[4] See, e.g., J. S. Mill, Political Economy, Book I; Marshall, Principles of Economics, Vol. I, Books II-V.
[5] Cf., e.g., such an account as Barrows, Ethno-botany of the Coahuilla Indians.
[6] What would be the scientific rating of the work of a botanist who should spend his energy in devising ways and means to neutralize the ecological variability of plants, or of a physiologist who conceived it the end of his scientific endeavors to rehabilitate the vermiform appendix or the pineal eye, or to denounce and penalize the imitative coloring of the Viceroy butterfly? What scientific interest would attach to the matter if Mr. Loeb, e.g., should devote a few score pages to canvassing the moral responsibilities incurred by him in his parental relation to his parthenogenetically developed sea-urchin eggs?
Those phenomena which Mr. Clark characterizes as "positive perversions" may be distasteful and troublesome, perhaps, but "the economic necessity of doing what is legally difficult" is not of the "essentials of theory."
[7] It is a notable fact that even the genius of Herbert Spencer could extract nothing but taxonomy from his hedonistic postulates; e.g., his Social Statics. Spencer is both evolutionist and hedonist, but it is only by recourse to other factors, alien to the rational hedonistic scheme, such as habit, delusions, use and disuse, sporadic variation, environmental forces, that he is able to achieve anything in the way of genetic science, since it is only by this recourse that he is enabled to enter the field of cumulative change within which the modern post-Darwinian sciences live and move and have their being.
[8] "The capital-goods have to be taken unit by unit if their value for productive purposes is to be rightly gauged. A part of a supply of potatoes is traceable to the hoes that dig them.... We endeavor simply to ascertain how badly the loss of one hoe would affect us or how much good the restoration of it would do us. This truth, like the foregoing ones, has a universal application in economics; for primitive men as well as civilized ones must estimate the specific productivity of the tools that they use," etc. Page 43.
[9] Cf. a criticism of Mr. Fisher's conception in the Political Science Quarterly for February, 1908.
[10] "The machine itself is often a hopeless specialist. It can do one minute thing and that only, and when a new and better device appears for doing that one thing, the machine has to go, and not to some new employment, but to the junk heap. There is thus taking place a considerable waste of capital in consequence of mechanical and other progress." "Indeed, a quick throwing away of instruments which have barely begun to do their work is often the secret of the success of an enterprising manager, but it entails a destruction of capital."
[11] The position of the laborer and his wages, in this light, would not be substantially different from that of the capitalist and his interest. Labor is no more possible, as a fact of industry, without the community's accumulated technological knowledge than is the use of "productive goods."
[12] Cf. Distribution of Wealth, chaps, xii, xiii, vii, viii; Essentials, chaps, v-x.