The errors which I have mentioned have been committed principally by those who, without being professedly political economists, frequently indeed expressly disclaiming that character, have treated the subjects which Political Economy considers. But many who have avowedly devoted themselves to its pursuit, seem to have misdirected their efforts, for want of a clear conception of the object of their investigations, of the manner in which they ought to be conducted, or of the nature of the difficulties to be surmounted. If the teacher of Political Economy has not decided whether he is engaged on a science or on an art, whether it is his duty to explain phenomena or to deliver precepts, whether his principal business is to observe facts or to deduce inferences, whether his premises are all physical truths or depend partly on arbitrary assumption,—his work, though it may contain partial views of the highest value, cannot possibly form a clear or a consistent whole. Nor is it sufficient that the professor should have made up his mind as to what he has to teach. It is important, though not equally important, that the student should have a general notion as to what he has to learn, as to the nature of the subjects which are to be laid before him, of the conclusions to which he will be asked to assent, and of the arguments by which they will be supported. The view that is to be taken, may perhaps not suit his habits of thought or of inquiry. It may be too abstract or too concrete. If he be accustomed to demonstration, he may be ill satisfied by proofs and illustrations drawn from actual life, and mixed with irrelevant accidents. If his pursuits have been practical, he may be disgusted by reasonings founded on hypotheses representing nothing that actually takes place. Or his objections may be directed rather against the subject itself than against the mode of its treatment. He may think that too much importance, or if not too much importance, too exclusive an attention, is directed towards wealth. He may wish that economists would consider man as a being with higher qualities, higher duties, and higher enjoyments than those which are concerned in the production, distribution, and consumption of commodities and services, and may regret to see him treated merely as a cause or a recipient of rents, profits, and wages. But if he be forewarned, he will not be disappointed, and, knowing beforehand the sort of study in which he is to be engaged, he will more easily perceive the premises and weigh the arguments of its professor.
[LECTURE II.]
POLITICAL ECONOMY A MENTAL STUDY.
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.