[847] Principles, 4th ed., Book I, chap. 3.
[848] Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften. In his Grundriss we read: “The writers who figure as representatives of inductive research in recent German economics are not opposed to the practice of deduction as such, but they do believe that it is too often based upon superficial and insufficient principles and that other principles derived from a more exact observation of facts might very well be substituted for these.” Everyone would subscribe to this view.
[849] Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft, Dr. Wickett’s translation.
[850] “National life, like every other form of existence, forms a whole of which the different parts are very intimately connected. Complete understanding even of a single aspect of it requires a careful study of the whole. Language, religion, arts and sciences, law, politics and economics must all be laid under tribute.” (Roscher, Principles.) Cf. also Hildebrand, Die Nationalökonomie der Gegenwart und Zukunft, p. 29. This is also Knies’s thought.
[851] Die Nationalökonomie der Gegenwart und Zukunft, p. 29.
[852] Principles, Book I, chap. 4, § 1. “History,” says Wagner (Grundlegung, § 83), “may well affirm the existence of causal or conditional relations, but it can never prove it.”
[853] History may, as a matter of fact, become explanatory, but only in a particular sense. In other words, although it cannot discover the general laws regulating phenomena, it may show what special circumstances (whose general laws are already supposed to be known) have given rise to some event equally specialised in character. But every honest historian has to admit that such explanations are definitely personal and subjective in character. For a recent examination of these ideas from the pen of a historian see the profound yet charming introduction contributed by Meyer to the second edition of his Geschichte des Alterthums. Cf. also Simiand, pp. 14-16.
[854] Cf. Marshall, Principles, Book I, chap. 6, § 4, and especially Menger, Untersuchungen, pp. 15-17: “We may be said to have historical knowledge of a particular phenomenon when we have traced its individual genesis, i.e. when we have succeeded in representing to ourselves the concrete circumstances among which it came into being, with their proper qualifications, etc. We may be said to have a theoretical knowledge of some concrete phenomenon when we are enabled to envisage it as a particular instance of a certain law or regularity of sequence or coexistence, i.e. when we are able to give an account of the raison d’être and the nature of its existence as an exemplification of some general law.”
[855] A full exposition of this idea is given in his Grundriss, but Knies, in the name of the conception of a unique evolution, contests the view.
[856] This is what M. Renouvier thinks of this conception: “If we proceed to ask another question in addition to the difficult one already asked and inquire as to the circumstances under which different nations have advanced or declined in the path of goodness and of truth and transmitted their triumphs or their defeats to the next generations, and if we support ourselves in the quest by the belief that we already have some knowledge of a scientific law and consequently of the aim of human society (this kind of knowledge generally begins with formulating such aims), we shall find ourselves in the position of a religious prophet who, not merely content with an inspired version of the truth, and of the destiny of mankind, proceeds to expound to his auditors the necessity under which both preacher and auditors are compelled to believe and to act in accordance with what will undoubtedly come to pass. Philosophical and religious imagination seeks in external observation the elements of a confidence which it can no longer place in itself. History becomes a kind of inspiring divinity. But although the object of the illusion is different its nature is still the same, for the new deity is as little effective as were the ancient ones in the opinion of those who have no faith in it, and it only inspires those who already believe.” (Introduction à la Philosophie analytique de l’Histoire, 2nd ed., vol. i, p. 121.) Bergson’s philosophy also contests the possibility of guessing what the future may be like from the character of the present. See especially Creative Evolution.