And, just as one form of physical energy may be substituted for another, under different systems of technique, electricity taking the place of steam power, steam doing the work formerly done by horse or human power, so, in particular forms of social organization, one form of social force may do the work that is better done by some other form of social force under a different form of social organization. Thus the regulation of the details of conduct, a matter of iron law (or of custom with the force of law) in certain stages, we now leave to the control of subtler social forces. At one stage we depend on religious values, the curse and the benediction of the church, as a tremendously vital power in social control; now we find other modes of social energy frequently more efficacious. Now we depend primarily on economic social values, under a competitive system, to motivate the economic activities of society, to determine whether this piece of land shall be planted in wheat, or in some other crop, or fertilized in this or that manner; in the mediæval English manor, many questions like these were settled by vote of the manor court.
But whatever the form in which the social energy of control and motivation manifests itself, its functional character is the same. It has its origin in, and receives its vitality from, the social will—or better is a phase of the social will—as steam power, electric power, and the energy in human muscles, are species of the same generic force.
The effort has not been made to put the whole of our argument into these obviously uncongenial terms. The mechanical analogies, often useful for particular purposes, fail to bring out the rich complexity, the organic nature, of the social processes, and, by their very simplicity, often lead to the ignoring of essential factors. For the purposes of the practical economist, however, concerned with price analysis in a situation which is so complex that he can give attention to only one set of forces, or tendencies, at a time, and where quantitative measurement is essential, it is often highly necessary to abstract from the organic complexity, to assume that other forces than those he is measuring are constant, and to put his argument into mechanical terms. My conception involves no radical revision of economic methodology in this matter. It is primarily concerned with the interpretation and validation of this methodology. To this topic I shall return in the chapters on the relation between the theory of value and the theory of prices.
FOOTNOTES:
[179] Social Organization, p. 264.
[180] Professor J. R. Commons has made some interesting comments in a note ("Political Economy and Business Economy," Quar. Jour. Econ., Nov., 1907), as to the extent to which intangible objects have come to have economic value. The legal and psychical nature of such values is, of course, very manifest.
[181] Moral values, like economic values, in the sense in which I use the term here, are actual facts, and not mere ideals. A moral value is a value, to the extent that it is an effective power in motivation, to the extent that the social will backs it up, and punishes with its disapproval and with the subtle penalties which social disapproval involves, infractions of the moral standard in question. I am not here passing judgment on moral values themselves in the light of any ideal standard, but simply describing the manner in which moral values function.
[182] Intrinsically, there is no more reason why the economist should concern himself with measuring quantitatively the effect of tariff laws than with a similar treatment of other legal values. Tariffs do not affect industry any more intimately than hosts of other laws. The obvious reason why the economic laws of taxation have been worked out and the others ignored, in our economic analyses, is that the tax laws, being themselves expressed in money terms, are more easily handled by the economist.