By this appeal to experience and by this rejection of all metaphysical intrusion, I place myself in a position to meet the objection which you bring forward to my conception of economic data. You think that the ambiguity of the term value comes from this, that it denotes a very complex fact, a collection of facts included under a single word. For me, on the contrary, the difficulty in it arises from its denoting a very simple fact, a summum genus, i.e. the fact of the very activity of man. Activity is value. For us nothing is valuable except what is an effort of imagination, of thought, of will, of our activity in any of its forms. As Kant said that there was nothing in the universe that could be called good except the good will; so, if we generalise, it may be said that there is nothing in the universe that is valuable, except the value of human activity. Of value as of activity you cannot demand a so-called genetic definition. The simple and the original is genetically indefinable. Value is observed immediately in ourselves, in our consciousness.[98]
This observation shows us also that the summum genus 'value,' or 'mental activity' gives place to irreducible forms, which are in the first instance those of theoretical activity and practical activity, of theoretical values and practical values. But what does practical mean?—you now ask me. I believe that I have already answered by explaining that the theoretical is everything which is a work of contemplation, and the practical everything that is the work of will. Is will an obscure term? We may rather call the terms light, warmth and so on, obscure; not that of will. What will is, I know well. I find myself face to face with it throughout my life as a man. Even in writing this letter, today, in a room in an inn, and in shaking off the laziness of country life, I have willed; and if I have delayed the answer for two months, it is because I have been so feeble as not to know how to will.
You see from this that the question raised by me, whether by choice you meant conscious or unconscious choice, is not a careless question. It is equivalent to this other one; whether the economic fact is or is not a fact of will. 'This does not alter the fact of the choice,' you say. But indeed it does alter it! If we speak of conscious choice, we have before us a mental fact, if of unconscious choice, a natural fact; and the laws of the former are not those of the latter. I welcome your discovery that economic fact is the fact of choice; but I am forced to mean by choice, voluntary choice. Otherwise we should end by talking not only of the choices of a man who is asleep (when he moves from side to side) but of those of animals, and why not? of plants and why not again? of minerals; passing rapidly along the steep slope down which my friend Professor C. Trivero has slipped in his recently published Teoria dei bisogni, for which may he be forgiven![99]
When I defined economic data as 'the practical activities of man, in so far as they are considered as such, independently of any moral or immoral determination,' I did not make an arbitrary judgment, which might authorise others to do likewise, in a science which does not tolerate arbitrary judgments; but I merely distinguished further within the species practical activity, two sub-species or grades: pure practical activity, (economic), and moral practical activity, (ethical); will that is merely economic, and moral will. There is ambiguity in your reproach that when I speak of approval or disapproval as aroused by economic activity, I am considering the matter from a synthetic instead of an analytic point of view, and that approval or disapproval are extraneous factors. I did not however speak (and I believed that I had explained myself clearly), of moral, intellectual or æsthetic approval or disapproval. No, I said, and I repeat, that a judgment of approval or reprobation was necessarily bound up with economic activity: but a merely ECONOMIC judgment of approval or reprobation. 'By saying that Rhenish wine is useful to me, has a value for me, is ofelimo to me, I mean only to say that I like it; and I do not see how this simplest of relations can be well or ill-managed.' You will forgive me if in this sentence of yours I have italicised the words by saying. Here is the point. Certainly the mere saying does not give rise to an internal judgment of economic approval or disapproval. It will give rise to a grammatical or linguistic, i.e. æsthetic, approval or disapproval, according to whether the saying is clear or confused, well or ill expressed. But it is no question of saying: it is a question of doing, i.e. of the action willed carried out by the movement that is willed, of a choice of movement. And do you think that the acquisition and consumption of a bottle of Rhenish wine involves no judgment of approval or disapproval? If I am very rich, if my aim in life is to obtain momentary sensual pleasures, and I know that Rhenish wine will secure me one of them, I buy and drink Rhenish wine and approve my act. I am satisfied with myself. But if I do not wish to indulge in gluttony, and if my money is all devoted to other purposes, for which I wish as preferable, and if, in spite of this, yielding to the temptation of the moment, I buy and drink Rhenish wine, I have put myself into contradiction with myself, and the sensual pleasure will be followed by a judgment of disapproval, by a legitimate and fitting ECONOMIC REMORSE.
To prove to you how, in all this, I omit every moral consideration, I will give you another example: that of a knave who thinks it ofelimo to himself to murder a man in order to rob him of a sum of money. At the moment of assassination, and although remaining a knave at heart, he yields to an emotion of fear or to a pathological feeling of compassion, and does not kill the man. Note carefully the terms of the hypothesis. The knave will call himself an ass and an imbecile, and will feel remorse for his contradictory and inconclusive conduct; but not indeed a moral remorse (of that he is, by hypothesis, incapable), but, precisely, a remorse that is merely economic.
It seems to me that there is another confusion, easy to dispel, in your counter criticism to my criticism of the scale of values (economic) you say that 'there is no need for one person to find himself at the same moment under different conditions; it is enough that he can picture to himself these different conditions.' Can you in truth picture yourself being at the same moment under different conditions? Fancy has its laws; and does not allow the imagination of what is unimaginable. You can easily say that you picture it to yourself: words are docile; but, to picture it in reality, is, pardon me, another matter altogether. You will not succeed in it any more than I. Ask me to imagine a lion with the head of a donkey, and I will comply at once; but ask me to imagine a lion standing at the same moment in two different places, and I cannot succeed. I will picture to myself, if you like, two similar lions, two exactly alike, but not the same in two different positions. Fancy reconstructs reality, but possible reality, not the impossible or what is contradictory. Thus my demonstration of the absurdity of the scale of values applies both to actual and to possible reality. Nay, in discussing science in the abstract it was framed precisely on the mere consideration of the possible.
I do not know whether I have answered all your objections, but I have endeavoured to answer all those which seem to me fundamental. A dispute, in which questions of method and of principle are at stake need not be carried on pedantically into minute details; we must depend to some extent on the assistance of the readers, who, putting themselves mentally in the position of the two disputants, work out for themselves the final application. I wish merely to add that it is my strongest conviction that the reaction against metaphysics (a far-sighted reaction in that it has freed scientific procedure from admixture with the arbitrary judgments of feeling and belief) has been pushed forward by many so far as to destroy science itself. The mathematicians who have a quick feeling for scientific procedure, have done much for economic science by reviving in it the dignity of abstract analysis, darkened and overwhelmed by the mass of anecdotes of the historical school. But, as it happens, they have also introduced into it the prejudice of their profession, and, being themselves students of the general conditions of the physical world, the particular prejudice that mathematics can take up in relation to economics—which is the science of man, of a form of the conscious activity of man—the same attitude which it rightly takes up in relation to the empirical natural sciences.
From what I have now stated you will easily discover exactly how far we are in agreement in the establishment of the principles of Economics and how far we disagree. If my new observations should assist in further reducing the extent of the disagreement, I shall indeed be glad.
Perugia, 20th October, 1900.[100]