence), and as the mind can act only through the body, even the
more purely mental sciences are forced to take notice of matter; and
many of them, such as the sciences which have been called æsthetic,
those which account for the pleasure which we derive from beauty and
sublimity, seem at first sight to treat of little except material
objects. But they consider those objects merely with reference to their
effects on the human mind. To classify and account for those effects as
a part of the philosophy of mind is the purpose of the science, and it
regards in matter only the qualities which produce them. On the other
hand, a botanist in the description of plants cannot omit the qualities
which render them agreeable or useful to man. Without doubt, to be
pleased by the sight and smell of a rose is as much an attribute of the
human mind as the form, colour, and other qualities which occasion
that pleasure are attributes of the rose. But it is to the rose only
that the botanist looks. He states that it is beautiful and odoriferous
as a part of the description of the plant, not of that of the being to
whom it is beautiful and odoriferous.
The same difference separates arts, though the line is less clearly
marked. For as every art must use material instruments, it is to a
certain extent physical; and as every art aims at producing pleasure
or preventing pain, it must be, to a certain extent, mental. Still,
however, the difference exists. No one would call rhetoric a physical
art, though its teacher must deliver precepts as to voice and gesture.
No one would call agriculture a mental art, though a treatise on
agriculture would be incomplete which did not compare the advantages
and disadvantages of task-work and day-work,--a comparison involving
wide and numerous moral considerations.
Where the subject is matter the distinction between an art and a
science is in general easily perceptible. No one confounds the science
of projectiles with the art of gunnery, or the art of surgery with the
science of anatomy. But it appears to be much less easy to distinguish
the arts and the sciences which have for their subject the operations
of the human mind. Thus we often talk of the art of logic, and of
the science of morality. But logic is not an art but a science. It
is not a collection of precepts how to reason, but a statement of
the principles on which all reasoning depends. The logician does not
advise, he merely instructs. He does not teach us to argue by means
of syllogisms, but asserts the fact that all reasoning is syllogistic.
His statements are all general; they have no relation to time or to
place. They are unconnected with any science but his own. On the
other hand, morality is not a science but an art. The object of the
moralist is not to inform us as to the nature of the faculties and the
sensations of man, but to advise us how to use those faculties, and how
to subject ourselves to those sensations, for the purpose of promoting
our happiness. He must therefore draw his materials from many different
sciences, and must vary his precepts according to the social condition
of those whom he addresses. The morality of the Stoics was fitted to
an aggregate of petty communities constantly engaged in foreign and
civil war, in which defeat involved the worst of human evils, the loss
of life, of relations, of property, and of liberty. No Greek could
be sure that in a year’s time his country might not be conquered by
a neighbouring tribe, or his party overthrown by a revolution, and
all his family and friends murdered before his eyes, or sold with him
into slavery. Under such circumstances, insensibility, the power of
enduring the approach and the presence of evil, and the insecurity, and
even the absence of good, appeared to be the quality most conducive
to happiness. The Stoic moralist, therefore, was as anxious to blunt
the desires and harden the perceptions of his pupils, as the English
moralist is to rouse their ambition, and to expand their sensibility.
The logic of Aristotle and the logic of Whately are the same, but how
little do we find in common when we compare the morality of Zeno with
that of Smith or of Paley.
It appears to me that the greater tendency to confound science and
art, when the subject is mind, than when it is matter, arises from
the more immediate influence on human conduct possessed by the mental
sciences. The sciences which consider matter have often little apparent
connection with any of the arts to which they are subservient. The
application of chemistry to agriculture has taken place almost within
our own recollection; its application to navigation is still more
recent; to transport by land, more recent still; to the transmission of
intelligence, scarcely ten years old. Such sciences may be, and indeed
generally are, most earnestly studied by men who have no object beyond
the discovery and diffusion of truth. That object is enough to satisfy
the most ardent scientific ambition, and to urge the most unwearied
scientific labours. The astronomer does not consider what will be the
practical results of his inquiries, or whether they will lead to any
practical results whatever. His object is knowledge. The uses to which
that knowledge may be applied, the mode and the degree in which it may
affect men’s conduct, he leaves to others.
On the other hand, the mental sciences are directly and obviously
connected with the arts of which they furnish the principles; and
those arts almost every educated man must practise. No man studies
the science of reasoning without resolving to apply its principles
whenever he has to exercise the art of controversy. No man inquires
into the laws which regulate the human intellect or the human passions,
without framing out of them some practical rules for the employment of
his own faculties and the regulation of his own affections.
The distinction between physical and mental is important, not only
with respect to the subjects treated by the sciences and arts in each
class, but also with respect to the principal sources from which they
respectively draw their premises.
In all sciences and in all arts these sources are but three--observation,
consciousness, and hypothesis. The physical sciences, being only
secondarily conversant with mind, draw their premises almost exclusively
from observation or hypothesis. Those which treat only of magnitude and
number, or, as they are usually called, the pure sciences, draw them
altogether from hypothesis. The mathematician does not measure the radii
of a circle in order to ascertain that they are all equal: he infers
their equality from the definition with which he sets out. Those which
abstain from hypothesis depend on observation. It is by observation that
the astronomer ascertains the motions of the planets, the botanist
classifies plants, and the chemist discovers the affinities of different
bodies. They disregard almost entirely the phenomena of consciousness.
The physical _arts_ are almost exclusively based on observation. As
their object is to produce positive effects, they trust as little as
possible to hypothesis; and the mental phenomena which they have to
consider are generally few and simple. The art of navigation, the art of
mining, or the art of fortification, might be taught by a man who had
never studied seriously the operations of his own mind.
On the other hand, the mental sciences and the mental arts draw their
premises principally from consciousness. The subjects with which they
are chiefly conversant are the workings of the human mind. And the only
mind whose workings a man really knows is his own. When he wishes to
ascertain the thoughts and the feelings of others, his first impulse
always is, to endeavour to suppose himself in what he believes to be
their situation, and to consider how he himself would then think and
feel. His next impulse is to infer that similar moral and intellectual
processes are taking place in them. If he be a cautious observer, he
endeavours to correct this inference by examining their countenances,
their words, and their actions. But these are uncertain symptoms, often
occasioned by a state of mind different from that which they appear
to indicate; and often employed for the purpose of concealment or of
deception.
When a man endeavours to discover what is passing in the mind of
another, by reflecting on what has passed or is passing in his own,
the certainty of the result depends of course on the degree in which
the two minds coincide. The educated man, therefore, estimates ill the
feelings and the faculties of the uneducated, the adult those of the
child, the sane those of the insane, the civilised man those of the
savage. And this accounts for the constant mismanagement of the lower
orders, and of children, madmen, and savages, by their intellectual and
moral superiors. The student of mental science is in the situation of
an anatomist, allowed to dissect only a single subject, and forced to
conjecture the internal conformation of other men by assuming that it
resembles that of the subject which he has dissected, and correcting
that assumption only by observing the forms of their bones and the
outward play of their muscles. The mental peculiarities of other men
are likely to mislead him in particular instances. His own mental
peculiarities are likely to mislead him on all occasions.
Another important difference, between mental and physical studies, is
the degree and the manner in which they respectively can be aided by
experiment. When we are dealing with matter, we frequently are able
to combine its particles at will, and to ascertain the results of the
combination. If we find that, all other things remaining the same, the
presence or absence of a given element is followed by the presence
or absence of a given result, we ascribe to that element and to that
result the relation of cause and effect, or at least of condition and
result.
But we can scarcely be said to be able to make experiments on the minds
of others. It is necessary to an experiment, that the observer should
know accurately the state of the thing observed before the experiment,
and its state immediately after it. But when the minds of other men
are the subject, we can know but little of either the one state or of
the other. We are forced, therefore, to rely not on experiment, but
on experience, that is to say, not on combinations of known elements
effected for the purpose of testing the result of each different
combination, but on our observation of actual occurrences, the results
of the combination of numerous elements, only a few of which are within
our own knowledge. And the consequence is, that we frequently connect
facts which are really independent of one another, and not unfrequently
mistake obstacles for causes.
The measure now[A] before parliament for introducing into Ireland a
compulsory provision for the destitute, is defended by an appeal to
experience. We are told that the English poor have such a provision,
and are the most industrious and the best maintained population in
Europe. The Irish poor have no such provision, and are the idlest
and the poorest people that is called civilised. If the presence of
a poor law in the one and its absence in the other were the only
difference in the history of the two countries, this would really be an
instance of experience. If a country with a previous history precisely
resembling that of England, possessing precisely the same physical and
moral advantages, and differing solely in the absence of a poor law,
were found to be idle and miserable, we might justly infer that the
prosperity of England is owing to its poor law; for there would be no
other cause to which it could be referred. And the misery of the other
country could be referred to no cause except its want of a poor law.
But when we find that the English and the Irish nations differ in race,
in religion, and in habits,--that the one is chiefly a town and the
other almost exclusively a country population,--that the one consists
principally of labourers for hire, the other of small tenants,--that
the one lives on wages, the other on its own crop,--that the vice of
the one is improvidence, that of the other indolence,--that in one
country the religion of the people has been persecuted, in the other
endowed,--that in the one the clergy of the people are the allies of
the government, in the other its enemies,--that in the one public
sympathy is with the supporter of order and peace, in the other with
the disturber,--that the code which prevails in the one is that which
is sanctioned by parliament and administered by courts of justice, in
the other is one framed by conspirators, promulgated by threatening
notices, and enforced by outrage and assassination,--that it is
more dangerous to obey the law in the one than to violate it in the
other,--when we find that these differences have lasted for centuries,
and that, almost from our earliest knowledge of them, the circumstances
in which the two countries have been placed have been not only
dissimilar but opposed, it is obvious that the wretchedness of Ireland
in the absence of a poor law does not prove that the presence of such
an institution has been beneficial to England. All that is proved is
that a country can prosper with a poor law and be miserable without
one. To that extent the experience of England and Ireland is decisive.
It is a complete answer to any one who should maintain either that a
country in which the population are forced to rely for subsistence on
their own resources will necessarily be laborious, or that one in which
the law protects every one, whatever be his conduct, from want, will
necessarily be indolent. But it is no answer to any one who should
maintain that such are the tendencies of the two opposite institutions,
but that such tendencies may be neutralised by counteracting causes.
And yet there are thousands of educated men who call such reasoning
as this arguing from experience, and are now anxious to make the
tremendous experiment of an Irish poor law on the English model in
reliance on what they call the experience of England.
[A] This Lecture was delivered in March, 1847.
When we direct our attention to the workings of our own minds, that is
to say, when we search for premises by means of consciousness instead
of by means of observation, our powers of trying experiments are much
greater. To a considerable degree we command our own faculties, and
though there are few, perhaps none, which we can use separately, we
can at will exercise one more vigorously than the others. We can call,
for instance, into peculiar activity, the judgment, the memory, or the
imagination, and note the differences in our mental condition as the
one faculty or the other is more active. And this is an experiment.
Over our mental sensations we have less power. We cannot at will feel
angry, or envious, or frightened. But we can sometimes, though rarely,
put ourselves really into situations by which certain emotions will
be excited. And when, as is usually the case, this is impossible or
objectionable, we can fancy ourselves in such situations. The first
is an actual experiment. We can approach the brink of an unprotected
precipice and look down. We can interpose between our bodies and that
brink a low parapet, and look over it. And if we find that our emotions
in the two cases differ,--that though there is no real danger in either
case, though in both our judgment equally tells us that we are safe,
yet that the apparent danger in the one produces fear, while we feel
secure in the other,--we infer that the imagination can excite fear for
which the judgment affirms that there is no adequate cause. The second
is the resemblance of an experiment, and when tried by a person with
the vivid imagination of Shakspeare or Homer may almost serve for one.
But with ordinary minds it is a most fallacious expedient. Few men when
they picture themselves in an imaginary situation take into account all
the incidents necessary to that situation. And those which they neglect
may be among the most important.
Having explained the distinction between a science and an art, and the
chief differences between the arts and sciences which consider as their
principal subject the laws of matter, and those whose principal subject
is mind, I now come to one of the practical questions in which this
long preface will I hope be found useful, namely, whether Political
Economy be a mental or a physical study.
Unquestionably the political economist has much to do with matter.
The phenomena attending the production of material wealth occupy a
great part of his attention; and these depend mainly on the laws of
matter. The efficacy of machinery, the diminishing productiveness,
under certain circumstances, of successive applications of capital to
land, and the fecundity and longevity of the human species, are all
important premises in Political Economy, and all are laws of matter.
But the political economist dwells on them only with reference to the
mental phenomena which they serve to explain; he considers them as
among the motives to the accumulation of capital, as among the sources
of rent, as among the regulators of profit, and as among the causes
which promote or retard the pressure of population on subsistence. If
the main subject of his studies were the physical phenomena attending
the production of wealth, a system of Political Economy must contain a
treatise on mechanics, on navigation, on agriculture, on chemistry--in
fact, on the subjects of almost all the physical sciences and arts,
for there are few of those arts or sciences which are not subservient
to wealth. All these details, however, the political economist avoids,
or uses a few of them sparingly for the purpose of illustration. He
does not attempt to state the mechanical and chemical laws which enable
the steam engine to perform its miracles--he passes them by as laws
of matter; but he explains, as fully as his knowledge will allow, the
motives which induce the mechanist to erect the steam engine, and
the labourer to work it. And these are laws of mind. He leaves to the
geologist to explain the laws of matter which occasion the formation
of coal, to the chemist to distinguish its component elements, to
the engineer to state the means by which it is extracted, and to the
teachers of many hundred different arts to point out the uses to which
it may be applied. What he reserves to himself is to explain the laws
of mind under which the owner of the soil allows his pastures to be
laid waste, and the minerals which they cover to be abstracted; under
which the capitalist employs, in sinking shafts and piercing galleries,
funds which might be devoted to his own immediate enjoyment; under
which the miner encounters the toils and the dangers of his hazardous
and laborious occupation; and the laws, also laws of mind, which
decide in what proportions the produce, or the value of the produce,
is divided between the three classes by whose concurrence it has been
obtained. When he uses as his premises, as he often must do, facts
supplied by physical science, he does not attempt to account for them;
he is satisfied with stating their existence. If he has to prove it,
he looks for his proofs, so far as he can, in the human mind. Thus the
economist need not explain why it is that labour cannot be applied to
a given extent of land to an indefinite amount with a proportionate
return. He has done enough when he has proved that such is the fact;
and he proves this by showing, on the principles of human nature,
that, if it were otherwise, no land except that which is most fertile,
and best situated, would be cultivated. All the technical terms,
therefore, of Political Economy, represent either purely mental ideas,
such as _demand_, _utility_, _value_, and _abstinence_, or objects
which, though some of them may be material, are considered by the
political economist so far only as they are the results or the causes
of certain affections of the human mind, such as _wealth_, _capital_,
_rent_, _wages_, and _profits_.
In the next Lecture I shall consider the first of the two remaining
questions,--namely, whether Political Economy may be better treated as
a science or as an art.