Modern Science and Human Values A Study in The History of Ideas - Everett W Hall

MODERN SCIENCE
AND
HUMAN VALUES
A STUDY IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
EVERETT W.
Kenan Professor of Philosophy
The University of North Carolina
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M .M
To
C., R., D., D. and S.
â"Proff"
465
Preface
The ensuing study is addressed primarily neither to scientists nor
to historians. In writing it the author had in mind two groups of
people. On the one hand, there are people like himself, inquisitive
laymen in these fields, who, bewildered by the cross-currents of con-
temporary thought, wish to get some perspective by means of an
historical approach. On the other, there are students, some looking
ahead to careers in science, medicine or engineering, who desire a
broader cultural framework for their subjects than their technical
training promises; others in philosophy and the humanities who
wanted an outlook on modern scientific method and its relations to
human values other than that offered from the stony and narrow
path of some actual scientific pursuit. The author has no special
qualifications in the way of scholarship in the areas involved, and
certainly puts forth no claim to having established any new theories.
If he has made any contribution it is in the tracing out of certain
clusters of ideas and their association with certain attitudes that
have profoundly affected the modern mind. He hopes and believes
that the insights which this sort of approach can give will be of help
in gaining that kind of objectivity concerning itself which the pres-
ent age so greatly needs.
Several people have helped to make this book in its present form
possible. I hope they will not be condemned too severely for their
parts in it; in any case, the author is deeply indebted to them.
First, there are those who have read the manuscript, at various
stages, and encouraged its publication. They are Professor Ralph
Ellsworth, Director of Libraries at the State University of Iowa,
Professor Lewis Zerby of the Department of Philosophy at Michigan
State College, Professor George Mosse of the Department of History
at the University of Wisconsin, Doctor Nathan Womack, Head of
the Department of Surgery in the School of Medicine at the Uni-
versity of North Carolina, Mr. Lambert Davis, Director of the Uni-
versity of North Carolina Press, and Professor Henry Margenau of
the Sloane Physics Laboratory, Yale University, who, it should be
added, expressed some disagreement with the author's general ac-

vi Preface
count of value with its rather sharp demarcation of value from fact.
Then there is Professor James King of the Department of History
at the University of North Carolina who not only read Part I but
also offered numerous criticisms both of a general and a detailed
character. That he must not be held responsible for historical errors
and misinterpretations that remain may best be indicated by my stat-
ing that I still hold to an account of the development of science and
of economics in particular from which he differs, as I understand
him, almost toto caelo.
Above all, I owe a debt of gratitude to people connected with a
course of lectures in the history of ideas which I gave at the State
University of Iowa at the close of World War II and from which
the present book has evolved. On the one hand, there are my assist-
ants who shared with me its many problems and discouragements
with relatively few rewards, Doctors Leonard Pinsky, Thomas
Thompson and Romane Clark. On the other, there is the mass of
students enrolled in it who succeeded in driving me to whatever
lucidity I may have achieved.
Finally, there is my wife, Charlotte, whose general support of the
project has been supplemented by many hours of concrete aid in
reading proofs and assembling the index.
To all of these, as well as to my publishers, who have been exceed-
ingly cooperative, I give my thanks.
Chapel Hill, N. C. EVERETT W. HALL
July
Table of Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
IntroductionâOn the Difference Between the
Modern and the Medieval Mind 1
Part IâAttainment of the Method of Modern Science 9
1. MEDIEVAL BACKGROUNDS IN SCIENCE 11
Ideas on Motion 11
Ideas on Wealth and Exchange 37
2. SOURCES OF THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION IN THE RENAIS-
SANCE 46
Physical Science in the Renaissance 46
The "Copernican Revolution" 46
The Rise of the Experimental Attitude 69
Economic Thought in the Renaissance 78
3. THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION AND THE AGE OF REASON 90
The Revolution in Physics in the Seventeenth Century 90
The Impact of the Scientific Revolution upon the
Eighteenth Century 126
In Physical Science 126
In Popular Thought 137
The Revolution in Political Economy 149
The Physiocrats 151
The Classical School 161
4. ROMANTICISM AND SCIENCE 185
The Counterrevolution in Economics 185
Its Social and Cultural Causes 185
The Historical School 196
The "Utopians" 202
The Communists f 212
The Scientific Revolution in Biology 221
5. SCIENCE IN THE PRESENT AGE 237
Extension of the Method of Modern Science in Physics:
The Theory of Relativity 237
The Achievement of Scientific Method in Economics 255

viii Table of Contents
CHAPTER PAGE
Marginal Utility 255
The Mathematical School 261
Part IIâToward an Independent Investigation of Values 271
PROSPECT AND RETROSPECT 273
6. MEDIEVAL OUTLOOK ON VALUES 276
Ideas on the Good 276
Ideas on Law and the State 292
7. RENAISSANCE ICONOCLASM 308
Ethics: From Saint to Humanist 308
Political Theory: The Rise of Absolutism 317
8. VALUES IN A SCIENTIFIC AGE 329
Theoretical Conflict Between Political Absolutionists
and Popularists 329
Ethics and the Impact of the New Science 354
Hobbism and Anti-Hobbism 356
The Selfishness Controversy 371
The Ethics and Psychology of Impartiality 382
9. ROMANTICISM AND VALUES 394
Romanticism in Ethics 394
The Historico-Romantic Theory of Law and the State 402
10. VALUES IN THE PRESENT AGE 425
Formal and Scientific Approaches to Law 425
Recent Controversy in Ethics 445
Evolutionism 445
Intuitionism 452
Skepticism 455
Existentialism 462
ConclusionâWhere Do We Stand? 467
INDEX 477
List of Illustrations
FIGURE PAGE
1. Compound Motions 25
2. Changeless Forms of Change 26
3. The Structure of Space as Determining Simple Motions 27
4. The Elements 28
5. Natural Places of the Elements 29
6. Observed Celestial Motions 33
7. The Homocentric System 35
8 The Ptolemaic System 36
9. Geometrical Numbers of the Pythagoreans . 50
10. The Elements (Plato's Timaeus) 51
11. The Copernican System 52
12. Planetary Oscillation 54
13a. Relative Perfection of Circle and Ellipse 58
1 gb. Kepler's Second Law 59
130. Table Showing Kepler's Third Law 60
14. Mechanism for Lifting Water 71
15. Apian Projection 72
16. Mercator Projection 73
17. Tycho Brahe's Giant Quadrant 75
18. Galileo's Experiment: Inertial Motion 103
19. Galileo's Trajectory of Cannon Ball 107
20. Torricelli's Barometer 113
21. Newton's Third Law 119
22. Analysis of Circular Motion 121
23. Motion of a High-velocity Projectile Shot from a Moun-
tain 123
24. A Race 125
25. Lavoisier's Apparatus 133
26. Quesnay's Economic Table 154
27. Labor Value of a Shoe 166
28. Mendel's Genetic Scheme 230
29. Lorentz Transformation Principle 245
30. Rationalizing Production (Individual Firms) 267

x List of Illustrations
31. Conflict of Priority: Intellect vs. Will 286
32. Rationalism and Voluntarism in Legal and Ethical
Theory 291
33. Basis of Hobbes' Political Absolutism 344
34. Fundamental Contradiction in Locke 351
35. Fundamental Ambiguity in Hobbes 358

INTRODUCTION
On the Difference Between the Modern
and the Medieval Mind

The atom bomb that burst upon Hiroshima not only released a
great deal of dangerous radioactivity, it also accelerated the spread
of a serious type of questioning that had been gathering momentum
before this event. People everywhere are now seriously asking,
"Hasn't physical science advanced too far, not in itself, but in its
relation to our knowledge of values?" Different groups answer this
question differently. To be honest with the reader, I must say im-
mediately that the present book does not offer a verdict, although
perhaps it is not wholly irrelevant to the task of working out an in-
telligent one. Whatever the answer, however, the question is itself
interesting. I cannot help but feel that it is symptomatic of our
time. You will note that it implies a basic distinctionânamely, the
distinction between physical science and the study of values.
Let us pause for a moment to try to clarify this. It may involve
no more than a division of labor within the sciences. It may mean,
for example, that the study of values falls to the lot of the social
sciences, that the physical sciences concern themselves with value-
free matters, such as mechanical and chemical changes. So we find
people urging (I think of the late John Dewey as an example) that
our basic trouble is that we haven't developed the social sciences
adequately, that their application of the scientific method, so suc-
cessfully achieved by the physical sciences, should be brought up to
a level somewhat nearer to equilibrium with the latter. Let us note
the point of the argument. It is not simply that scientific method in
the area of social studies should be promoted; it is rather that this
promotion should occur in order that we may be more intelligent,
be wiser, in our choice of the ends to which our greatly expanded
physical knowledge is devoted.
Now, even on this interpretation the distinction we are discussing
is symptomatic of our age. In the Middle Ages there was of course a

4 Modern Science and Human Values
very definite distinction between the study of nature and the study
of man, between physics and ethics, but the basis was not that the
latter studied values whereas the former concerned itself with value-
free processes. As I shall try to make perfectly clear, medieval physics
was a study of values, of goal behavior on nature's part. It was also
a study of facts, but the same can be said about medieval ethics. In
the medieval period there was no need to urge that the methods of
physics should be extended to the study of human behavior, because
there was no basic disparity between the two.
A revolution in method in physics has occurred since the Middle
Ages. The physical sciences no longer seek the goals of natural
processes; they no longer explain that such and such changes occur
in nature because they are "for the best." To discover just what the
character of their "explanations" is, what they seek to find out with
their new method, forms one of the objectives of the present essay.
Without anticipating too explicitly the results I hope to reach, I can
already point up a serious problem for our contemporary Deweyans.
If modern scientific method (as contrasted with medieval) has freed
itself from explanation by goals or "final causes," as they were called,
what can it offer us when applied to the study of human behavior?
There is a current answer to this last question, an answer, how-
ever, that can offer small satisfaction to our Deweyans. It is that
modern scientific method can attain "explanations" of human be-
havior which are the same in principle as those it has so successfully
achieved in the area of physical phenomena. Since these embrace no
final causes, no it-is-for-the-best's, it follows that when the new scien-
tific method is adopted by the social studies it does not produce any
increased wisdom as to values that should be pursued.
There is a vociferous and highly articulate contemporary group
that would push this latter viewpoint further. The positivists claim
that modern scientific method is the only reliable method of ac-
quiring knowledge. Since it gives us no knowledge as to the values
we ought to seek, there can be no such knowledge. And, to carry on
logically to the bitter end, if no knowledge of values is possible it
becomes nonsense to say that there are values. The positivists do
not deny that people use value words; they simply deny that these
refer to anything. They do not prohibit the study of the occurrence
of value expressions, in relation, for example, to emotional and voli-
tional behavior and to the situations that stimulate such behavior;

Introduction 5
they simply rule out such study as not having any supposed bearing
upon wisdom or intelligent choice of goals that should be sought.
This position again presupposes, and in a far more radical fashion,
a distinction between physical science and the study of values. The
difference is no longer one within the sciences and indicative of a
division of labor. It is a distinction between a genuine and a pseudo
investigation. It is thus based on a deeper distinction, namely, that
between the legitimate subject matter of modern science and the
illusory subject matter of the value disciplines (such as ethics and
aesthetics). Let us, for purposes of simplicity of reference, call the
former "laws of fact" or just "facts"; the latter, "moral or aesthetic
laws" or just "values." The positivists, then, assume a basic distinc-
tion between facts and values; the former being genuine constituents
of the world, the latter not.
The drawing of this difference is characteristic of our period; it
is utterly foreign to the medieval mind. Indeed, even as drawn for
the more innocuous purpose, not of eliminating values but of claim-
ing their ultimate uniqueness of status, their irreducibility to facts,
the distinction is characteristic of the modern mind. There is a con-
temporary school of thought, to which the author belongs, agreeing
with the positivists in denying that values can be investigated by the
method of modern science. This school, however, claims that there
are values and that, by a different method, they can be known. This
is not the place to elucidate these contentions; a brief mention of the
historical affiliations and the broad outline of the views of this school
as well as of those of the positivists will be found near the end of the
present study. It is to the point in the present context, however, to
indicate that both positivists and objectivists are committed to the
admission of a fundamental distinction between facts and values,
and that this is something peculiarly modern.
A word of clarification about terminology might not be amiss here.
The author uses "fact" and cognate terms to refer to anything that
actually is (has been or will be) the case. Thus, he would say that
it is a fact that he is writing these sentences with blue ink on white
paper, that the sun is hot, that Lincoln felt deeply about slavery, that
copper is a good conductor of electricity. He uses "value" and its
kin to mean anything, whether actual or not, that is good or bad or,
again, anything that ought to be or not, taken, in each case, in the
character mentioned. Thus, the hurricane called "Hazel" was, on

the whole and in its total effects, bad, thus of negative value. Segre-
gation in schools and other public institutions ought to be ended in
the South. Atomic energy should be utilized for peaceful purposes
only. These shoulds, oughts, goods, and their opposites are what the
author calls "values."
There are two ways in which values are closely related to facts, so
closely indeed that it is easy to confuse the two. On the one hand,
there are facts about people's beliefs in and actions guided by values.
Thus, I believe in the values mentioned at the end of the preceding
paragraph. This is clearly a fact about me. Scientists are controlled
in their scientific behavior by their conviction that the ascertainment
of the laws of nature is worth the effort it requires. Christians of the
first century believed in a kind of simple communism and practiced
it. All these are facts, not values; but facts that in some sense re-
quire values as somehow involved in their aims or objectives.
Contrariwise, values always bear within themselves a kind of refer-
ence to possible facts, namely, to those that are or would be good or
bad, or as they ought or ought not to be. What is good or bad is that
something be or be not the case, such as a clear foreign policy on the
part of our State Department, or an understanding of the nature of
scientific method and its relation to our knowledge of values. Even
though values thus inherently aim, so to speak, at facts, they are not
themselves facts. Our language tends to play us tricks here. It may
be a fact that something of value actually existsâfor example, that
I have caught the reader's attention and aroused his interest. But its
valuableness is not the same as its actuality.
I hope this terminological digression may have been of help. In
any case, it is necessary to get back to the main road. I was saying
that there has emerged in recent times a rather sharp distinction be-
tween facts and values together with the realization that we have
found an admirable method (the scientific) of establishing generali-
zations about the former not matched by any equally reliable one
for giving knowledge of the latter.
We have come then to a characteristic of the modern mind mark-
ing it off quite basically from the medieval. It is with the rise and
development of this characteristic that the present study is funda-
mentally concerned. It will not be confined wholly within these
limits in any strict sense, however. It is a further conviction of the
author that the distinction between facts and values is bound up
historically with many other matters and that, with this distinction
Introduction 7
in hand, one has a sort of key to unlock many a treasure chest in the
history of ideas.
Each of the two parts of the ensuing study is chiefly directed to the
portrayal of a major revolution in men's attitudes toward facts and
values and the methods of investigating or assaying them. Such a
study would have remained vague and unreal unless attached to the
history of more particular ideas in which these basic changes were
embodied. Two alternatives were open. One was to use materials
from all men's intellectual efforts, to picture the revolution through
a panoramic survey. The other was to choose a few disciplines of
thought only and, within these, to concentrate upon a few major
figures and crucial ideas, but constantly to remind the reader that
these are representative of broader developments. The author took
the easier and less hazardous roadânamely, the latter.
In tracing the achievement of modern scientific method, material
has been drawn largely from the histories of dynamics and eco-
nomics. It was thought wise to take a physical and a social science,
and the actual choice in each area was dictated largely by the fact
that it was in the chosen disciplines that the new method found its
earliest attainment. Since the choice involved no commitment to a
writing of the history of the special sciences involved, no conscience
was felt either about lacunae or occasional excursions into other
fields (the chief example being the notice taken of the theory of
evolution in the nineteenth century); but, in the main, attention
was confined to the history of the laws of motion in mechanics and
of price laws in economics.
The historical materials for the study of values were drawn largely
from ethics and political and legal theory (with increasing emphasis
upon jurisprudence as that became distinguished from political
theory). Aesthetics was entirely omitted for two major reasons, one
good and one bad: its chaotic condition and the author's woeful
ignorance both of it and of the history of art in conjunction with
which it would need to be treated.
I have tried to be fair in indicating the prejudices controlling the
selection of material and the point of view in evaluating it that have
gone into the present study. To be honest in showing one's preju-
dices is not to get rid of them (notwithstanding certain claims of the
sociologists of knowledge to the contrary). I share certain outlooks
of the present on the present and its historical origins. The point of
view here developed may be wrong; I am sure it will be superseded.

I am reminded of the Epilogue to J. B. Bury's The Idea of Progress,
a book, incidentally, I like to think did for the idea of progress, in its
replacement of the idea of providence, what I am trying to do for the
distinction of fact and value and its replacement of the amalgam of
the two in men's thinking. Wrote Bury: "Will not that process of
change, for which Progress is the optimistic name, compel 'Progress'
too to fall from the commanding position in which it is now, with
apparent security, enthroned? ... A day will come, in the revolu-
tion of centuries, when a new idea will usurp its place as the direct-
ing idea of humanity. Another star, unnoticed now or invisible, will
climb up the intellectual heaven, and human emotions will react to
its influence, human plans respond to its guidance. It will be the
criterion by which Progress and all other ideas will be judged. And
it too will have its successor." We have not had to wait for "the
revolution of centuries" to find the optimism of "unending progress"
become old-fashioned if not completely obsolete. Whether the idea
of value-free scientific knowledge has or will climb as high in the
intellectual heavens may be doubted, but however high it climbs, it
will, we may rest assured, sink again to be surmounted by some other
star. What will that star be?âthat there are values and that there
is a way of finding them out?

PART I
Attainment of the Method of Modern Science

CHAPTER 1
Medieval Backgrounds in Science
Ideas on Motion
When we try to read ourselves into the outlook of thirteenth-
century Europe, particularly as that relates to what has come to be
known as mechanics, we find ourselves in an intellectually foreign
atmosphere. Part of our difficulty is linguistic. I do not mean merely
the obstacle furnished by school-Latin and the scarcity of translations
into English of writings dealing with what we call "mechanics," but
more especially a systematic difference in terminology that has to be
retained in any acceptable translation. Such a difference reveals a
thorough-going shift in ideas themselves, for the terminology of a
period used in dealing with any given group of problems is no mere
crust covering the substance of its thought and easily removable
without affecting the essence.
This sense of intellectual strangeness which assaults us when we
try to read anything of a scholarly nature written in the thirteenth
century and which is most disturbing when we are concerned with
discussions of physical motion is certainly in part responsible for a
widespread misapprehension. That misapprehension is to the effect
that the thinking of the Middle Ages was throughout enslaved and
deductive, confined within theological and metaphysical fences. No
wonder, so it is argued, there was no science, particularly no physical
science, for science demands the open fields of free inquiry and
direct observation. Medieval thought, to continue our misapprehen
sion, was completely under the control of external authority, particu
larly the twin authority of the scriptures and of Aristotle.
With this rather glib explanation we all too often feel justified in
making no further effort to understand medieval ideas concerning
the phenomena of motion. Now I must confess that such an attitude
if shared by my reader presents me with a serious initial impediment.
How can I show the truly stupendous change in outlook and modes
of thought instituted by modern physics if all that occurred was that

12 Modern Science and Human Values [1]
men revolted against blind adhesion to the authority of Aristotle and
the Bible and began to use their own sense organs to see how nature
really did perform?
Perhaps the best thing to do first is to admit that there is a half-
truth in this traditional misconception. After all, the physics of the
thirteenth century was essentially the physics of Aristotle. To some
degree this can be attributed to an intellectual conservatism and
authoritarianism characteristic of the period. However, lest this ad
mission too seriously weaken the case for the tremendous historical
significance of the revolution in thinking brought about by modern
physics, let us put this feature of medieval thought in its social set-
ting. Unquestionably authoritarianism in physics was there, but it is
equally unquestionable that a major social upheaval was needed to
replace it by experimentalism.
Let us recall some well-known facts about European society and
learning in the period immediately preceding the thirteenth century
(on the assumption that the outlook and mentality of a civilization
are in part at least products of those social factors that have gone into
its formation). Social organization was, as the historians put it,
"feudal." This term covers a complex of features, one of the most
important of which, from our standpoint, is the absence, by and
large, of social movement. "Vertical" movement, that is, movement
of individuals during their lifetime from a given social class to a
higher or lower one, was exceedingly difficult and rare. Custom and
hereditary status largely determined an individual's conditions of life
and work. We may roughly divide feudal society into four classes:
the clergy (noble and non-noble), the nobility, petty freemen and
serfs. Between these, and even within them, there existed quite a
hard, social stratification.
The serfs were tied to the land, ownership of which carried with
it ownership of the serfs that were appended to it. Conversely, the
serf, in most instances, could not be evicted; he had rights to some
small plot of ground and some small amount of his own time to work
it. Even among the serfs there were gradations, depending upon the
amount of land to which the individual had rights.
The petty freemen could, theoretically, leave the land. This was a
rather empty privilege so far as any opportunity to move to other
manorial estates was concerned. But with the growth in the number
and importance of towns and the increase in demand for the work of
artisans in them who sold the products of their craftsmanship for

[1] Medieval Backgrounds in Science 13
money, this freedom of movement involved a very real privilege. On
the manor itself the status of the freeman was appreciably higher
than that of the serf. He was not subject to forced labor, although
he had to pay duesâat first in produce, later in money. The
stewards, bailiffs and other petty manorial administrators were
drawn from this class. Here too there were definite distinctions of
rank.
It is in the nobility, however, that we see the greatest diversity in
status. The nobles were distinguished from those lower in the social
scale by the possession of the one great means of production in the
Middle Ages, the land. This ownership was not characterized by the
power of exchange on the market, but it did involve the right to re-
ceive payments from free tenants and labor from serfs. Thus, the
nobility were free from the necessity to work the land or even, as a
rule, to oversee its working. The lives of the nobility were devoted
to the more elevated occupations of hunting and warfare. At the
lowest level was the individual knight. Above him were higher
nobles to whom he acknowledged vassalage. He had to swear per-
sonal homage to his overlord, which in practice meant giving service
to the latter in war, paying him money when exigencies demanded
and acting in the latter's council. In general, the king was simply the
highest of the nobility and frequently found his position somewhat
precarious. In England in the eleventh century, William the Con-
queror brought in greater regularity by distinguishing the higher
nobility, the tenants-in-chief, made up largely of his own Norman
followers, from the lower, the tenants-in-mesne, consisting chiefly of
the conquered English nobles.
In the clergy we find a similar hierarchy, from parish priests and
clerks up through abbots, bishops, archbishops and cardinals to the
popeâa structure rendered even more clear-cut and regular by the
international character of the church and the fact that relations
within it were more institutionalized. On the other hand, there was
more freedom of vertical movement within it than in secular society
resulting, to a great extent, from the vow of celibacy, which, officially
at least, made it impossible for any man to inherit an ecclesiastical
office from his father. But this freedom of social movement was
largely offset by the control the church exercised over the thinking
of all its representatives.
There was, then, little opportunity for men to move from one
class to another. They stayed where they belonged and led the life
appropriate to their status as determined by custom. Naturally, this
was associated with conservatism in attitude and viewpoint. Just as
one inherited his place and duties in life, so in addition his ideas
about the world. There was not present in any appreciable degree
that stimulus to fresh inquiry, to a questioning of traditional modes
of thinking, that comes with free mobility in social status. Different
social outlooks did not effectively overlay one another in the chang-
ing perspectives of particular individuals. Clearly this was conducive
to intellectual conservatism, to acceptance of ideas from the past, to
authoritarianism, not of an arbitrary or willful sort, but of the kind
embodied in such great traditions as those of Hebraic-Christian re-
ligion and Greek philosophy.
Moreover, this lack of "vertical" social movement was reinforced
by an absence of "horizontal" movement: people of different regions
did not generally associate with one another. This is a phase of the
localism of feudal society. The economy was agrarian. Population
was largely rural. The basic unit of society was the manor, which
was very nearly self-sufficient economically. It usually had its own
mill (owned of course by the lord of the manor), where its grain was
ground. The wool from its own sheep was spun and woven by hand
in its own cottages. Although metal often had to be obtained from
a distance, usually there was a metal worker on each manor capable
of fashioning those simple tools with which the soil was worked.
Most manors were surrounded by forests, which not merely fur-
nished wood for all the inhabitants and hunting for the lord, but
also isolated the population. Bad roads, poor means of communica-
tion and transportation, lack of protection for the traveler all served
to keep the manorial residents at home. And, as we have noted, the
serf, who made up probably more than half the population, was tied
by custom and law to the manorial land.
Of course, the nobility moved about somewhat more freely. But
even here we must avoid mistake. War was, in the main, quite local,
a more or less continual series of small raiding parties or glorified
jousts. The defensive advantages of the fortified castle and the
walled town favored localism. Only occasionally, as in the crusades,
were larger armies assembled for distant undertakings, and their
organization was loose and temporary, their movement over long
distances difficult and quite extraordinary and fraught, as a matter
of fact, with important consequences arising from the new social
contacts.
There were, of course, towns, and in the towns trade flourished.
But before the twelfth century it was unimportant as a source of
social change; it appears to have been confined largely to the furnish-
ing of articles fabricated by local craftsmen to local nobility and
higher clergy together with the disposal of foodstuffs and raw ma-
terials received from the surrounding countryside. That is, trade in
the towns was largely local. Here too there was little opportunity
for meeting strangers, for contact with foreign customs, religions,
ideas. This was to change and, as we shall note in due time, it was
precisely in the towns and in connection with their widening trade
that the ferment of new ideas and attitudes was first to develop and
to challenge the conservatism of medieval thinking.
Along with this lack of social movement we must put the poverty
of feudal Europe. The great mass of the population, the serfs and
petty freemen, had no leisure to devote to speculation or inquiry.
They could not, of course, read or write. They spent the daylight
hours in hard manual labor to eke out a bare subsistence, and when
night came they had to regain their strength in sleep in their cheer-
less mud hovels. The tilling of the soil was tedious, by slow ox-
drawn plows for the most part. The possibilities of soil fertilization
were not well understood, so that the arable fields, won with so much
difficulty from their natural state, had to lie fallow every second or
third year in order that crops could again be grown on them. Ab-
ject poverty and grinding toil are anything but conducive to fresh
observation and speculation on such abstract matters as the forms
and causes of physical motion. If these had already been investigated
by learned men in the past, obviously there was no point in reopen-
ing the matter.
But what of the nobles? Did they not have leisure? They had
leisure but not in the main for learning. With rare exceptions they
were not much better educated than the serfs who tilled their do-
mains. They could neither read nor write, and the height of their
intellectual accomplishments was attained in supporting court jest-
ers to tickle their vanity and troubadours to recite lengthy epics
purporting to prove the daring and fidelity of their sort in acts of
violence.
In this situation the church exercised a virtual monopoly over
learning. No schools survived the disintegration of the Roman Em-
pire save those connected with monasteries or those founded and
controlled by bishops. Somewhat earlier than the thirteenth century

a new educational institution had arisen, the university. But the
church was in firm control of it. Most of its faculties were regular
ecclesiastics or members of one of the great religious orders, the
Dominican (especially at Paris) or the Franciscan (particularly at
Oxford). Even lay teachers could obtain their licenses to teach only
from the chancellor representing the bishop, and what could or
could not be taught was strictly supervised by the church.
This control had arisen quite naturally. On the one hand, it was
in the interest of the church. Her clergy needed some learning. The
parish priest must be able to say the mass and read Latin sufficiently
for ritual purposes. The basic power of the church was, as we would
say today, "ideological." True, the church had by the thirteenth
century attained vast holdings of land all over Europe, and, under
Pope Innocent III, had successfully contended for supremacy, in
even a legal and political sense, over lay princes and their subjects.
In theory, however, it was based on the idea of the precedence of
the "spiritual" over the "temporal," and the contention, seriously
challenged by no one, that the church was the final authority in mat-
ters of faith and morals. The church, then, as custodian of men's
souls, required the "spiritual arms" to carry out this task, and the
subordination of "temporal arms" to itself wherever their aid seemed
necessary.
Negatively this took the form of the excommunication of anyone
not recognizing the church's authority and of the interdiction of all
religious rites in the territory of a recalcitrant prince. These pow-
ers were invoked when anyone dared question the supremacy of
the authority of the church in carrying out its mission. Wherever
there was definite heresy, that is, conflict in beliefs with those of-
ficially accepted by the church, more serious consequences arose.
The Inquisition, under the "Holy Office," could arrest and secretly
try anyone suspected of heresy, and condemn him to even the ex-
treme punishment of death and confiscation of property.
Positively it took the form of the shaping of the thinking of the
masses by the ritual and the preaching in the local churches, which
were to be found in every town and attached to every manor, and
which had no competition from other dispensers of ideology com-
parable to our modern newspapers, radios, motion pictures or pub-
lic forums. Therefore, it was all the more important that the priests
and higher clergy, through whom this control flowed, should have
the "right" ideas, and that the intellectual and professional class
generally should stay under the superintendence of the church.
Thus, we see that the church had strong motivation to exercise a
monopoly over learning. And it had the means to do so. Since it
had been the only depository of what learning there was during the
Dark Ages, it was in a position to control the universities when they
arose in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Moreover, the general
poverty of Europe meant that the class of scholars was small. Even
though students lived most frugally and there were no expenditures
for buildings (to say nothing of athletics and alumni associations),
there could be only a few universities, and these few tended to spe-
cialize. At Bologna the chief emphasis was on law; at Salerno, on
medicine; while the famous university of Paris, where St. Thomas
taught, specialized in theology and philosophy. Thus, by necessity,
despite the localism of the age, universities were international, both
in their faculties and student bodies. It was quite natural that the
one great international institution of any power, the church, should
exercise control over them. Moreover, an international language
of scholarship was, under the circumstances, a necessity. The one
available candidate was the international language of the churchâ
Latin.
The church, then, was able to exercise a great deal of authority
over universities and what was taught in them. It might be thought,
however, that the cosmopolitan character of the universities would
give that social contact between different regions whose absence in
the case of the noneducated classes we have seen to be a part cause
of their conservatism. To the extent this contact occurred it did
definitely challenge traditional modes of thought. But it must be
remembered that scholars in Europe had very much the same mental
outlooks and life habits. Moreover, there was an especially strong
factor within the universities themselves making for a conservative
attitude. I refer again to poverty. This, combined with the ex-
tremely great cost of publishing books, which required copying by
hand, meant that what few books there were were greatly prized. Not
every young upstart could get his writings publishedâbooks must
be largely confined to the accepted writings of the past. Since there
were not enough of these, great emphasis was placed on memorizing,
which is not ordinarily conducive to new ideas. Because each copy
of a book had to be made individually, many errors crept in. Con-

sequently scholars had to spend a great amount of time discovering
glosses. The emphasis on the correct text, that is, the original or in
any case earlier one, likewise strengthened the transmissive character
of learning. Education was, therefore, largely linguistic and bookish.
The seven liberal arts were all literary; and the center, the core of
the educational structure, was the trivium, consisting of grammar,
rhetoric, and dialectic (logic), required for any advanced work. This
last was itself bookish. It consisted of lectures and disputations. The
lectures were expositions of, and commentaries upon, standard texts
which were often taken from the ancient world. In the disputations
there were set subjects for debate, and the final basis for decision
was an interpretation of such authorities as Aristotle or the church
fathers. This type of education developed the fine art of making
distinctions and developing many possible interpretations of given
statements. It was an excellent device for achieving clarity in the
communication of ideas already stated and accepted, but offered
little encouragement to develop new and original ideas.
After this somewhat extended consideration of the social back-
grounds of ideas, let us return to our initial argument. We were
saying that there is half-truth, or perhaps a little more, in the com-
mon idea that the physics of thirteenth-century Europe was Aristote-
lian because of the conservatism and authoritarianism of the age.
Even granting this, we were saying, the scientific revolution brought
about by modern physics involved a tremendous and basic shift in
attitudes, for the conservatism and authoritarianism were very deeply
founded. We shall see that great new social forces had to arise to
make possible any such revolution in men's thinking. Before turn-
ing to this, however, I should like to clarify my statement that the
view under criticism is only a partial truth and is therefore mis-
leading.
It must be admitted that the intellectuals in thirteenth-century
Europe did, by and large, accept the mechanics of Aristotle. No
doubt the conservatism and authoritarianism of the age did require
that opinions in this, as in every subject, have the sanctity of age.
But this leaves unexplained why the views of Aristotle should have
been preferred to other ancient interpretations of motion: the rather
inchoate, unsystematic ideas of the Bible, and within the sphere of
more systematic thought, the positions of the Greek atomists and
of the geometrical physicists, if we may so call themâthe Pythago-
reans, Plato, Archimedes. Indeed, it should be pointed out that

Aristotle's system of physics had been lost to western Europe (al-
though retained by the Arabs) from about the sixth century to the
twelfth. It was largely due to the zeal of the neo-Aristotelian,
Thomas Aquinas, and of his teacher, Albertus Magnus, that Aris-
totelian physics became quite universally accepted in the thirteenth
century.
If it be said that this success was due to the obvious way in which
Aristotelian physics accorded with and supplemented Biblical ideas
and Christian theology, the answer should be a denial. There were,
as a matter of fact, flat contradictions causing Aquinas serious em-
barrassment. One example will suffice. It was a basic principle of
Aristotle's that motion must always be preceded by earlier motion,
so that there could have been no initial motion in point of time.
This idea could have been united with the Biblical account of crea-
tion, which records the beginning not of all things but of an ordered
world; however, it conflicted very violently with accepted theology
that the universe and all the motions it contained were created
ex nihilo, so that there must have been a motion not preceded by
any earlier ones.
To this it may be objected that we must not fasten on particular
divergences between Aristotle and orthodox Christianity. These of
course did give the neo-Aristotelians of the thirteenth century a
great deal of trouble. But in its basic framework Aristotelian physics
agreed well with current theology, for being teleological and domi-
nated by value concepts, it could easily be made to fit a religious
outlook that ascribed the creation of the physical world and its gen-
eral overseeing to a good God. However, the Pythagorean-Platonic
physics was at least equally dominated by value concepts (if we are
not fully aware of this it is because we have to some degree separated
geometrical concepts from value overtones). Moreover, Aristotle
placed the purposive regulation of natural processes in the processes
themselves. He did not conceive it as a separate purpose in the
mind of a creator, similar to the purpose of a skilled artisan in fab-
ricating an article which remains quite impassive. Here I think is a
basic difference between Aristotle and orthodox Christian thought.
The reason Aristotelian physics came so easily to dominate thir-
teenth-century thought lay elsewhereâin the fact that this inter-
pretation simply systematized certain commonsensical observations.
This may sound surprising to those who have been affected by the
misapprehension to which I have referred. Of course every one

admits that Aristotle's ideas on this subject, as on all others, were
worked out systematically. Indeed, I think it is this obvious feature
of his thinking that has been mistaken for a metaphysical rationalism
which supposedly deduced everything from a priori first principles,
that is, principles having nothing to do with experience. That this
is a serious mistake, a mistake that just about exactly reverses the
truth, will be a major portion of my task to show. But if I am cor-
rect in this, why do Aristotelian ideas on motion seem so foreign;
why do we find them so hard to grasp? Precisely, I think, because
we have lived since the revolution brought about by modern physics.
"Acceleration," "inertia," "mass," "momentum" have become famil-
iar jargon. They seem so appropriate that it is hard to set them aside
and just look at motions, in a direct and unsophisticated fashion. If
it be added that this jargon is so familiar that most of us would not
have the faintest idea how to construct precise and correct definitions
of any of its terms, it should be no matter of astonishment that we
are quite unable to compare the laws stated in it with the phenomena
of motion as we can directly observe them.
It is simple indeed for me to illustrate this, but difficult, I fear,
to convince my reader. Let me start by pointing out a very funda-
mental feature of Aristotelian dynamics. It is not a science in its
own right. Motions (Aristotle called them "locomotions") are a
form of changeâchange in place. But they are only one form of
change. There are others just as fundamental as they: alteration or
change of quality, generation and destruction or change of being,
growth and diminution or change of magnitude.
Consider for a moment alteration. It is as truly a matter of direct
observation that objects change in quality as that they change in
location, argues Aristotle. I see the flaming reds of the sunset deepen
into purple, fade into violet, and disappear, through blues and
grays, into the black of night. For observation this is quite as real
and ultimate as is the motion of a cloud across the sky. To say that
I actually see only motions, that all I really see is differently shaped
particles (as Democritus claimed), or ether waves of different fre-
quencies (as school children are taught today), when I suppose I
am seeing the sunset's changes of hue, is simply to deny the facts of
direct observation in favor of an accredited jargon. As with colors,
so with warmths, odors, sounds, tastes. When I come into my house
on a January day, I certainly do observe qualitative change from
coldness to warmth. It is of course popular to say that what I ex-

perience is not this but rather a change in the average velocity of
the molecules of the air. But no one, I submit, ever directly per-
ceived, whether thermally, visually, or in any other way, an average
velocity of a set of molecules or, for that matter, the specific velocity
of any particular molecule. Even if they had, this would not be the
experience I have when going from the cold outside into the warmth
of my house.
I fear this is not a matter for argument but just of being clear as
to what we are talking about. As Aristotle expressed it, to the
physicist who will not accept the fact of change, as something directly
observed, there is nothing more to be said. Let me put it differ-
ently. That there are other kinds of changes than motion is a fact
of direct observation. It may be, as many suppose modern science to
teach, that behind the scenes, in a world beyond the reach of per-
ceptual observation, the only changes are locational, and it may be
that these cause all the qualitative changes of our sensory experience.
In any case, the latter are just what they are, and a physics whose
foundation is unmodified, direct observation must accept them and
make them part of its building blocks.
Much the same thing can be said for change of being (generation
and destruction) and of magnitude (growth and diminution). To
say that these are different from and not to be identified with local
change, with the transportation of objects from one spot to another,
is to say something borne out by direct, commonsensical observation,
when we have freed that observation of the overlay of modern
scientific concepts. When an uprooted plant withers and dies, or a
fire destroys our dwelling, we certainly do not merely see objects,
otherwise unchanged, transported from one location to another.
Again, in everyday life we would surely distinguish the changes in-
volved when we carry the baby from one room to another and when
the baby begins obviously to put on weight, to grow.
For Aristotle and the neo-Aristotelians of the thirteenth century,
motion (I shall restrict this term henceforth to translation in space)
is just one of several observably different kinds of change. In trying
to understand how they treated it, it is well to consider first certain
things they said about change generally. What is the common nature
of all change? I think in a sense we grasp their point of view best
by denying that we can define "change" or describe it in terms of
any more ultimate concepts. Change and its oppositeâpermanence
or the state of fixityâare just there for observation, like black and
white or cold and hot, and also, like the latter, are fundamentally
different from or opposed to each other. Yet we cannot quite leave
the matter here. We can say something about it. Change is always
a "becoming"; something becomes what it was not before: the skies
that were red become blue; the baby that was small becomes larger;
the stick that was in one location comes to be in another. But not
every such becoming is possible. A lump of bronze can become a
statue, a puddle of water cannot; a baby can become a man, a chunk
of wood cannot. Thus, when anything changes in any way it be-
comes only that which was all along a possibility for it. Aristotle
speaks of this as potentiality. The apple is potentially red and sweet
even while it is green and sour. So we can speak of change as the
becoming actual of what was only potential. This packs into the
little word "becoming" everything really characteristic of change;
but as long as some condition or property remains potential, then
the thing of which it is a potentiality is, in that respect, fixed or
changeless. When the condition or property is actual, the change is
already over. However, "becoming" is merely a synonym for "change,"
so we get nowhere if we define change as the becoming actual of
what was potential. In this predicament Aristotle made an unfortu-
nate choice. Instead of saying, as I believe his whole approach should
have led him to say, that "change" is indefinable, is an ultimate con-
cept, he tried to define it anyway. The result is the definition: "The
actuality of that which exists potentially, in so far as it exists poten-
tially, is change."
I do not wish to lampoon this definition, nor even to undertake
a serious criticism of it (how can the potential as potential or in its
very potentiality be actual?). Rather, I want merely to point out
that it leaves the impression that change is not an ultimate and
therefore indefinable idea, that actuality and potentiality, which
separately are not change, somehow in combination come to con-
stitute it. Now, it was to be characteristic of the new dynamics of
Galileo that "motion" should be defined in terms of concepts
(namely, distance and time and the mathematical operation of divi-
sion) that did not themselves presuppose it. Motion for Galileo was
thus essentially a defined idea. Observationally, you are not to look
for it but for locations and times. Here is a fundamental difference.
For the Aristotelian you are not to look for potentialities and ac-
tualities and then combine these observations according to a defini-

tionârather, change is there, ultimately and in its own right, just
to be seen.
Although change is undeniably present in our world and to be
accepted as an observed fact, it does not follow that we should not
try to understand and explain it. Indeed, Aristotle is greatly con-
cerned with its explanation, which he subdivides under four heads
designated as "causes." This is somewhat misleading, however, as
there really are two pairs of causes based on two quite different
principles. The first pair would certainly not today be called causes,
and their use would hardly be deemed an explanation. I refer to
what Aristotle termed the "material" and the "formal" cause. When
he says that every change has a material cause and a formal cause,
all he means is that in every change there is something that changes
and there is some respect in which it changes. Thus, when the green
leaf turns brown in the autumn, the leaf is the material cause, the
color involved is the formal cause. When a stone falls, the stone is
the material cause, its location the formal. The terminology seems
odd, but the idea is quite in harmony with common sense, and in-
deed this phase of Aristotelian physics was not challenged in the
revolution instituted by Galileo. Apparently the revolution brought
about by quantum mechanics in the present century has challenged
it. It would seem that change can occur without there being any
(even theoretically) identifiable thing that undergoes it. If this is a
correct interpretation it reveals that we have in twentieth-century
physics an even greater break with the common sense of the Middle
Ages than occurred in the seventeenth century.
The other pair of causes that Aristotle enumerates consists of the
efficient cause and the final cause: the source of the change, that
which institutes it, and its objective or goal. It has been usual to
identify the former with the mechanical cause and to say that what
Galileo in effect did was to eradicate or at least disregard Aristotle's
final cause and leave his efficient cause in control of the field. This
I believe is wrong. Both members of this second pair of causes are
purposive, and Galileo in effect destroyed them both, as far as me-
chanics is concerned. I think we should identify the efficient cause
with the means, the instrument used, the effecting agent; the final
cause with the end, the goal, that for the sake of which the instru-
ment is used.
Here we run into difficulty again. Not that the ideas involved
are no longer current. They are very much a part of our common
sense today. We ask a thief, "Why did you do it?" and he probably
tells us about his wanting to procure food for his starving family.
We also ask, "How did you do it?" and he no doubt explains how
he jimmied a window. The distinction is, I think, exactly that between
Aristotle's final and efficient causes. When we apply these ideas to
the phenomena of mechanics, we run into obstacles. We think it an-
thropomorphic to seek the purpose of a ball's rolling; we should
consider it equally anthropomorphic to ask what instrument was
used to effect this purpose. This may be quite correct. My point is
simply that even here Aristotle was close to commonsensical observa-
tion.
Besides artificial change, says Aristotle, there is natural. In the
former, men set the goal and are the effecting agents. In the latter,
the goal is inherent in the process and nature furnishes the effective
means without the help of man. When we see fire and smoke rise,
and observe that whatever obstacles we put in their paths, they still
tend to rise, it seems almost open to direct observation that they are
"going somewhere," their goal is upward. And do we not reveal a
completely Aristotelian framework of thought when we say, "Water
seeks it own level," "Unlike magnetic poles attract one another," or
"The organism adjusts to its environment"? Indeed, we feel no
challenge to our modes of thinking when told that the pituitary
gland regulates the rate of skeletal growth, whereas conversely we
are somewhat disturbed when we hear that the vermiform appendix
performs no function whatsoever. That is, when caught unawares
we are still Aristotelians at heart. Nature's processes have goals. I
grant that these illustrations have been drawn from fields other than
mechanics (yet even in the latter we are accustomed to speak of
forces "pushing" and "pulling"!), but this does not make them ir-
relevant.
In speaking of the causes of change Aristotle is concerned with all
forms of change, not merely with motion. He was moreover a biol-
ogist and made many observations as to living processes. Here the
purposiveness of changes in nature seems especially obvious. The
adult form of the species is so easily seen as the objective of em-
bryonic and immature developments. The condition of normal
health in the individual is so readily observed as the goal of those
compensations which disease provokes. Finally, we must not sup-
pose that Aristotle ascribed conscious purpose, that is, an imaginative

anticipation of a goal, to natural processes. In technical phraseology,
Aristotle's teleology is "immanent": the goal is present simply as a
controlling, directive force. Even this statement is misleading, how-
ever, since "force" may have connotations borrowed from modern
physics. Perhaps the best way to put it is to say that natural changes
are always for the best (not of course for humans but for the chang-
ing things themselves); they are value directed.
So much for change in general. We must now turn to Aristotle's
account of local change, of motion. Here we encounter our greatest
difficulty in seeing how the Aristotelian view is quite directly reflec-
tive of everyday observations. We must put aside our ideas of a
geometry of motions, and the approximations to such a geometry
that have been attained in the laboratory. Let us keep in mind the
sort of observations, available to everybody in everyday situations,
which furnished the basis of the Aristotelian system: the calm mo-
tion of the stars across the heavens, the ebb and flow of the tides, the
rising of smoke, the falling of rain, stones thrown by boys, the sea-
sons and their changes.
Aristotle took this chaotic mass of commonsensical data and sys-
tematized it. This he did by simplifying. He said that all these
motions could be treated as either straight or curved or a combina-
tion of the two. And curved motions could be considered finally as
parts of circular motions. Quiet rain falls in straight lines. The sun
Surf f Falling leaf
Fig. 1. Compound Motions
transcribes a semicircle across the skies. Breaking surf and falling
leaf combine the two, as my accompanying sketches attempt to indi-
cate (Fig. i).
Our modern reaction is to say that only one of these is simple, and
specifically that all curvilinear motions are compounds of straight
motions. This, however, shows the effects upon our thinking of the
invention of the calculus, whereby curves are broken down into
small segments and treated as combinations of short straight motions

in the directions of the axes of a coordinate system. Of course, this
is conceptual, not observational. Indeed, on the basis of direct ob-
servation Aristotle should be criticized on the opposite score. For
sensation, motions in straight lines and arcs of circles are no more
simple than many other motions. Perhaps we should say that any
motion that forms a perceived pattern is simple. And here Aristotle
has anticipated us. He has an answer, one which characteristically
reveals how for him value considerations were interwoven with fac-
tual descriptions. He argues that straight and circular motions are
elementary because they and they alone have an inherent perfection,
the perfection of maintaining a constant form. They are kinds of
change that exhibit an aspect of changelessness. We shall presently
ask why Aristotle assumed that perfection involves changelessness.
That motions in a straight line and in a circle are changeless in form
probably means no more than that they are seen to maintain their
shapeâany portion could be superimposed on any other and it
would conform. (See Fig. 2.)
Ii
T/
Fig. 2. Changeless Forms of Change
It will be remembered that, according to the Aristotelian analysis
of change, there must always be something that changes. This of
course is true in the case of motion. There can never be sheer mo-
tion by itself; all motion is motion of bodies. So in considering the
kinds of motion we must also consider the kinds of bodies in motion.
This is especially important in reconstructing a view which sees some
changes, including some motions, as natural, that is, as inherent in
the things undergoing change and as directed toward their perfec-
tion.
Aristotle argues that as there are simple motions of which all
others are composed, so there must be simple bodies, to which these
simple motions are natural, forming the elements of which all other
bodies are composed. This of course introduces a tremendous sim-

plification into everyday experience: there seem to be innumerably
different kinds of bodies for direct observation. The simplification is
not as great, however, as might at first appear to be required. It
might be thought that Aristotle should admit only two elements,
whose natural motions are respectively circular and straight. Ac-
tually he accepts five. One of these, the fifth substance or "quintes-
sence," is that whose natural motion is circular. But there are four
that naturally move in straight lines. How can he maintain this
without contradiction?
To understand this we must glance at the spatial structure of the
Aristotelian universe. Here again we must divest ourselves of modern
scientific ideas. We must not assume a geometrical space, infinitely
extended in all directions and without differentiation of regions
within it. Aristotle's space is closer to that of everyday observation.
It is limited, in extent, to what we can see. Its shape is spherical. It
Fig. 3. The Structure of Space as Determining Simple Motions
has a center, our point of observation. In this world we can distin-
guish different straight motions in terms of their orientation. There
is motion from our point of observation, the earth, toward the
heavens; this is upward motion. There is also the opposite, down-
ward motion. Cross-motions, however, cannot be straight. They
partake of the sphericity of the shape of spaceâof the heavens and
the earth. A little diagram may help to make this clear (Fig. 3).
28
[1]
Modern Science and Human Values
This still leaves us, however, with only two straight motions. To
understand the origin of the other two we must make a short digres-
sion.
The weather of Greece is quite sharply divided into two periods.
There is the dry season, which is also warm, and the wet or rainy
one, which is also cool. This striking difference could not fail to
make an impression upon a philosopher eager to observe nature and
catalogue her processes. It had, of course, profound effects upon
vegetation, its growth, death, preservation and decay. With his
penchant for system, Aristotle organized his data according to a dou-
ble pair of principles, two sets of "opposites" as he called them.
These were: warmth and coldness, and again, wetness and dryness.
The two former he conceived to be active, the two latter, passive.
Just why he conceived them thus we shall not consider except to say
that it is clear that his conception was based on a wealth of evidence.
ACTIVE
PRINCIPLES
Warmth
Coldness
PASSIVE
PRINCIPLES
Dryness
Mo i si ness
I Eorth |
Fig. 4. The Elements
To observations of life and the weather in Greece must be added,
as raw material for Aristotle's systematization, a concept he inherited
from his predecessors, specifically Empedocles, to the effect that there
are four physical elements: air, earth, fire, and water. These had
been conceived, particularly by Heraclitus, to be capable of trans-
mutation into one another. These ideas are clearly just homely
attempts to simplify obvious facts of everyday experience. Fire, for
example, was not confined to the crackling, leaping flames that con-
sume our fuel: it was also to be found in the burning light of the
sun and the cooler rays of the moon and stars (although in this
matter, Aristotle disagreed with his predecessors, as we shall see).

Aristotle, not satisfied with two principles of classification, at-
tempted to reduce his predecessors' views concerning the elementary
bodies to his own account of the two pairs of opposites. This he did
by treating each of their elements as a combination of two of his
opposites, one active and one passive. Perhaps a diagram will again
help (Fig. 4).
This reduction of the elements to combinations of the opposites
allowed Aristotle to "explain" what Heraclitus could only assertâ
the transmutation of the elements. In rain, air (that is, cloudy
vapor or mist) is transmuted into water. This Aristotle explains by
having the warmth of air replaced by coldness to form water. When
a stick burns, earth becomes fire. This is accounted for by having
the coldness of earth replaced by warmth to produce fire.
Moon
Fig. 5. Natural Places of the Elements
Now we can return to the problem of straight motions. It is to be
observed that the flames of fire leap upward. Stones, when loosened
on mountainsides, roll down. Clouds and mist, though hugging the
earth, do not seem to be as heavy as water, and yet rocks and earth
plunge through water as though they had much more of a tendency
downward than the latter has. Thus, says Aristotle, we must suppose
two lightnesses or tendencies to move upward, that of fire being
greater than that of air, and similarly two heavinesses or tendencies
to move downward, that of earth being greater than that of water.
The two upward motions, though they may appear to be the same,
are differently oriented. One is toward the outside of the sublunar
sphere, the other is toward the region midway between this and the
earth's surface. They can be distinguished partly by their different
speeds, but chiefly by their different goals; and similarly for the two
downward motions. Each of the four elements, then, has a place
where it belongs; the motion natural to it is a straight motion to-
ward this place. If it is in its place, its natural condition is the op-
posite of motion, rest. (See Fig. 5.)
Other bodies in the sublunar regions are mixtures of two or more
of the elements. They participate in the tendency of each of their
elements to go to its proper region, each somewhat counteracting
the other, the result being a kind of compromise. Thus, a stick of
wood contains earth and thereby tends to sink in water, but it also
includes air, and thus seeks to rise above water. The total result is
that it succeeds in doing neither: it floats.
Now all of this account of the natural motions of sublunar bodies
is quite straightforward in terms of a certain simplification of every-
day observations assuming, as seems justified, that the ordinary man
in the ordinary situation thinks he directly experiences the tendency
of naturally moving bodies to "go somewhere," to be directed in
their motion toward some place. But it raises a serious question.
Why haven't all such bodies long since reached where they are
going, especially since (on Aristotle's account) they have been at it
for all eternity? Why isn't the whole sublunar region in a state of
rest?
The Aristotelian answer brings us to the subject of violent mo-
tions. A motion not inherent in a body and natural to it, but im-
pressed upon it from without, is called "violent." One great class
of violent motions is formed by the motions whose efficient causes
are living beings. The voluntary acts of humans, for example, are
the source of many violent motions.
In this connection we might, in passing, note a peculiar problem
for Aristotle that was to cause increasing difficulties. By its nature,
a violent motion requires the action of an external agent; it has no
goal inherent in the body moved. Hence it can continue only as
long as this external agent acts upon the body. Now, there is a class
of violent motions where this does not seem to be the case, namely,
thrown missiles. When an irate Xanthippe throws some household
article at her exasperating Socrates, we observe that that article con-
tinues to move toward Socrates after it has left Xanthippe's hand.

Aristotle had an explanation but it was a lamentably weak one. He
said that the article continued to move because the force from Xan-
thippe's hand had been impressed upon the air behind the article,
this air then serving as the instrument that kept the article moving
toward Socrates. We shall come upon this problem in Aristotelian
physics again. We return to our earlier question as to why there
continues to be a natural motion of the four sublunar elements.
The violent motions instituted by the goal-directed acts of living
organisms not only are themselves motions, thereby, in some degree,
explaining the fact that complete rest has not been attained in the
sublunar regions; they also displace bodies from their natural places
or obstruct them in their natural motions. We lift building stones,
throw sticks in the air, carry water and otherwise disturb things.
These things naturally move back toward their proper places when
opportunity allows. All of this, however, can only account for an
insignificant modicum of the motions we observe in our region here
below the moon. Some vaster source of violent motion must be
found. Great meteorological disturbances could hardly be ascribed
to human intervention in nature's processes.
Although in detail Aristotle's account is not too clear, in general
his explanation is simple. The natural motions of the heavenly
spheres are circular. The inmost of these, that of the sphere of the
moon, is to some degree imparted to the fire which, as we have seen,
occupies, in its natural state, the outermost portion of the sublunar
region. Fire, in turn, transmits some of this circular motion to the
air below it.
This engenders heat, for, as Aristotle observed, rapid motion
produces heat (due, as we would say, to friction). This then serves
to set up a process of transmutation, separating the warmth from
the moisture in air, so that this dehydrated air rises to the region of
fire, but the remainder, being cooler, turns into water, producing
rain and similar phenomena. The details, I repeat, are not for us
important. The general principle is that violent motions are set up
by the circular motions of the heavens, which are transmitted toward
the center of the universe, the earth. Thus, although for the fifth
essence, these circular motions are natural; for sublunar substances,
they are violent and their transmission is the source of those mete-
orological phenomena for which, as we saw, an explanation was nec-
essary.
We must now turn from the sublunar to the celestial region. Here
again, I contend, Aristotelian mechanics is essentially a set of com-
monsensical observations systematized. In this instance also we must
try to set aside our inheritance of modern scientific concepts and
get back to direct, unsophisticated experience. On this matter the
men of the ancient and medieval worlds had an advantage over us.
Lacking our bright artificial lights, they no doubt devoted more
time to watching the stars at night.
If we were to take the trouble we would note that the moon and
stars, for the most part, move quite regularly across the sky, rising
in the east and setting in the west, just as the sun does in the day-
time. Somewhat more accurately, one star, Polaris (for us in the
Northern Hemisphere) remains practically at rest, and the others
move as if fixed in a rotating hollow sphere with one end of their
axes of rotation fixed in Polaris. This is the diurnal revolution of
the heavens; it defines the sidereal day. The sun takes a little longer
than the stars to go from one rising (or setting) to the next. The
solar day is a little longer than the sidereal. If we could take pictures
of the sun against a background of stars we could make a movie.
Suppose our camera fixed and we take an exposure each time a cer-
tain constellation is in the same position in our camera's field. The
sun would then, in our movie, appear to move slowly backward,
from west to east, across our expanse of stars. To complete this ap-
parent retrograde motion across the whole heavens would take the
sun a year. This is the annual rotation of the sun, and its apparent
path against the starry background is called the ecliptic. The moon
is more of a laggard. It takes only a month to find itself back where
it was. There are other celestial bodies, the planets, that likewise
lag behind the stars, their periods differing among themselves, Mer-
cury taking approximately eighty-eight days, Venus nine months,
Mars two years, Jupiter twelve years, and Saturn thirty, the first two
of these, moreover, not traversing the whole heavens but only loop-
ing back and forth about the sun. These retrograde motions, as seen
against the heavenly background, are called the zodiacal revolutions
of the planets, and occur in a strip embracing the ecliptic called the
zodiac, from the signs (the Ram, the Bull, the Crab, etc.) which
form its divisions and obtain their names from the supposed resem-
blances to animals of the constellations in them. But the planets
are peculiar in that their lagging behind the daily rotations of the
whole heavens is irregular. Sometimes it is greater, sometimes less,

and for brief periods it disappears and is even transformed into a
spurt ahead. (See Fig, 6.)
These facts as to celestial motions, and of course many, many more,
were well known to the ancients. They excited great admiration,
especially among the geometrical philosophers. Even the prosaic and
commonsensical Aristotle was filled with awe. In the absolutely
regular revolutions of the heavens, one occurring each sidereal day,
West
East
Revolut/0o
^0
West
Man
Fig. 6. Observed Celestial Motions
Eost
he saw a perfect motion which must be the motion of a perfect
element, a divine substance. This he "rationalized," as we would
say today, as follows. Circular motion is more perfect than motion in
a straight line. The latter can continue for awhile without change
of form, but eventually must cease. As we have seen, motion in a
straight line is up or down. The former must cease when it reaches
the lunar sphere; the latter when it reaches the earth. The circular
motion of the heavens is the only motion that can go on forever
without changing its form.
Perhaps this is the place to note why Aristotle thought perfection
required changelessness. His argument goes: Anything that changes
must change either for the better or for the worse. If it changes for
the better, it was not perfect to begin with. If for the worse, then at
best it is deteriorating, and what is deteriorating cannot remain (if
it ever was) perfect. Behind this formal argument, there were, we
may conjecture, at least two influences. On the one hand is the com-
monly noted fact that any being striving for a goal ceases at least
that striving when it arrives. As we have seen, rest, for Aristotle, was
the objective of every natural motion. On the other hand, it seems
rather evident that in his account of the heavens Aristotle was greatly
influenced by the geometrical physicists, and probably carried over
some of their sense of worship for geometrical forms and numerical
relations in nature.
We must now return to Aristotelian celestial mechanics and spe-
cifically to a serious problem that had to be faced. Aristotle wished
to allow only regular, circular motion to the heavenly bodies. But
the planets, with their irregular retrograde motions, created a dif-
ficulty. This was the problem of "saving the appearances," which
Aristotle shared with all astronomers from Plato to Copernicus. The
problem was to account for the apparent or observed motions, which
are erratic, by means of combining several regular, circular ones.
Here Aristotle was not very original. The problem itself is one not
of systematizing direct observations but of making geometrical con-
structions that will meet certain specifications. He largely followed
the system of the astronomer Eudoxus.
The celestial bodies are fixed in invisible spheres whose center
is the earth. The outermost sphere is that of the fixed stars, having
a simple rotary motion (the sidereal day). It is hollow, a mere shell.
The sun and planets each require a number of spheres. These
spheres were considered to be solid, not hollow, thus allowing the
combination or impartation of motions, from the outermost, hollow
sphere, to the one in which the sun or planet is fixed (specifically, on
its equator or region of maximum rotary motion). The outermost
sphere, for each planet, would share the diurnal revolution (from
east to west) of the fixed stars, common to the whole heavens. The
second one, going inward, would revolve from west to east in the
period of the zodiacal revolution for that planet. The apparent
oscillatory motions of the planet were accounted for by two further
spheres, one, to explain the lag, the other the spurt, of the planet's
motions as seen against the background of the fixed stars. All these
spheres had a common center, the earth; thus the system is called
"homocentric." (See Fig. 7.) This is probably the simplest, most

commonsensical of the geometrical accounts of observed celestial
motions: a rotating sphere is assigned to account for each type of
celestial revolution.
All these spheres were considered to be invisible. Indeed, Eudoxus
apparently thought of them as simply convenient hypotheses or
merely geometrical constructions, for he treated the spheres com-
bining to give the motion of one planet as independent of those used
ov
West
East
Fig. 7. The Homocentric System
to explain the motion of another. But for our commonsensical Aris-
totle, the spheres were taken to be physically real. Thus, for him the
whole heavens was one, interlocked, tremendous mechanism operat-
ing on the principle that every included sphere participated in every
motion of every sphere including it. This had the absurd con-
sequence, for example, that the moon must share in all the motions
of all the heavenly bodies. This quite spoiled the geometrical saving
of the appearances by Eudoxus, and was not particularly helped by
Aristotle's adding a number of intervening spheres with appropriate
motions to erase those outer motions he didn't want within.
Later Greek astronomers developed a more elegant mathematical
account, still based on the principle that all apparent celestial mo-
tions can be constructed by combining regular circular ones. This

was stated in its classic form by Ptolemy of Alexandria, who, how-
ever, was more of a summarizer than creator. There were really two
chief steps in this development (from Eudoxus and Aristotle to
Ptolemy), corresponding to two chief changes in the theory. First,
the homocentric system had not really saved the appearances. Some
of the errant celestial bodies changed both their apparent size and
apparent velocities in the course of their zodiacal revolutions. This
could easily be accounted for by placing the center of their zodiacal
sphere outside the earth, so that in the portion of their revolution
West
East
Fig. 8. The Ptolemaic System
farther from the earth they appeared smaller and their apparent
velocity was smallerâas if you watched a race on a circular track
from inside but at a point removed from the center. This was a
radical departure from Aristotle and common sense, however, since
it meant that this sphere had as its center a merely geometrical
point, that is, nothing real. It may have been one of the neo-Pythago-
reans who invented itâthey believed that the world was composed
of mathematical entities.
Once this step was taken, it was easy to build a system using
spheres not having a common center to account more easily and
simply for the apparent oscillations in the motions of the planets.
In this new, nonhomocentric system, the basic principle of combina-

tion of motions was that of a deferent (or motion that carries an-
other) with an epicycle (literally: a circle built upon something
else). Imagine that we are at rest in the center of a merry-go-round.
Suppose we watch Johnny in a seat at the outer edge. He has
brought his toy merry-go-round with him, and he has it wound up
and running. Johnny's motion is the deferent. The motion of the
toy Johnny on the real Johnny's toy merry-go-round is the epicycle.
If we can ignore all the other things and just note the motion of the
toy Johnny against the background of the outside world, we shall
see a form of motion much like that displayed by the planets (after
subtracting the diurnal revolutions of the whole heavens). The
deferent furnishes the zodiacal motion; the epicycle, the oscillations
therein. (See Fig. 8.)
Thomas Aquinas was acquainted with both the homocentric and
the epicyclic views. Apparently he could not make up his mind be-
tween them. He was aware that the Ptolemaic system could better
account for the appearances, but it did not square with Aristotelian
first principles. In fact, it was not based on a general physics of
motion, but was simply a geometrical hypothesis to save the appear-
ances. It lacked the commonsensical appeal of the homocentric sys-
tem.
This was a serious defect, if I have been right about the physics
of thirteenth-century Europe. The latter had found in Aristotle "the
master of those who know" precisely because his system was "down
to earth," was grounded upon facts of everyday experience. From
our standpoint, one of the most important commonsensical elements
in it was that it conceived motions as the ordinary man would view
them, that is, as motions of specific bodies, with their characteristic
differences, and as purposive, as embodying values. The natural
motions on and near the earth of our sublunar substances were
directed, were "going somewhere," each to its proper place. The
vast and highly regular motions of the heavens, which clearly em-
bodied something eternal in their form, must be of some divine sub-
stance. This doctrine carried the weight of the authority not of
scripture or papal decree, but of common sense. It was to take a
major revolution in man's outlook to overthrow it.
Ideas on Wealth and Exchange
In the area of economic thought, thirteenth-century Europe does
not seem so utterly strange and foreign to us. We can read ourselves
back into its ideas with much less effort than in the case of physical
science. This does not mean that there has been no revolution in
economic thought since then. I think it does indicate, however, that
the revolution which did occur has not had as important effects upon
our everyday modes of thought and speech. We are somewhat skep-
tical of claims that there is a "science" of economics with established
laws, in the strict sense. For example, although we tolerate the ex-
pression, "the law of supply and demand," we like to think that we
can set it aside when occasion demands. This is partly due, no
doubt, to our war experience with governmental controls, price
ceilings and rationing. So we say that such a law as that of supply
and demand holds only in a free-market system, and that other, con-
trolled systems, whether desirable or not, are quite possible.
This popular attitude probably has deeper historical roots, how-
ever. It is reasonable to suppose that it reveals the influence of a
great counterrevolution in economics itself, which, in the nineteenth
century, set itself the task of overthrowing the revolution of the
previous century that had sought, particularly in the case of the
"classical" school, to found a strict science of economics comparable
to Newtonian mechanics. But even deeper than this is the fact that
the new type of concept introduced by Galileo and its use in formu-
lating scientific laws have in general been allowed to enter the social
sciences only very slowly and with reluctance. On the one hand,
this can be ascribed to the complexity of the phenomena involved.
Direct description of everyday experiences still seems far more reli-
able than the abstract procedures of the scientific intellect, which has
had so little of that kind of success which alone impresses the lay-
man, namely, fulfillment of predictions of specific events: What will
I have to pay, for example, for eggs six months from now? On the
other hand, it must to some degree also be ascribed to a fundamental
resistance on the part of human beings against having their behavior
treated in a merely factual manner. They are aware that, from their
standpoint, they are determined by values: they are seeking goods
and trying to avoid evils. To consider these efforts as just so many
factual occurrences seems somehow to involve not merely an omis-
sion but a falsification. Thus, the medieval attitude, which saw no
need to distinguish questions of fact from questions of value, seems
in this area to be quite congenial. "Things happen so because that
is natural or for the best" does not so harshly grate on our ears when
the subject is economics as when it is mechanics. Nor do we feel

much objection to Aristotle's classification of economics (which term
in the Greek literally meant "household management") under the
heading of practical, as contrasted with theoretical, subjects.
Thirteenth-century ideas on wealth and exchange are just as much
dominated by Aristotle as are those on motion. Thus, what was
said in the preceding paragraph concerning the authoritarianism in
medieval thinking and its relation to earlier social and educational
conditions could be largely repeated here. However, the relevance
of Aristotelian concepts to social conditions becomes more striking.
After all, the observations of physical motion available to the medi-
eval European and to the ancient Greek must have been very much
the same. Changes in men's social relations could hardly affect this.
But when one inquires into certain aspects of human behavior, then
matters of social organization enter not merely as conditions of one's
thinking but as part of the subject matter itself. Now, no one who
gives it a little reflection can fail to be impressed by the aptness of
Aristotelian economic theory to the economic facts of medieval
feudalism. Let me very briefly point this up.
Feudalism was almost wholly agrarian. Such little manufacturing
as there was was carried on in direct connection with the land and
its products, as in the case of the weaving of woolen cloth. Only a
few simple tools were needed. Thus, economic goods under feudal-
ism were almost wholly consumer goods, that is, goods such as food
and clothing, to be themselves consumed and not used, like some
machinery, for producing other goods.
Furthermore, by being so closely tied to the land, feudal economy
favored a static and localistic social organization. The feudal manor,
as we have seen, was largely self-sufficient economically. This favored
a fixed social hierarchy, with fixed economic rights and obligations.
What economic exchange there was had to remain within this frame-
work. Speculation, the accumulation of profits, and other modern
devices whereby men have been able to "better themselves" were
quite impossible.
Indeed, in such a system there could be little in the way of trade,
especially across great distances. The fear of the stranger and the
fact that the stranger did not have much to offer, besides the gen-
eral poverty that furnished little to give in return, effectively re-
strained commerce. There was small need for money and none for
credit, in our sense. Such exchange as occurred was largely by direct
barter. There were no middlemen, no men dedicated to the busi-

ness of buying in order to sell at a profit. Indeed, there was no clear
conception of what constituted profit in the modern sense, which
requires an accounting of costs wholly foreign to medieval practices.
Sale was made in fact with a view not to profit but to return the
labor and raw materials that went into the manufacture of the
article sold.
Obviously there could be no free markets in the sense of the deter-
mination of prices by the free competition of a large number of sell-
ers (and of buyers). Exchange of goods was in fact very carefully
regulated, in part by the church and the princes but chiefly by the
guilds, both merchant and craft, which were set up primarily to in-
sure monopoly.
The merchant guilds, whose power was founded on a town charter
from a local lord, generally prohibited outsiders from selling goods
in the town. They determined the quantity and kinds of goods their
members could sell, with the object of achieving an equal distribu-
tion of the available trade among their own members. They main-
tained inspectors to see that articles for sale met quality standards
(so that the seller could not make a special profit by lowering the
quality and therefore the cost).
The craft guilds in the hands of skilled workers, developing some-
what later, took over most of these powers of regulation of trade
from the merchant guilds. They were primarily concerned with
monopoly in the production of goods, that is, the closing of oppor-
tunities to outsiders to enter a skilled trade. Within, they attempted
to equalize opportunities among their members. Thus, certain
regulations were directed against attempts on the part of individual
craftsmen to gain advantages in the purchase of raw materials. For
example, there were rules against forestalling (the purchase of goods
before they were offered in the regular market in the townâas by
meeting farmers on the way to town), engrossing (the buying of an
unjustly large share, cornering the market), and regrating (purchas-
ing for simple resale, without fabrication).
The craft guilds had control of the selection and training of men
to participate in the craft and to enjoy the status such participation
gave. How many could be apprenticed, what their wages and work-
ing conditions were to be, the length and character of their training,
the standards for mastership in the craftâall these were strictly
regulated.
Thus, it is not surprising that prices should be regulated too. The
guilds saw to it that their members received adequate returns to
maintain their standards of living, while the church and the political
powers attempted to protect the public against exploitation. The
result was a common recognition of a just price, determined not by
competition but by the requirements of maintaining craftsmen at a
fixed level of living.
As there was not much money, capital remained mainly in the
direct form of lands, cattle, tools, acquired skills. Consequently there
was little hiring of money, that is, the obtaining of loans at interest.
Loans were largely to tide the borrower over until the next harvest
or until the manufacture of some article was completed. Thus, it is
not surprising to find the church prohibiting usury, that is, the
charging of interest upon loans.
The sense of a taint upon money and upon financial and trade
pursuits directed toward the making of money was aggravated by
widespread practices leading to the devaluating of coinage. The
tremendous variety in the coinage, which bore stamps of many dif-
ferent principalities and originated in many different periods, meant
that coins could be worth little more than the metal they contained.
Also it allowed various dishonest practices: clipping (filing the edges
or faces of coins), sweating (shaking coins in a box to remove par-
ticles), debasement (decreasing the gold or silver content without
decreasing the size or denomination), as well as outright counterfeit-
ing. Consequently unless one was expert in the handling of money,
one was extremely liable to be cheated in a money deal. Money,
money dealers, foreign trade for money profit all came to have a bad
name.
It is in this setting that we are to put scholastic economic thought
if we would understand it historically. The appropriateness of the
whole Aristotelian system to such a setting will become obvious, I
think, as we proceed. Thinking, then, in terms of goods which are
directly consumableâshoes, fruit, dwellings, clothesâwe may con-
sider them in two different ways. We may consider them as things
to be used: the shoes to be worn, the fruit to be eaten, and so on.
On the other hand, we may consider them as things that can be
exchanged for other things: the shoes may be bartered for clothes,
the fruit sold for money. We may mark this distinction of Aristotle's
with terms borrowed from Adam Smith, and speak of the first as
"use value" and the second as "exchange value" (although I do this
with some hesitancy, since the term "value" will introduce serious
complications).
It is easy to see why the thirteenth-century scholastic felt sym-
pathetic with Aristotle's disparagement of exchange value. In an
economy where production was largely for direct consumption there
was little exchange. Exchange value is a dependent sort of value; it
gets its being from use value. No one would barter anything of use
for something else unless that something else were of use. Thus,
exchange value comes to a thing from outside; it is a value bestowed
upon it by other things. It is like violent motion. Use value, con-
trariwise, is like natural motion. It is inherent in the thing. The
goal, the primary purpose of a pair of shoes, is obviously the wearing
of them.
We must not suppose that all exchange is to be condemned, how-
ever. With any division of labor, even the simplest, some exchange
is required if everyone is to obtain even the necessities of life. There
is a type of exchange that is to be condemned. This is exchange for
profit. It arises when men have gone beyond the stage of bartering
and sell their goods for money.
Now money is not something evil in itself. It is one kind of ex-
changeable thing among others. It differs from others in that it
fluctuates in its exchange value less than others and thus can be used
as a measure or standard of exchange. Thus instead of trying to
express the exchange values of shoes, fruit, clothes, fuel and in-
numerable other goods each in terms of everything else for which
it can be exchanged, each can be expressed in terms of money. More-
over, since money is more durable and easily transported than other
goods, it forms a convenient medium of exchange. Instead of barter-
ing my shoes for fruit and then carrying the fruit about until I can
barter it for the fuel I want, I can sell my shoes for money and buy
fuel with the money.
These distinct advantages of money, however, carry with them a
temptation. It becomes easy to suppose that exchange has a purpose
in itself, as contrasted with the goal of obtaining goods to be con-
sumed. That is, one forgets that exchange value is dependent upon
use value. Thus, one is led to undertake trade simply for profit, for
the increase of the exchange value of one's possessions. Once one
starts on this, there is no limit. Exchange to acquire goods for con-
sumption has a natural limitânamely, the satisfaction of one's needs

(or those of one's household, city or domain). Here there is a goal
defined by the uses of the goods acquired, and the process of ex-
change being devoted to this end ceases when it is achieved. Like
the motion of the four elements, the acquisition of goods for con-
sumption has a natural limit. Not so with exchange for profit, for
the increase of exchange value itself. To stop with any given amount
is arbitrary; there is no goal defined by the process itself. It is un-
natural.
Thus real wealth or riches is to be found in goods for consump-
tion, not in money. Or, putting Aristotle's thought more accurately,
I think we may say that real wealth lies in use value, not in exchange
value.
This conception has important implications. One of these we have
already come upon. No one who is aware of the true nature of
wealth will try to accumulate an unlimited amount of it. It need not
be pointed out that this view is entirely appropriate to a static
economy, where production is kept constant and is carried on
simply to supply the same needs of approximately the same number
of people generation after generation.
Another implication is that it is those activities which produce
the use value of things, their consumability, that are the real source
of wealth. These are primarily agriculture and the extractive in-
dustries, such as mining. Secondarily, there is manufacturing of
various kinds. But trade, however it may increase exchange value,
contributes nothing to use value. Thus, it is not productive of real
wealth. It, along with money changing and allied business, is to be
looked upon as barren. People who live by trade are really parasites.
Now, as we have seen, not all exchange is to be condemned. When
it is for the sake of acquiring something wanted for consumption it
is legitimate. But then it is not undertaken for profit, and both
parties to it should be satisfied with a just price. A just price is one
in which there is neither profit nor loss to either the buyer or the
seller.
How is this determined? Not by appeal to the market, to prices
other sellers demand or other buyers offer. In a day of very strict
regulation of trade, such a device for determining a just price was
meaningless. We could express the thought of Aristotle and his
medieval followers by saying that the just price exactly covers the
cost of the article. But the term "cost" has connotations from a later
day, suggesting that it is itself a price, namely the total price paid,
for labor, raw material and so on, for production. Thus, its use
merely presses our problem one step further back.
Aristotle gives us a suggestion. A just exchange is one in which the
ratio of goods is the inverse of that of the producers: "As a builder
then is to a cobbler, so must so many shoes be to a house. . . ." Per-
haps if we used another example his thought would be clearer: As
a worker in precious metals is to an unskilled serf, so must the meas-
ures of grain be to the ornaments of gold. That is, he seems clearly
to be saying that some producers stand higher in society than others
and thus that their products should command more in exchange
than the products of those lower in the social scale. There is no
suggestion that this difference in social position is to be determined
by supply and demand, that it is a matter of the relative scarcity or
abundance of the kinds of workers involved. He simply accepts it as
a factâand his medieval followers had no inclination to do other-
wiseâthat there is a hierarchy of labor. Thus, to say, as Aristotle
does, that in a just exchange there is equality of goods exchanged,
that neither party suffers any loss nor makes any gain, is to say that
a just exchange is one which maintains the relative position, the
relative standard of living, of the producers of the exchanged goods.
Now, as any exchange undertaken for profit is evil and a life de-
voted to it unnatural, so all the more deplorable is "the unnatural
breeding of money from money," as Aristotle characterized the put-
ting out of loans at interest. Here clearly no real wealth is being
produced; there is no increase in the use value of commodities. To
this argument of the Philosopher against "usury" Aquinas adds an-
other. One may loan other things, where use can be separated from
the thing itself, as when a tool is used but not consumed; not so with
money. Its very nature is in its useâto buy other things. The mere
loan of money, as contrasted with its complete transfer, is impossible.
If this sense of the evil of loaning money at interest seems strange
and incomprehensible to us, it is because we live after the commer-
cial revolution. In a day when there was very little long-distance
trade, when men did not speculate on the outcome of such ventures
as sending a ship to the Orient, but confined their trade to local
markets for the traditional necessities of one's way of life, loans were
not integral to business. They were needed, for the most part, only
to tide over some temporary and personal or local inconvenience or
disaster. Taking interest was viewed as a form of despicable personal
advantage.
It should be obvious to the most casual spectator of these Aris-
totelian ideas that they are infused with value considerations. The
condemnation of usury, the disparagement of the merchant's busi-
ness, the demand that exchanges be on the basis of a just priceâ
these are no merely factual concepts, but reveal strong convictions as
to what ought and ought not to be. Even more fundamental is the
idea that true wealth lies in use values.
Perhaps here is the place to clarify our language. "Use value"
need not be used in a value sense at all. A term is used in a value
sense when it is used to indicate that something is good or right or is
something that ought to be (or the opposite of any of these). When,
in speaking of the use value of an article, we mean simply to refer to
the fact that its consumption could satisfy a need or desire, we are
not using "use value" in a value sense. Thus, we could agree on the
use value of whisky whatever our views on the value question:
Should whisky be consumed? Analogous remarks could be made
concerning "exchange value." Thus, the use of these concepts does
not mean that one is involved in questions of value. But the word
"wealth" is different. Particularly in such questions as, In what
does real wealth consist?, "wealth" is a value term. When Aristotle
tells us that wealth lies in consumable goods, or more accurately,
in their use value, he is making a value judgment, not a merely
factual statement. He is telling us how we ought to behave, what our
goals should be in the production and exchange of goods. Not until
these questions of value were separated from factual questions could
a truly scientific economics arise. This revolution, as we shall see,
came later and was more gradual than the correlated revolution in
men's thinking about mechanics.

CHAPTER 2
Sources of the Scientific Revolution
in the Renaissance
Physical Science in the Renaissance
The "Copernican Revolution"
Historians have been eminently successful in popularizing the
phrase, "The Copernican Revolution." As so frequently happens,
however, a price had to be paid for this result, in the form of a
sacrifice of insight as to the true historical significance of the pub-
lication (in 1543) of Copernicus' great work, Concerning the Revo-
lutions of the Heavenly Spheres. As popular legend has it, Coperni-
cus, by displacing the center of the universe from the earth to the
sun, laid the basis for the complete overthrow of the medieval con-
ception of the world and specifically of man's place therein. Accord-
ing to that conception, God's central purpose, determining the na-
ture of the whole created universe, was the salvation of man. God,
consequently, put man at the center of things, so that, looking out
from his habitat, he might observe that everything else revolved
about him. But Copernicus, so the popular fable runs, by displacing
the earth from the center of things destroyed the visible and out-
ward proof that God meant man to be the hub of the universe.
This legend is picturesque but highly misleading. It certainly
misses the significance of Copernicus for the emergence of modern
science. More than this, it fails to grasp the really important impact
of Copernicus upon popular thinking, which occurred not so much
directly, by a change of spatial pictures, as indirectly, through the
effects of the scientific revolution (for which Copernicus helped pre-
pare the way) upon popular modes of life and thought. Indeed, I
think the legend, as I have called it, is hardly more than an extended
metaphor or pun, whereby the words "center," "central" and cognate
spatial terms are made to suggest "important," "chief," "dominat-
ing" and similar value concepts. It is true that modern science has
[2] Sources of Scientific Revolution in Renaissance 47
pretty thoroughly read value out of its description of facts, but this
was not due, in any perceptible degree, to a change in the concept
of what is located at the center of the universe. Consider another
possible metaphor, that which uses such geometrical terms as "peri-
phery" and "peripheral" to suggest "unimportant" or "merely inci-
dental." I am not aware that any popularizing historian has said
that in the medieval, Aristotelian outlook, the Empyreanâout there
beyond the sphere of the fixed stars where dwells, or at least acts, the
great prime mover, Godâis "just peripheral." To make God and
his direct operations thus incidental to the Aristotelian scheme
would be too much for even a metaphor to accomplish.
Now of course the medieval outlook did (from our standpoint)
confuse spatial and value concepts. This we have abundantly seen
in such ideas as that of the proper place of the four sublunar ele-
ments and the divinity of the substance of the celestial bodies. It
might of course be contended that, by fundamentally changing the
spatial design of the universe, Copernicus loosened the adhesion of
value overtones to locational concepts. Well, if the introduction of
the Copernican system had any such effect, it was slight indeed.
In any case, Copernicus' own thought was as value charged as that
of Aristotle or any of his medieval followers. In fact, one of his argu-
jnents for the heliocentric system he advocated was that it squared
better than the geocentric with just those value considerations so
characteristic of the Aristotelian point of view. Regular circular
motion, although the most perfect of motions because it is eternally
changeless in form, is nevertheless motion. The completely change-
less is better yet. Thus, it is more appropriate to have the sphere of
the fixed stars at rest, as the heliocentric system requires, than to sup-
pose it moving ar1d the earth at rest, for the stars are clearly more ,
noble, more divine than the earth. We also find that Copernicus
retains several features of the geocentric systems (common to both
the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic forms) because of value considera-
tions quite characteristic of medieval thinking. Thus he argues
that the universe is spherical since the sphere is the most perfect
form, being the same throughout ("needing no joints") and having
the largest volume. Again, he argues that of all motions the circular
is best, being the same throughout (having "neither a beginning nor
an end"), and that therefore the motions of the heavenly bodies must
all be reducible to motions of this form.
It has been contended that Copernicus meant his system to be

just a device to simplify the calculation of planetary tables. This
interpretation was fostered by the insertion in Copernicus' book of
a preface by Andreas Osiander, a Lutheran clergyman and friend of
Copernicus who had been entrusted with the book's posthumous
publication. But the preface was not in the original, and indeed
Copernicus had refused to add such a statement, despite the fact that
it might serve to assuage the feelings of those attached to the pre-
vailing geocentric system. Moreover, the valuational aspect of Co-
pernicus' thought is too deeply embedded to be compatible with this
interpretation.
It is of course possible to abstract from such value considerations
as were undoubtedly present in Copernicus' own mind and contend
that his historical importance was simply that he substituted a helio-
centric system for the prevailing geocentric theory. To be clear on
this point we perhaps ought to remember that we should not let our
notion of what is the truth influence our discussion of an historical
problem. That is, we would be guilty of a confusion to suppose that,
since the heliocentric system is the true theory and it was the one
advocated by Copernicus, Copernicus was historically important for
having argued for it. Indeed, if we are interested in the matter of
the truth as between the rival heliocentric and geocentric views, we
must take cognizance of Einstein's theory of relativity in accordance
with which neither of these views, taken as rivals, is correct, since
they both assume a distinction between absolute rest and absolute
motion which is untenable.
To return to the historical point of view, it may well be held that
Einstein might never have developed his theory had the rivalry not
occurred. There can be no doubt that the exciting debates in the
late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries concerning this issue
(debates which were of far more than merely academic interest, as
Galileo's conflict with the Holy Office proves) did center on the
name of Copernicus. This, of course, must not be forgotten, but the
espousal of a heliocentric system was not something entirely novel.
Copernicus himself tells us that the suggestion of the daily rotation
of the earth came from certain ancient Pythagoreans (Heraclid and
Ecphantus by name) and the idea of the earth's motion in space
from another member of this school (namely, Philolaus). We know
that the complete heliocentric system had been outlined in the
ancient world (by Aristarchus of Samos, around 250 B.C.). Nor can
we attribute to Copernicus any appreciable new evidence for it. He

made few observations of his own and they were crude; although he
did draw up a table of planetary observations, this was based on an
uncritical acceptance of earlier reports.
Finally (if I may presume that the reader is not too weary of hear-
ing what the Copernican revolution did not consist in), we are not
to suppose that the importance of Copernicus lay in his rejection of
Aristotelian mechanical concepts in favor of a new type that were
to be characteristic of modern physics. As we shall see, he did con-
tribute to a development which was to have this consequence, but he
did not himself either discard Aristotelian terms or clearly adopt
others of the new sort. Let me illustrate the former.
Copernicus still operated with the idea that the natural motions
of the various kinds of elementary bodies are toward their proper
places in the universe and that these are to be contrasted with violent
or impressed motions. He held that, on our planet, gravity is the
tendency of the substance, earth, to move toward the center of the
earth. True, he did hold that the sun, moon and the planets other
than the earth each has a gravity of its own. Some such view was
necessary for one who, still operating with Aristotelian concepts of
gravity, nevertheless displaced the earth from the center of things
and gave it motion. It would seem to have the strange consequence
that there are as many heavinesses and as many inherently heavy
substances as there are centers of gravity, that is, at least one for the
sun, moon and each planet in our system. Copernicus also retained
the idea that circular motion is the perfect kind and thus that all
celestial motions are forms of it, and that rest is the opposite of mo-
tion and somehow the objective of all natural motions.
Now it is necessary to call a halt, since I do not want my argument
to leave the impression that there was no "Copernican Revolution"
at all, that the phrase is just a snare and a delusion. The work of
Copernicus was upsetting and it specifically contributed to the shift
from medieval to modern modes of scientific thought. It was an im-
portant step in one of the two major developments in the Renais-
sance whose combination produced the scientific revolution.
I think we can find a clue to the major significance of Copernicus
in certain facts concerning the man himself. He showed an early
interest, while at the University of Cracow, in mathematics and its
application in astronomy. Although a native of Poland, he spent ten
years studying in Italian universities. While at one of these, namely
Bologna, he enjoyed close personal and intellectual contact with a

man (Domenico di Novara, Professor of Astronomy there) who was
a leader in the neo-Pythagorean movement that was developing at
that institution. It seems quite clear that Copernicus was profoundly
affected.
To see the depth of this influence upon Copernicus and, by antici-
pation, upon Kepler too, where it is perhaps even more obvious, it
will be necessary to digress a moment for a look back at the ancient
world.
The Pythagoreans were a philosophico-religious sect whose origins
are shrouded in antiquity, it not being certain that their reputed
founder, Pythagoras, even existed. They thought that all things
stood in numerical ratios, and that these must be grasped by anyone
who would understand the universe. One of their conquests lay in
deciphering the ratios at the base of musical intervals: the octave,
for example, could be represented as the ratio 1:2. Looking out on
the regularities of heavenly motions they were convinced that there
was a literal harmony of the spheres. This sort of insight they di-
vulged as a secret mystery to new initiates in their order. Ancient
rumor had it that one of their number was drowned at sea for re-
vealing the discovery (which of course was a threat to their whole
position) that the side and diagonal of a square are incommensur-
able.
It would seem, indeed, that some of the Pythagoreans held not
merely that things could be understood through numbers but that
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Fig. 9. Geometrical Numbers of the Pythagoreans
they were numbers. This may not seem quite so wild if we see that
they did not distinguish numbers from geometrical figures. We read
of square, oblong and triangular numbers (which in one reconstruc-
tion have been represented as in Fig. 9). If we follow Plato's ac-
count (in his Timaeus), there was a Pythagorean view to the effect
that the universe is composed of the five regular solids, one being the
shape of the whole, the other four, themselves constructed out of
two triangles, namely, an isosceles right triangle and an equilateral
triangle, forming the elements of which the world is composed. (See
Fig. 10.) This literal construction of the physical world out of geo-
-141
Half-tnangle
(rl/2 equilateral)
Half-square
(isoseceles-right)
from which are built:
Tetrahedron (fire)
(4 equilaterols)
Cube (earth)
(6 squares)
Octahedron (air)
(8 equilateral})
Icosahedron (water)
{20 equilaterals)
Fig. 10. The Elements (Plato's Timaeus)
metrical figures (themselves not distinguished from numbers) was
perhaps an exuberance, not characteristic of the main body of
Pythagorean thought. But there can be no doubt that the whole
movement was animated by a profoundly mystical sense of the geo-
metrical beauty and perfection of nature and particularly of the
heavens, which seem especially to have fascinated them.
We have already noted how Copernicus himself points out his
discovery in the writings of ancient Pythagoreans of the idea that
the earth moves. I wish now to suggest that he was far more pro-
'
foundly influenced by this school, recently revived at his time, than
such a particular indebtedness suggests. It was his desire to find the
hidden geometrical symmetries, the divine simplicities of the heav-
enly motions, that animated his replacement of the traditional geo-
centric systems by a heliocentric one. Moreover, it will be my con-
tention that it was precisely in this attitude that we shall find his
major contribution to the rise of modern science in its breaking
Fig. 11. The Copernican System
away from the down-to-earth common sense of Aristotelian physics.
It will be recalled that there were two geocentric systems that the
Middle Ages inherited from the ancient world, the homocentric\
theory of Eudoxus and Aristotle, and the epicyclic theory of Ptolemyy
By the time of Copernicus the homocentric theory was no serious
contender; the epicyclic theory held the field. What advantage did
the Copernican system have to offer over the Ptolemaic? Essentially
just oneâa tremendous geometrical simplification in the account of
planetary motions. Still adhering to the ancient program of "saving
the appearances" Copernicus was able to cut down the number of
circular motions necessary, and particularly of those (namely, the

epicyclic) that were centered on other motions and thus not sym-
metrical. He was returning to a kind of homocentric view, but now
with the sun, not the earth, as the common center. (His picture of
the heavenly motions is given in Fig. 11.)
By giving the earth a double motion (a daily rotation on its own
axis and an annual rotation about the sun), he could account for the
diurnal revolution of the whole heavens and the annual revolution
of the sun along the ecliptic: both now became only apparent, the
real motion being in our point of observation. To the other planets
he needed in each case to give essentially only one motion, from west
to east, to account for their zodiacal revolutions (which were real
motions around the sun, their apparent sharing of the diurnal revo-
lution of the whole heavens, from east to west, being accounted for
by the daily rotation of our point of observation). The really neat
trick came, however, in the explanation of the planetary irregular-
ities. These again were merely apparent, being due to the annual
rotation of the earth taken together with the appropriate rotation of
the given planet about the sun.
It will be recalled that in the Ptolemaic system planetary irregu-
larities were assimilated to constant rotary motions by the use of
epicycles. In our analogy, the planet could be considered a toy
Johnny on a toy merry-go-round held in the lap of a real Johnny on
a real merry-go-round; we, at rest in the center, keep our eye on the
toy Johnny's apparent adventures. Copernicus would put us in
place of the real Johnny, that is, circling the center of the merry-go-
round (the sun). Johnny, now let off the merry-go-round (perhaps
he was a bad boy) is running after us at a safe distance, but unable
to keep up. As we pass him, he appears to us to be moving back-
ward. But as we swing into a motion at right angles to his, his real
motion is visible, and indeed, when we enter that portion of our
circle which is essentially opposite to Johnny's motion, his apparent
motion is increased by the addition of our oivn motion. (See Fig.
12.) Thus, it is the regular revolutions about the sun of our point of
observation that give the appearance of those fits and starts in the
motions of the planets which had for so long plagued all those who
wished to "save the appearances."
By giving the planets (including our own) different revolutionary
speeds about the sun Copernicus was also able to deal simply and
regularly with another obstreperous appearance, that of the apparent
variation in the size of the planets. In place of a complex set of

eccentric circles, he could now use the motion of the earth to account
for this fact. For any given planet we are observing, we are some-
times on the same side of the sun as it is, sometimes on the opposite
side. In the former case the planet appears large; in the latter, small.
The great advantage of the Copernican system should now be
evident. By making the fixed stars motionless, by giving the planets
Fig. 12. Planetary Oscillation
(now including the earth) basically the same kind of regular circular
motion from west to east about the sun, but adding a daily revolu-
tion on its own axis to the earth, Copernicus was able to introduce a
great simplification, an increased symmetry, into the mechanism of
the heavenly motions. On this score his heliocentric system did not
conflict at all with medieval thought. Even commonsensical Aris-
totle, as we have seen, had incorporated in his system some of the
awe of the geometrizing astronomers for the vast and as they thought
perfect motions of the heavens. But on certain other entries the
Copernican system was in violent conflict with the Aristotelian

[2] Sources of Scientif1c Revolution in Renaissance 55
^ physics of the Middle Ages. These were all matters concerning what
can be directly observed (as contrasted with the hidden and sup-
posedly perfect mechanism visible only to the eye of the geometrizing
intellect).
Let us note these commonsensical objections. They go back
specifically to Ptolemy (who formulated them) and are quite defi-
nitely Aristotelian in spirit.
First, and perhaps most fundamental, is the obvious fact that we
see and feel the earth to be at rest. The only observed motions are
out there, in the heavens. It is clear that Copernicus' .whole system
rests upon the assumption of the relativityjof motion, by which, in
this connection, I do not mean that he denied absolute motion and
absolute rest theoretically (for him the fixed stars and the sun are at
rest; the planets, in absolute revolutions about the sun); I mean
ratheiLthat he denied that we could determine absolute rest and mo-
tion by observation. What we observe is never another body's ab-
solute motion but only its motion relative to us; to what we are
properly to^ascrfbe this motion, whether wholly to it, wholly to us,
or partly to each, is not a matter for observation to determine, but
is to be determined by the intellect (seeking the greatest geometrical
perfection).
This, it seems to me, is a radical departure from the very founda-
tions of Aristotelian physics. Aristotle and Ptolemy allowed mech-
anisms that could not be observed (crystalline spheres and epicycles
turning on deferents), but these were to account for the observed
motions. That is, they added unobserved motions to the observed
ones so as to be able to treat the latter as compounded of perfect
motions. But they never, in the interest of theoretical perfection,
denied the observed motions. This Copernicus did; he saw the stars
move: he deniectlhat they moved. He ascribed their observed mo- !
tion to something (the earth) which he did not observe to be in mo-
tion.
Copernicus was apparently not wholly unaware of the upsetting
character of this procedure, of its conflict with common sense. In
several places he seeks to make it palatable. He quotes Virgil, for
example, "We sail out of the harbor, and the countries and cities
recede." That is, he points out that in everyday life we do not always
trust our observations as to what moves. And of course he was per-
fectly correct in this. But it is one thing occasionally to say that our
senses are wrong, that what is seen to move really did not move, and
another to make the deception of our senses, in this regard, the very
basis of a whole system of celestial mechanics.
In comparison with this first objection, the others seem and indeed
are rather minor in historical import. Yet they_ all illustrate the
same truth, namely, the conflict of the heliocentric system of Co-
pernicus with the experiential basis of the reigning point of view.
We observe that heavy objects, if given a rotary motion, tend to ily
outward. If we swing a stick about our head we note its outward
pull and the fact that when we let go it sails rapidly away from us.
Thus, loose, heavy objects on the earth's surface ought to fly out
into space if the earth's surface is in that diurnal revolution ascribed
to it by Copernicus.
Here again Copernicus' answer, from the standpoint of the tradi-
tional view, was weak. He said that this objection should apply with
all the more force to the Aristotelian view that the fixed stars are in
daily rotation about the earth, for as they are farther from their
center of rotation, on that view, than loose objects on the earth are
from theirs according to his system, so their tendency to fly outward
ought to be even greater. The weakness of this answer lies in the
failure of Copernicus to stay within the Aristotelian framework.
The stars are composed of the fifth substance, whose natural motion
is circular. We are not to suppose that circular motion is a violent
motion, imposed from without, as is the case with heavy objects at
the earth's surface. That is, we are not to ascribe to them something
observed to obtain in the case of naturally heavy things, namely, the
tendency to fly outward when rapidly moved in a circle.
Another objection is similarly based on ordinary observation.
Heavy bodies unsupported at the earth's surface or thrown straight
upward are seen to fall straight downward. If the earth had the daily
rotation assigned to it by Copernicus, they should appear to move
from east to west just as do all the celestial bodies, since our point of
observation is moving from west to east (which motion, as we have
seen, accounts for the apparent diurnal rotation of the whole heav-
ens from east to west). But this cannot be detected with such freely
falling bodies. Similarly for clouds, mist and air: as the earth ro-
tates from west to east they should be left behind and thus have the
appearance of the heavens generally, sharing in its diurnal rotation.
But clouds do not thus appear regularly to rise in the east and set in
the west.
Once more the answers Copernicus offers are singularly weak in

that they require special modifications of Aristotelian physics having
no systematic foundation. He says that the substance, earth, natur-
ally participates in the rotary motion of our planet. When it is
separated from its proper place it acquires an additional motionâ
that toward the earth. Thus, the motion of heavy, falling objects is
compound, partly in a straight line toward the center of the earth,
partly in a circleânamely, that of the daily rotation of the earth.
The latter we do not see, since we have the same motion ourselves.
Thus, it looks as though these objects had only one motionâ
straight downward. This answer, by ascribing to earth a natural but
unobservable rotary motion, has obviously diverged from Aristote-
lian dynamics without, however, attaining any new foundation. In
the case of clouds and air Copernicus gives a different account. As
their natural motion is upward and their proper place is at some
distance from the earth, he could not have them share, as natural
motions of their own, the rotational movement of the earth. So he
suggests they are dragged along by the earth and heavy objects on or
near the earth's surface.
In his answers to these Aristotelian-type objections, Copernicus
displays a queer mixture of Aristotelian concepts with ideas that are
quite foreign. The truth is that his heliocentric system, to be con-
sistently worked out, required a deeper conceptual bouleversement
than any achieved by Copernicus himself. A system, such as Aris-
totle's, whose basis was just everyday, commonsensical observations,
was quite inadequate. A new kind of celestial mechanics founded on
a new kind of concept was required. For this we must await Galileo
and Newton.
However, the contribution of Copernicus in preparing the way
for this more basic revolution in men's thinking was by no means
negligible. The very fact that his heliocentric system could not be
readily united with Aristotelian physics provided a stimulus to ex-
plore the possibility of some new basis. But more important was the
fact, which indeed saved his speculations from being simply dis-
carded because of their conflict with Aristotelianism, that his system
introduced awe-inspiring geometrical simplifications into the picture
of the heavenly motions (which picture by his time had become a
pretty complicated and patched-up affair). He reanimated the faith
of those ancient mathematical philosophers who would have physical
nature be a perfect geometry, a faith that the neo-Aristotelians of the
thirteenth century had submerged under the systematized common

sense of The Philosopher. In Johann Kepler this Pythagorean
number-worship becomes even more striking.
Kepler is famous in the history of science for his three laws of
planetary motion. They are stated in terms of the Copernican sys-
tem, which Kepler enthusiastically embraced, and are concerned
with the revolutions of the planets about the sun. The first law
states that each planet describes an ellipse with the sun in one focus
thereof. The second says that for each planet the radius vector
drawn from the sun to the planet sweeps across equal areas in equal
times. The third compares different planets, saying that the squares
C A=C B
a_
Fig. 131. Relative Perfection of Circle and Ellipse
of their periodic times (that is, the times they require for their
elliptical revolutions about the sun) are proportional to the cubes
of their mean distances from the sun.
Let us see what these mean. The first is simple enough. Kepler
found he had to replace the circular path ascribed to the planetary
motions by an elliptical one. A fact to be kept in mind is that an
ellipse, although it does not have the same shape throughout for
ordinary observation, does have, in its mathematical definition, a
constancy only one step removed from that of a circle. A circle may
be defined in terms of the motion of a point which at all times re-
mains at a fixed distance from a motionless point, the center. An
ellipse, similarly, may be defined in terms of the motion of a point
the sum of whose distances from two motionless points, the foci, re-
mains fixed. That is, for an Aristotelian an ellipse does not share
the perfection of a circle: it is not the same sensible shape through-
out; segments of equal length could not everywhere be superim-

posed. But for a geometrician an ellipse, though more complex than
a circle, can be seen (with the mind's eye) to have a constant nature
throughout. (See Fig. 13a.)
The second law shows a similar substitution that Kepler found
himself forced to make. In place of a constant speed in its rotation
about the sun, each planet is assigned another constancyâthat of the
ratio of the area its radius-vector sweeps out in a given time to the
time. A figure here may help (Fig. 13b). Here again we should note
Planet
â¢EH
Fig. 13!). Kepler's Second Law
that for an Aristotelian the shift introduced by Kepler is disastrous;
the sensible speed of rotation has lost its perfect constancy. For a
geometrician, however, only a slight complexity has been added, as
represented by the change from distance (or from angular degrees)
to area; otherwise the perfect regularity has been retained.
The meaning of the third law can perhaps be most directly pre-
sented by a table, where t stands for the periodic timeâthat is, the
time taken for a planet's revolution about the sunâand d for the
mean distance of that planet from the sun as it travels in its elliptical
orbit. (See Fig. 13c.)
In this third law, Kepler offered a sheer gain. He had found a
new, a further perfection in the heavenly motions. The first two,
however, represent some loss, even for the eye of a geometer, in the
picture of the divine simplicities of the celestial motions. Why was
Kepler induced to accept even such a small loss? The answer really
involves us in the other great movement in the Renaissance which,
Planet id t* d3
Earth 1 1 1 1
Mercury 0.24 0-387 0.058 0.058
Venus 0.61 o-723 Â°-378 Â°-378
Mars 1.88 1.524 3.54 3.54
Jupiter 11.86 5-202 '4Â°-7 140.8
Saturn 29.46 9-539 867-9 868.0
Note: By making the units for t and d their values for the earth, /2 = </s for each
planet. Not using this device, we would find t*/d* is the same for each planet.
Fig. 130. Table Showing Kepler's Third Law
I shall insist presently, is, along with the one we are now tracing, a
source of the great scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.
I refer to the experimental attitude, the shift from everyday, com-
monsensical observations to controlled ones and the use of precision
instruments in making them. Not wishing to anticipate that story
here, all I shall do is to point out that Kepler had inherited from
the Danish astronomer, Tycho Brahe, a mass of data on astronomical
positions characterized by a greatly increased accuracy permitted by
the use of better instruments. It was this that forced upon Kepler
the increase in complexity just referred to.
It is, however, important to see just in what lay the significance of
Kepler's use of these data fortunately made available to him. We
must not suppose that he just discovered his laws of planetary motion
by a sort of passive reception and classification of Brahe's observa-
tions. He came to his task with an active commitment, a commit-
ment to the Copernican system, a system whose advantage lay in the
greater mathematical perfection it offered. The astronomer has a
choice. He does not simply lay his dividers, rule and quadrant
against the skies and thereby observe the true orbits and velocities
of the planets. Those orbits and velocities are geometrical construc-
tions on his part. Brahe himself continued with a geocentric system
(though somewhat different from the Ptolemaic) and tried to get
Kepler to do likewise. But Kepler refused; he saw greater geo-
metrical simplicities in the direction Copernicus had indicated.
So we see Kepler rejoicing over his good fortune in inheriting
Brahe's data because the Creator, being a perfect geometer, made no
errors; hence, the more accurate our observations the more reliable
would be any reconstruction of ours which, while ascribing only

simple geometrical constancies to the celestial motions, would save
the appearances with great fidelity. Thus, we find that a discrepancy
of eight minutes of arc in the orbit of Mars made Kepler scrap long
calculations and assume the new labors involved in giving up the
circular in favor of the elliptical path. Why? Not for the sake of
observational accuracy itself but because God made no errors and
yet eight minutes constituted a greater discrepancy than Brahe's
methods (including a procedure for determining the probable er-
rors for the instruments used) would permit. Similarly, it was his
faith that an exact and simple relation could be found between the
periodic times of the planets and their distances from the sun that
kept him laboring for seventeen long years on Brahe's observations
before his third law dawned upon him and "overcame by storm the
shadows of his mind."
Kepler's Pythagoreanism is best seen in his first work, The Mystery
of the Cosmos, published when he was twenty-five, which contains
the seeds of all his later work and indicates clearly the sort of moti-
vation animating him. He was seeking the simple mathematical
harmonies of the universe. These must be discernible in the relative
distances of the planets from the sun. He tried first simple arith-
metical proportions, then simple multiples, then the relations of
radii of circles that could be interposed between members of the
series of regular plane figures (polygons). Finally, failing in all these,
he tried the radii of spheres that could be interposed between mem-
bers of the series of regular solids. Here he had such success that
he was convinced he had found the secret of the universe.
Suppose we start with a large sphere. In it we construct a cube
such that its eight corners just touch the inside surface of the sphere.
In this cube we construct a smaller sphere whose outside surface just
touches the cube in the middle of each of its six faces. In this smaller
sphere we construct a tetrahedron such that its four corners just
touch this sphere. Then inside this tetrahedron another sphere, in-
side this sphere a dodecahedron, then another sphere, inside which
we put an icosahedron, another sphere, then finally an octahedron,
each contained figure just touching its container as indicated. Then
in the radii of these spheres we have the secret of the distances of
the planets from the sun (the largest sphere's radius being assigned
to Saturn's orbit, the next to Jupiter's, then Mars', the Earth's,
Venus's, and Mercury's, according to the Copernican system). Kepler
was especially pleased with his discovery of this secret of the heavens
for it showed conclusively why there could only be six planetsâthere
are only five regular solidsl
This Pythagoreanism of Kepler's was no merely youthful enthusi-
asm. His third law was published in a book, The Harmony of the
World (that appeared when he was fifty-eight years of age), which
purported to establish the identity of the proportions of the angular
velocities of the planets about the sun and the ratios of the frequen-
cies involved in musical intervals. It was, clearly, just a refinement
on the doctrine of the ancient Pythagoreans of the music of the
spheres.
I hope I have made my point sufficiently clear. The Copernican
revolution, as exemplified in the work of Copernicus and Kepler,
was a bold attempt to simplify anew the geometrical picture of the
true celestial motions. It was animated by a profound faith in the
mathematical perfection of these motions. It was in rather violent
conflict with the commonsensical basis of medieval physics. To come
into harmony with observed facts it required a new kind of concept,
a new way of dealing with the facts. This it did not itself furnish.
This interpretation of the Copernican revolution, however, en-
genders a surprising paradox when placed in the general framework
of the present book. I have said that I believe the increasingly clear
distinction between factual questions and value questions to be a
chief characteristic of modern thought. More specifically, I have re-
marked that it was in the rise of modern science, in the scientific
revolution first occurring in seventeenth-century physics, that we
find the earliest and perhaps the chief impetus toward making this
distinction. If, as I have already claimed and shall presently insist,
the Copernican revolution contributed significantly and essentially
to this development, I am involved in the following paradox. It was
very largely through a mode of value thinking concerning factual
matters (the quest for geometrical perfections in celestial motions)
that there arose the first clear distinction between factual and valua-
tional issues. Now I think that this is what actually happened; its
explanation, however, must await a discussion of the scientific revolu-
tion. Our next, immediate task is to explore very hurriedly the
historical conditions favorable to the occurrence of the Copernican
revolution as here interpreted.
We have already noted two great traditions in Greek thought.
On the one hand, there was commonsensical Aristotle, systematizing
everyday observations, stressing the purposiveness of natural occur-

rences especially as found in growth and living processes, but sup-
posedly discoverable in mechanical phenomena as well. On the
other hand, there were the number-worshipping Pythagoreans and
the perhaps less superstitious yet profoundly mystical Plato. The
latter tradition was not wholly suppressed in the Middle Ages, but
the former had by the end of the thirteenth century become domi-
nant. Neither one of these Greek traditions was inherently compati-
ble with the Judeo-Christian concepts of sin, salvation, and a
Messianic hope. But the Aristotelian system was more easily adapted
to and united with the Christian outlook, especially in physics, be-
cause of its exoteric basis.
In the Renaissance we find a very decided revival of the Pytha-
gorean-Platonic tradition. This may not be unrelated to a certain
element of paganism characteristic of the Italian Renaissance. For
the tradition was revived not in the Christianized form given it, for
example, at the very close of the ancient world by St. Augustine, but
consisted for the most part in the rediscovery (for the West) and the
translation into Latin of the work of Plato himself and of other
pagan representatives. The movement known as Italian humanism
was by and large neither Christian nor Aristotelian in spirit, and
possibly the real though not avowed lapse in the former was con-
nected with the explicit rejection of the latter, which had become
so closely associated with it.
Before the middle of the fifteenth century, Cosimo de'Medici had
established the Platonic Academy at Florence. The immediate
stimulus to this was furnished by the visit from Greece of the pagan
neo-Platonist, Pletho. Pletho not only had an intimate acquaintance
with the Platonic writings and with ancient Pythagoreanism, which
he combined in a mystical philosophy, but he specifically attacked
the reigning Aristotelianism of the western scholastic tradition. In
both respects he found in Italy enthusiastic support.
The basis for this cordial reception had been laid in the four-
teenth century by Petrarch. Petrarch was a pioneer in the "revival
of learning" in Italy, a revival first of classical Latin authors, such as
Cicero and Virgil, and then of their Greek predecessors. He was an
assiduous collector of lost manuscripts and a zealous proponent of
the reintroduction of a knowledge of the Greek language into learn-
ing. This whole movement was of course literary, "humanistic."
Petrarch was disgusted with scholastic thought, but largely because
of its bad Latin and its abstractness. He had no interest in replacing

its Aristotelian commonsensical basis by a Platonic mathematicism.
Yet the interest kindled in ancient writings, and specifically in non-
Aristotelian ones, may have furnished a favorable environment for
the revival of the geometrical tradition.
This revival of learning apparently did contribute significantly to
the atmosphere of intellectual and artistic emancipation character-
istic of the Renaissance. However, the liberation amounted largely
to the rejection of one ancient school in favor of another: not until
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the general orientation
changed from the past to the future, from the established authority
of one's predecessors to the anticipated discoveries of one's successors.
It has been said, perhaps with some justice, that this sense of
deliverance from medieval thought patterns was augmented by the
geographical explorations and discoveries of the Renaissance, such
as the famous voyage of Marco Polo to China, the rounding of the
Cape of Good Hope by Vasco da Gama, the discovery of the new
world by Christopher Columbus, and the circumnavigation of the
earth by Magellan's expedition. It may be that, by bursting the
limits of geographical knowledge, men were emboldened to throw
off traditional intellectual restrictions generally; by discovering what
was all the time waiting beyond the distant spatial horizons, men
were encouraged to seek new intellectual territories waiting them in
the ancient world. But this is rather close to that metaphorical
thinking in history against which we must steel ourselves. Certainly
we must not subscribe to old wives' tales such as that Columbus had
to argue for the sphericity of the earth against the current opinions
of astronomers and geographers. Something, no doubt, the new
discoveries did contribute to the intellectual ferment of the time.
What we must emphasize, however, was that the really important
contribution they made to the rise of modern science lay elsewhere
and in much more specific and mundane matters. I refer to the im-
petus they gave to the development of better instruments and in-
creased knowledge for navigation, to improvement in the designing
of ships, and to the arousing of interest in a host of mechanical
problems. But this anticipates a later discussion.
The revival of learning in Italy was associated with the rise of a
new class of intellectuals, the humanistsâliterati and artists who
were more than just highly skilled artisans whose work, as in the
great Gothic cathedrals, was anonymous. This group of self-conscious
and self-confident individuals was supported by a new institution, the

commercial city, or really by a single dictator-benefactor or a small
ruling clique therein. The Roman church at first followed the lead
of these secular rulers and patronized the purveyors of revived pagan
culture and the new group of individualistic artists. This tendency
reached its height under Pope Leo X. But the revolt of the Protes-
tants led to a counterreformation in the Roman church. Hence, we
may say that fundamentally it was a new social institution and a new
social class seeking the intellectual and cultural symbols of power
and affluence that supported the humanist of the Renaissance and
fostered the revival of learning, thereby promoting the rediscovery
and propagation of works and ideas in a different tradition from the
Aristotelianism of the medieval church. It is then relevant to con-
sider very briefly what forces led to the emergence of this new social
institution.
It was in Italy that the revival of learning originated. It was in
Italy that that series of profound changes which historians call "the
commercial revolution" first started some centuries earlier. These
changes centered around the shift from a condition of small-scale,
mostly local trade (largely between the towns and their surrounding
countrysides, with an occasional fair attracting merchants from
greater distances) to one of relatively large-scale transportation of
goods over long distances, requiring the full-time activities of pro-
moters and organizers. This development naturally occurred first in
a maritime region, because the only adequate form of transportation
was by ship. And as between different coastlands it was almost in-
evitable that it should occur first in a district of protected waters,
where harbors were close together and tides moderate, navigation
already long established and sailing routes well known, where, in
short, the least advance in technical knowledge and in mechanical
facilities was required. That is, it was quite proper that the com-
mercial revolution in Europe should start in the region of the in-
land sea, the Mediterranean.
A series of historical events favored this development and, in par-
ticular, the leading place of Italian cities in it. In the first place,
there were the crusades. Although several Italian cities had already
begun an expansion of overseas trade, these "religious" adventures
added great impetus to this development. As the crusading armies
approached and entered the Holy Land, their supplies had almost
necessarily to come by boat across the Eastern Mediterranean. Venice
and Genoa particularly profited from this necessity. This military

requirement was followed by more permanent demands for trade, as
the wealthier classes acquired a taste for the luxuries with which they
had come in contact in the Near Eastâcommodities both locally
produced there and imported overland from the Far East: spices,
silks, fruits, cotton goods. This acquired taste was not, of course,
confined to Italy; it spread to the north with the return of the
crusaders and with continued contacts (many through warfare) of
northerners with Italian cities. So trade expanded. By the fifteenth
century Venice sent protected trading fleets regularly as far north as
England and the Netherlands.
Another historical circumstance favoring this development was
the fostering of the rivalry between Italian cities by the papacy. One
may suppose that there would be a natural tendency toward compe-
tition for long-distance trade between any port cities undertaking it.
This did not in the north, however, prevent union into leagues and
the use of various devices on the part of the emerging nation-states
for mutual protection and promotion, as we shall see in discussing
mercantilism. In Italy this unification did not occur, partly be-
cause the papacy did not want it: it felt that such a condition would
be a threat to its own political power. Hence, it undertook various
alliances with northern powers against Italian states, and fostered
conflicts between the latter and among factions within them.
This papal policy contributed to the rise of the new class of intel-
lectuals. Each aspirant to political power in the various Italian cities
wished to prove his status by his patronage of artists and humanists.
The papal policy also indirectly fostered the same result. By pro-
moting division, a multiplicity of independent states and a conflict of
political factions, it inadvertently encouraged newcomers to aspire
to political power. Under such conditions hereditary aristocracy
could no longer be secure. Political adventurers found opportuni-
ties. A new means to political power was necessary and availableâ
acquired (as contrasted with inherited) wealth, wealth primarily in
ships, goods and money rather than in landed estates. This, as al-
ready indicated, could be used as a symbol of status through the
purchase of the services of architects, artists, literatiâby patronizing
the arts. It also had more direct uses in promoting the political
power of its possessor. Public favor could be obtained by muni-
cipal gifts. It was indispensable for the use of those techniquesâ
bribery, the hiring of private armies and the services of adventurers
("condottieri," as they were called)âwhich the new conditions

favored. To acquire such wealth quickly men indulged in the specu-
lation of long-distance trade and its financing and what, to our eyes,
amounted to preying upon it in the form of outright piracy.
A further peculiarity of the commercial revolution in Italy was
that the class it brought to powerâthe merchant-capitalist, the spec-
ulative banker, the promoter-adventurerâdid not, as did its bour-
geois counterpart in the north, enter a long contest with the older
aristocracy, the feudal nobles and the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
Rather, this new group succeeded in pushing itself into, identifying
itself with, and indeed substituting itself for the older ruling classes.
By the time of the Renaissance the original feudal aristocracy had
been almost completely replaced by a younger one based on wealth
acquired through trade and moneylending. Lords and prelates of the
old order had found themselves through extensive borrowing at
usurious rates from the new merchants and bankers quite insolvent.
Such great families of Florence, for example, as the Gianfigliazzi, the
Cerchi, the Peruzzi, had started on a level with that of our modern
pawnshop dealers but before long were claiming all the perquisites
of those born to the purple. Cosimo de'Medici himself was able to
put his family in power only by leading a group of the more daring
families of recently achieved affluence as against the older aristocracy.
This phenomenon probably favored a more rapid but also a
shorter-lived flowering of the commercial revolution in Italy. The
new ruling group did not set itself up as new. It contrived to clothe
itself with the mantle of established power and privilege. It ac-
quired landed estates by purchase if not by forfeiture; it made
munificent benefactions to the church as well as to the city-state.
One of its subtlest and most successful devices for insinuating itself
into and taking over the older aristocracy in both church and state
was utilized precisely in the area of the revival of learning and art
which is at the moment our primary concern. It was successful in
getting the new humanism, as contrasted with the old scholasticism,
to be the symbol of status even, as we have seen, in the church itself.
As contrasted with the medieval baron, who might in some small de-
gree support learning and art, the new Italian merchant-prince not
only lavishly patronized the arts, he actively took part in them and
became, himself, a learned man, an artist, a humanist.
This account, however, still leaves us with the problem of con-
necting the revival of learning in the Renaissance with the Coperni-
can revolution, for the revival itself, as we have seen, was literary and
artistic. We can point to no striking discoveries of ancient mathe-
matical and astronomical texts that directly contributed either to the
views of Copernicus or to the general atmosphere that made those
views acceptable to fellow scientists. The propositions of Euclid's
geometry were apparently taught throughout the Middle Ages but
without the proofs. The whole of his Elements became available
through a translation by Adelard of Bath in the twelfth century.
Archimedes' writings, although known in the later Middle Ages,
were not available in a satisfactory Latin translation until the second
half of the sixteenth century, that is, until after the death of Co-
pernicus. In this same period the writings of Hero and other minor
ancient mathematicians became available in Latin. But these events
were probably not so much causes as effects of the growth of the
geometrizing spirit of the time.
In general we must admit that there is little evidence that the
humanists contributed discoveries of specific manuscripts that gave
impetus to the Copernican revolution. Still it seems reasonable to
suppose that the general atmosphere they created, of veneration of
classical Rome and Greece and especially of the Platonic and neo-
Pythagorean traditions, had its effect upon those of their contempo-
raries interested in physical science. In any case, this seems a plausi-
ble explanation of the revival of the mathematical, Pythagorean
emphasis in the Italian universities of the sixteenth century. It may
not be irrelevant to point out that these universities themselves ap-
parently had become, to a great extent, prestige symbols like the
humanists and supported by the same newly arisen institutionâthe
commercial city-state and its ruling clique of merchant-capitalists.
It is said that Bologna spent as much as one half of its revenue upon
its university (it will be recalled that it was here that Copernicus
came under the neo-Pythagorean influence of di Novara). The Uni-
versity of Pisa, when Galileo attended it and later lectured in it in
the late sixteenth century, was supported by the Medician govern-
ment of Florence. In this respect the Italian universities should be
contrasted with the University of Paris, which stayed more fully
under the control of the church and continued as a center of Aris-
totelianism.
We may then with some hesitancy suggest that the mystical,
geometrical preoccupation so clearly revealed in the work of Co-
pernicus and Kepler and so fundamentally opposed to the common-
sensical basis of medieval Aristotelian physics, grew up in the Renais-

sance in part owing to the favorable atmosphere created by the
humanists. We may supplement this, perhaps with equal hesitancy,
by saying that at the bottom of this change was the rise of a new
institution and class, the small city-state and its ruling merchant-
princes, nurtured in the developing commercial revolution and
destined to undermine the church's traditional control of the intel-
lectual class and its almost complete monopoly of ideas. Fortunately
we need not be quite so cautious in expounding the historical condi-
tions, likewise originating in the commercial revolution, favorable
to the second great source, in the Renaissance, of the coming
scientific revolution. I refer to what may be called the rise of the
experimental attitude.
The Rise of the Experimental Attitude
By the phrase, "the experimental attitude," I of course do not
mean the whole method and orientation of modern science, but only
one element in it. This is the tendency to try new ways of doing
things to discover whether they may not work better than old ways
in the accomplishing of some purpose or simply to see, for the sake
of curiosity, what will happen. This experimental attitude spread
very rapidly during the Renaissance. This was due in part to the
fact that, once started, it was in many cases successful in finding bet-
ter ways of getting things done, and so it came to fire men's imagina-
tions. But this is at most an incomplete explanation: it leaves en-
tirely open the question of why this came about in the Renaissance,
the answer to which requires reference to certain aspects of the com-
mercial revolution.
First we should note a social factor. In considering the impact of
the commercial revolution upon Italy we have already had our at-
tention drawn to the enhanced status of a certain type of personality,
a kind of adventurer, not on the trysting field, jousting according to
ancient rules for some chivalric token of favor (but never for a mo-
ment endangering his knightly status), but in the more vital game of
long-distance trade and piracy upon it, where the stakes were one's
whole social position. Here no ancient rules obtained; the winner
was he who could outsmart both his competitors and the forces of
nature. Success here depended in no small degree upon ability to
command the right sort of brains, brains fertile in devising new
techniques and instruments of war and in offering new knowledge
of those natural forces and facts that bear upon shipping by sea. So
the rise to power of the adventurous merchant-capitalist elevated at
the same time a dependent but necessary class composed of engineers,
inventors, navigators and explorersâmen equipped with the experi-
mental attitude. The rise of this new class coincided with the break-
ing up of the craft guilds. These, we have seen, were monopolistic
and restrictive, designed to keep the traditional knowledge and skills
of a craft in the hands of a few, usually the sons of those already in
possession of them. The new engineer-inventor or navigator-ex-
plorer was an individualist; his commodity was not mastership of old
skills but an imagination productive of new devices and ideas. He
sold his services as an individual to some merchant-capitalist or to
one of the rising national monarchs allied with these tradesmen.
Now let us shift our emphasis from the social to the technological.
We must put aside a somewhat current misconception to the effect
that theoretical science comes first, historically, to be followed by
practical, technological applications, inventions and the development
of physical instruments and procedures. At the present stage in the
evolution of science there is perhaps some validity in this claim, but
it is very nearly wrong when one goes back to the beginnings.
Modern science did not arise until after a very appreciable and
rapid growth in technologies, particularly in the Renaissance.
I would like to make this more concrete by mentioning develop-
ments in four areas. First there is mining and metallurgy. The
Renaissance witnessed little improvement in the basic processes in-
volved in these, two of man's oldest industries. But greatly in-
creased demands for metal accompanying the commercial revolution
did much to change the knowledge of these practices from trade
secrets confined to a skilled but illiterate few to generally available
information. It was in the sixteenth century that there first appeared
significant attempts at careful descriptions of the processes, as in
Agricola's De Re Metallica based on that author's own observations.
This increased demand also stimulated the perfecting of various
engineering devices, such as windlasses, water pumps and contriv-
ances for ventillating mine shafts.
A second area is connected with urbanization. The commercial
revolution brought large populations together, especially in port
cities. This gave rise to engineering problems. Sanitation does not
seem to have been one of them in the Renaissance. But the need of
greatly increased water supplies and hence, in many instances, of
works to lift large amounts of water was recognized. For example,

by the middle of the sixteenth century Augsberg had a water works
that involved the lifting of water by means of several towers, at
least some of which used the principle of a series of large screws
operating in cylinders pushing water up from a lower to a higher
trough. (See Fig. 14.) Such devices raised problems concerning
pressures, strengths of materials and so on, which were to prove
stimulative of scientific inquiry.
Power from river
Screw in pipe
Fig. 14. Mechanism for Lifting Water
Warfare is apparently a perennial activity of man; it certainly
furnishes no distinguishing mark of the Renaissance. But the
Renaissance did see men progressing in their techniques of killing
one another. Gunpowder had been known in Europe since the
thirteenth century; but it was in the Renaissance that it was fruit-
fully applied to the art of war, which was revolutionized by the in-
troduction of the arquebus, the pistol and the cannon, thanks to the
ingenuity of the engineer in this area. With the commercial revolu-
tion, making war ceased to be an aristocratic prerogative, a high-
level craft monopolized by a few and protected zealously in its rules
and techniques. It was one of the methods, along with banking and
shipping, required for the amassing of fortunes by trade (Herbert
Spencer had not yet converted trade into a peaceful occupation!).
The perfecting of firearms gave rise to many new problems in con-
nection with their use: problems as to the types and deployment of
soldiers, kinds and strengths of fortifications, the use of armor and
so on. It also, as we shall note, stimulated men's scientific curiosity.

The problem of determining the trajectory of a cannon ball led to
ideas of no small significance concerning inertia, gravity and their
combination.
It is in the area of navigation and exploration, however, that we
find the most striking union through technological developments of
the forces of the commercial revolution with the experimental at-
titude destined to play so important a role in the method of modern
science. Here we see a great deal of progress in the design of boats
and gear. Much attention was given to the action of water in naviga-
ble rivers and harbors due to river flow and tides. Artificial harbors
were designed, different methods of dredging and of using retaining
walls were tried out. Of more importance to us was the increase in
geographical knowledge and speculation. Men obtained a more
accurate conception of the size of the earth. Important contributions
were made to the understanding of the earth's curvature and through
this to the methods and theory of celestial navigation.
Equator
. . , , X.
Meridians of ^
longitude
Fig. 15. Apian Projection
The need for more reliable maps was keenly felt. Not only did
men desire a better knowledge of the locations and distances of land
and water masses. Those actively engaged in navigation were acutely
aware of the lack of a good method of representation of the earth's
surface. Globes could do this fairly accurately, but they were of
little practical use in commerce or exploration, as their scale was
of necessity too small, and flat surfaces were required for the use of
rulers and dividers. The sixteenth century witnessed significant
progress in the methods of projecting the three-dimensional surface
of the earth upon two-dimensional charts. Peter Apian made world
maps with the equator and parallels of latitude appearing as straight,

[2] Sources of Scientif1c Revolution in Renaissance 73
horizontal lines, the meridians of longitude being drawn as portions
of circles with increasing curvature as one approached the edges
of the map. (See Fig. 15.) Although this projection gave a good
picture of the earth and roughly preserved relative distances, at any
rate in the east-west dimension, it did not stay true to mariner's
compass directions (so that, for example, north-south is always per-
pendicular to east-west). Hence, it did not lend itself to practical
navigational use for large-scale charts. The greatest advance in this
matter was made by the Flemish cartographer, Mercator (Gerhard de
Kremer). He drew the meridians, like the parallels, as straight lines,
Parallels .
of latitude
\\
- Equator
"Small scale
â¢ Large scale
Meridians of longitude
Fig. 16. Mercator Projection
the two being everywhere perpendicular to each other. The meridians
he spaced equally. This produced a distortion of distance, increasing
toward the poles (where on the earth's sphere all the meridians in-
tersect). But he combined this with the device of spacing the paral-
lels farther apart as one approaches the poles. Thus, for any given
small region the distortions in the two dimensions counterbalance,
so that relative distances north-south and east-west are maintained.
Thus, any small segment of the world map is quite accurate in that
relative distances and directions are preserved in the two major axes.
(See Fig. 16.) This was of such practical value for navigation that it
is standard even today.
Besides maps and charts, mechanical instruments in aid of naviga-
tion were of great importance. The mariner's magnetic compass was
known in Europe from the twelfth century. In the thirteenth and

fourteenth centuries there was perfected the floating-card form of
this compass, which stayed approximately level despite the motion
of the ship. In the fifteenth century the variation in the compass or
magnetic direction from true or geographical north was discovered.
As th1s variation differed for different locations it was important to
plot it so that the navigator could determine his true directions. It
was hoped that by plotting this variation the navigator would also be
able to determine his longitude. The compass, of course, only gave
directions, not locations. Location north and south, that is, latitude,
could be found by observing the maximum elevations of the celes-
tial bodies from the northern horizon (in the Northern Hemisphere),
since, on any given day, these are the same for any point on a given
parallel, but differ for different parallels. But location east and west
could not be determined by an analogous procedure (taking the
maximum elevation say from the eastern horizon). Since the whole
celestial sphere appears to rotate daily from east to west, f1nding such
an elevation could help determine longitude only if one had syn-
chronous clocks for all longitudes. Such clocks were not yet available
in the Renaissance. It was hoped, however, that, if amounts of com-
pass variations were plotted and lines drawn connecting equal ones
(called "isogonics"), one could determine one's longitude by finding
where on such charts the variation observed intersected one's lati-
tude. The sixteenth century also witnessed the discovery of the
downward dip or inclination of the magnetic needle. This likewise
raised hopes as to the determination of longitude by drawing lines
connecting equal inclinations (called "isoclinics"), and noting at
what longitudes they intersected given parallels of latitude. Both
these hopes were doomed to disappointment, however, their failure
aggravating the problem of the determination of longitude. Explora-
tion and long-distance trade were greatly hampered by the want of
a solution to this vexatious problem. Thus, tremendous stimulus
was given not merely to inventive activity, particularly in the perfect-
ing of mariners' clocks, but also to the elaboration of astronomical
and magnetic theory.
Another class of instruments that were greatly improved during
this period included the quadrant, sextant and octant. These were
used for determining the elevations of celestial bodies above the
horizon and thus, in particular, for ascertaining latitude. They were
essentially graduated portions of a circle combined with a device for
sighting the celestial body and either a means of sighting the horizon
or of determining the zenith by a plumb line. Tycho Brahe started
his celestial observations, so important as we have seen for Kepler's
work, with a type of quadrant in actual use by navigators. He en-
larged and improved the construction of these instruments so that
they served to give him much more accurate readings. (See Fig. 17.)
Vcrticol
pivot
Sights to locate
celestial object
Horizontal
pivot
Plumb line, elevation
directly read
Fig. 17. Tycho Brahe's Giant Quadrant
As a final way of indicating the substantiality of the experimental
attitude in the Renaissance I should like to call attention briefly to
its exemplification by two men, one of predominantly practical in-
terests, the other displaying somewhat more of the sheer curiosity
of the scientist. Although both of these men made significant ex-
perimental contributions, I think it is fair to treat them not as key
figures in their own right but rather as outstanding cases of the
broad tendency we have been noting.
First there is the Italian artist-engineer, Leonardo da Vinci. He
was eminently successful in "selling himself" to the new elite, com-
bining services of practical value with the production of artistic
symbols of prestige. He has long been famous as a painter. Even
here his experimental ism is apparent. Not merely is his artistic
style new and individual. It is clearly the result of trying out new
ways of painting and drawing. Thanks to discoveries of his note-
books, which he never himself published, we now have considerable
insight into ways in which he went about doing things. He made
numerous studies in linear and aerial perspective and in highlights
and shadows. He made careful observations of human anatomy,

claiming, in fact, to have dissected ten human cadavers. He also
made extensive studies of the human body in action, relating external
appearances to skeletal and muscular dispositions, which quite ob-
viously required the use of models from whom he sketched.
Leonardo was also an engineer, architect and inventor, serving
in these practical capacities in the courts of Florence, Milan, Rome
and in the service of Francis I of France. We have descriptions and
drawings from his notebooks of a folding camp bed, of a movable
bridge on wheels to cross rivers where the enemy has destroyed the
permanent bridges, of a fire-ball composed of turpentine and pitch,
of an armored car shaped like a squat cone and propelled by a pedal
mechanism, of a new method of using grappling hooks in marine
encounters, of a design for firing mortars that will insure the satura-
tion of a fortified areaâof an almost endless progeny of a fertile
brain turned to the problem of new ways of carrying on war. Leo-
nardo apparently also devoted much energy to the study of harbors
and river navigation. We have sketches of a dredge involving a large
scoop operated by a windlass and accompanied by a barge to carry
off the dredgings; designs for harbors and for canals with locks; de-
scriptions of methods of controlling water erosion in river beds. He
obviously was much interested in engineering problems connected
with waterworks. He has left us accounts of forcing pumps to be
operated by driving beams and studies in the weights and pressures
of liquids showing that the same liquid in communicating vessels
will stand at the same level and that different liquids will rise to
heights inversely related to their densities. Less immediately prac-
tical but striking more vigorously upon present fancy are his studies
in the flights of birds and their application to the problem of
designing a heavier-than-air machine for human flight. We have
plans of different models, built on the principle of bird flight, with
flexible wings activated by the pilot through cranks or pedals.
It is natural that the discovery of Leonardo's notebooks has led
to absurd claims concerning him, for example, to the contention
that he was the first modern scientist and really introduced the
method of modern science. Of one thing there can hardly be a
doubt: he was one of the most successful of the new class of artist-
engineer-inventors and displayed to a very striking degree the new
experimental attitude of the Renaissance. But the new science was
to integrate this attitude with the mathematical perfectionism ani-
mating the Copernican revolution, producing laws whose relation to

the observable ways in which nature behaves, even under human
manipulation, was only indirect, being bridged by mathematical
calculations. It is true that Leonardo praised mathematics on oc-
casion, indeed, in the language of superlatives. However, he was
not a mathematician in any appreciable degree, and he never sig-
nificantly integrated mathematics with his experimentalism, which
was practical: he did not use it, for the most part, to establish theo-
retical generalizations but rather to solve concrete, practical prob-
lems. Some of his experiments show him to be animated by idle
curiosity, but these are exceptional. That the experimental attitude
once engendered by practical problems does tend to spread to in-
vestigations with no immediate practical objective, to be applied
just for the fun of finding things out, is better illustrated by the
second figure we briefly consider.
William Gilbert was professionally a doctor, and very successful
in his profession, being President of the College of Physicians at
Cambridge and physician to Queen Elizabeth. It is possible that he
was influenced by the strong empirical movement in that profession,
but the experimental studies for which he is famous lie in another
area, that of magnetism and static electricity (although his own con-
viction that the two areas are not independent is revealed by the
full title of his book, On the Magnet, Magnetic Bodies, and the
Great Magnet, the Earth, a New Physiology).
Gilbert used a magnetic needle to study more carefully than had
been done before the properties of a globular piece of lodestone,
which he called a "Terrella" or "Little Earth" on the assumption,
borne out by the observations of the mariner's compass by explorers,
that the earth is a large magnet. He plotted the magnetic lines of
force of his Terrella in circles intersecting in two poles. He found
that by dividing his lodestone new and opposite poles were formed
at the new surfaces. He investigated the dip of the magnetic needle,
showing that it was part of the three-dimensional attraction of the
poles of his Terrella for the (opposite) poles of the magnetized
needle. He applied his findings to the earth and predicted that the
magnetic dip would increase as one approached the earth's poles, a
prediction confirmed by Hudson in exploring the arctic regions of
America in 1608.
Gilbert also experimented with frictional or static electricity. He
found that many other substances than the traditionally used amber
could be made to attract one another by rubbing, especially in dry

air. He constructed a simple electroscope that would indicate such
attraction. These phenomena were clearly distinguished by him from
the related phenomena of magnetism.
It has been claimed that Gilbert was a scientist in the modern
sense. This, I think, is not to be conceded. We must admit that in
him the experimental attitude, although closely connected with
practical problems and instruments (for example, with the use of
the mariner's compass in navigation), did expand into a means of
satisfaction of pure curiosity (as in his use of the electroscope in
electrostatic investigations). Such an extension of the experimental
attitude was a condition of its incorporation in modern scientific
method. Moreover, Gilbert was not merely an experimentalist, a
versatile tinkerer with nature. His observations led him on to specu-
lations. He conceived his Terrella to be (so far as magnetic phe-
nomena were concerned) a little earth; thus he applied his findings
on magnetic lines of force to the earth. This itself was a bold gen-
eralization. But he went further and speculated that the planets in
our system are bound together by magnetic force (he accepted the
Copernican theory). Incidentally, this speculation was adopted by
Kepler, who thought that the elliptical orbits of planetary motion
could be explained by the change in the planets' magnetic orienta-
tions toward the sun (at one time, one planetary pole being nearest
the sun, at the opposite phase, the other).
Granting all this, however, we do not have sufficient basis for
finding the modern scientific method in Gilbert. His concepts were
tied too closely with items of direct observation to allow the formu-
lation of the kind of law we shall see to be characteristic of modern
science. His attitude, translated into the region of magnetic and
electrostatic phenomena, was much the same as that of Aristotle in
the biological realm save that he was more eager to try things out,
to use instruments, to meddle with nature. The birth of modern
science had to await a genius who could combine that worship of
the hidden geometrical perfections of nature which characterized
Copernicus and Kepler with the experimental attitude so strikingly
displayed by Leonardo and Gilbert. This genius was, of course,
Galileo Galilei.
Economic Thought in the Renaissance
If it be granted that Renaissance developments in the field of
physics did not amount to the birth of modern science, it will surely
be conceded that such an event did not occur during this period in
the realm of economic thought. We shall, in fact, find abundant
evidence that a modern scientific treatment was first applied to
economic phenomena in conscious imitation of the methods already
successfully adopted in mechanics. It therefore had to wait upon the
scientific revolution in physics in the seventeenth century. The first
really serious attempts to establish a science of economics occurred
in the Enlightenment, and even these retained, in certain respects,
nonscientific elements. Nevertheless there was a development in the
Renaissance, continuing down through the seventeenth century, that
did quite definitely help prepare the way for the coming scientific
revolution in economic theory. I shall speak of it as the "mercan-
tilist revolution." It can be thought of as analogous, in a way, to
the Copernican revolution in celestial dynamics, although I warn
that the analogy is somewhat misleading.
In the first place, it is proper to speak of both these occurrences
as "revolutions": both were cases of rather fundamental changes in
men's thinking; both offered challenges to the Aristotelian orienta-
tion of medieval thought. In this respect they performed a like
function of loosening the fetters that had come to bind theoretical
speculation. It is possible to go even further, to say that they were
somewhat alike in the way they did this. With the reader's in-
dulgence, I might point out a very superficial resemblance, yet one
not perhaps devoid of suggestiveness. The Copernican system re-
placed the earth by the sun as the center and hub of all celestial mo-
tions. The mercantilist system offered a similar displacement: gold
and silver coins, "treasure," to use the current phrase, were sub-
stituted for consumer goods as the center of the economic order, as
furnishing the definition of real wealth. This claim of kinship be-
tween the two revolutions is not of much weight since it rests on an
ambiguity. The sun, for Copernicus, was literally, that is, geometri-
cally, central; treasure in gold and silver can be said to have been
central for the mercantilist only in some analogical sense, for ex-
ample, in that it was of greatest importance or was definitive of the
basic goal of economic activity. Of course, even here there was some
likeness. One of the arguments Copernicus used in favor of his
revolutionary theory was that it gave the sun, as being truly at rest,
a higher status than it had on the accepted view. In this, of course,
he was not anticipating the new science but carrying on the old
value mode of thinking about fact. However, in this respect the

ideas of the mercantilists about treasure were on a par: they were
concerned to show where the real wealth of a nation resided. As
already remarked, "wealth" is a value concept. In this regard, then,
the mercantilists carried on the medieval approach; they were anx-
ious to determine what wealth really consisted in, that is, what an
economic order should make its goal.
Perhaps, then, the analogy between the two revolutions has some
worth. But it begs an issue which is still a matter of controversy
among scholars. Did the mercantilists really mean that what con-
stitutes the true wealth of a nation is money (hard money and the
precious metals and jewels readily convertible thereto)? There are
those who deny this, who say that the primary objective of the mer-
cantilists was not to increase the treasure of their country, specifically
through maintaining a favorable balance in its foreign trade, but to
further its political and military power (and perhaps its prestige
generally) among nations. This is no place to argue the question
nor is the present author qualified to do so, but some matters that
are perhaps beyond dispute may be noted. They happen to favor
the more traditional interpretation which, by chance, fits somewhat
better the schema of the present study.
It should of course be mentioned that we have no systematic,
theoretical treatises from the mercantilists. Mercantilism was essen-
tially a practical movement, a set of political policies publically
advocated and in many cases actually adopted in the form of legisla-
tive action. In this respect, the mercantilist revolution was decidedly
unlike the Copernican. The leading writers were pamphleteers.
Their purpose was always quite immediate: to influence legislative,
commercial, or productive activities. Thus, they do not indulge in
much speculation regarding such basic concepts as wealth, value and
the functions of money. Granting all this, I think a case can be
made out for Adam Smith's assumption (in the course of his attack
upon them) that their thought was founded on the principle that the
wealth of a nation lies in its treasure (money and precious metal),
obtained through a favorable balance of foreign trade. The very
titles of some of the most famous mercantilist tracts indicate this:
Samuel Fortrey's England's Interest and Improvement Consisting in
the Increase of the Store, and Trade of this Kingdom, and Thomas
Mun's England's Treasure by Forraign Trade or, The Ballance of
our Forraign Trade is The Rule of our Treasure (it is not of signifi-
cance to our argument that these happened to originate in the

seventeenth century). Also, the practical policies advocated seem to
rest on some such assumption as that suggested by Adam Smith.
Mun places at the very beginning of his tract the admonition:
"The ordinary means ... to increase our wealth and treasure is
by Forraign Trade, wherein we must ever observe this rule; to sell
more to strangers yearly than wee consume of theirs in value." He
then likens the kingdom to an individual who, if he buys regularly
more than he sells is soon in penury, but conversely, if he produces
and sells each year more than he spends is presently affluent. Mun
then proceeds to "say something concerning those ways and means
which will increase (the kingdom's) exportations and diminish
(its) importations of wares, . . . and to shew that all the other
means which are commonly supposed to enrich the Kingdom with
Treasure are altogether insufficient and meer fallacies." Waste lands
are to be made productive. Wherever possible, raw materials are to
be manufactured into finished products within the kingdom, trans-
ported in the kingdom's ships, financed by the kingdom's bankers,
thus guaranteeing that as large a portion of their selling price shall
return to the kingdom as possible. To this end, manufacturing and
shipping industries are to be encouraged, even to the extent of mak-
ing it attractive to skilled artisans and mariners to come to England
from other countries. Finished products are to be sent to those
countries where they will meet the least competition from local pro-
duction and thus will command the highest price. But care must be
taken not to price them too high lest this encourage the undertaking
of their production locally. Where they are produced locally, Eng-
lish products must be sold below the local price, if need be by adding
a governmental bounty, in order to put the local industry out of
business, after which prices may be raised, but not too high. Raw
materials that may be worked up within the kingdom should be
allowed to enter duty free. Finished goods should be allowed to
leave without export duties. It is particularly important to keep con-
sumption down within the country, by efficiency, frugality, and
thrift and by legislation aimed to discourage vice and luxury spend-
ing.
As a group, the mercantilists were what we would condemn today
(and I think justly) as "imperialists." They favored the "exploita-
tion" of a colonial empire. Colonies were to be kept at the level of
agricultural production so that, on the one hand, they would be
sources of cheap food and raw materials for the mother country's
82 Modern Science and Human all1es [2]
industrial production and on the other would furnish a market for
her manufactured goods. To this end legislation prohibiting manu-
facturing in the colonies, the use of any but the mother country's
bottoms in shipping and participation in long-distance trade or its
financing was advocated. Of course, the colonies were to have no
voice in foreign relations nor any military power of their own. In-
deed, it was seen that mercantilist policies demanded that the mother
country have a strong naval force.
These policies, taken together, seem to indicate a common out-
look, a basis of economic thought which, if not stated abstractly by
the mercantilists themselves, can be so formulated, a basis funda-
mentally in conflict with that of scholastic economics. Their com-
mon purpose was not to maintain the status quo within a given
region but to make the flow of money into a kingdom as great as
possible. To use terminology borrowed from physics, their system
was not static but dynamic. It is, I believe, not too farfetched to
suppose that they meant to replace the medieval view that real
wealth lay in goods for consumption and that money was just a
measure of that wealth and a mechanical help in exchange proc-
esses by the belief that real wealth resided in money (or perhaps in
its acquisition), consumable goods being simply the means of obtain-
ing it. As so conceived, the mercantilist revolution was an important
step toward modern science. While not challenging the scholastic
blending of valuative and factual thinking, it did modify the actual
values considered most basic. This alone served to weaken the in-
tegrity of the scholastic outlook. A similar questioning of basic
values was to occur in the eighteenth century when the mercantilist's
position on real wealth was to be itself severely criticized. Such basic
shifts in the value-component of men's thinking on economic matters
helped clear the way for a purely factual approach.
The discussion of the mercantilist revolution should not be left
with this negative emphasis, however. Its positive contribution to
the new scientific method was as genuine, if not as considerable, as
that of the Copernican revolution. From the nature of their objec-
tives, the mercantilists were forced to place much more emphasis
than medieval thinkers on quantitative relations, and to develop
concepts not directly applicable to observable facts. For the Aristote-
lian, exchange was legitimate if it served the needs of direct consump-
tion by putting in the hands of those who required them goods
which were not needed by those possessing them. The simplest form
of such exchange was barter; here the exchange was open to direct
observation. Even where money was used, it was considered a me-
chanical aid and the transactions involved in getting the consumable
goods into the hands of their consumers could fairly easily be traced
out. For the mercantilists, wealth lay in a favorable balance of
trade; money entered not merely as a mechanical aid, but as the goal
of the whole complex national economy. Thus, the role of money
was not only more important, it was also more involved. It is in-
teresting to note that one of the measures successfully advocated by
the mercantilists was the setting up by the government of a board
of Commissions for Trade, whose function it was to determine fig-
ures on exports and imports so that the balance of trade could be
ascertainedâa matter not open to simple, direct observation. It is
pertinent to mention that several mercantilists wrote in advocacy
of the "use of political arithmetic" (to borrow the title of a tract by
Sir William Petty) and the training of young men in the keeping of
accounts. Also we should note that by the seventeenth century
several types of crude calculating machines, capable of carrying out
the operations of addition and multiplication, were in use. On the
mercantilist account, your wealth, supposing you were wealthy, was
not something easily observable, in storehouses of food and cloth-
ing, but something that had to be figured out.
It must be admitted that all this was a far cry, in economic thought,
from the mathematical perfectionism embodied in the Copernican
revolution in astronomy. Yet it did perform a similar function in
introducing the mathematical emphasis necessary for the invention
of the kind of concept characteristic of modern science and required
for the formulation of scientific law. The mercantilists were not
themselves primarily interested in the statement of laws, although
occasionally in the course of their more practical activities they
came close to achieving this result. An example can be drawn from
Thomas Mun: "For when Cloth is dear other Nations doe presently
practise clothing, and we know they want neither art nor materials
to this performance. But when by cheapness we drive them from this
employment, and so in time obtain our dear price again, then do
they also use their former remedy." Perhaps in some vague way this
writer presupposed the law of supply and demand. But we must not
assume that the mercantilists were endowed with that idle curiosity
or that pure worship of nature which was so important an ingredient
in the formation of modern science. They were practical men.

This last point may serve as a transition from our consideration of
the nature of the mercantilist revolution to its social and historical
context. The writings of the mercantilists were no doubt not with-
out effect in bringing about basic changes in men's economic ac-
tivities, but the latter had causes of a nonideational order as well.
Indeed, it is perhaps at least equally justifiable to treat the mercan-
tilists' doctrines as effects of these great changes as it is to suppose
them causes thereof.
It is a suggestive fact that mercantilism as an ideology flourished
mainly in England, and to a somewhat lesser extent in northwestern
Europeâthe Lowlands, France (where it was known as "Colbert-
ism") and Germany (where it went under the name of "Kameral-
ism"). The commercial revolution, which we noted began in
southern Europe, most particularly in Italy, had spread to the west
and north. The Mediterranean had broadened to the Atlantic Ocean
and even to the North Sea and the Baltic as an avenue of transporta-
tion for long-distance trade. This was consequent upon improve-
ments in the seaworthiness of ships, the construction of more reliable
instruments of navigation, the increase in men's knowledge of the
earth's geography and magnetism to which we have already alluded.
It is perhaps something of a paradox that explorations carried out
by countries of southern Europe (Italy, Spain and Portugal) in
search of a western sea route to the Far East contributed to the
eventual downfall of these countries commercially in favor of their
northern rivals (especially Holland and England). This search set
an example to the northern Europeans who, fired by the idea of a
Northwest Passage to the Far East, themselves undertook important
explorations: witness John and Sebastian Cabot, Henry Hudson,
Martin Frobisher. Not, of course, that any of these northerners
found an easy and direct route to the fabulous East; but something
else happened that almost amounted in its eventual results to the
same thing.
It was the Spanish and Portuguese explorers and conquistadors in
lower North America, Central America and South Americaâsuch
men as de Soto and Pizarroâwho found and expropriated the gold
and silver of the new world. Long-distance trade was of course
greatly facilitated by the possession of precious metals; coins made of
them were light in weight for their value, suffered no spoilage, were
in demand everywhere. This event, then, gave Portugal and Spain
an early, tremendous commercial advantage over Holland and Eng-

land. The very absence of possessions of such sources of precious
metals, however, led the latter countries to build a different sort of
overseas empire from that of their southern rivalsâa kind of em-
pire that exploited foodstuffs and raw materials for manufacturing
to be used for producing goods that could in turn purchase gold
and silver coins. But this required the establishment of colonies,
their economic and political organization, the regulation of trade,
the development of a large merchant marine, the growth of an
energetic and powerful class of merchants and bankers. All of this
revolutionized the social order in the northern countries. Nothing
comparable happened in Portugal and Spain. There the older aris-
tocracy simply took over the new, easily acquired wealth, which
furnished no dynamic social impetus like that experienced in the
north. The destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588 may be con-
sidered a sort of historical mark of the victory of the northern over
the southern type of imperialism.
This shift to the north as the commercial center of the West was
not unrelated to the rise of the nation-state. Italy, as we have seen,
was not unified; it could not compete in empire building with Hol-
land or England. These countries were able to pursue policies favor-
ing their own merchants, as in the granting of monopolistic charters
for trade with colonial or generally backward areasâthe East India
Company is a good case in point. As we speculated before, the lack
of unity in Italy was partly due to the political policy of the Roman
Church. Perhaps more basically it was the result of the amalgama-
tion of the new merchant-capitalist class with the older nobility.
Much of the older localistic tradition of feudalism was thus retained,
as also the emphasis on luxury consumption as a prestige symbol,
only externally modified when taking the form of public largesses
and the glorification of the city. Thus the profits of trade were quite
directly consumed, keeping the social balance largely undisturbed
and mainly local as in feudal times, whereas in the north, profits
were put back into increased trade, furnishing a social dynamic that
could not be confined within a localistic framework.
Thus, we find that in southern Europe the new wealth did little
to disturb the old social and political relations. In the north the
matter was different. There the new merchant-capitalists fought the
older nobility and, particularly in Holland and England, won out.
In the fifteenth century in England the Wars of the Roses saw the
older nobility largely liquidated. An important instrument in this

process was the national monarchy. As contrasted with the feudal
system of military fealty and customary service, new methods of
warfare, such as the hiring of soldiers, the use of expensive cannon
and other equipment not furnished by the soldiers themselves, in-
volved the increasing expenditure of money. This required a new
source of revenue, one which would yield money. Taxes were levied.
These in the main were borne by the merchant-capitalists, who were
willing to support a monarch who would sweep aside feudal obstruc-
tions to trade and grant them special commercial privileges.
The Protestant reformation of the sixteenth century was con-
nected with the shift of the commercial revolution to the north and
with the rise of the nation-state. This is indicated by the fact that
it was essentially a north-European movement, a fact hardly com-
pletely accounted for by the location of the center of the Roman
Church in the south and thus by its great effectiveness, through the
Inquisition and by other methods, in stamping out disaffection in
nearby areas. Indeed the affiliation of the Protestant revolt with
the new nation-state is clear in its own right and, so far as I know,
hardly a point of debate. In England the break with Roman Catho-
licism was originally just a political act. Henry VIII simply rejected
the ecclesiastical power of Rome and set himself up as titular head
of the English branch of the churchâthus incidentally also legitimiz-
ing his marital vicissitudes and his acquisition of church property.
Doctrinal and ritualistic questions did not enter. That is, in this
instance the revolt from Rome was a case of direct self-assertion on
the part of a national monarch, and the church that resulted was
clearly a state-church, not only headed by the monarch but sup-
ported by state taxes.
The connection of the other Protestant churches with the nation-
state is not so direct, yet it can quite readily be made out. The
great reformers had to appeal to secular governments or be crushed:
Luther to the Elector of Saxony, Zwingli to the independent city of
Zurich, Calvin to Swiss Geneva. It is true that these were local gov-
ernments, but it was not long before the northern monarchs, with
some exceptions (notably, France, though it had its "Gallican liber-
ties") saw the value in their struggle with feudalism and its great
ally, the Roman Church, of giving protection to these new churches.
The spirit of nationalism was favored in the Protestant churches
not merely by their opposition to a "universal" church in point of
ecclesiastical power and organization, but also by the facts that they
conducted their services in the national language, translated the
Bible into it, and identified themselves with national customs in
other ways.
This whole association has been the subject of further emphasis
(and possibly exaggeration) in the theory of the German economist
and sociologist, Max Weber, presented in The Protestant Ethic (the
same general emphasis but in a more judicious expression can be
found in R. H. Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism). This
theory calls attention to a shift in the ethical point of view in Prot-
estantism. On the Catholic view, the highest life for man was
reserved for the few, who were given a special, divine calling to the
priesthood or holy orders. But to Luther and Calvin every man's
callingâbe it that of shoemaker, housewife or whatnotâwas divine.
Thus, one's special religious duty was to do his job well, to be indus-
trious. On the other hand, these men, especially Calvin, condemned
sense-gratification. The result of applying these two moral maxims
was that not all of the fruits of a good man's labor could be con-
sumed by him. He could not, of course, justifiably exchange them
for luxuries, so his sole outlet was to put his surplus back into his
business (or into someone's business) as capital. To this should be
added a certain effect of the Calvinistic doctrine of election. Strictly,
of course, that doctrine did not permit knowledge during this life
of election nor did it portray election as a reward that could be
earned by any display of virtues. But there was a tendency to treat
success in commerce as an indication of God's good grace bestowed
upon hard work, thrift and abstemiousness. Thus, in a sense, the
prosperous capitalist in Calvinist countries came to occupy a place
held by the saint and the monastic in Catholic societies.
As already hinted, I would not wish to push this account too far.
A counterrelation probably was also operative. The need, in any
mercantilist program, for thrift and severe restriction in luxury
consumption no doubt itself had significant effect upon northern
(and so predominantly Protestant) minds in making them receptive
of an ethic of frugality. The likelihood is, then, that economic
prudence and religious ethics were reciprocally influential. In any
case, the fact must be admitted that on the whole the merchant-
capitalist class were Protestants, not Roman Catholics.
In our brief survey of factors favoring mercantilistic ideas we
come finally to certain significant changes in manufacturing. This
coincides with an actual increase in the amount of it in mercantilist

countries. But there seems to be a deeper affiliation than this, one
involving a change in the nature of fabricative processes. While they
were still "manufacturing" in the etymological sense, that is, making
by hand, they were no longer geared to meet just local consumer
needs. They were undertaking to produce profit from sale in distant
markets. The medieval, craft-guild system was breaking down in
the face of inroads by a practice known as "the domestic system."
Consider the making of cloth. We find here a new party involved,
the "merchant draper." He was not a master workman, overseeing
and training apprentices. He was an "entrepreneur," an undertaker
of a business, without any of the craft skills of his own. He bought
the raw material (wool), and hired skilled laborers to spin and
weave it in their homes. The finished product was, of course, his
property which he sold on the market, his own inducement and re-
ward being the profit he made (that is, the selling price minus the
costs). This, of course, destroyed the monopolies in production
possessed by the craft guilds and introduced competitionâcompeti-
tion between various entrepreneurs for the market and between
skilled laborers for jobs. It undercut the idea of a just price, for the
purpose of manufacturing was not to produce goods for direct, local
consumption, exchanging them in ratios that would maintain the
class structure and the standards of living associated with it, but to
end up with more money than one had put into the transaction.
Naturally, we are not to suppose that these new procedures im-
mediately gave rise to free markets. Monopolistic practices were still
present, but in new hands and connected with wider markets.
Merchants themselves organized trade associations setting up restric-
tions and privileges as to markets. They used the national monarch
not only to help overthrow the older, feudal restrictions of church,
manor, and craft guild, but also to gain special advantages for them-
selves: through charters and royal orders, as against rival merchants
of the same nationality, and through tariffs on competitive imports,
subsidies on exports, prohibitions on taking money out of the coun-
try and so on, as against foreign competitors.
As this brief and superficial account indicates, mercantilistic ideas
and practices were so closely intertwined as to be well-nigh indis-
tinguishable. In this respect, the next great advance in economic
theory was to follow suit. Although the basic policies advocated by
the physiocrats and the classical schoolâsuch as governmental lais-
sez faire and free marketsâwere in almost exact opposition to those

of the mercantilists, still they were directly and intimately related
to current, actual economic developments. This made the matura-
tion of a science of economics difficult. On the one hand, it ob-
structed the separation of factual issues from questions of value, since
it kept economic thinkers to a large extent in the role of advocates.
On the other hand, it hampered the freeing of factual thinking from
confinement to some special type of economic order so that strictly
universal laws could be formulated. Something like Newton's union
of terrestrial and celestial dynamics, that is, a union of laws holding
for monopolistic and competitive systems, was required before eco-
nomics could become a science in the modern sense. For this we
must wait until the twentieth century.

CHAPTER 3
The Scientific Revolution and
the Age of Reason
The Revolution in Physics in the Seventeenth Century
A profound revolution in men's thought about the world occurred
in the seventeenth century. To appreciate it historically we must
not take it for granted as simply an overdue discarding of the blind-
ers of medieval superstition, a coming to see facts as they are. It
required the adoption of a peculiar attitude and the use of a strange
type of concept. It broke boldly with the modes and objectives of
commonsensical thinking. That it ever succeeded should be the
source of amazement. So we ask two questions concerning it: What
inherently was the character of its success, that is, wherein was the
new science better than the Aristotelianism it replaced; and what
social conditions favored it; who supported it, particularly in its
infancy; how did it ever come to be?
I shall start with the second question, with what the sociologists
would call its "existential basis." As the first part of my answer, I
would put the accident of the appearance of a geniusâGalileo Gali-
lei. That the new science had to be formulated and practiced before
it could be of any social consequence whatever is a remark which, if
not too profound, is perhaps at least true. This required the right
man in the situation.
It has been recently argued that Galileo was not as original as has
long been thought. The contention that he was anticipated in the
actual formulation of the laws of dynamics will be noted shortly.
Here I wish to say a word in opposition to the claim that the tradi-
tion making him the founder of modern scientific methods has over-
estimated his contribution. It has been pointed out that there had
occurred at the University of Padua, shortly before Galileo's arrival,
a long and heated debate as to the character of scientific method.
This discussion had been carried on in Aristotelian terms and was

[3] Scientific Revolution and the Age of Reason 91
not unconnected with the advance of medical studies at Padua and
the important place in them of observational procedures. Zabarella
summed up this development, stressing the double method of argu-
ing from causes to effects and from effects to causes.
This debate may well have had a stimulating effect in making
Galileo self-conscious as to problems of method. But I cannot see
that it anticipated in any marked degree his unique positive achieve-
ment. The method advocated by Zabarella did not involve mathe-
matical (or specifically geometrical) reasoning at all. And its use of
observation was essentially Aristotelian; it did move beyond the
simple sort of direct generalization from everyday experiences char-
acteristic of Aristotle's inductive procedure to an analysis of com-
plex phenomena and a complementary deduction of observable
consequences of such speculatively suggested causal factors or com-
ponents; it was dedicated to the principle that to conquer one must
divide; it did introduce a step that may be called "formation of a
causal hypothesis"; but it continued to operate with qualitative
concepts quite directly related to ordinary experiences and what
could be quite directly observed; it was not the experimentalism
Galileo so ingeniously combined with geometry. Â«No, it lacked the
genius of Galileo, who united a conviction of the mathematical
perfection of nature, which he shared with the neo-Pythagoreans of
the Renaissance, with the experimental attitude of the craftsmen-
engineers of that period.
Galileo was by inclination and training a mathematician. At the
age of twenty-five, he was appointed lecturer in that subject in the
university of his native Pisa. Three years later he was made lecturer
in mathematics at the University of Padua. The influence of the
neo-Pythagorean movement is seen in his early and consistent ad-
vocacy of the Copernican system, as revealed, for example, in his
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Systems of the World, the Pto-
lemaic and the Copernican. Moreover his Dialogues on Two New
Sciences, which may be said to have formulated the new scientific
method for the first time, was filled with geometrical expositions
and demonstrations. It showed a profound faith in the geometrical
character of nature's processes, but was singularly free from neo-
Pythagorean extravagances. Galileo had the advantage over Coperni-
cus that by his time the complete works of Archimedes had found
adequate Latin translation.
But Galileo was also an experimentalist. He was greatly interested

in the problems of the engineers and the instrument makers of his
time. In his Dialogues on Two New Sciences he tells of his frequent
visits to the Venetian Arsenal and to the shipbuilders' yards, and he
gives many examples of his solutions of their problems. He suggests
geometrical methods for dealing with the questions of the strength
of beams and the trajectory of projectiles. Moreover, his contribu-
tions were not merely theoretical. He devised and used a much more
precise method of determining relative times by means of a sort
of water stopwatch, the ratio of times being ascertained by the ratios
of weights of water passing through a small orifice. Having heard of
the invention of a telescope by a Dutch spectacle-maker but without
knowledge of its design, he made a successful one himself, perfecting
it until he had a model that would magnify some one-thousand times,
proving not merely his inventiveness, but also his ability to apply
his geometrical abilities to practical matters. He was himself fired by
the thought that his discovery, by its use, of Jupiter's moons might
be a means of determining longitudeâa serious practical problem
for navigators of his age, as we have seen.
It was no doubt to be expected that two such pronounced tend-
encies as the mathematicism and the experimentalism of the Renais-
sance should come to be joined in the thought of one man. It was
perhaps equally unsurprising that their union should occur in the
area of investigations of terrestrial phenomenaâyou can worship
the heavens and the geometrical perfections of their motions, you
can even be interested in improving your methods of observing
celestial phenomena, but it is a little presumptuous to try to experi-
ment upon them. What does call for astonishment is Galileo's suc-
cess in integrating these emphases in his actual procedures (as con-
trasted with simply urging that both be used, as Roger Bacon, for
example, had done, or praising the one while actually exemplifying
only the other, as is illustrated by the case of Leonardo da Vinci). It
was in this that his genius lay.
Granted, then, that the right man, the man who could make this
integration, appeared in the situation. It may be presumed that
others would quickly take up and extend his method. There re-
mains, however, an "existential" question: How did the practitioners
of this new scientific method come to be recognized? What social
forces and institutions backed them up, financially and politically?
Without such support the new attitudes and procedures would have
withered at the roots.

It is clear why the new science was not backed by the church. The
church lacked the necessary freedom of thought. One of its chief
bases of power lay in its monopoly of ideas through its control of
the intellectual class. The new science involved a violation of this
sway. The Copernican revolution overthrew the commonsensical
Aristotelian system the church had sanctioned. The experimental
attitude was by itself innocuous, whether pursued for practical pur-
poses or just out of idle curiosity, but, when united with mathe-
maticism to develop a whole new approach to nature, it too was
dangerous. Indeed this union was to prove a greater threat than
the Copernican revolution by itself, although the church apparently
did not immediately sense it, since it raised no objections to Two
New Sciences, whereas it was greatly disturbed by Two Chief Sys-
tems of the World. The conflict here is dramatically brought to a
head in Galileo's own relations with the Holy Office. The recanta-
tion Galileo had to make in 1633 shows how basically opposed the
church was not merely to the Copernican system but to any au-
thority outside itself on any fundamental issues concerning the
world: "I bend my knee before the honourable Inquisitor-General,
I touch the holy Gospel and give assurance that I believe, and always
will believe, what the Church recognizes and teaches as true. I had
been ordered by the Holy Inquisition not to believe nor to teach
the false theory of the motion of the Earth and the stationariness of
the Sun because it is contrary to Holy Scripture. Nevertheless I
wrote and published a book in which I expound this theory and
advance strong grounds in its favour. I have consequently been
pronounced to be suspect of heresy. Now, in order to remove every
Catholic Christian's just suspicion of me, I abjure and curse the
stated errors and heresies, and every other error and every opinion
that is contrary to the teaching of the church. . . ."
It might be supposed that the matter was different as regards the
Protestant churches, that they stood for freedom of thought and
investigation, and so must have been spiritual allies of the new
science. Eventually, the Reformation did have the effect of increas-
ing men's toleration, but only after terrible religious conflicts such
as the Thirty Years' War that devastated central Europe in the early
seventeenth century. Moreover, the freedom of thought finally at-
tained was quite unintended by the Reformers. It was due to no
desire to foster new ideas, but to the loss of unified control over old
beliefs; the conflict of authorities presented the individual with in-

creasing opportunity and need to make his own choices in doctrinal
matters. This came to the aid of the new science only after the
latter had already made its own way in society. At first, the Prot-
estants were just as vehement in their demands of orthodoxy as the
Catholics. Among the Protestants themselves, Luther condemned
the Copernican system in no uncertain terms, as did also Calvin
and many Anglicans.
No, it was not the church, in either of its branches, that was the
institutional force to which we owe thanks for the protection and
promotion of the interests of the new science during the critical
period of its establishment. We must look in another direction if
we are to find this forceânamely, toward the new monarchical in-
stitution, the nation-state, and behind it the merchant-capitalist.
We have already seen that the experimentalism of the new science
was very closely connected with the progress of the commercial
revolution. This affiliation remained as the young science developed:
it continued to adopt and in turn to perfect and invent instruments
and processes of value to commerce, navigation and warfare, and
some of the knowledge of nature's laws that it acquired was usable
in these practical enterprises. But the relation between science and
the nation-state is not so tenuous as this vague remark suggests. A
specific institution arose in the seventeenth century to protect and
encourage the new type of scientific investigation, to give to those
pursuing it financial aid and social prestige, and to furnish a center
for exchange of ideas and communication of results. This was the
scientific society. Although founded by scientists themselves, it was
backed in many cases by the secular government, by the state, and
in most instances directly by the king himself.
In Italy, where the church was strongest and the force of national-
ism weakest, the scientific society had its shortest life. Two of the
Medicis, Grand Duke Ferdinand II of Tuscany and his brother,
Prince Leopold, both of whom had studied under Galileo, started a
laboratory and acted as its patrons. Here various scientists met for
experimentation and discussion. In 1657, under the leadership of
two of Galileo's most distinguished students, Viviani and Torricelli,
it became a formal institution bearing the name of Accademia del
Cimento (Academy of Experiments). It was, unfortunately, dis-
continued just ten years later, at the very time, in fact, when Prince
Leopold was created a Cardinal. Malicious rumor had it that its

discontinuance was the price the Pope demanded for the Cardinal-
ship.
The French scientific society, the Acaddmie des Sciences, was of
more lasting significance. It originated in meetings of a group of
menâmathematicians, physicists, and philosophers including such
outstanding people as Descartes, Pascal, Gassendi, Fermat, Mersenne
âwho gathered to discuss the new science and some of its larger
implications. Colbert, comptroller-general of finances under Louis
XIV and advocate of French expansion in commerce and manufac-
turing, saw the advantages of giving these informal meetings official
recognition, as had already been done in the case of the Royal So-
ciety in England. It was upon his proposal that the King granted the
Academic a charter in 1666, and indeed went a step further than
Charles II in relation to the English Society by furnishing financial
aid for its researches and pensions to its members. Its work was not
confined to pure science (mathematics, physics, and biology), but
extended into the region of practical engineering: it published its
designs for various mechanical devices in an illustrated catalogue; it
studied ways of improving machines in industrial use. Its greater
support by the government was probably not unconnected with its
less individualistic more cooperative methods of experimentation
than its English counterpart, and this, in turn, was not without rela-
tion to the practical emphasis found in its publications. In fact, the
King expressly directed its members to occupy themselves mainly
with descriptions of new tools and instruments. Much of the credit
for facilities and encouragement to Huygens leading to the publica-
tion of his Horologium under its auspices is to be given to the
Acade-mie; and it should be pointed out that this work, although de-
scriptive of an instrument (the pendulum clock), contained much
of purely theoretical interest in dynamics.
Probably the most important of these scientific institutions was
the Royal Society of London for Promoting Natural Knowledge. It
originated in the meetings at Gresham College, London, of a group
of adherents of the inductive philosophy of Francis Bacon, for the
most part physicians and divines. It soon changed its character,
however, as scientists and experimentalists became members. In
1662 it was granted a charter by Charles II. Under the leadership
of the physicist and astronomer, Robert Hooke, it adopted an in-
creasingly experimental emphasis. Its interests in natural phenomena

were almost universal. In biology, it carried on dissections and ex-
periments on animals. It early opened a repository of zoological,
botanical and geological specimens, many of which were acquired
from explorers, whose reports on distant and unknown lands it
collected. It was interested in industrial processes and inventions,
having a special committee on Histories of Trades. Of most lasting
significance, however, were the contributions of many of its members
to pure science, of such men as Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Isaac
Newton. Indeed, if it had done nothing else than publish Newton's
Principia, it could justly claim historical fame. It is, I believe, almost
impossible to overestimate the importance, as a social and institu-
tional factor, of the Royal Society in promoting the new scientific
attitude in England. It gave opportunity for the exchange of ideas
and findings; it stimulated specific investigations and reports for
presentation at its meetings; in its Transactions it made available to
the learned world the theories and findings of its members; it lent
prestige and even financial support (although this came only some
time after its founding) to individual scientists.
In order to appreciate more fully the vital character of the support
to the young science given by the national scientific societies in the
seventeenth century, we ought to ask ourselves why it was that the
universities did not, by and large, furnish this necessary impetus and
protection. The answer, of course, is that the university was a medi-
eval institution which even in the seventeenth century was still
largely dominated by the church. The remarkable thing, I would
suppose, is not that it was not the ally and patron of the new science
in the seventeenth century but rather that it ever took on that role.
It was precisely in the universities, particularly those of Oxford and
Paris, that Aristotelianism found its continuing stronghold. Even
in Italy, where, as we have seen, neo-Pythagoreanism flourished and
mathematicism ripened, the general outlook of Aristotle in science
remained dominant, particularly at Padua.
More specifically, the new experimentalism, forming so vital a
component of modern science, found no sympathetic atmosphere in
the university tradition. We have seen that that tradition was cul-
turally conservative, was concerned with preserving the learning of
the past and thus was essentially "bookish." The invention of
printing with the consequent reduction in the cost of publication
was eventually to overcome, at least to some degree, the reverence in

which the written word was held, but this result was still mainly
future (as indeed is true even in our day of pocket editions). The
university professor was the lecturer, that is the reader of books and
the commentator upon them. The engineer-inventors, the new
craftsmen, the experimentalists were quite outside the university
circle. They found their patronage in the owners of workshops,
shipyards and merchant fleets, or in secular governments allied with
these interests.
As against the universities, then, it was no mere accident that the
scientific societies of the seventeenth century fostered practical in-
ventiveness, studied aids to navigation, published reports of improve-
ments in manufacturing processes. And this was not just a quid pro
quo to their patrons, a paying of their way, so to speak. It was in a
sense integral to the new approach. They realized that knowledge
(of the new scientific sort) was power. They sought a mastery over
nature that had never been envisaged by medieval science. I, of
course, insist that this is not all: modern science is avid for laws
even where these promise no practical application, and if its father
was experimental manipulation of nature its mother was reverential
acceptance of nature's perfections. Yet from the first the truth was
apparently sensed that a knowledge of the invariable and precisely
formulable regularities of nature could be put to use in a way in
which an appreciation of nature's inherent goals could not.
It is just here, that is, in the insistence that the new kind of
knowledge is power, that we find whatever bit of insight was con-
tributed by Francis Bacon. This greatly overrated individual is
frequently portrayed as at least the true godfather, if not the actual
progenitor, of the new science. This, I think, is essentially wrong,
and its modicum of half-truth lies in a contribution often ignored
or only acknowledged with embarrassment by the Baconian en-
thusiast. It is, I think, precisely in his popular and utopian New
Atlantis that we find Bacon's firmest grasp of the character of the
new type of knowledge. Here he shows us how science offers power
through practical inventions arising out of extensive experimentation.
He sees that this sort of result can be attained and made humanly
useful only if there is a social institution specifically devoted to the
support and growth of the scientific enterprise. Indeed, despite his
somewhat exaggerated portrayal of it, in what he calls "Salomon's
House," Bacon correctly realized that this kind of development re-

quired a special scientific society wholeheartedly backed by the state
and by public opinion generally. This reveals, it seems to me, con-
siderable insight into the historical situation.
Granting all this, we must not make the mistake of supposing that
Bacon's vision ever penetrated to the core of the new science and
its method. His serious contribution here was dubbed by him a
"New Organon." It was to form the methodological foundation of
a projected Great Instauration of the sciences. What he had in mind
by this designation was a replacement of the Aristotelian logical tool
(Aristotle's logical writings had come to be known as his "Organon")
by a new one. Bacon correctly sensed that the new science was
destined to overthrow the whole Aristotelian approach. But he
thought this meant the replacement of a deductive by an inductive
method, which shows that he had failed to apprehend the character
both of Aristotelian science and of its modern successor. The new
science, on Bacon's account, was to proceed more patiently and sys-
tematically than the old. It was to build its generalizations more
painstakingly on observed data, tabulating them extensively, gen-
eralizing from them stepwise. What were the data foundational in
this procedure? Quite unmistakably those of commonsensical ob-
servations. He did not realize that Galileo had already overturned
this basis, that the new science, so far as it was grounded on observa-
tion, demanded data of a peculiar sort, not obtainable under ordi-
nary, everyday conditions, but requiring an experimental design to
make them fit the blanks in a mathematically "functional" kind of
concept, so that, no matter how long and painstaking the care in
accumulating them, they could never be transformed into scientific
generalizations of the new type unless they were of the right sort to
begin with. Moreover, if they were of the right kind, such accumu-
lation and tabulation were, on the whole, quite unnecessary, in fact,
were rather encumbrances than aids in the process of generalization.
Once we see this defect in Bacon's serious account of the new
method we get fresh light on the experimentalism of his popular
exposition. The New Atlantis pictured a group of scientists simply
trying out new things and generalizing their results. It did not have
a place for the mathematical form of the laws the new science
sought. Thus, Bacon did not see that experimentation must some-
how fit the mathematical concepts used and must be designed to
this end or it would be of no significance in the new methodology.
Mere manipulation of nature, the mere trying of new things, was

not sufficient. Bacon was bright and clever, but he did not have the
genius necessary to unite experimentalism with mathematicism in a
fashion requisite to the birth of the new kind of science. That
genius, we have said, is found in Galileo. Just what it fashioned it is
now our task to investigate.
We thus come to a consideration of our first type of question:
What was the nature of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth
century; why, as science, was the new approach successful in over-
throwing the reigning Aristotelianism? In attempting to answer
this question by reference to the work of Galileo, we shall use as
material for our analysis his contribution to three great laws of
dynamicsâthose of inertia, of gravity and of their combination (the
parallelogram principle).
As regards inertia, it has been said that what Galileo did was
simply to change Aristotle's identification of the natural condition
of thingsâthe condition in which they were as they should be, in
which, that is, they had achieved their inherent purposeâfrom one
of rest in the given body's proper location in the universe to one of
constant rectilinear motion with whatever velocity the body had
already, by whatever circumstance, acquired. On this interpretation
it is, indeed, easy to make out that Galileo's innovation was small.
This view would not only place him within the general framework
of Aristotelian physics, with its concepts of "natural" and "violent"
motions and the merging of factual with value considerations which
these concepts presuppose, but it would deny him originality even
within this framework, since by his time there had become current
just the sort of revision of the Aristotelian position this interpreta-
tion would ascribe to Galileo. Indeed, there are those who claim
that Galileo's ideas on inertia were merely a form of the so-called
"physics of impetus"âan offshoot of orthodox Aristotelianism first
suggested by Philoponus in the Hellenic world, then revived and
developed in the fourteenth century at the University of Paris by
Jean Buridan and Nicholas of Oresme, and later represented at the
University of Padua, where Galileo may have gained his acquaintance
with it (he offered criticisms of it).
Members of this school were dissatisfied with Aristotle's account
of the motion of projectiles. It seemed absurd that large, heavy
bodies could, after the cessation of visible action upon them by
external forces, be continued in their motion merely by air im-
pressed behind them. Moreover, Aristotle's explanation seemed to

involve a circle, for what continued to activate the impressed air
after the original moving force was removed? Also, when one runs
and jumps one does not feel the air behind pushing, but rather that
in front obstructing. In place, then, of this concept of impressed air
these reformed Aristotelians adopted the idea of a transmitted force,
an "impetus," which the moving force imparted to the projectile and
which kept the projectile in motion after the cessation of the action
of the moving force upon it. They tried to keep this idea within the
general framework of Aristotelian physics. In one sense they suc-
ceeded: the concept of an impetus was that of a directly observable
quality. Although not visible (in which respect, incidentally, it did
not differ from Aristotle's impressed air), the impetus could be
directly experienced in muscular effort. Whenever we throw a heavy
object we have a sense of imparting something to it, something it
seems to retain, for it not only continues to move in the direction in
which we have thrown it, but overcomes considerable opposition
when it meets an obstacle to this motion. In another sense they were
not successful: the concept of impetus did not fit readily into the
division of motions into natural and violent. An impetus was an im-
parted force, not originally inherent in the projectile; in this respect
the motion it explained would seem to have to be violent. But once
imparted, it became inherent; in this regard the projectile's motion
would appear to be natural. However, whatever modification in
Aristotelian physics the concept of impetus demanded, it did not
involve as fundamental a change as that introduced by the Galilean
type of concept.
If Galileo still retained the distinction between natural and vio-
lent motion, as there is some evidence that he did, this fact is not the
historically important consideration. The significant thing is that
he "geometrized motion," as the Aristotelian did not and could not
do. The importance of this does not lie simply in the introduction
of quantitative procedures, in the use of mensuration in the observa-
tion of motions; its full consequence is found only when we note
that it brought in a new type of concept involving a different rela-
tion to direct experience. Concepts of this sort did not purport to
represent items of direct experience, things subject to observation in
their own right. Rather, they were built up mathematically from
such data; they were "functions" whose "values" could be ascer-
tained only by the observational determination of the values of their
"arguments," to use the mathematician's language.

To illustrate: To state his position as to inertial motion, Galileo
found it necessary to define "uniform motion" (that is, "constant
velocity"). His definition was: "By steady or uniform motion, I
mean one in which the distances traversed by the moving particle
during any equal intervals of time, are themselves equal." It should
be clear that the uniform motion of a body was not something itself
directly observable; rather, one observed distances traversed and
times consumed by a moving body and subsequently figured out
whether or not it was in uniform motion. From his concept of uni-
form motion thus defined together with certain "axioms" which he
thought followed from it Galileo deduced a number of "theorems";
for example, "If a moving particle, carried uniformly at a constant
speed, traverses two distances the time-intervals required are to each
other in the ratio of these distances." Thus, he was able to construct
a miniature geometry of uniform motion. His deductive procedure
was made possible by his definition of uniform motion, for his
theorems were essentially just elaborations of what was contained in
the definition; yet the whole system could be applied to observed
motions, for the elements of the definition ("equal distances,"
"equal times") could be determined by appropriate measurements.
I hope it is clear that the important matter here is not that Galileo
had a concept of uniform motion, nor even that its application to
experience involved measurement. Aristotelian physics included an
idea of uniform motion and was quite compatible with a mensura-
tional determination of its quantitative values. Suppose Aristotle to
have observed a vessel sailing along at the horizon. He could have
noted, by directly "sizing up" its speed, whether it was in uniform
motion. The value of this uniform motion Aristotle could have de-
termined in the following ingenious way. He could have had
Alexander the Great, whose tutor he was, send out an accompanying
fleet of galleys propelled by oars each moving at a different uniform
speed as determined by ordinary observation. He could then match
the sailing vessel with one of these, or find that it was intermediate
between two. However wasteful and fruitless this procedure, it
would have constituted a "measurement" of the uniform motion of
the sailing vessel. Now, being sublimely unmindful of historical
realities, let us put Galileo in the same situation. He would put out
buoys at equal distances along the sailing vessel's route. Only if it
traversed the distances so marked in equal intervals of time would
he allpw that the sailing vessel was in uniform motion.

What constituted the advantage of the Galilean over the Aris-
totelian concept? In the first place, it permitted greater precision in
the description of motions; that is, negative cases, cases where the
concept did not apply, could be more definitely and confidently as-
certained. Even in the seventeenth century one could measure dis-
tances and times much more accurately than speeds. Thus, in many
cases where the Aristotelian could only crudely guess that the speed
looked uniform, the Galilean could with assurance add that it was
not. At first glance, this might seem to have been a disadvantage.
How can we ever hope to find uniform motions in nature if we in-
sist on such precision? We answer by pointing out that Galileo, like
Copernicus and Kepler, was convinced that nature's processes were
beautifully simple and absolutely exact in their regularity. When
observations seemed to show that they were not, one was to suppose
that external factors had come in to cause deviations. These disturb-
ing factors were to be sought and eliminated wherever possible.
Another advantage of the Galilean over the Aristotelian concept
was that it permitted the formulation of uniformities in nature even
where there was no uniformity in what was directly observed.
Galileo's setting out of equally spaced buoys was really unnecessary.
By the theorem which we noted Galileo had deduced from his defi-
nition of uniform velocity, he could ascertain whether the sailing
vessel was in uniform motion by observing the times required to
cover unequal distances, as marked perhaps by objects already scat-
tered along the vessel's route. If, but only if, the ratio of the times
consumed was the same as that of the distances traversed, the vessel
was in uniform motion. The uniformity was to be found in a
mathematically defined relation of the observed elements, not in the
observed data themselves. This opened a vast area of possible uni-
formities in nature that could be formulated in Galilean but not in
Aristotelian concepts, namely, all those for which the uniformity
was one of relations between observable elements and was not
matched by a uniformity of anything directly observable. To antici-
pate, modern physics was to be strikingly successful in exploiting this
area by means of such essentially non-Aristotelian concepts as those
of invariant acceleration, force, energy, work and action.
Galileo's formulation of the law of inertial motion was really
incidental to his investigation of gravitationally accelerated motion.
It is, however, quite clear that he held that any body which was in
motion in a plane perpendicular to the force of gravity would con-

tinue uniformly in that motion were it not for outside impediments,
chief of which was friction. But it could not be denied that for
ordinary observation this was not the case; on such a basis Aristotle
was correct: a body moving in such a plane naturally slows down and
stops. Here the two systems conflict, and it is precisely here that
Galileo turns from ordinary experience to experiment. He took
highly polished brass balls and rolled them on very smooth, flat
planes, lined with parchment to eliminate friction as much as possi-
In I.E. ffl. o = b whatever the value of c
Therefore in EZ, where b--O. c becomes indefinitely large
Fig. 18. Galileo's Experiment: Inertial Motion
ble. To test his assumption as to inertial motion directly, he would
have had to place these planes perpendicular to the earth's gravity
and make them unpractically long. This he did not attempt; rather,
he did something very different and quite revealing. He rolled the
balls down one plane and up another. He found that, whatever the
angles of inclination of these planes, the balls very nearly attained
the heights from which they started. He then assumed that if they
were to roll on a horizontal plane, they would continue indefinitely

with practically undiminishing velocity. He argued that the slowing
down of the balls as they went up the second inclined plane was not
due at all to the horizontal distance they traversed but wholly to the
vertical, that is, to their overcoming of gravity, as evidenced by the
fact that they nearly attained their original height no matter how far
they had to travel horizontally. (See Fig. 18.)
The experimental test which Galileo here introduced is significant
in a number of respects. Most important, perhaps, is the way in
which he integrated his manipulation of natural events with the
geometrical system it was used to verify; Galileo was a geometrical
experimentalist. A complementary feature is of scarcely less signifi-
cance. The verificatory value of his results obtained only if they
were modified from what he actually observed to what one is to as-
sume he would have observed under ideal conditions. The rolling
balls never did mount up to the height from which they started;
Galileo never did use a second plane that was in a horizontal position
nor did he even closely approximate this. He was, of course, aware
that his data were "ideal," but this seems not to have worried him:
since nature is geometrically perfect throughout, we should con-
sider it a verification of our principles if they hold with sufficient
approximation under more complicated conditions than those ab-
stractly formulated in our geometry.
Galileo's investigation of gravitational motion illustrates, perhaps,
even more strikingly the characteristic features of his method. Once
again he started with a definition: a body is uniformly accelerated
"when, starting from rest, its momentum receives equal increments
in equal times," by which Galileo meant that its speed was equally
increased in every equal period of time. It is to be noted that this
concept was even less directly connected with what can be observed
in its own right than was that of uniform motion. It was constructed
from observable elements (distances traversed and times consumed)
as a relation of a relation (as a "function" one of whose "arguments"
is itself a function) of them, for what Galileo called "momentum"
and we have interpreted as meaning speed or velocity was really for
him a ratio, namely, the ratio of the distance traversed to the time
consumed, so that uniform acceleration was a uniform ratio of a
ratio of observable elements. Here again Galileo boldly broke with
the Aristotelian tradition.
After defining uniform acceleration, Galileo geometrically de-
duced certain consequences (actually assuming some of Euclid as

well). One of these was: "The spaces described by a body falling
from rest with a uniformly accelerated motion are to each other as
the squares of the time-intervals employed in traversing these dis-
tances." This may be put in the algebraic formulation familiar to
us: "s = i/Â£gf2-" But it is to be noted that at this stage Galileo simply
had a mathematical consequence of a def1nition of "uniform acceler-
ation," that is, a theorem in a miniature geometry.
His next step was to apply this little system to matter of fact. This
he did by assuming that freely falling bodies (bodies in gravitational
motion) are uniformly accelerated. Such an assumption needed to
be checked by observation of fact. Here again he made use of his
unique kind of experimentation. Whether a freely falling body was
uniformly accelerated (in Galileo's sense) could not be directly ob-
served. It could not even be determined by observing the body's
motion in equal intervals of time so as to determine whether its
velocity gained equal increments therein, for an increment of vel-
ocity was not something on the Galilean account open to direct ob-
servation. His system was built on two observable quantities: Times
consumed and spaces traversed by moving bodies. Now by def1ni-
tion, as we have seen in the theorem noted above, distances traversed
by a body in uniformly accelerated motion must be proportional to
the squares of the times involved. To determine whether this rela-
tion actually obtained in the case of freely falling bodies required an
experiment and an apparatus especially designed for the purpose.
However, all Galileo's ingenuity as an instrument-maker did not
allow him to measure the distances and times in the motions of
freely falling bodies with sufficient accuracy to put his applied
geometry to the test. So he made the additional assumption, in con-
nection with which he had, as we have seen, attempted to establish
his inertial law, that the speeds of balls rolling down inclined planes
was due to the vertical factor entirely, and not at all to the hori-
zontal. On this assumption, Galileo argued that the ratios of veloci-
ties of a ball rolling down an inclined plane must be the same as the
ratios of the velocities of that ball if freely falling. If that be the
case, then the ratios of the distances traversed must likewise be the
same in the two cases.
By using a sort of stop watch of his own invention, he found that,
whatever the inclination of the plane, a ball, starting from rest,
would roll one fourth the distance in one half the time; one ninth
the distance in one third the time: that is, that the distances tra-
versed were proportional to the squares of the times consumed.
Thus, to put it somewhat paradoxically, he tested his law of freely
falling bodies by experimenting with something else. Again, he was
not too disturbed by this discrepancy, for he worked under the sway
of the conviction that nature is geometrically perfect throughout.
As has been indicated, many of the problems which the new
physics attempted to solve arose in the first instance in the field of
practical engineering. Galileo's work offers many illustrations. Prob-
ably the most important example is his attempt to determine the
path of a projectile, such as a cannon ball, shot out horizontally.
Little did he realize that his solution of this problem of the military
engineer was to furnish the keystone in Newton's gravitational struc-
ture which was to combine celestial and terrestrial motions in one
system of mechanical laws. His central idea here was that which has
since come to be known as "the principle of the parallelogram of
forces," although he used it to deal with the combination of mo-
tions. He had been anticipated in its use by the Dutch mathema-
tician, Simon Stevinus, although the latter had applied it to prob-
lems in statics (specifically, to the analysis of weights in equilibrium
acting through pulleys by means of attached strings), and, which is
more to the present point, Galileo apparently developed it quite
independently. Indeed, we have already encountered its tacit as-
sumption in Galileo's analysis of the motion of a ball rolling on an
inclined plane into two, independent factors: the horizontal or in-
ertial and the vertical or gravitational.
A cannon ball shot out horizontally, said Galileo, may be assumed
to combine two motions: its original inertial motion and the motion
of a freely falling body. These, he supposed, would combine inde-
pendently of each other; that is, the cannon ball would conform to
two laws at once. (See Fig. 19.)
Although Galileo was not quite so explicit in this instance, I
think that we may here again say that he began with a definitionâ
in this case, a definition of the combination of motions perpendicu-
lar to each other. He then developed certain consequences (for a
body in uniform motion in one direction and in uniform accelera-
tion in a perpendicular direction, the definition would require the
body to move in a path the mathematicians call a "parabola," as
shown in Fig. 19). We have once more a miniature geometry: it was
necessary to apply it to fact. This Galileo did by assuming that the
cannon ball actually did combine motions in the sense required.

tage the new physics had over the old. We may say, if we wish, that
the former was far more precise, or again, that it introduced a tre-
mendous simplification. Both statements would be quite correct, but
they might mislead and they certainly need supplementation to give
a proper historical picture. Consider the latter first.
The new physics did not simplify dynamics in the sense of present-
ing an account of motions that was more easily understood: the
Aristotelian system was formulated in far more familiar terms much
more directly connected with observable matters of fact. The
simplification introduced was in the form of a recondite, highly in-
tellectual economy: more uniformities could be found. This should
not be read as implying that it introduced more laws, for one of its
outstanding characteristics was its ability to embrace a larger num-
ber of phenomena under fewer laws. The parallelogram principle
is a case in point. It was, of course, another law, to be added to the
laws of inertial and gravitational motion. So considered, its use
involved no greater economy in intellectual equipment than would
the introduction of a special parabolic law for projectiles in hori-
zontal motion. But it (combined with certain further geometrical
assumptions) could also be used to describe many other uniformities
of motion, such as that of a man walking athwartships on a moving
vessel, and of forces in equilibrium, such as those investigated by
Stevinus, where such a parabolic law could not.
However, this reference to an "economy in intellectual equip-
ment" is itself misleading. It involves ideas coming from the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which certainly should not
be read back into the late sixteenth and early seventeenth. Galileo
was not interested in economizing men's intellectual tools, but in
laying bare nature's perfections. Although he did not indulge in
Kepler's numerological speculations, he did share that thinker's pro-
found faith in the geometrical simplicity of motions. In fact, he
carried it one step further, as he himself pointed out: he brought it
down from the heavens to the earth, from celestial to terrestrial
mechanics. The culmination of this development was to occur in
Newton's gravitational system, which made Kepler's laws of plane-
tary motions into corollaries of Galileo's laws of terrestrial ones. It
eventually permitted the sloughing off of value assumptions as to
nature's processes and so allowed the emergence of the idea that
simplicity was a value only to man, as an economy in his efforts to
predict and control events. But this outcome was not imminent.
It was to be mediated by the idea that nature was a vast machine, a
set of undeviating motions which, whether started by a world me-
chanic or not, were themselves purposeless. This concept, in turn,
could only arise after the kind of thing accomplished by Galileo and
Newton: the attainment of the idea that terrestrial motions were as
mathematically perfect as celestial; that circular or elliptical motions
were no more divine than rectilinear; that nature was throughout on
a level, all her motions being of equal perfection, since all con-
formed to the same few laws.
A comparable supplementation must be given to our other state-
ment as to the advantage of the new physics over the old. We now
think of greater precision in the description of natural events as
valuable in permitting more reliable prediction of occurrences and
thus greater success in the application of our science to the satisfac-
tion of human wants; it may be that there is some aesthetic enjoy-
ment thrown in or perhaps a bit of pride in good workmanship.
But this kind of attitude originated much later: when the new
physics first arose, increased precision was thought valuable because
it brought one closer to the mathematical exactitude of nature her-
self. Galileo could appreciate Kepler's concern to eliminate a dis-
crepancy of eight minutes of arc because he shared in its motivation.
According to a popular conception, Sir Isaac Newton was im-
portant in the history of modern thought for having successfully
constructed a purely mechanical world system, for having elimi-
nated the idea that there is a special region, namely the celestial,
whose motions cannot be explained mechanically but call for a
special, divine dispensation. That there is a modicum of truth in
this view may be admitted; it should, however, be pointed out that
the picture of the world as a machine was really one of the popular
consequences of the success of Newtonianism rather than an inherent
aspect of it. To portray the world as a machine was to take all pur-
pose and value out of it, putting them elsewhere. This occurred in
the eighteenth and late seventeenth centuries in the theological
movement known as "Deism," which gained its strength from the
new physics and especially from the acclaim given to Newton. But
Newtonian physics itself, although not explaining particular motions
by special purposes, was still inspired by the faith, common to Co-
pernicus, Kepler and Galileo, that nature is perfect, that the world
of fact is at heart a sort of incarnate mathematical system.
Further, the popular conception just mentioned misleads in an

even more deceptive fashion. To speak of the universe as a "ma-
chine" suggests cogs working upon cogs, a sort of giant contraption
whose construction and operation are, at least in the imagination,
open to direct experience. This subtly cancels the true significance
of Newton, for it represents him as working with essentially Aris-
totelian conceptsâa mechanical contraption, although not too famil-
iar a sight in Aristotle's own time, was a common matter of everyday
observation in Newton'sârather than, as was the case, continuing
and perfecting the use of Galilean concepts. When Newton con-
ceived the moon as a body constantly falling toward the earth but
never getting there because of its own inertia, he had left the uni-
verse of spheres (even weightless, invisible spheres) turning within
spheres for a world of uniformities not themselves observed or ob-
servable but only mathematically calculable from observable data.
To attain a firm grasp of this requires that we undertake a brief
analysis of Newton's formulation and verification of the laws of
motion.
Although great mathematical progress had been made subse-
quently to the publication of Galileo's Dialogues on Two New
Sciences, Newton himself having contributed by the invention of an.
early form of the calculus of infinitesimals, Newton's method was
basically the same as Galileo's. Concepts of the functional type, in-
volving mathematical relations (or relations of relations) of observ-
able elements were introduced by definition. The laws themselves,
formulated in terms of these defined concepts, were presented as
"axioms." Consequences, called "corollaries," were logically de-
duced. Thus Newton, like Galileo, worked out a "geometry of mo-
tions," which he assumed portrayed the actual uniformities in the
world. To test this observationally required the designing of ex-
periments and instruments especially for this purpose, since observa-
tions from everyday life, no matter how numerous, were not appro-
priate. As with Galileo, Newton was not disturbed by the necessity
of assuming ideal conditions, and of "correcting" his actual results
so as to fit such conditions.
On this account, Newton was essentially a follower; it was Galileo
who was the innovator. Yet Newton did make signal contributions
to the development of the new physics. These may be characterized
by the terms "clarification" and "extension" of the new approach.
To illustrate, let us start with inertial motion. Galileo had not
explicitly stated, in generalized form, any inertial law. His treat-

ment of it, as we have seen, was incidental to his attempt to estab-
lish his law of freely falling bodies. Newton gave such an explicit
statement. Moreover, Galileo, although carefully defining his key
concept here of uniform motion, had introduced others (besides his
observationally basic ones of distance traversed and time consumed)
without definition, for example, "momentum" and "force." Newton
was able to overcome this defect by means of the concept we now
speak of as "mass," but which he called "the quantity of matter."
Let us look into this.
Newton defined quantity of matter as "the measure of the same,
arising from its density and its bulk conjunctly," or, as we would put
it today, mass is the product of density and volume. This definition
seems acceptable enough if the approach is that of everyday experi-
ence. What Newton had in mind can be illustrated by the case of
two bodies composed of the same materialâsay, iron; if the larger is
twice the size of the smaller, it may be said to contain twice the
quantity of matter; or again, there is the case of two bodies of the
same size, but one constituted of material having twice the density
of the other, in which instance we would say that the one contained
twice the quantity of matter of the other. But if we drop this ap-
proach, as we should, and attempt to analyze Newton's definition as
a definition in his system, we find ourselves in trouble.
Since "quantity of matter" is introduced by a definition, we may
suppose it does not refer to anything directly observed in its own
right (such as distance or time in Galileo's definition of uniform
motion). So we turn to the key words in the definition, namely
"density" and "bulk." The latter furnishes no difficulty; we may
suppose either that bulk can be directly observed and measured in
its own right, or that it can be defined as a function of lengths, which
are themselves thus observable. Our trouble originates with "den-
sity." Is it not to be defined as the ratio of quantity of matter to bulk,
or, as we would say, as mass divided by volume? But, if so, the whole
definition is circular and therefore useless. But perhaps we are tak-
ing Newton out of his historical context and giving his words a con-
temporary reading that was not in his mind. This leads to a brief
review of the idea of the density of matter and particularly of the
work on air just preceding the writing of Newton's Principia, a
review that may have some historical interest in itself as well as a
value in coming to an understanding of Newton.
Our removal from medieval ways of thinking can hardly be given

better illustration than in our attitude toward the saying, "Nature
abhors a vacuum"; we take this aphorism to express a superstitious,
occultist view from which science has been able to free men by turn-
ing directly to observable fact. Actually, however, it was modern
science that shifted its gaze from everyday matter of fact to some-
thing which, if not occult, was certainly not open to direct experi-
ence. The great difficulty of creating a vacuum was a matter of com-
mon knowledge: air, water or whatever was nearby would rush in
to spoil any attempt to empty any space of its contents. It was Otto
von Guericke in the seventeenth century, however, who pointed up
this difficulty experimentally. After many failures, he finally ob-
tained what appears to have been rather close to a perfect vacuum in
a copper sphere formed of two hemispheres. It took a team of six-
teen horses to separate the halves of his receptacle, and when they
succeeded, there was a violent report similar to an explosion.
It should be mentioned, however, that von Guericke himself did
not accept the Aristotelian explanation, to which he preferred the
account given by Evangelista Torricelli. On Aristotelian principles,
of course, it was simply to be admitted as a fact of immediate ex-
perience that nature abhors a vacuum. This fit the general assump-
tion that every region was the proper place of some substance, so that
if, for example, one attempted to form a vacuum under water, the
displaced water would push back toward this location, an analogous
result obtaining in the case of air. Galileo himself, in trying to ex-
plain why a suction pump could lift water a certain distance only,
still appealed to the idea that nature abhored a vacuum, although he
had no systematic place for it in his physics. It was his disciple,
Torricelli, who first challenged the Aristotelian interpretation and
put the description of the phenomena involved in the language of
the new physics.
Torricelli argued that we live at the bottom of a sea of air, and
it is the weight of this air that explains the difficulty of producing a
vacuum. But he did more than talk; he experimented, thereby de-
veloping an instrument that was really the first barometer. He took
a long, glass tube that was sealed at the bottom but open at the top,
filled it with quicksilver, then inverted it in an open bowl of quick-
silver. He observed that a vacuum was formed, without any diffi-
culty, in what was now the upper end. This result, although con-
flicting with the Aristotelian account, did not itself demand the use
of Galilean concepts, but Torricelli's explanation of it did. He said

line being about %2 of an inch). He carried one to the top of a
nearby elevation and found that its reading had dropped to 23
inches 1l/Â£ lines. A second observer meanwhile had noted that the
unmoved barometer's reading had not changed.
Like Pascal, Robert Boyle, one of the first members and most
active supporters of the Royal Society of London, accepted the
Torricellian account, but developed and tested another implication
of it. It was, of course, obvious that no column of air was actually
separated out from the atmospheric sea in which one was immersed
to balance the column of quicksilver in Torricelli's barometer. The
fiction of such a separable weight had to be replaced by the concept
of a ratio of weight to the area upon which it rested and the assump-
tion that this ratio was uniform over any surface at a given elevation,
that is, with a constant depth of air resting upon it. This led to the
idea of pressure and to the problem of the relation of the pressure
to the density of air. It had long been known that air could be
rarefied and condensed, that its density did not remain constant.
Boyle assumed that the pressure and density of air stood in the
simplest possible relation to one anotherâthat of direct proportion:
air that was twice as dense, that is, air that had been condensed so
as to occupy half the space, exerted twice the pressure.
Boyle, by assuming Torricelli's theory, was able to put his assump-
tion to an experimental test. He took a long tube, bent it in the
middle to form a "U" with two long parallel arms pointed upward,
one of which was sealed. He poured quicksilver in it, agitated it
(thereby allowing air to pass through) until the quicksilver reached
the same level in both arms. He noted this level, and assumed that
the air pressure was the same on both the open and the closed sides
of the tube. He then added quicksilver to the open arm until the
level in the closed arm had been raised halfway to the sealed end,
thus condensing the enclosed air to one half its original volume,
that is, doubling its density. He observed that the amount of quick-
silver in the open arm was now 29 inches above the original level.
Since this amount was almost exactly the barometric reading for the
elevation where he was working, this meant that he had doubled
the pressure acting upon the air in the enclosed arm, thus proving
that the density and pressure of a given quantity of air were directly
proportional (its volume and pressure, inversely proportional). Of
course, the whole "proof" rested upon the Torricellian theory, which
indicates another and very vital property of the new physics, namely
its capacity to utilize uniformities already formulated to state and
verify further ones. This gave it a dynamic character that Aris-
totelian physics lacked and that was quite appropriate to the new
social environment in which it was evolving.
This digression may perhaps help us to understand why Newton
included the concept of density in his definition of quantity of mat-
ter: he had been impressed by the fact that the same quantity of air
could be rarefied or condensed almost indefinitely, so that it could
not be identified by its bulk alone; it was constant not in its volume
but in the product of its volume and density. But why did he not
take its weight? Probably the correct answer involves his own work
in the realm of gravitational motions which had the consequence
that the weight of the same body would change as its distances from
other bodies changed. Thus, the same quantity of air (or any other
substance) was no more characterized by a constancy of weight than
by one of bulk. Yet there had to be something constant about it;
this was not merely a prejudice carried over from common sense, it
was a requirement of the very laws of motion that Newton so suc-
cessfully formulated, as we shall see in a moment. One other alterna-
tive comes to mind: Why not introduce "quantity of matter" as an
undefined term in its own right, comparable to Galileo's "distance
traversed" and "time consumed"? Here again, however, Newton's
path was blocked, for quantity of matter (as distinguished from
weight) did not seem to be directly observable, and certainly it could
not be measured directlyâits constancy appeared always as some-
thing to be assumed for any particular body to make the laws of
motion come out right. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that
there was something queer about this new concept of Newton's; this
suspicion will, indeed, find further grounds in a paradox in New-
ton's system which was eventually to lead to Einstein's radical pro-
cedure of eliminating "mass" entirely as a basic concept of
mechanics.
We have anticipated our story, however, and perhaps thereby en-
dangered our appreciation of Newton's contribution. It was a signal
achievement at the time to introduce the concept of quantity of
matter, for without it Newton could not have defined other key
terms nor stated his laws in the clear form they took. One such
term was "quantity of motion" which he defined as "the measure of
the same, arising from the velocity and quantity of matter con-
junctly" (in our terms, "momentum is the product of velocity and

mass"). Thus, for example, Newton would say that one body had
twice the quantity of motion of another if it had the same quantity
of matter but twice the velocity or the same velocity but twice the
quantity of matter. Another such term was "force" which he defined
as the quantity of change of motion. Since the quantity of matter in
a particular body was on his view constant, this was equivalent to
denning force as the quantity of change in the velocity of a body
conjunctly (as Newton would say) with the quantity of matter (in
present-day language, "force is the product of acceleration and
mass").
By using these concepts, Newton was able to give a clearer and
more comprehensive statement of Galileo's law of inertial motion.
This he did in his famous three laws or "axioms" of motion:
I. Every body perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in
a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces
impressed thereon.
II. The alteration of motion is ever proportional to the motive force
impressed; and is made in the direction of the right line in which
that force is impressed.
III. To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction; or the
mutual actions of two bodies upon each other are always equal,
and directed to contrary parts.
From these axioms he deduced certain corollaries, thus rounding
out a miniature geometry of inertial motions. The applicability
of this to actual motions required the use of the Galilean type of
experiment. This will be considered presently. First, however, I
should like to draw attention to certain features of the laws them-
selves.
The laws were stated in terms of functional concepts introduced
by definitions constructing them by means of mathematical relations
from ultimate elements which alone were capable of experiential de-
termination (by direct measurements). Perhaps a tabulation will
make the point clearer:
action = force
force = change of motion
motion (momentum) = velocity X quantity of matter
quantity of matter (mass) = density X bulk
velocity = distance -f- time

As already indicated, it is not clear whether "density" and "bulk"
should be taken as definable terms or not; in either case, my point
is clear: Newton had embarked upon that unending tendency of
modern physics to build mathematically away from foundations in
sense experience in order to state precisely as many uniformities in
as few generalized laws as possible.
The uniformities formulated in these laws were invariances in the
functions these definitions marked out, not in the observable ele-
ments (their "arguments") from which they were built. The attempt
of Aristotelian physics to find nature's laws in directly observable
regularities was completely left behind.
Newton not merely clarified Galileo's statement (by defining
terms he left undefined); he also extended its scope. Galileo had
recognized that his inertial law held only for ideal cases; under
actual conditions allowance had to be made for disturbing factors.
Presumably these factors obeyed their own laws, but Galileo did not
attempt to formulate them. In contrast, Newton's first law was
stated so as to cover deviations from pure inertial motion, and his
second law specified a uniformity in them. But the most striking
extension of Galileo's law which Newton introduced was that which
freed it from restriction to individual bodies and gave it application
to systems of bodies themselves acting upon one another, that is,
changing their inertial motions in accordance with the second law.
This was accomplished in the third law. (Incidentally, it should be
noted that Newton used "action" not in its contemporary sense but
as equivalent to "force," except, perhaps, that he was thinking of
force as the cause of that change of motion which he called "action,"
but a cause whose only determination was through its effect and one
which "remained no longer in the body" after the effect had oc-
curred.)
That Newton clearly saw this is plain from the third corollary he
derived from his third law: "The quantity of motion, which is col-
lected by taking the sum of the motions directed toward the same
parts, and the difference of those that are directed to contrary parts,
suffers no change from the action of bodies among themselves" (that
is, as we would say, "the total momentum of an isolated system is
constant"). The importance of this extension of the inertial law to
systems of interacting bodies can scarcely be overestimated: without
it Newton's transformation of Galileo's law of freely falling bodies
into a universal law of gravity would strictly have been impossible.

But it points up sharply the distance the new physics had moved
away from the old. Bodies acting upon one another could now be
treated as though they constituted a single body with its own inertial
motion; and, conversely, the interactions of such bodies could be
computed by subtracting from each of their motions the common
motion of the whole system. Quite obviously, Newton did not ac-
cept the motions directly experienced as ultimate: he analyzed them
into component motions which were themselves not observed. This
he did by the use of the parallelogram principle.
As already stated, Newton formulated his laws of motion, after
the manner of Galileo, as a miniature geometrical system, with its
definitions, axioms and corollaries. Like Galileo, he saw that if this
system were to be given factual significance it had to be put to the
test of sense observation; this required the performance of experi-
ments specifically designed for the purpose. By way of illustration
let us note one of his attempts to verify the third corollary of his
third law. He used impact as the form of action in this instance.
Strictly, he should have used bodies that were moving in straight
paths, but he found it beyond his capacity to measure the changes
in the velocities of such bodies upon striking one another, so he
adopted Galileo's expedient of measuring something else: in place
of bodies displaying rectilinear motion, he considered bodies whose
motions were in the form of arcs of a circle. He hung two balls on
strings of equal length from nails placed closely together so that the
pendula thus formed could be released in a fashion allowing them
to strike together at the end of their descents, that is, directly below
the nails supporting them. He argued that at the moment of impact
their velocities could be considered to be wholly in the horizontal
dimension and, of course, in opposite directions (on the assumption
that a sufficiently small segment of a circle could be treated as a
straight line). The changes of velocity undergone by these pendula
upon impact obviously could not be directly observed; Newton as-
sumed that their velocities were proportional to the arcs they fell
through or along which they rebounded, so that the proportional
changes in their velocities could be determined by finding the sum
of these two arcs for each pendulum. He ascertained the quantity of
matter in each pendulum by its weight. He found that his pendula
lost and imparted motions upon impact in proportions consonant
with the third corollary of his third law, that is, so that the total
[3] Scientific Revolution and the Age of Reason
119
(See
momentum of the system remained unchanged -upon impact.
Fig. 21.)
Newton's extension of the inertial law to systems of bodies had a
disquieting consequence, however. The Copernican system, as we
have noted, required the denial of the possibility of distinguishing
real from only apparent or relative motion by means of simple ob-
servation. It might be supposed that the laws of inertial motion
11
Quantity of motion
of system=O
Quantities of
matter [masses]
Quantities of
motion [momenta]
change of motion
[force] =2
Velocities before
and after impact
Quantity of motion
of system = 2 ââ¢
Change of
motion =6
Change of
motion =6
Fig. 21. Newton's Third Law
would come to one's aid, that the real motions were those obeying
these laws, the apparent ones not. But according to the corollary we
have just been discussing, Newton's system rules this out: bodies
interacted within any system quite independently of the motion of
the whole system. Incidentally, this consequence furnished a solu-
tion to one of the problems that Copernicus faced: Why were not
unattached bodies at or near the earth's surface left behind? It
could now be said that they shared in the inertia of the whole sys-
tem, that their actions and reactions were unaffected by the motion
of the whole system of which they were part. But this contribution
to the acceptability of the Copernican system must have seemed far
outweighed by the associated grounds of doubt. It should be borne
in mind that the issue between the Copernican and the Ptolemaic
systems in the seventeenth century was real and physical. Copernicus
had held that the apparent motions of the sun and the fixed stars
were not real motions, but were due to the real motion of man's
point of observation. Naturally he could not establish this observa-
tionally, nor was he impelled to do so. But Newton shared Galileo's
experimentalism; moreover, he held that all bodies, celestial as well
as terrestrial, obeyed the same mechanical laws. Now it seemed
that the laws of motion would never allow one to distinguish real
motions from apparent. Granting this, they seemed to furnish no
grounds for distinguishing real space, whose points of location, rela-
tions of distance and so on must remain eternally fixed and immova-
ble, from merely apparent space, relative to the observer and chang-
ing with his motions.
Newton, however, refused to accept this consequence. He retained
the Copernican idea of an absolute or fixed space and of the differ-
ence between absolute motion (through this absolute space) and
relative or merely apparent motion (through a space that merely
appears to be at rest for some observer). He admitted that the
phenomena of inertia did not enable one to pick out absolute mo-
tions so long as one dealt only with systems whose motion was uni-
form, but they were of service when one observed accelerated sys-
tems. Which system (one's own or that under observation) was
really accelerated could be distinguished by the need of impressing a
force upon the really accelerated system, or what amounts to the
same thing, by noting which system displayed inertial resistance to
the acceleration. Newton's famous example was the piling up of
water around the periphery of a twirling pail. Here again, however,
there was no acceleration as far as direct observation was concerned.
To make this case relevant, it was necessary to analyze the simple
circular motion of sense experience into a complex, one of whose
elements was an accelerated motion.
In Newton's analysis, circular motion was composed of two recti-
linear factors; one toward the center of the circle, the other perpen-
dicular thereto. Supposing the circular motion to be uniform (that
is, to exhibit a constant number of revolutions per unit of time), on
this analysis the radial factor would display a constant acceleration

whereas the tangential would have a uniform velocity. (See Fig.
22.) This was, of course, an extension of the type of treatment to
be found in the parallelogram principle: a motion which, to the
Inertlol motion
(constant velocity)
Accelerated motion
(requiring force toward center)
Fig. 21. Analysis of Circular Motion
senses was simple, was taken by the geometrizing intellect to be
complex.
Surely it was unquestionable that to the eye a circular motion,
such as that of Newton's twirling pail, was as simple as a straight
one; no one literally saw it as composed of a series of rectilinear
motions: a uniform tangential motion followed by an accelerated
radial one, another tangential one, and so on, like cogs on a sprocket
wheel. But the advantages of this break with commonsensical fact
were tremendous. For the moment, let us consider only the twirling
pail. The water, as it attained the rotation of the pail, piled up
around the outside edge. On Newton's analysis, this could be
treated as simply a case of inertia: the water was being left behind
in the acceleration toward the center of the rotation; there had to
be an "impressed force," in accordance with the first two laws of
motion, to overcome its inertial tendency to continue with a uni-
form velocity in a straight line. This impressed force was exerted
through the rim of the pail. Thus, this peculiar phenomenon fitted
the inertial laws as Newton had formulated them. But it did more,
according to his thinking, than this: it unmistakably revealed that
the real motion lay in the pail and its contents, not in the surround-
ing universe. Following Copernicus, it had to be admitted that one
couldn't trust ordinary observation and simply say that it could be

seen that the pail and its water rotated, not the universe, for sight
only distinguished apparent motion. Newton, however, thought
that the physical phenomenon of the water's piling up around the
edge of the pail unmistakably proved that it was the water that was
really being accelerated. Thus, he thought he had a test for real
motion and consequently an experimental basis for distinguishing
absolute space and time from their merely apparent or relative coun-
terparts.
The case of the twirling pail is striking, however, not merely in
that it was an extension of the Galilean mode of analysis, but also in
that it was an extension of it to circular motion, which had for so
long been revered as the most perfect kind. We must not interpret
this as a proof that Newton had put aside all ideas of perfection in
nature, that he had superseded value thinking and approached mo-
tions with a coldly factual attitude; rather, we should see it as a clear-
cut instance of his transcendence of that value thinking which was
tied to what was directly observable and found the perfection of na-
ture in selected departmentsâin this case in certain motions that
formed so to speak the aristocracy. There was still value thinking
here, but the perfection sought was in all motions, and in them not
as directly observable forms, but as cases of a minimal number of
calculable uniformities.
To appreciate the significance of this shift we must note how New-
ton, precisely through the sort of analysis of circular motion just
considered, was able to assimilate celestial to terrestrial mechanics
and thereby to portray the universe so as to fire the mathematical
imagination in a degree far beyond any potentialities in the Aris-
totelian picture.
The key idea in what is commonly referred to as "Newton's uni-
versal law of gravitation" was that the circular (strictly the elliptical)
motion of the planets around the sun, in accordance with the Co-
pernican theory, could be analyzed into an inertial, tangential mo-
tion and a constantly accelerated, radial motion, just as in the
instance of the twirling pail save that the radial factor was a case of
gravitational acceleration similar to that found in Galileo's freely
falling bodies. To simplify it to bare essentials, we may say that New-
ton derived Kepler's planetary laws from Galileo's inertial and gravi-
tational laws by means of an extension of the parallelogram princi-
ple. Indeed, even this extension was in essence contained in Galileo's
treatment of the motion of projectiles, which combined a uniform

Fig. 23. Motion of a High-velocity
Projectile Shot from a Mountain
inertial motion with the constantly accelerated velocity of a freely
falling body to produce a parabolic path. As a matter of fact, New-
ton himself pointed out the anal-
ogy on his account between the
planetary motions around the sun
and the motion of a projectile shot
with a sufficiently high velocity
from a mountain on the earth.
(See Fig. 23.)
I think I do the English scien-
tist no historical injustice nor ren-
der the Italian unwarranted credit
when I say that Newton's funda-
mental contribution to modern
science, as instanced in the field
of mechanics, was the clarification
and extension of the Galilean
method. Newton's success in these
respects as instanced in his universal law of gravity made him, with-
out doubt, the most influential of the new physicists, not merely in
point of the impact of the new approach upon popular thought,
but in that of its effects within the area of science itself. The revolu-
tion in men's thinking that this produced did not immediately
overthrow the mixing of value considerations with questions regard-
ing matters of fact, but it won an important, perhaps historically
necessary, preparatory phase in this battle.
Every victory, however, must be paid for; Newton's was no excep-
tion. His gravity was an odd entity indeed. Judged on common-
sensical standards it was certainly novel. On Newton's definition it
was a force, since it changed the uniform motion of bodies in right
lines, accelerating them toward one another. But how did it do this?
Not, as with the water in the twirling pail, by contact, not by fric-
tion, and not by pulling as though it were an invisible string. It
acted "at a distance" with no physical means; and it acted instan-
taneously across distances of any magnitude. Yet it was not inde-
pendent of distance, for its strength varied inversely with the square
of the distance; but this weakening with distance was not to be con-
ceived as a kind of diffusion, for that would make gravity a sort of
substance and thus something that should be observable and whose
action should take appreciable time. Moreover, although it varied

with a body's mass, the latter could be considered as concentrated at
the body's center, for the body's size, shape, contour made no differ-
ence.
Newton himself said: "Hitherto I have not been able to discover
the cause of these properties of gravity from phenomena, and I
frame no hypotheses"âa revealing remark for it shows a certain
nostalgia for the Aristotelian world picture, with its requirement
that every activity have its agent and its instrument. Newton was
not himself quite clear that his "force" was no ordinary entity, was
nothing that could itself be observed, nor were the laws it helped
formulate uniformities which could be encountered in everyday ex-
perience. He pictured a beautifully perfect nature, precisely regular
in its motions throughout; but where and what was it? Was it just
a mathematician's vision of a set of relations of relations of relations
of ... elements supposedly observable under ideal experimental
conditions? Had these relations, of which gravity was such a striking
example, no substance of their own? Did they exist only as defini-
tions and mathematical calculations? Such questions were to give
rise, especially in connection with the atomic theory of matter, to
severe controversy which, indeed, has not been terminated even yet.
The Aristotelian framework of thought was not easily to be ex-
punged from the human mind.
There was an even more fundamental enigma, not due to any
lingering attempt to treat gravity as an Aristotelian concept, but
arising from the very construction and use of that concept in the
"inverse square" law itself. Galileo had held that bodies of different
weight display the same gravitational acceleration toward the earth
when unsupported (although perhaps we had better relegate to the
wastebasket of unproved legend the story of his attempt to test this
by dropping objects from the tower of Pisa). Newton used this sup-
position in extending the gravitational law to all bodies. He con-
ceived that the moon, despite its great mass, fell toward the earth
with the same acceleration a stone in that location would exemplify.
But the force necessary to give a body any definite acceleration was
to be calculated as a product of the acceleration and the mass (to use
present-day language). Thus, the force necessary to make the moon
fall toward the earth with the same acceleration a stone would have
at that distance would have to be as many times greater than the
force acting on the stone as the moon's mass was greater than the
stone's. There was something queer here. Gravity had to act selec-
the situation. Somebody must have fixed the race. Strange as it may
seem, it took over two centuries for this scandal to be fully exposed;
not until Einstein formulated his general theory of relativity was it
rectified. The telling of this story, however, must await its appropri-
ate setting.
The Impact of the Scientif1c Revolution upon the
Eighteenth Century
In Physical Science
The eighteenth century has been characterized, quite properly, as
an "age of reason," a period of "enlightenment," an era of opti-
mism and self-confidence, an epoch dedicated to an almost unquali-
fied faith in human progress. We shall explore this phenomenon in
its more general ramifications in the next division of this section;
here we shall be concerned with a development that lay at its core:
the expansion of the new method in physical science itself. The suc-
cess of Newtonianism in science can be explained in one wordâthe
tremendous simplification it offered. However, this word may be
misleading, as we have already been warned. In this connection,
"simplification" is not equivalent to "familiarization" or "the mak-
ing easier of imaginative portrayal." The new physics, indeed,
moved in quite the opposite direction, toward the recondite, toward
ideas that can be grasped only by the mathematically trained in-
tellect. This has already been sufficiently stressed; there is another
possible misinterpretation which should be pointed out.
The simplification offered by the new physics did not consist of a
decrease in the number of concepts used. It has been said that Aris-
totelian science had almost as many concepts as there were kinds of
observable phenomena, that its "explanations" were essentially just
the bestowing of names upon events to be explained and that the
real innovation of the new science was the cutting through all this
to the bedrock of a few fundamental ideas. To illustrate: the new
physics cut out three of Aristotle's kinds of motion to leave only
one, namely locomotion, and within this class it made drastic reduc-
tions by denying real differences between the rectilinear motions of
the four elements and by analyzing circular motions into combina-
tions of rectilinear.
There is undoubtedly validity in this characterization, particu-

larly if it is qualified in a certain way. It can hardly be correctly said
that the new physics cut down the total number of concepts used,
but it did decrease the number of basic, undefined ideas, the ones
whose meaning could be determined only by reference to direct,
sensory experience. But this simplification was incidental, I think; it
was not this feature, or in any case not this alone, that brought about
the expansion of the new method in science. The definition of such
terms as "force" and "quantity of motion" not merely restricted the
number of basic or undefined terms; it opened the possibility of
stating uniformities in events which could not be observed in their
own right. The great attraction of the new approach was that it
could state a larger number of regularities in happenings in a fewer
number of laws, and it could do this more precisely, that is, so that
exceptions could be more definitely identified.
This had the unfortunate consequence of leading many scientists
and philosophers to deny the reality of obvious features of experi-
ence merely because they were not used in this kind of simplification.
A striking example is furnished by the denial of the reality of "sec-
ondary properties," such as colors, odors, sounds, which, unlike dis-
tances traversed and times consumed by the motions of bodies, were
not used in the definitions of terms occurring in the laws of the new
mechanics. This blunder, it should be remarked, was entirely
natural under the circumstances. Scientists were not yet prepared
to treat the great simplification offered by the new method as just a
fact about nature, to be accepted so far as established experimentally
and perhaps to be put to practical use, yet just a fact along with
other facts; they were still under the domination of that sort of
value thinking that could only admit as real what it saw to be per-
fect. Nature must be simple, however untidy the appearances;
hence, those properties of sense that could not be utilized in the
magnificent simplifications offered by the new mechanics were to be
ruled out of account, as somehow subjective errors. The affiliation
of this with the Aristotelian conviction that "nature does everything
for the best" seems rather plain, despite the tremendous shift in the
sort of values looked for in the world of fact.
Nevertheless, as already stated, the shift involved should not be
overlooked, since it was far easier to eradicate value from the world
of fact, to put it in the scientists's motivation, when that value was
in the form of an over-all simplification of the sort just ascribed to

the new science than when it was constituted of myriads of final
causes, of specific purposes of specific natural processes open to
everyone's unaided observation.
Perhaps the two most outstanding examples of the success in
physical science of the new kind of concepts and the simplification
in laws they made possible are furnished by the so-called "conserva-
tion-laws." The history of one of these, the law of the conservation
of energy, will take us quite definitely beyond the eighteenth cen-
tury, but the evolution of the ideas involved was so much of a piece
and so analogous to that found in the history of the notion of the
conservation of matter that I think I am justified in treating it here.
We shall begin with a brief consideration of the latter.
In his inertial and gravitational laws Newton had tacitly assumed
that the "quantity of matter" or mass of any body or system of
bodies remained constant, whatever the motions undergone. The
weights of any two bodies (taken as the gravitational forces they
exerted upon one another) did vary, on his account, as the distances
between the bodies changed: so far, however, as bodies maintained
the same spatial separations their weights remained the same and
were proportional to their masses. Thus, in Newton himself there
was the assumption that the mere motion of a body did not affect its
mass and that under certain circumstances weight was a reliable
indication of mass.
There are other changes that bodies at least appear to undergo
besides motions. It was natural that interest should arise in the
question whether these other changes affect a body's mass. For ex-
ample, there are the phenomena that Aristotle called "coming-to-be"
and "passing-away," particularly in the case of the transmutation of
the four elements into one another, that we would today call "chemi-
cal change." Three of these in particular seem to have fascinated
experimentalists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: ordi-
nary combustion (the burning of wood, candles, etc.), what they
called "calcination" (the oxidation of metals), and respiration (the
breathing of living things). They noted that all these processes re-
quired ordinary air, that they presently ceased in closed containers
or in partial vacua.
To understand their theoretical problem we must note that the
chemists of the seventeenth century operated with concepts that were
fundamentally Aristotelian in characterâindeed, they retained many

of his actual terms. It was held that all things were composed of
air, earth, fire and water, to which ancient elements were frequently
added the three principles of the sixteenth-century medical or
"iatro-" chemist, Paracelsus, namely, sulfur, mercury and salt. What
we call "chemical" changes were treated as combinations and separa-
tions of these elementary substances, mainly under the influence of
fire and the heat it produced. Robert Boyle, in his Sceptical Chem-
ist, showed that fire was not the only agent of chemical analysis and
that the concept of "element" with which the chemists worked did
not square with actual experimental results (on the assumption that
the mark of an element is that it cannot be experimentally broken
up into two or more distinguishable substances). But the Aristote-
lian concept of element, particularly that of fire, continued in vogue.
It was just a somewhat refined form of this that was given the
name "phlogiston" or the inflammable principle by G. E. Stahl, a
German professor living in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries. He held that all combustible materials contained phlogis-
ton, which appeared in nearly pure form in charcoal. He recognized
that combustion required free air as well as combustible material.
Thus, it was supposed that, in burning, the combustible material
gave off phlogiston which was absorbed by the free air, the air be-
coming "phlogisticated" or "fixed" (we would now say that the
oxygen in the air combined with carbon to form carbon dioxide).
The experimentalists of the period proved that the respiration of
living beings and the calcination of metals had this same effect of
changing free air into fixed. For example, Robert Boyle, Robert
Hooke and John Mayow (all of the Royal Society) showed how
mice would die quickly in vessels from which the air had been
pumped out, slowly in those into which fresh air was not allowed
to enter, duplicating in their lives the burning of a candle under
similar circumstances. Moreover, these chemists assimilated respira-
tion to burning even more strikingly by showing that a mouse died
quickly when placed in a closed container in which a candle flame
had burned out and that a candle flame was soon extinguished when
placed in a vessel in which a mouse had died for want of fresh air.
Somewhat later calcination was found to have the same effect upon
free air. On the phlogiston theory, which was widely held until the
end of the eighteenth century, each of these processes was given the
same explanation: the phlogiston in the candle, the organism or the

metal was given up and absorbed by the free air which became fixed;
if there was no free air, as in a vacuum or in a vessel where the air
was already phlogisticated, the process must stop.
As we look back, we might suppose that the calcination of metals
should have revealed the untenability of this account, for the
"calces" or oxides of metal weigh more than the pure metals, and
how could this be if the only difference was that the pure metal had
lost phlogiston in becoming a calx? But such an objection would
fail to operate within the Aristotelian framework. Fire, in that
point of view, was essentially light, as proved by the direct observa-
tion that flames, heat and smoke naturally push upward. Thus,
phlogiston could easily be conceived as having negative weight, so
that its loss increased the weight of the object losing it. No, there
was no difficulty in explaining any one of these processes in this
way, but there was a most serious one in trying to explain them all
in the same fashion. Whereas calcination involved the gaining of
weight, ordinary burning was accompanied by its loss, yet both were
explained as a release of contained phlogiston to the surrounding
air. Surely it must be a queer substance which in one instance had
negative weight, in the other, positivel
It was Antoine Lavoisier, "father of modern chemistry," who in
the late eighteenth century gave the death blow to phlogiston and
by the same stroke laid the basis for the law of the conservation of
matter. He pointed out the anomaly mentioned in the preceding
paragraph: the advocates of phlogiston had played fast and loose
with it, giving it incompatible properties. More telling than this
polemic, however, were his experimental findings. In general de-
sign, most of Lavoisier's experiments were based upon, if not very
largely repetitions of, the work of others. The significant thing he
added was the consistent measurement, both before and after the
chemical change, of the weights of the substances involved.
Repeating an experiment of Boyle's, Lavoisier showed that when
tin was calcinated in a closed flask the total weight remained con-
stant, even though the calx weighed more than the original tin. On
opening the flask after the calcination, air rushed in, increasing the
weight of the total by the same amount as the tin had gained by
calcination. The obvious explanation was that the tin had united
with the air or some part of the air to the amount indicated by its
gain of weight (and the equal weight of the inrushing air after open-
ing the vessel).

Lavoisier then heard of some work of Joseph Priestly, who had
separated "dephlogisticated air"âwhich Lavoisier later named "oxy-
gen" or "acid generator"âby heating the calx of mercury. This
process yielded metallic mercury and the "dephlogisticated air" in
which combustion occurred much more rapidly than in ordinary
air. Lavoisier found that the weight of this oxygen was exactly that
lost by the transformation of the calx into metallic mercury. The
obvious account was that the calx contained oxygen which was re-
leased upon heating. Not only was phlogiston unnecessary to ex-
plain the results, its assumption, in line with the current theory, was
incompatible with the experimental facts. That theory would have
it that metallic mercury contained phlogiston which it lost upon
calcination. Thus, a reversal of the process whereby the calx re-
turned to the metallic mercury demanded that phlogiston be ac-
quired. But Lavoisier generated his oxygen and metallic mercury
by heating the calx of mercury in a vacuum, where there was no
possible source of phlogiston, and by carefully weighing both the
whole apparatus and each part of it and each substance involved, he
showed that nothing, whether of positive or negative weight, had
been acquired from the outside. Phlogiston had vanished.
The trouble with phlogiston was not that it was itself unobserv-
able. As has been noted repeatedly, this was a characteristic of most
of the concepts introduced by the new science. The trouble was that
it was not a functional concept, constructed as a mathematical rela-
tion of other entities and suitable to use in the statement of a uni-
formity in the way they varied. Like Aristotle's fire, it was something
that should be open to direct observation; but unfortunately it
couldn't be observed. The attempt to make it functional, as a rela-
tion, for example, of weights, resulted in incompatible definitions.
In place of this, Lavoisier's idea of a constant quantity of matter
(as measured by weight) was functional. But was not weight some-
thing directly observable; was it not an Aristotelian concept? No:
Aristotle's heavinesses and lightnesses were visible motions and
muscular heftings; Lavoisier's weight was calculated by means of a
balance. More fundamentally, the constancy of weight that Lavoi-
sier found to obtain through a chemical change was not any direct
motionlessness in a balance. It involved the invariance of a sum,
where the summands changed in amount. Suppose the weights of
the original substances to be a and b, those of the substances after
chemical change to be c and d. He was concerned not with these

individual weights as such, but with their sums, so that he found
an invariance in weight (expressible as "a + b = c + d") even when
no individual weight remained constant. It was this calculated
weight, this mathematical relation of observed elements, that en-
tered the law stating that weight remains invariant through chemical
change.
Thus, by using a Galilean type of concept, Lavoisier was able to
extend Newton's assumption from "quantity of matter was un-
affected by mechanical change" to "quantity of matter was unaf-
fected by either mechanical or chemical change." This was a long
step toward the modern atomic theory, involving the consequence
that, in a certain sense, chemical laws could be assimilated to me-
chanical. We cannot go into this development, but we can remark
that its occurrence is another example of the appeal to the scientist
of the tremendous simplification in laws the new method made
possible.
Parenthetically and in the interest of historical accuracy we must
note that Lavoisier had not broken completely with the Aristotelian
approach. He retained the idea of "caloric," a weightless heat fluid,
although he admitted it might be merely hypothetical, necessary
only as an aid to our mode of thinking.
The importance in Lavoisier's experimental work of the perfect-
ing of instrumental aids should not be completely overlooked. One
instance, however, must suffice to illustrate. He could hardly have
accomplished what he did without a device for collecting gases in a
vacuum and permitting chemical changes to occur in a vessel from
which gases, particularly air, had been evacuated. This was permitted
by the evolution of the Torricellian barometer. (See Fig. 25.)
In the third corollary to his third law of motion, Newton stated
that the total quantity of motion (the momentum) of a system of
bodies "suffered no change from the action of the bodies among
themselves." Whatever momentum one body lost upon impact with
another was gained by the other. The success of Newtonianism in
science is impressively illustrated by the expansion of this statement
into the law of the conservation of energy. The latter embraced all
kinds of change, not being restricted to motion. We must be satis-
fied with a brief sketch of this extension from motions to heat
changes, and even in this region it will be necessary to omit heat phe-
nomena due to chemical changes.
As regards the physics of heat, a number of facts were well known

from one body to another there must be something hot that moves,
just as when there is visible motion there must be something colored
that moves. The tendency of bodies in contact to attain a common
temperature was explained by the flow of caloric from the hotter
body (which had an excess of it) to the colder. The expansion of
bodies upon being heated was said to be due to the caloric's getting
between the particles of the heated body and forcing them apart;
the fact that solids liquefied and liquids became gaseous at suffi-
ciently high temperatures was considered to be just an extreme case
of this same process. The heating of bodies upon prolonged friction
was accounted for in two ways: one explanation would have the
friction directly push or squeeze out some of the caloric in the body
undergoing friction so that it entered adjacent bodies (such as one's
hand or a thermometer) and became sensible there; the other would
have the friction indirectly accomplish the same result by lowering
the capacity for caloric of the body subjected to it.
At first, the caloric theory seemed quite adjustable to experimental
results. In the seventeenth century the Accademia del Cimento
found that different substances had different thermal capacities.
Equal volumes of different liquids at the same temperature were
poured over ice. It was noted that different amounts of ice were
melted by them, thus apparently proving that equal volumes of
different substances contained different amounts of heat. It came
to be generally supposed that this heat capacity was in proportion
to the density of the substance, so that equal weights of different
substances at the same temperature would have equal heat contents.
In the eighteenth century Joseph Black showed this assumption to
be incorrect. He developed a new method, using water as his stand-
ard and mixing with it equal weights of different substances at
different temperatures, noting the changes in temperature as the
whole mixtures attained thermal equilibrium and stating the ther-
mal capacities of the substances in terms of the inverses of these
changes. For example, he mixed one pound of gold at 15oÂ°F with
the same weight of water at 50Â° and found that they came into
equilibrium at 55Â°; the water had gained 5Â° while the gold had
lost 95Â°, a ratio of about 1 to 19; hence, he said that gold had about
1/19th the thermal capacity of water.
This change in method allowed Black to discover what he called
"latent heat." It had been assumed that not much, if any, more
heat was required to melt a solid or vaporize a fluid than to produce

an equal rise in temperature of an equal amount of the same sub-
stance. Thus, to melt ice at 32Â° and produce water at 33Â° supposedly
required little, if any, more heat than to raise the resultant water
from 33Â° to 34Â°. This Black disproved by adding equal amounts of
warm water to ice and to water at approximately ice temperature,
noting the final temperatures of each. He also used a method in-
volving time. He placed equal weights of ice at 32Â° and water at
33Â° in a room kept at 40Â°. He found that it took 1oi/Â£ hours for the
former to melt and reach 40Â°, but only i/Â£ hour for the latter to
attain that temperature. Analogous experiments gave similar results
in the case of the production of steam from water.
Black explained his experimental findings by supposing that heat
material (caloric) could become latent, could be absorbed by a body
without elevation of temperature whenever the body passed from a
solid to a liquid or from a liquid to a gaseous state. This, of course,
pushed an Aristotelian concept quite beyond the limits set by its
nature: to think of heat as a fluid was to think of it as essentially
an observable material; to find that its only observable property was
its heat should have been sufficiently disquieting, but to discover
that this attribute itself disappeared for large quantities during long
periods of time should have shown the complete untenability of
the theory requiring it. The coup de gr&ce, however, was still to
come. ~*
A great deal of experimental effort in the eighteenth century went
into the attempt to determine the weight of caloric. Results were at
first conflicting; some experimenters finding that it had a slightly
positive, some, a slightly negative weight, others that it had no
weight at all. Count Rumford (an American adventurer in the
military service of the Elector of Bavaria) showed "that a quantity of
heat equal to that which (93^ oz.) of gold would require to heat it
from the temperature of freezing water to be red hot (about
28ooÂ°F), had no sensible effect upon a balance capable of indicating
so small a variation of weight as that of one-millionth part of the
body in question." This did not itself overthrow the concept of
caloric, since weightless substances had long been accepted and were
to be for some time, as in the cases of electricity and the luminiferous
ether. But it was this same experimenter who was soon to give the
death blow to the whole idea.
While boring cannon at Munich, Rumford was surprised by the
apparently inexhaustible amount of heat generated, so he devised

the experiment of boring a brass cylinder within a box containing
1834 pounds of water. In 224 hours of boring, the temperature of
the water was raised from 60Â° to 212Â°F. Clearly this heat had not
been acquired from the surroundings; it must have come from the
metal itself. If it had been due to the forcing of caloric from the
metal by the friction, the metal would not have shared in the tem-
perature rise, which, however, it did. If it had been due to the
decrease in the heat capacity of the metal caused by the friction, this
would have shown in a permanent decrease in that capacity after the
boring had ceased. No such decrease could be found. There seemed
to be no conceivable source for the tremendous amount of caloric
required on the current theory to explain the results. Rumford con-
cluded that heat was not a substance but (in line with a rival theory
that by his time had been largely discarded) an activity, a motion of
the internal parts of the hot body.
Theoretically, then, heat could be assimilated to Newton's laws
of motion. To do this required that an increase in heat be ascribed
to the action of some force; heat due to friction must be attributed
to the force causing the friction. How could this be put to experi-
mental test? Our answer leads us into the nineteenth century and
to the work of the English physicist, James Joule.
Joule constructed a paddle wheel made to turn in a can of water
by means of descending weights. He also used a piston perforated
with small holes operating in a glass cylinder filled with water and
similarly activated by descending weights. He found that on the
average it took the equivalent of 838 pounds (later he computed it
at 772 pounds) falling one foot to raise the temperature of one
pound of water 1Â°F. The significant thing was not the measurement
of the "mechanical equivalent of heat" but its approximate con-
stancyâwhich was only very rough with Joule, but this was quite
appropriately ascribed to the differences in the loss of heat of the
whole apparatus. The same amount of heat was produced at differ-
ent times and in different ways by the same amount of mechanical
work. Incidentally, we might note that Joule also applied these
same ideas to electrical and chemical changes, showing here also
that the amount of energy required to produce a given amount of
heat was, roughly, constant.
It should be pointed out that Joule's contribution required the
use of a new functional concept, for which he was indebted to
Thomas Young. It was not momentum (Newton's "quantity of

motion") which he found to be conserved as motion was trans-
formed into heat, but energy; not mass multiplied by velocity, but
mass multiplied by the square of the velocity. In the invention of
this idea we find the new physics to be moving further from directly
observable fact toward mathematical constructions built upon it.
Joule concluded "that the grand agents of nature are . . . in-
destructible; and that wherever mechanical force is expended, an
exact equivalent of heat is always obtained." Thus, the foundation
was experimentally laid for the extremely general law or principle
that in any closed system the total energy was constant. This was
essentially an extension of Newton's third law and its third corollary,
using the type of concept we have attributed to Galileo, and reveal-
ing the remarkable impression the new method had made upon scien-
tists, despite the tenacity of Aristotelian modes of thought. The next
and last great extension of Newtonianism in physical science that
we shall consider was that due to Einstein, who eliminated the dis-
tinction between matter and energy and thus between the two con-
servation laws.
In Popular Thought
To speak of the eighteenth century as a period of "enlighten-
ment" is perfectly appropriate, yet in one respect it might be mis-
leading. Compared with the present, the reading public was small,
probably not over two million people. Even this, however, was a
tremendous increase beyond any previous century. Moreover, there
was a remarkable growth in the "intelligentsia," by which I mean
the group who supported themselves by learned and artistic pur-
suits. It was upon this group that the scientific revolution had its
greatest effect.
The fame of Newton and the acceptance of his views, especially
his universal law of gravity, were immediate and widespread upon
the publication in 1687 of his great work, Philosophiae Naturalis
Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Phi-
losophy). Leading members of the Royal Society embraced his sys-
tem enthusiastically. Only five years after its appearance his work
was publically referred to from an English pulpit as "incontestably
sound." His views gained acceptance at Cambridge and Oxford
without even a struggle and were being taught in these institutions
before the end of the century. One hundred years after its first pub-
lication, Mathematical Principles had gone through eighteen edi-

tions; by that time there had appeared some forty works about it in
English, seventeen in French, eleven in Latin, three in German, one
in Italian and one in Portuguese.
Acceptance of Newtonianism was somewhat slower on the con-
tinent than in England. In France, in particular, it had to overcome
general adherence to a rival theory of the philosopher-mathema-
tician, RenÂ£ Descartes, ascribing the motions of celestial bodies to
vortices in an invisible celestial substance. Voltaire, the great French
poet and satirist, returning from England in 1728 a convinced New-
tonian, was phenomenally energetic and effective in spreading
Newton's fame and popularizing his views on the continent. It was
not long before Newton had no serious rival, in the public mind in
France and indeed throughout Europe as well as in England, for the
honor of being the leading scientist of the age. Alexander Pope
summed up the attitude of the eighteenth century toward Newton
in the couplet, penned, we must suppose, in absolute seriousness:
Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night:
God said, Let Newton be! and all was Light.
Besides calling forth direct recognition in its own right, Newton's
work influenced popular thinking through its effects upon other
sciences, most strikingly through the stimulus it gave to the attempt
to form sciences of human behavior modeled after it. During his
visit to England Voltaire came perhaps as much under the sway of
John Lockeâwho, according to Voltaire, "reduced metaphysics to
being the experimental physics of the soul"âas of Newton. Locke
has been frequently cited as the founder of modern psychology, and
he did play an important role in the formation of that science. It is,
moreover, entirely correct to say that he was greatly influenced by
Newton and indeed that he thought he was doing something in the
realm of ideas and their combinations comparable to what Newton
had accomplished in the realm of bodies and their motions. That
his method was really quite different is important when one is con-
sidering the nature of scientific psychology, but it does not over-
throw the historical fact that Locke and his successors saw themselves
as applying Newton to the mind and that the public accepted this
interpretation.
Of Locke's eighteenth-century followers in this development, two
were especially outstanding: David Hume and David Hartley, both
Scotchmen. The former took over from Thomas Hobbes (who, in-
cidentally, had obtained it from the Aristotelian tradition, though
making it far more central) the so-called "law of association," a gentle
attraction between ideas which, comparable to gravitation in phys-
ics, supposedly held together and gave order to the vast realm of
mental phenomena. The latter developed and applied this law and
added, from a direct but rather incidental suggestion in Newton, a
doctrine of physiological accompaniments of ideas which he dubbed
"vibratiuncles." We shall look somewhat further into this whole
development in Part II in connection with the history of moral
ideas.
Although it cannot be said that scientific psychology was born in
the eighteenth century, a fairly good case can be made that that
century saw the beginnings of a scientific economics. Since we shall
turn to this topic in the following section, it may here be passed over
save again to point out the influence of Newton. The Scotch phi-
losopher, Adam Smith, consciously attempted to discover the uni-
versal gravitational law in economics, the law governing "the natural
price" toward which actual market prices tended everywhere to
gravitate. Here once more the public took the writer's own estimate
of his work: here was Newtonianism in economic theory.
In legal and political thought the scientific revolution exerted a
similar influence. Even in the seventeenth century and before the
publication of Newton's Mathematical Principles, although sub-
sequent to the work of Galileo, Thomas Hobbes had nearly suc-
ceeded in transforming the concept of "the law of nature" from
that of a moral obligation binding all men as men, quite apart from
special legal enactments, into that of a scientific law of human mo-
tivation, a statement of men's selfish fears leading them ever to-
ward murder and war unless restrained by the security of a powerful
government. This gave rise in England and Scotland during the
eighteenth century to a heated controversy concerning the character
of men's motives. It issued at the close of the century in Bentham's
attempt to reform English law on the basis of a frank calculation of
human action as under the sway of anticipated pleasures and pains.
Here, too, thinkers were dominated by the desire to find an analogue
to Newton's universal law of gravitationâin this case a universal
law of motivation. Although, as we shall see, they actually mixed
this factual question with issues as to value, the public generally
saw them as they viewed themselvesâas Newtonians pioneering in
new areas.
If it was in England and Scotland that Newton had his chief
effect upon the sciences generally and the rising sciences of human
behavior in particular, in imitation of his success in mechanics, it
was in France and in Europe generally, in imitation of France, that
Newton and the new science he represented had the greatest impact
on the thinking of the publicânot of course of the peasant and the
laborer but of the upper middle classes, of the intelligentsia other
than the scientists, and, negatively to a great extent, of the ruling
classes in church and state. In England the Glorious Revolution of
1688 marked a victory for the bourgeoisie, for the parliamentarians
in government and the dissenters in religion. Toleration, freedom
of thought and of faith were secure.
In France, this result had not been achieved; it was only to be
attained by a much bloodier French Revolution a century later.
Voltaire, after his return from England, remarked, "I must disguise
at Paris what I could not say too strongly at London." The French
court under Louis XIV had allied itself with the Roman Church and
had purchased the nobility with glittering symbols that lacked the
reality of power. This monarch was able to say, with considerable
approximation to the truth, "I am the state." There was no large
middle class; the commercial tycoons sought to convert their profits
into landed estates and to transmute their wealth into aristocratic
status. Accompanying this was a general censorship over ideas. Al-
though the church was no longer able to confine the intellectual
class to the priesthood and those in holy orders, it tried to control
lay writers and thinkers by the arm of the secular government. Vol-
taire and Diderot were both thrown into prison early in life for
indiscretions of expression, and later had to fly precipitantly or stay
in hiding to avoid repetitions of this chastisement.
So it is not surprising that in France the influence of the new
science appeared largely as a popular liberation, an emancipation,
an enlightenment. Indeed, this intellectual rebellion was led by
certain revolutionists who were quite aware of what they were doing
and were extremely successful in the doing of it. They were seeking
positively to popularize the new science and what they conceived to
be its method and the world picture it established. Negatively, they
sought to overthrow the intertwined power of church and state,
founded, as they saw it, on superstition, deceit and human gullibil-
ity. Their chief weapons were two: popular reports of the new scien-
tific knowledge and its applications and biting satire of old shib-
boleths.
These revolutionists were known as "les philosophes," which per-
haps should not be translated "philosophers" (for they were not
philosophers in any technical sense), but rather "scientific popular-
izers" or again "free thinkers"âor perhaps better, it should not be
translated at all. The most outstanding of them were Pierre Bayle,
Voltaire and "the Encyclopedists," whose guiding spirit was Denis
Diderot. In England their closest parallel was Jeremy Bentham and
"the Philosophical Radicals"; in America, Thomas Paine and
Thomas Jefferson. The negative emphasis was perhaps most pro-
nounced in Bayle, who, for his attacks on traditional theology and
biblical history in his Historical and Critical Dictionary, had to flee
first to Switzerland and later to Holland. In the Encyclopedists we
have the best example of the positive factor. Their Encyclopedie,
finally completed in seventeen volumes of text and eleven of plates,
largely through the tireless efforts of Diderot, attempted to sum-
marize the knowledge of the day but obviously with a sympathetic
slant toward the new science and technological improvements as-
sociated with it. The attempt was to get specialists to write the
articles in their fields, although to a large extent the editors failed in
this regard. Although the idea of an encyclopedia was not entirely
novel, indeed, the project started as a translation of an English
Cyclopaedia, its immediate success (indicated by the fact that six
editions of the Encyclopedie were issued in a short period) inau-
gurated a definite trend, the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britan-
nica appearing shortly after the last volume of its French prototype
and the Encyclopedie Suisse just a few years later.
Les philosophes were not merely zealous in the popularization
of the new science and its applications in industry and the trades;
they firmly believed in the possibility of a new society, to replace
the priestly dominated one they so sharply castigated. This faith was
partly a conviction that the new methods of production could, as
we would say today, raise the general standard of living. Diderot,
who himself grew up in the home of a master cutler and inventor,
was indefatigable in studying new and better methods of production
wherever he could find them, and he wrote a large number of articles
for the Encyclopedie on such methods. But far more important in
this outlook was the sense that the new psychology of Locke could
be applied to man's limitless improvement.

Locke's French disciple, Helvetius, in particular, took his master's
doctrine that the mind at birth was a blank tablet whose whole char-
acter was determined by the writing of experience upon it and de-
veloped its inherent environmentalism. All men, he wrote, were
quite literally equal at birth, and if the old methods were replaced
by an enlightened education administered by a benevolent and
intelligent government, perpetual improvement could be made in
raising the whole social level of intelligence and happiness. Only the
viciousness of the old order and a mistaken view of the nature of
man stood in the way of such boundless progress.
In general, les philosophes saw the betterment of the human race
as a matter of contrivance (through education) and as coming from
above (through the activity of enlightened monarchs). Rousseau
and the leaders of the French Revolution, as well as such American
revolutionists as Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, shared the
belief of les philosophes that, with the riddance of bad political and
religious institutions, human nature would come into its own, but
they had lost faith in enlightened monarchs as the instruments of
progress.
It is easy to see that the spirit of the Enlightenment quite directly
challenged the traditional status and point of view of the church.
The Enlightenment was far more of a revolt from the "Universal
Church" than the Protestant Reformation had been: if Luther was
anti-pope, Voltaire was anti-Christ. The Reformation was just a
greater instance of the reforms the church had periodically experi-
enced, calling for a return to Pauline and Augustinian Christianity
âa reform, however, which got involved in the developing national-
ism and culminated in an institutional break. Fundamentally it was
not an ideational revolution. But the Age of Reason brought just
such a basic ideological challenge. Ideas like those of Helvetius to
the effect that all human beings were indefinitely perfectible through
appropriate education clashed head-on with doctrines of the total
depravity of man and the election of a few only to salvation through
an inscrutable act of divine grace.
The whole region of the irrational in religion was cast into
disrepute by the Age of Reason. Men became suspicious of miracles,
first those subsequent to Biblical times but attested by the church,
then finally those recounted in the Bible itself. David Hume was
the most famous spokesman of this change. In his Essay on Miracles
he argued that proofs for matters of fact must be based on experi-

ence. All human experience, he said, showed nature to be uniform
so that a miraculous event would be in conflict with the whole basis
of factual knowledge. Moreover, evidence for miracles was always
secondhand, through reports of others. But humans were notoriously
gullible, as anyone's experience abundantly proved. It was, then,
far more probable that stories of miraculous happenings were due
to the credulity of their human transmitters than to the occurrence
of the events portrayed. With unmistakable irony Hume laid down
the criterion: only if the falsehood of the testimony for a miracle
would require a greater miracle than the miracle to which it tes-
tified could the latter be accepted by a rational man.
It took little additional boldness to proceed from the discarding
of the miraculous to the casting out of special revelation; it had in-
deed become a central argument in Christian theology that miracle-
working attested divine inspiration. Of course, there had all along
been champions of reason in religion, their position having been
well expressed by the contention of St. Thomas that most of the
dogmas of orthodox Christianity could be established by reason.
Such dogmas constituted "natural religion," which had to be supple-
mented by revelation and, since truth was one, could never con-
tradict the latter. On the part of many who still wished to retain
religion, of whom there were more among the English than the
French intellectuals, the throwing out of the miraculous in the
Age of Reason was followed by a rejection of revelation but a reten-
tion of natural religion. This was essentially what the Deists did, a
group that flourished mainly in England in the second half of the
seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth.
The Deists often said that "Nature" was their Bible, as though
they had a new revelation, but clearly this manner of talk just con-
fused the issue. For them, not revelation but reason (including of
course perceptual observation as well as rational inference) was the
sole reliable avenue of reaching religious truth. As already men-
tioned, it was in fact nature as portrayed by the new science that
furnished their foundation. Addison's well-known hymn expressed
admirably the faith that animated them:
The spacious firmament on high
With all the blue ethereal sky,
And spangled heav'ns, a shining frame,
Their great Original proclaim:

In reason's ear they all rejoice,
And utter forth a glorious voice,
Forever singing as they shine,
"The hand that made us is divine."
John Locke, although not strictly a Deist since he accepted revela-
tion and even the miraculous, wrote a book, The Reasonableness of
Christianity, seeking to prove that all doctrines necessary to true
Christianity could stand the test of reason. John Toland went fur-
ther and in his Christianity Not Mysterious attacked the miraculous
and generally nonrational elements in Christianity. Involved in the
denial of special revelation and as one of the arguments in its favor
there was the idea that a religion of nature was available to all men:
no one was to be eternally damned merely because, through the
accident of history, he had lived in a place where the special revela-
tion of Christianity was unavailable. In the early seventeenth cen-
tury Lord Herbert of Cherbury had used the argument that God,
being universal, was equally beneficent to all peoples and all times.
In the eighteenth century Matthew Tindal developed this idea in
his Christianity as Old as Creation. Charles Blount drew the natural
but shocking conclusion, to become prevalent among the more ex-
treme Deists, that the doctrines and rites of religions that involved
special revelations or dispensations were fraudulent inventions of
power-seeking priestcraft.
The religion of the Deists, in general, included three fundamental
tenets. There was a creator of the universe: this could be inferred
from the character of the worldâit was lawful throughout, on the
Newtonian account; it could be understood by man through scien-
tific reason; therefore, it must have been made by a rational being.
There were moral principles common to all men, and anyone who
would guide his life by them was assured of the attainment of salva-
tion; these principles, like the laws of nature, could be grasped by
man through the use of reason. Finally, there was a life after death:
although in this life virtue was generally rewarded and vice punished,
the correlation was not sufficiently perfect to fit a wholly rational
scheme of affairs; therefore there had to be a next life to set things
right.
In France, as might be expected, the eighteenth century witnessed
an even greater break with traditional religion than that exhibited
by the English Deists. We see in some of les philosophes religious
skepticism and outright atheism. One interpretation of Hume's

Dialogues on Natural Religion makes it an attempt to refute all the
traditional rationalistic proofs of the existence of God; but there is
some doubt whether he wished to refute the design argumentâthe
argument we have seen to be the special favorite of the Deists. Vol-
taire, however, in his acidulous satire, Candide, left no doubt. This
tale, although mainly directed against the optimistic theology of the
philosopher, Leibniz, who had found our world to be the best of all
possible ones, did make the argument from design look ridiculous,
especially when applied in detail to actual matter of fact. Voltaire
had Dr. Pangloss, a professor of metaphysico-theologico-cosmoloni-
gology, prove to simple-minded Candide:
'Tis demonstrated that things cannot be otherwise; for, since every-
thing is made for an end, everything is necessarily for the best end.
Observe that noses were made to wear spectacles; and so we have spec-
tacles. Legs were visibly instituted to be breeched, and we have
breeches.
Voltaire, however, would not have his skepticism reach the masses:
"If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent one." Bayle,
on the contrary, not only praised disbelievers in a personal God and
in immortality, but argued that a whole society of atheists might
exist without any lower moral standards than those of Christians.
Diderot apparently wavered between Deism and atheism; but La
Mettrie, in his Man a Machine, and Baron d'Holbach, in his System
of Nature, explicitly argued atheism. They claimed that the new
science showed the world to be merely a material mechanism, quite
operative by itself without first cause or final end.
Newton, himself a firm believer in the design argument and a
staunch defender of Christianity spending his last days in textual
studies of the New Testament, would have been aghast at this atheis-
tical outcome in popular thinking of his system of mechanics; but
the actual causal connection here can hardly be questioned. New-
tonianism, by reading out of nature all particular values, all final
causes and special perfections, left the way open for a complete elimi-
nation of value. For Newton, the rational simplification the new
physics offered was itself sufficient warranty of the deity in facts, but
this did not deter some of his followers from accepting the simplifica-
tion without the deity. Although the English Deists and the French
skeptics of the Enlightenment were extremists in their day, the views
they somewhat vociferously argued have quietly permeated later

thinking, so that at present if science is not conceived as atheistical
or at least antimiraculous and antirevelational in implication, it is
at least free not only of final causes but, in its main direction, of
value thinking generally.
If we ask what were the causes of the remarkable success of the
scientific revolution in capturing the public imagination, our an-
swer must in the main repeat what has already been said concern-
ing the social conditions favorable to that revolution. Most basic
was the commercial revolution with its multiplying demand for new
inventions and instruments which, although immediately devoted to
improvements in commerce and production, could be seen to be in-
timately connected with developments in experimental science. This
carried with it the recognition that the new scientific knowledge
was required for the elevation of living standards. Thus, the scien-
tific revolution was seen to be joined with the social, particularly
in England, where the Glorious Revolution served to restrict the
powers of the church and the monarchy in favor of the rising bour-
geoisie. In France, a somewhat more direct attack upon the "ancient
regime" and a more explicit propagation of the new science was
necessary. This requires a brief consideration of a factor not suffi-
ciently emphasized earlier.
The Enlightenment could not have come to pass had there
not arisen a new class of intellectuals, freed from dependence upon
the church and the nobility. At its core, as has been said, were the
scientists themselves, supported by the new commercial capitalists
and, through the intermediation of the national scientific societies,
by the state. But even at that early stage in scientific development,
the popularization of the new type of knowledge could not, for the
most part, be achieved directly by the scientists themselves. It was
necessary that they be supplemented by the literati, by philosophers
and professional writers, who on the wholeâand strikingly so in
Franceâwere spokesmen for the new science.
This new intelligentsia at first had a diff1cult time supporting it-
self. In England, where the church was more tolerant and writers
sympathetic to the new movement were not as extreme in denuncia-
tion of the established order, many were ecclesiastics. Moreover,
patronage by the wealthy was not too distasteful since there were
many of this class who shared the liberal and scientific outlook of the
writers whom they supported. But in France conditions were much

less favorable for the new intellectuals. Church wealth and nobility
were very largely united behind the monarchy in the attempt to
suppress the dangerous new ideology. It is doubtful whether the
professional writer in sympathy with the scientific outlook would
ever have succeeded in getting his views generally known had it not
been for the growth of the reading public through the development
of cheaper methods of publication made possible by improvements
in printing. It is true that les philosophes had a few powerful patrons
behind them and that they never gave up their faith in an en-
lightened monarch as the instrument for bringing about the changes
they advocated, but had they not been able to gain an expanding
audience for their teachings, all their wit and literary skill would
never have won them an appreciable hearing among those in social
power.
The eighteenth century saw a notable increase in cheaper, more
ephemeral types of publication: pamphlets, broadsides, news sheets
and literary and popular journals became characteristic media for
propagating ideas. Even books became much more widely available,
not merely through reduction in their costs but also by the growth
of the institution of the public library; the first free, circulating
public libraries were founded in America at the very beginning of
the century, Europe soon following suit.
Thus, the phenomenon of the independent writer, supporting
himself by the sale of his writings to the general reading public, was,
if not yet quite an actuality, nevertheless for the first time a practical
possibility, and was sufficiently near reality to give literary men pretty
direct access to the public mind. This trend was very materially
aided by copyright protection to authors first established in this cen-
tury. It was closely connected with the emergence of a new style of
writing. For the general public, of course, men had to write in the
vernacular. Their style had to be simple and clear in structure and,
above all, it had to be interesting. The calm impartiality of scientific
discourse, quite apart from the technicalities of mathematical ex-
pression, made the language of science itself unsuitable. The use
of conflict, scorn and ridicule were necessary to keep the attention of
the wider public. Here Voltaire was a master, and, in a much nar-
rower field, Tom Paine was an able disciple.
This new style of writing was also powerfully affected by another
institution of the Enlightenment, the face-to-face gathering permit-

ting a brilliant oral display of wit and learning by the new writers.
In France this was the salon, usually sponsored by a lady of actual
or hoped-for social standing who wished to lionize current celebrities
in order to enhance her own status. In England a somewhat anal-
ogous opportunity was afforded by the club, fraternal organization
and the coffee house, where literary news, class scandals and brilliant
repartee generally were exchanged. Naturally this tended to sharpen
the wit and enliven the style of the participants.
Undoubtedly, especially in France, the new note of social optimism
aided the spread of the gospel of enlightenment. To a people in-
creasingly oppressed by governmental taxes to support an effete,
extravagant court, who noted the untouched wealth of the church
and perhaps wondered a bit whether there was no connection be-
tween this and the preachment that one must accept one's lot in this
life and be indebted entirely to the church for one's salvation in the
nextâto such a people the gospel taught by les philosophes must
have had the attraction of a great release and a great hope. More-
over, the Protestant Reformation, although not itself favorable to
the new science and not interested in religious toleration or intellec-
tual freedom, could not but have opened the way for a general
recognition that a challenge to the dogma (as well as to the institu-
tion) of the Catholic Church was possible and might prove success-
ful. In any case, the terrible fanaticism, bloodshed and restriction
of human freedom to which the church's struggle to remain in power
gave rise furnished an all-too-obvious butt for the barbed ridicule of
the apostles of reason and science. The church had made a botch
of things; it did not pay to hand over your thinking, your beliefs
and finally your life and happiness to such an institution. Why not
use your own reason under the guidance of science?
Thus, medievalism disappeared from Europe: it was overthrown
in science itself by the revolution of the seventeenth century; it was
displaced in the public mind by the successful propagation in the
eighteenth century of the attitude of enlightenment. Nineteenth-
century romanticism, however, was to stage a powerful counter-
revolution. Although only in part an attempt to revive medievalism,
it was wholeheartedly opposed to the spirit of enlightenment and
to the success of science which that involved. But before consider-
ing this challenging turn of events, we must resume our story of
economic theory and see what effect the success of the new physics
had upon that area of men's thought.

The Revolution in Political Economy
The first significant impact of the new science upon economic
thought came in the Enlightenment. It was of sufficient magnitude
to allow us to speak of a "revolution in political economy." Many
historians refer to the change it instituted as "the founding of eco-
nomics as a science," but this is an unhappy way of describing it: it
was far from being radical enough to justify such a characterization.
Why was this?
We must not underestimate the psychological difficulty of shifting
from the commonsensical concepts of the Aristotelian tradition to
the functional ones introduced by Galileoâwe have seen this even
in physics in the instances of "phlogiston" and "caloric." True, the
mercantilists, with their "balance of trade" and "political arith-
metic," had made some progress; but most of their writings were in
the form of unsystematic, political pamphlets. Moreover, the new
political economy of the Enlightenment was opposed to the prac-
tical objectives and programs of the mercantilists; it attempted, for
example, to substitute a policy of laissez faire for governmental
paternalism and control: thus there was a natural tendency for it to
throw away their ideas in totoâindeed a good case has been made
for the extreme view that one of the forms of economic theory in
the Enlightenment (physiocracy, especially as formulated by Ques-
nay) was just a return to the scholastic standpoint of Thomas Aqui-
nas.
As intimated earlier, the influence of the new physics upon eco-
nomic thought was not direct; rather it came through that science's
success in capturing the public imagination. It is, perhaps, not with-
out significance that Quesnay was associated with les philosophes:
two of his important early statements appeared as articles in Diderot's
Encyclopedie. Adam Smith was, in a broad sense, a follower of
Locke and Humeâmen who had tried, as we have seen, to apply
Newton to the phenomena of mind and of knowledge. Thus, any
impression the new method made upon economic thinking was
certain to be rather superficial.
To this must be added that an important element in the motiva-
tion leading to the scientific revolution in physics was to a large
extent lacking in the case of economic thought in the eighteenth
century. The physicists had been moved by a profound faith in the
mathematical perfection of nature. The new political economists

did not have this to sustain them: there was no long tradition of
belief in, and devoted effort to delineate, the geometrical simplicity
of human behavior. The Christian doctrines of man's free will and
his sinfulness, if not total depravity, in exercising it (although in
strict logic irrelevant to the issue), perhaps served to delay the
application to human behavior of the idea of mathematically precise
and undeviating laws. In any case, one of the accompaniments of
the revolution in physics, as we have seen, was the relegation to the
human mind of all those aspects of direct experience, such as the
"secondary" qualities of sense, which did not have a place in the
functional formulations of the new mechanics.
Moreover, it must be admitted by everyone that both the physi-
ocrats and the classical economists were political reformers and that
their political objectives affected their theoretical inquiries. Ques-
nay frankly favored agriculture and the landed interests; Adam
Smith wrote in a similar vein, although his followers developed his
position into an ideology favorable to the growing class of industrial
capitalists. Both used their economic theories to further their politi-
cal objectivesâfor example, to eliminate governmental regulations
of the mercantilist variety. They argued that, since economic science
proved the inevitability of price equilibrium at the free-market
level, for government to try to modify this was somehowânot silly
since unachievable butâwrong, since an interference with natural
law (imagine Newton analogously contending that governments
that interfered with the laws of motion were acting immorally!).
Both used their economic theories to condemn certain classes as
"sterile" and to prove wherein the real "wealth of a nation" lay.
Finally, in the very nature of the case it was far harder to elimi-
nate normative and teleological concepts from an inquiry into hu-
man behavior than from one into the motions of inanimate bodies.
After all, such motions never had been immediately experienced as
goal directed; they were only observed to be highly analogous to
purposive behavior. But anyone could at firsthand note that much
of his own behavior, and specifically his economic activity, was pur-
posive. A science seeking laws omitting this factor seemed not merely
abstract but falsifying (indeed, a science denying it would have
been falsifying, and many contemporary behavior-"scientists" talk as
though they meant to do precisely this). However, in the difficult
task of coming to see that one could abstract from human purpose
without denying it, the economist had a certain advantage over his
fellow social scientists. He could note the obvious fact that exchanges
of similar kinds and quantities of goods occurred between parties
animated by quite different purposes. It was thus not too difficult
to suppose that a science could be developed that concerned itself
with prices and quantities of goods only, without reference to the
particular objectives of buyers and sellers beyond the general sup-
position that some purpose leading to such exchange was present.
The Physiocrats
As political propaganda, the ideas of the physiocrats must be put
in their social and historical setting, and since whatever science there
was in this system was mixed up with the propaganda factor, it is
well to start with this broader context. Louis XIV had undertaken
a series of wars to build a French empire. These were almost com-
pletely unsuccessful yet very expensive. The cost they involved,
together with that of the extravagant court life, were defrayed largely
by taxes on the peasant and small farmer, the large landowner,
nobleman and merchant-capitalist being free from, or having dis-
covered various methods of, evading much of the tax burden. Tax-
gathering was farmed out, so that nearly twice the amount actually
received by the government was extracted from the taxpayers by the
collectors, who were able in many cases to accumulate great riches in
short periods of time. Moreover, there had been little improvement
in the technology of agricultural production. In England there had
occurred during the eighteenth century an "agricultural revolution,"
but this did not affect France until later. Thus, small farmers and
tenants were in serious straits and tended to blame the government.
Much of this feeling was directed against J. B. Colbert, comptrol-
ler-general of finances under Louis XIV, although as a matter of fact
he opposed the excessive taxes demanded by that monarch. In order
to compete with English and Dutch trade, Colbert had attempted to
imitate the policies of the mercantilists; French commerce and
manufacturing were governmentally protected and subsidized. Al-
though Colbert was sufficiently successful to make France the chief
rival of England and Holland, no permanent class of large bour-
geoisie arose in his country. This was partly due to the glamour of
French court life. Instead of reinvesting their profits in their enter-
prises, successful French manufacturers and merchants tended to
use them to buy landed estates through which they gained entree
into the aristocracy and thus acceptance at court. Those with lesser
wealth purchased offices whose sale netted income to the govern-
ment. Moreover, French manufacturing tended to concentrate on
luxury items, such as laces and objects of art, again no doubt under
the stimulus of court life, in this contrasting with English and
Dutch, which put greater emphasis upon staples for the masses. An-
other factor restricting the development in France of a powerful
class of capitalists that might have opposed the King was the latter's
persecution of the Protestants. The most shocking example of this
was the dispersion and liquidation of the Huguenots accomplished
by the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. It was in this
group that many of the leaders in finance, manufacturing and com-
merce favored by "Colbertism" were to be found. Finally, it is per-
haps fair to say that Colbertism was essentially the work of one man,
its policies imposed from above, so that its lack of support by the
French generally combined with the opposition of foreign countries,
especially the Dutch, spelled its rapid deterioration after Colbert's
death.
Thus, the French form of mercantilism did not enjoy the long-
term success of its English and Dutch prototypes; and by the second
half of the eighteenth century Colbertism was largely discredited in
France. Physiocracy arose as the ideology in opposition to it, suc-
ceeding in the measure that the latter failed. It quite consciously
championed the cause of agriculture. It is interesting to note that
the founder and outstanding leader in the physiocratic movement,
Francois Quesnay, was the son of a small farmer and a farmer him-
self, although also a court physician. He was moreover a devout
Catholic, which may have some bearing on the distinct traces in his
writings of scholastic economic doctrines.
The very term "physiocracy," coined by proponents of the posi-
tion it was used to designate, reveals a fundamental ambiguity per-
meating their thought. It meant "the rule of nature" just as
"democracy" meant "the rule of the people" and "aristocracy," "the
rule of the best." Thus, it had a definitely political slant. The same
was true of "nature," a word which the physiocrats loved to use.
Such a phrase as "the law of nature" had a specifically legal signifi-
cance. It referred to a law instituted by God, based on human na-
ture itself, and thus the same for all peoples and times, as contrasted
with merely human law that differed from group to group. How-
ever, the new science had already affected this concept, as most
strikingly illustrated in the writings of Hobbes, so that "the law of

nature" also on occasion meant the uniformities of human behavior
as a Newtonian scientist might find them, not determined by law
in any legal sense but, contrariwise, furnishing the only solid basis
for any legal law that could hope to rule men successfully. More-
over, there was widely current in popular thought the peculiar mix-
ture of legal and scientific concepts of law epitomized by such a
phrase as "nature's lawgiver," as applied, of course, to the Creator.
This singular amalgam of evaluation of how men ought to behave
with assertion of how they always did, represented by the very name,
"physiocracy," was characteristic of the whole approach of this
school. Let us try to unravel the two threads in their thinking, the
one indicating a continuance of the essentially medieval approach,
the other the influence of Newtonianism.
The physiocrats frequently drew an explicit analogy between the
laws of human society, including men's economic behavior, and
those of physics. Thus, Turgot wrote: ". . . to recognize these spe-
cial and fundamental laws, founded in Nature itself, by which all
the values existing in commerce are balanced against each other,
and settle at last into a fixed value, as bodies left to themselves take
their place according to their specific gravityâthis is to approach the
subject (of commerce) as a philosopher and a statesman." One of
their chief maximsâ"laisser passer, laisser faire," "do not attempt to
fix prices"âwas argued, in part, upon the assumption of a sort
of gravity in commerce. The mercantilists and Colbertists sought a
favorable balance of trade. The assumption was that this could
be achieved and maintained by suitable governmental inducements
and regulations. But, argued the physiocrats, if a single country were
successful in this so that it eventually accumulated all the money
and credit in the world, what could it do with it? No other country
would any longer be able to buy from it; therefore it would no
longer export; consequently its favorable balance of trade would be
destroyed. Furthermore, it would sooner or later buy something
from a foreign country and thereby create an unfavorable balance.
So all governmental regulations would in the end be of no avail;
prices would find their natural level and trade its natural flow.
Thus, by a supposedly scientific sort of reasoning it was concluded
that government should keep its hands off commerce, letting trade
be determined by the forces of free competition.
Quesnay's famous Tableau Iconomique has frequently been cited
as the first truly scientific approach to the problem of the distribu-

tion of income. I am personally inclined to think that it was more
normative than factual, and that in its factual aspects it mixed sev-
eral relations distinguished in later economic thought. In all prob-
ability, however, it did furnish a stimulus to a more genuinely
scientific treatment of several economic problems. The only way
The Economic Table embraces the three classes and their annual wealth and
determines their commerce in the form which follows:
FORMULA OF THE ECONOMIC TABLEâTOTAL PRODUCTION:
5 BILLION
ADVANCES
REVENUE
ADVANCES
Annual, of the For the Landed Of the Sterile Class
Productive Proprietors, the
Class.
Sovereign and
the Tithe Own-
Sums which serve to
pay the revenue and
the interest on the â¢
original advances
Expenditures for an-
nual advances
Total
a billion.
1 billion.'
1 billion-
1 billion >
2 billion
2 billion
5 billion
>../ billion
';.v1 billion
"â¢â¢I billion
Total 2 billions of
which half is retained
by this class for ad-
vances on the follow-
ing year.
At the left, at the head, is the sum of the advances of the productive class which
have been spent the preceding year in order to produce the harvest of the given
year. Below this sum is a line which separates it from the column of sums which
this class receives.
At the right are the sums which the sterile class receives.
In the middle, at the head, is the sum of the revenue, which is divided, to the left
and right, between the two classes where it is spent.
The division of the expenditure is marked by lines of points which start from the
sum of the revenue and go, by an oblique descent, to the one and the other class.
At the end of these lines is the one part and the other of the total which the pro-
prietors spend from their revenue in purchases from each of these classes.
The reciprocal commerce between the two classes is also marked by lines of points
which proceed by an oblique descent from one class to the other where the purchases
are made; and at the end of each line is the sum which the one of the two classes
receives from the other, reciprocally, through the commerce that they carry on
between themselves.
Fig. 26. Quesnay's Economic Table

to summarize it without prejudging the issue of its correct interpre-
tation would seem to be to present it in one of its simplest forms.
This is done in Fig. 26, which also includes brief explanations by
its author.
Let us analyze it first as a factual statement in the attitude of the
new science, for it probably did show some groping in this direction.
On this interpretation, it was an attempt to formulate some law or
set of laws. About what? One answer would be that they were laws
of circulation, stating the number of times money was used for
exchange in a given period, in this instance, a year. There seems
to have been an element of this present in the Tableau, especially
under "expenditures of revenue" where there seems to have been an
attempt to trace money originally paid out by the landowner, for
example, to a manufacturer for luxury items, next to a husbandman
for food, then to a manufacturer for tools, and so on. There ap-
parently was some notion of a law as to a tapering phenomenon in
circulation (unfortunately not indicated in the simple form of the
Tableau given in Fig. 26) such that a given payment engendered a
subsequent payment of a portion of the money involved, and so on.
Possibly the Tableau was intended to suggest that the amount
of manufacturing and commerce in a country was dependent not
merely on the total national income (which Quesnay equated with
agricultural production), but also on the rate of circulation.
It should be clear that such a concept of "circulation," supposing
it vaguely present in Quesnay's mind as indeed it apparently had
been in the thought of several of his mercantilist predecessors, was
of the new, functional type. There was no need to trace individual
coins through actual transactions; the concept only required ob-
servations as to numbers of transactions, amounts of money involved,
and periods of time, from which could be mathematically calculated
the ratio constituting the circulation.
Another answer to our question would be that the laws Quesnay
was trying to formulate were related to the problem of the distribu-
tion of income; that is, the Tableau attempted to state laws of how
the total income of an economic system through a period of time
(the production of economically valuable goods and services during
that period, usually reduced to monetary terms) was allotted to
various groups within the social order involved. This seems un-
doubtedly to have been dimly present as one of the purposes of the
Tableau: witness the apportionment of the total production of a

nation to farmers, landowners and the sterile classes. Apparently
Quesnay even had obscurely in mind some quantitative law as to this
distribution, as revealed by the tendency of the ratio, 2-2-1, to recur
(again, unfortunately, not shown in the summary form of the
Tableau given in Fig. 26). Since the interpretation now under con-
sideration is one that has been frequently given, it might be perti-
nent to assert that Quesnay could not have had clearly in mind the
formulation of a law of distribution, in the new scientific sense of
"law," for he made no attempt to verify his apportionment observa-
tionally, and he apparently did not distinguish it from an analysis
of the cost of production. On the other hand, to the degree to which
he was operating with the modern idea of distribution he was using
a functional concept of the Galilean kind.
Finally, our question could be answered by saying that the
Tableau was an attempt to affirm certain laws of production, in the
economic sense of that term. In most cases of the production of
goods having economic value there is the using up of other goods,
the destruction of exchange value; this is now designated "the cost
of production" and is usually stated in monetary terms. Thus, in
manufacturing there are usually consumed raw materials, labor,
special tools and machinery. These destroyed exchange values are
often called "factors of production." The modern economic concept
of production, then, can be expressed as that of the relations of the
factors of production to one another and to the product, all stated
as exchange values (usually money values). Such a concept is quite
obviously functional; it is a ratio of quantities which is itself to be
calculated, not directly observed. That this idea was somewhat
hazily foreshadowed in the Tableau must, I think, be admitted,
particularly in the notion of "advances" to the sterile classes for food
and the materials to undergo manufacturing and to the farmer for
seed, tools and labor. And the idea seems to have been used to
formulate a constancy in the relations of these factors, that is, to
state in an unclear way a scientific law of production. But once more
the ambiguity of Quesnay's whole undertaking must be emphasized.
If he had definitely conceived his Tableau as formulating such a law
in the strictly scientific sense, he would have seen the need of some
observational verification of it, of some data to bear it out. There
is no indication that he ever felt this; indeed, all signs point in the
opposite directionânamely, toward the view that the Tableau
formulated the ideal, the order of relations that ought to obtain in a

nation's economy and whose relation to actuality was not that of a
set of generalizations of hidden uniformities but of a condemnation
of abuses. There was thus present in it the medieval sort of value
thinking which we have noted characterized the physiocratic position
throughout and to whose further explication we now turn.
A basic concept of the physiocrats was that of the "net product."
This might be interpreted as an anticipation of our idea of "profit."
There could be some validity in such a reading, since the physio-
crats frequently spoke as though the net product were something
left over after the costs had been subtracted from the exchange
value of the product and were absent when there was no such dif-
ference. But this is a very minor consideration and leaves entirely
aside their basic contention that the only production which yielded
a net product was that of agriculture (they sometimes added the
extractive industriesâmining, fishing and hunting). Their argu-
ment was that in agricultural production, but in it alone, nature
blessed man's labors by a natural increase. Besides replacing the
seed grain, the harvest yielded a surplus; the herd not only repro-
duced itself, but grew in number. It was this natural increase in
living things from generation to generation that furnished the net
product. Manufacturing created no such increaseâthe artisan sim-
ply reshaped the material given him. Even more obviously, com-
merce and merchandising created nothing new; they simply facili-
tated the change in ownership in what had already been produced;
there was here no surplus.
As used in this argument it seems to me clear that the "net prod-
uct" of the physiocrats was not even a crude anticipation of our
"profit." One can realize a profit in manufacturing and commerce;
one can frequently fail to do so in agriculture even with the best
of crops (in the sense of natural increase). Indeed, I would go so
far as to say that the "net product," as used in the argument just
summarized, was not an economic concept at all: it was a concept of
physical production. An increase in the economic value of goods
can be produced by transporting them, storing them or working
them up into new products; on the other hand, no surplus in eco-
nomic value need be produced through the kind of increase exem-
plified by biological reproduction. Moreover, even as a physical
process, as judged by modern science with its law of the conservation
of matter, the propagation of living beings presents no peculiarity in
this respect. Biological reproduction does not increase the substance

in the world; it just reshuffles it in a fashion which is in principle no
different from that found in the reshapings of manufacture or the
translocations of commerce.
The truth of the matter is that we cannot understand what the
physiocrats meant by "net product" if we try to treat it as though it
were basically a scientific concept: it was fundamentally Aristotelian.
Direct observation showed that vegetable and animal life tended to
increase through reproduction; whereas in merchandising, transpor-
tation and even manufacturing, there was no such increase. In fact,
the tie with Aristotle was even closer. He had held that in repro-
duction like caused like, the young were always of the same species
as their parents. Hence, even if it be granted that when reproduc-
tion occurred there was no increase in the materials involved, still
there was an increase in the species, that is, in the number of indi-
viduals having the same formâa kind of multiplication, Aristotle
thought, not duplicated in inanimate nature. This was the sort of
thinking behind the idea of the net product.
This reference to Aristotle is not meant to point up a mere
analogy. In Quesnay particularly there seems to have been quite
definitely present a tendency to revert to Thomistic-Aristotelian
economics. Quesnay accepted the basic Aristotelian principle that
the function of economics was the practical one of management (al-
though with him it was management of a nation rather than of a
household as his predecessor had held), and hence that its basic con-
cept was that of wealthâits procurement and expenditure. Thus,
it was important to be clear as to where a nation's wealth truly lay
ânot in money, credits or commerce (as the mercantilists, in revolt
from scholastic thought, claimed) but in goods for consumption.
Money was a sort of artificial wealth, a means and a yardstick, but
not the real thing to be sought for its own sake. Wholly in the spirit
of Aristotle and St. Thomas, Quesnay wrote:
Money has no other function than to facilitate exchange of com-
modities by serving as the intermediate yardstick between sales and
purchases. People who think that money is real wealth haven't stopped
to consider that it cannot be immediately enjoyed; it is not itself con-
sumable, satisfying any natural desire.
Thus, people who devoted themselves to the amassing of money
fortunes had made a fundamental mistake. Exchange for profit was
wrong. It produced no increase in real wealth. The merchant who

sought to profit from the mere exchange of goods lived essentially by
robbing others.
There was, however, a form of exchange that was justifiableâ
namely, that of goods having equal value and undertaken in order
to get appropriate articles into the hands of the ultimate consumer.
As Quesnay put it: "Commerce (ideally) is simply an exchange of
value for equal value and there is neither loss nor gain between the
contracting parties." This, of course, harked back to the notion of
the "just price"; and something of this idea underlay the concept of
the net product and the whole Tableau dconomique, both of which
presupposed a static society where the status of every class was main-
tained by a fixed distribution of income. There was a difference.
For the physiocrat, there was no need to maintain a just price by
regulations enforced by the church, the state or the guild: free trade
would allow nature to maintain it. Nature was itself just; all inequi-
ties came from human interference. And this seems to have carried
another difference with it (although here we may be reading some-
thing into the physiocrats, who did not explicitly discuss wages).
Whereas the just price of the scholastics was intended in part to
protect the laborer, according to his status, the analogous notion of
the physiocrats apparently only guaranteed him subsistence. Farm
labor and the work of artisans was merely a cost item requiring re-
placement in each new year's operations. Consistency would have
required the physiocrats to say that wages, like other prices, were to
be justly determined by the free competition of workers.
This tendency to revive medieval economic thought was, it need
hardly be said, reactionary in its socio-historical significance. It at-
tempted to reverse the direction of economic evolution, which was
toward an increase in manufacturing and large-scale trade over long
distances. The concept of the net product allowed Quesnay to
characterize bankers, merchants, manufacturers, shippers and the
laborers they used as "sterile" economically. They were a luxury a
nation could afford only if kept to a minimum. Agriculture, on the
other hand, was to be encouraged, since "the origin, the principle
of all expenditure is the fertility of the land." Quesnay did not ad-
vocate positive governmental aids to agriculture but simply the
abolition of those pernicious governmental interferences with nature
associated with Colbertism. Among these was excessive taxation of
the farmer. Indeed, Quesnay contended, taxes should not be levied
against the farmer at all but against the landowner, since the latter
was to get the whole of the net product. Any taxation of the farmer
implied curtailment of expenditures for agricultural production with
a consequent decrease in that production and thus in the net prod-
uct, that is, in the nation's real income.
This points up an anomaly. Why did Quesnay assign the whole
net product to the landowners and to those classes immediately de-
pendent upon them, including all the officers of the government?
Why did he not, for example, allot it to the farmers, whom he de-
scribed as the "productive class"? If any class is "sterile," isn't it
that of the landowners? Quesnay's actual answer reverted to the
legal concept of a law of nature and of the natural rights it entailed,
in a form this took in the writings of John Locke. Originally, as it
came from the Creator, land was common property. Whence arose
private ownership? Men were born, in respect to legal rights, free
and equal. Every man had entire rights to his own body, its freedom
of action and its labor and thus, also, to the products of its labor.
By clearing and cultivating the land, the individual mixed his labor
with it: thus he acquired an individual right to it. This he could
bequeath to his children. Thus arose the landowner's rights to his
land and to its net product.
This argument was obviously exceedingly weak. I omit entirely all
criticism of its theoretical structure and confine myself to pointing
out one rather damaging consideration of its application. Very few
French landowners of the eighteenth century could, by any stretch of
the imagination, be said to have inherited their estates from the
original improvers of the land. Most of them had bought their lands
from the proceeds of precisely those enterprisesâbanking, trading,
manufacturingâwhich were sterile on our author's account. Theirs
was a purchased nobility sought for its prestige value.
This very criticism of Quesnay's argument, however, may throw
some light on the social and psychological causes of his position.
Quesnay, the court physician, could not free himself from the
glamour of the French court, with its retention of the symbols,
though not the substance, of the medieval status of the feudal no-
bility. He was not at heart one of les philosophes, in fundamental
opposition to the ancient regime. He saw the suffering of the farmer
and realized that it was due to governmental policies; but it seemed
sufficient to free him from the stranglehold of taxation on the one
hand and to eliminate governmental favoritism to his rivals in the
economic system on the other. By and large, then, Quesnay was not
the herald of a new order of laissez-faire capitalism, which would
have required a very complete overthrow of the social order of his
time; he was a reactionary who feared just such a change, but sub-
stituted for medieval regulation the idea of nature's soundness in
preserving a fixed social hierarchy if left to its own way of working.
The Classical School
Adam Smith was in complete agreement with the physiocrats in
opposing mercantilist policies and in advocating free trade and
governmental laissez faire in place of them. This apparently was due
to a similar sympathy with agricultural interests. It ought therefore
to strike us as surprising that by the time of Ricardo Smith's theo-
retical ideas and even his practical policies in political economy had
been quite explicitly adopted by his disciples as weapons to be used
in fighting for the cause of the industrialist as against not only that
of the laborer but also that of the landowner. How could this have
come about?
By the time that Smith wrote his famous Wealth of Nations,
England had experienced the "agricultural revolution." There was
nothing comparable to it in Quesnay's France, not merely because
Quesnay wrote earlier, but because conditions in the two countries
remained quite different. In France, bourgeois life and objectives
had never really taken root. The new wealth that had been invested
in the purchase of land estates did not affect the methods of farming,
for these estates were not treated by their new owners as businesses
but rather as insignia of nobility. Technologically French agricul-
ture had shown little improvement since the Middle Ages. This con-
dition lasted until the French Revolution, when the combination of
poor farming methods and almost intolerable taxes, tithes and rents
led tenant farmers and farm laborers to side largely with the revolu-
tionists. The success of the Revolution resulted in a settling of
ownership upon those actually on the soil; France became a nation
of small farmers who, by and large, retained the older, more primi-
tive methods they had inherited and that were well adapted to their
small plots of ground.
The situation in English agriculture was quite different. The suc-
cess of English commerce had brought a flow of "treasure" into the
hands of British merchants and manufacturers, many of whom used
it, as did their French counterparts, to buy country estates. But
there was a great difference in their handling of the land. Whatever

the causeâbe it the absence of the glamour of the French court, the
influence of religious toleration and thus the presence of Calvinist
ideals of industry and thrift, a greater impact of the experimentalism
of the new science or simply the earlier and more hardy flowering of
the commercial revolutionâthis new landed gentry retained and
applied to agriculture the characteristic attitudes and objectives of
commercial enterprise. Even before the eighteenth century litera-
ture had appeared purporting to show how agriculture could be
made profitable by the use of improved methods: witness such titles
as "A Way to Get Wealth," "Divers Rare and Profitable Inventions"
and "The Profitable Intelligencer." The eighteenth century saw the
successful application of these ideas. By its middle the fashion had
become current that gentlemen farmers set up model farms and in-
dulge in agricultural experiments. Two of the leaders.in this move-
ment were Jethro Tull, a man of property, and Viscount Charles
Townshend, a onetime prime minister. Each had to fight conserva-
tism of methods on the part of his tenants and laborers but was suc-
cessful in gaining disciples among fellow landowners. Neither was a
scientist; nor was there, in the true sense, any scientific farming in
the eighteenth centuryâthe chemical and biological sciences had
not sufficiently matured (indeed, the agricultural revolution was
itself the precondition of the scientific revolution in biology in the
succeeding century). Each however was a practical experimenter,
applying to agriculture the attitudes and methods that had already
"paid off" in shipping, warfare, merchandising, finance and business
generally.
The great advance to be credited to Tull was an increase in soil
cultivation, letting air and moisture get more effectively below the
surface of the ground and more fully preventing the growth of
weeds. To this end he ploughed the ground more thoroughly and
drilled seeds in rows so that cultivating could be carried on after the
crops had started growing. He invented a horse-drawn drill and a
horse-powered hoe or cultivator.
Viscount Townshend's chief innovation was a new system of crop
rotation that eliminated the wasteful medieval procedure of requir-
ing the land to lie fallow every second or third year. This was made
possible through his discovery that root crops and clover, if alter-
nated with grains, allowed the land to recover. These new crops
permitted larger numbers of livestock to be fed through the winter.
This was not without its effect upon animal husbandry. On the old
method, animal feeding was almost entirely in the form of grazing.
From medieval times this was largely done on the commonsâlands
supposedly unfit for cultivation upon which tenants and laborers as
well as landlords had grazing rights. Thus, effective breeding was as
impossible as it was unthought of. But with more fodder available
the segregation of herds and consequently breeding for certain com-
mercially desirable features became possible. Robert Bakewell was
important in this development. He kept genealogical tables and
selected for breeding those animals that had the characteristics he
wanted.
The new methods of farming had important social consequences.
They effectively ended feudal rural organization, which had been
on the way out for some time. Breeding required the separation of
herds and flocks; it thus encouraged the enclosing, as private grazing
fields, of the commons. Horse-powered cultivation of the soil and
row seeding demanded larger fields than the traditional manorial
strips. In general, production for profit called for larger working
units and thus for consolidation of traditionally small holdings. The
landowners were thus led to adopt various procedures to take over
the traditional rights to the soil of villeins and freeholdersâbuying
them outright, demanding larger inheritance fees for them, dispos-
sessing their holders by legal means. Indicative of the trend is the
fact that parliament, under the control of the landowners, in the
period between 1700 and 1760 averaged about four special enclosure
acts a year, allowing common pasturage to be enclosed for private
usage; by 1792 the average had mounted to forty per annum. The
result was that the feudal organization of rural society, involving a
complicated hierarchy where all had rights, however meager, to pro-
ductive soil in return for recognized duties, was replaced by a three-
class system whose basis was monetary: there was the owner who
viewed his land as a capital investment which was to net him as much
as possible; there was the tenant farmer who paid rent to the owner
and wages to his laborers, seeking to gain profit for himself above
these costs from the sale of the produce; and there was the completely
dispossessed farm worker who had to subsist on the sale of his labor.
This last class, during unseasonal periods and to some extent at all
times in its weaker and less industrious members, was completely
unemployed and thus without means of support. This phenomenon
gave rise to governmental measures of poor-reliefâan institution
receiving a good deal of attention from later members of the classi-

cal school. This new class structure furnished the social basis of the
threefold analysis of the determinants of price by Adam Smith.
These were rents, profits and wages. Such an analysis of price was
quite different from Quesnay's "net product," not merely in theo-
retical detail but in total orientation. Although the outlook was
still agricultural, the agriculture was that of emerging capitalistic
enterpriseânot of a refurbished medieval feudalism.
With this social background we are, I believe, in a suitable posi-
tion to understand Smith's ideas. Like Quesnay's, they show an
admixture of medieval value thinking with the influence of the new
physics of Galileo and Newton. But the ratio is different: the
Newtonianism is in far larger proportion. Throughout The Wealth
of Nations there are expressions making it unquestionable that
Smith was consciously trying to build a science of economics on the
model of Newtonian mechanics. In particular, one of his major
objectives was to formulate a law of prices which would bind many
economic phenomena together in one uniformity similar to the law
of gravity in the realm of motions. To do this, he needed, as he was
aware, a concept of the new scientific type.
In the concept of "price" Smith had an idea admirably suited to
this purpose. It was built on a distinction, however, that in a vague
way was present in the thought of Aristotle and the scholastics: that
between "use value" and "exchange value." Air and water, Smith
pointed out, had enormous use valueâthey satisfied basic desires;
but they had little or no exchange valueâthey were incapable of
purchasing other goods, the reason lying in their abundance and
availability. Diamonds, on the other hand, had little or no use
value (Smith was a Scotch philosopher, not a French courtier), but
a great deal of exchange value.
That Smith made exchange value the cornerstone of his system, as
contrasted with the stress put upon use value in scholastic economics,
shows a basic shift away from Aristotelian and toward Galilean think-
ing. Use value was something directly experienceable, exchange
value not. As power to purchase other goods, the exchange value of
anything was a relation not between it and some other thing for
which it was actually exchanged, but between it and any other good
for which it could be exchanged. Such an idea already presupposed
a law, although no doubt Smith, if he had thought of it, would have
called it an "axiom" and perhaps treated it as involved in the very
definition of "price": things that would exchange for each other

equally would exchange in a common ratio for any third thing, that
is, as far as exchanges were concerned they could be substituted for
one another. The emergence of a money economy and the impor-
tance placed upon calculation of balances of trade during the
mercantilist regime were factors leading from the rather imprecise
idea of exchange value of the scholastics to the quantitative notion
of price in Adam Smith.
In order to state a universal law of prices comparable to Newton's
law of gravity, Smith felt that it was necessary to find something con-
stant by which prices could be reliably measured. To point up this
need he used the analogy of spatial measurement: no laws involving
distances could be precisely formulated if the unit of measurement
of space were allowed to fluctuate (as it did in the case of hand
breadths or foot lengths). The yardstick Smith sought could not be
found in any commodity, for example, in a bushel of wheat, for the
prices of commodities obviously changed. It might be thought that
it could be found in money, but this would be an error arising from
the fact that money was the common medium of exchange so that
money values were regularly used to express and calculate exchange
values. That money itself fluctuated in value could be observed if
one noted that upon the opening of new gold mines, the exchange
value of money decreased (unfortunately Smith would have much
less trouble were he to try to prove his point to us living, or trying
to make a living, in a credit-currency economy).
The money value of anything was, then, only its "nominal" price;
its "real" priceâthat is, its price stated in terms of an unchanging
standardâmight be quite different. Where could one find such a
standard? Smith answered that it lay in the cost in toil or trouble of
acquiring the thing, in the labor of making it or transporting it or
in otherwise transforming it from its natural condition to one more
suitable for human consumption. It was this labor, Smith argued,
that constituted the original and uneliminable cost of anything.
Moreover, to each man at all times an equal expenditure of his labor
involved an equal cost to himself, an equal trouble which he would
equally desire to forego. Smith recognized that goods that had cost
the same amount of labor to produce might fluctuate in their ex-
change ratios to each other or to other goods, but then it would be
they which changed in value, not the labor that went into them;
indeed, without a constancy in the latter it would be meaningless
to speak of a fluctuation in the former.

Unhappily we must note that in this concept of "labor value"
Smith had left the realm of prices and exchange values entirely and
thus had surreptitiously forsaken Newton for Aristotle. We must
not permit his use of the word "cost," in this connection, to mislead
us. Today, "cost" is used to refer to a priceâthe price of the "fac-
tors of production," so that "labor cost" means a price paid, in the
form of wages, for one of these factors. Smith, however, distin-
guished, though not too consistently, the price of labor or wages from
the labor of production itself, which he called "labor value" and
which he claimed furnished the constant standard he needed. It
seems, then, undeniable that Smith's proposed standard was not an
exchange value at all but a use value, although a negative one. It
was simply the undesirability to the laborer of his expenditure of
effort in making something available for consumption. We may
mark this distinction by speaking of the "labor disutility" of any-
thing in contrast with its "labor price," the former referring to the
labor that went into it, the latter to the labor it could purchase. (See
Fig. 27.)
Labor disutility Labor price
y man-hours
x man-hours
Fig. 27. Labor Value of a Shoe
To see that these are quite different, we need in the first place
only imagine a little world in which there are no markets in any
senseâsay, a fabulous communism of some South Sea island, or the
lonely society of a Robinson Crusoe without his man Friday, where,
that is, since there is no private ownership of anything at all, no ex-
change of goods or services is possible. In this fictitious world many
things could have labor value in the sense of labor disutility, but
nothing would have a labor price. In the second place, leaving
fancy for fact, we can observe without much difficulty that in most
societies the two valuesânamely, the labor disutility of a thing and
its labor priceâdo not stand in a constant relation. After the last
war, for example, war surpluses suddenly deteriorated in the amount
of labor they could purchase, but obviously they remained un-
changed in the quantity of labor involved in their production.
As previously indicated, Smith did, at times at least, distinguish
his "labor value" from what we have called "labor price," and he
noted the fact that these do not always stand in the same ratio. His
position seems to have been that labor as exchangeable, as a price
on the market, did vary in value; it was only the labor required for
the production of anything that was constant and thus serviceable as
a yardstick. This does not mean that he denied or even overlooked
increases in labor efficiency, as brought about by improved methods
of production. But in such cases, he said, the real price of the
product went down. Thus, it would seem that for our author an
hour's labor was constant neither in what it would exchange for nor
in what it could physically produce for exchange, but only in its
ability to determine real prices. Our criticism is not that labor value
so conceived was not a quantitative idea; indeed, nothing seems
easier to quantify in the region of human behavior than the labor
required for the production of anything. Our difficulty lies in the
fact that Smith made it a measure of price; but price was exchange
value (quantified), whereas his labor value was not. Thus, he had
the "real" exchange value, something not found in exchanges at all,
something constant behind, and quite apart from, all markets and
their fluctuations, something consequently that, had he been clear-
sighted enough, he should have seen could not be an element in the
uniformity of exchange phenomena which it was his ambition to
state.
It was, then, in terms of price that Adam Smith formulated his
grand law of economicsâthe law since come to be known as that of
"supply and demand," although with him the factor of natural
scarcity, that is, scarcity other than that due to the disutility of labor,
was not sufficiently recognized. Smith was quite clear on the im-
portance of "demand," by which he did not mean merely desire, but
desire backed by the ability and willingness to pay, which he some-
times called "effective demand." He realized that this was relative
to price: a lower price would increase the effective demand; a higher
would decrease it. It is, I trust, unnecessary to point out that in
"effective demand" Smith did have an exchange concept: its values
could be determined by reference to quantities of goods purchased
at various prices.
In Smith's formulation, all prices tend to gravitate toward their
natural level. The "market price" was the actual price on the
market. It fluctuated around the "natural price," said Smith, but
never deviated too far from the latter, since any such deviation set
up forces that brought it back toward equilibrium, just as a pendu-
lum would always tend to return to its natural gravitational position.
If the market price were above the natural, more goods would flow
to the market, competing with those already there and bringing the
market price down; contrariwise, if it were below, the opposite
tendency would set in. Smith's assumption (his economic "axiom"
if you please) was that each participant in an exchange was selfishly
motivated, the buyer to buy at the lowest price, the seller to sell at
the highest. Suppose the market price of wheat were above the
natural. Then some landlords would see an opportunity to increase
their rents, some farmers to swell their profits and some workers
to raise their wages by shifting into the production of wheat. The
contrary effect would occur when the market price fell below the
natural.
Just what was this "natural price" toward which market prices in-
clined? Smith defined it as that which exactly covered the rents,
profits and wages that had been required for the production and
transportation of the commodity when these components were fig-
ured at their "natural rates." By "natural rate" he apparently meant
the average rate in the society concerned. In his thinking this in-
volved a noneconomic considerationâthe determination of prices
by custom and other sociological causes. On the other hand, there
was also an economic element in itâthe assumption that rates of
rents, profits and wages each tended to equalize throughout all the
enterprises serving the same market and to stand in a constant ratio
to the other two.
That market prices gravitated toward natural was to be under-
stood ultimately in terms not of nominal (or money) but of real (or
labor) prices, since only the latter were figured in terms of a con-
stant standard. This apparently raised a difficulty. Suppose by "real
price" Smith had meant labor price or wages. Then the natural
price would have been measured by wages alone, but he had already
defined it as covering rents and profits as well as wages. Since in
different societies serving different markets these rates might differ
in their relations to one another, Smith would have been involved
in a contradiction: real prices were measured by wages alone; they

were not measured by wages alone but required also the inclusion
of rents and profits. Insofar, however, as "labor value" meant for
him labor disutility, not labor price, this difficulty did not arise.
Indeed, it was precisely in connection with this supposed difficulty
that Smith was clearest in his distinction between the two and in his
assumption of a law relating them. The labor of production (labor
disutility) supplied commodities that would purchase more labor
(labor price) than went into them. This differenceâbetween the
man-hours required for production and those the product could
purchaseâallowed for rents and profits. Smith's indebtedness here
to Quesnay's "net product" should be apparent, although the idea of
a source of natural surplus was shifted from land to labor (and thus,
the expectant reader will observe, the road had been cleared for
Marx's "surplus value" and "the exploitation of the worker").
Actually Smith made no contribution to a labor-value analysis of
rent: for this we must await Malthus and Ricardo. Concerning
profits, he explicitly denied that they were to be treated as wages (for
the labor of management). So far as there was such labor in the
undertaking, it was that of clerks and should be explicitly assigned
to "wages." Moreover, profits were proportional to the amount of
"stock" involved in the enterprise, not to the amount of labor in its
management. This reference to "stock" indicates Smith's positive
analysis of profits. He distinguished stock from land and its improve-
ments. He spoke of the former as "circulating capital" because it
was used up each year in the producing of a new harvest; of the
latter, as "fixed capital" because it was of relatively permanent use.
Apparently by "stock" he referred to consumer commodities, such as
food and clothing, which some farmer had produced beyond his own
immediate needs and could thus use for the purchase of labor. It
was on this use that the farmer could demand a profit, since without
it he would not have thus disposed of his stock. But wherein lay the
labor value in this? Unquestionably there was labor in the produc-
tion of the stock itself. But how did this produce more value, so that
besides replacing itself it created a profit for the farmer?
There appear to have been rudiments of two later theories in
Smith's thought on this point. One rested on the idea of the dis-
utility of waiting: it had been a disutility to produce the stock; it
was an additional disutility to have to postpone the satisfaction
without which the original disutility would never have been under-
gone. This theory was in harmony with Smith's contention that

profits should be in proportion to the amount of stock invested. The
other was that the stock was "hazarded in the adventure," that there
was a danger or "risk" that it might not reproduce itself and thus
that the original labor might, in whole or part, be lost. It should
be observed that neither of these key factorsâthat of waiting for
satisfaction and that of risk of losing itâwas strictly a labor disutility
(of course it was not a labor priceâit just was not a labor anything).
However, we shall discuss at a later time and in their more explicit
statement the theories in which these ideas play lead roles. It need
only be pointed out here that they were to some extent at least
bound up with the quite unscientific moral problem of the justifica-
tion of profits, as, in fact, especially with Marx, the whole labor-
value theory was to become. In truth, we have so far given a false
perspective by abstracting the more scientific elements in Smith's
thought. We must hasten to correct this one-sidedness.
As already hinted, there lay at the very heart of Smith's New-
tonianism an Aristotelian element, showing that he had not freed
himself from commonsensical value thinking. Why did he accept
labor valueâthat is, the disutility of laborâas the undeviating
standard of price, when it should have been obvious that it was not
constant in what it would buy nor in what it would produce and
that, indeed, it did not enter exchange transactions at all?
The correct answer, I feel convinced, is that he thought that this
was right, that the labor value of anything gave the price it ought to
command. I grant that I am doing some "reading between the lines"
in this interpretation; yet I submit that some supplementation is
necessary to make sense of Smith, and that the flavor of value think-
ing is actually in his writing, as witness the following lines, chosen
somewhat at random:
The real price of anything, what every thing really costs to the man
who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. ...
What is bought with money or with goods is purchased by labour, as
much as what we acquire by the toil of our own body. . . . Equal
quantities of labour, at all times and places, may be said to be of equal
value to the labourer. . . . Labour alone, therefore, never varying in
its own value is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the
value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated.
Such statements must be put back in their eighteenth-century con-
text, when the concept of natural rights had become part of the very
air that any liberal thinker breathed. As to economic rights, John
Locke's formulation, with which we have made brief acquaintance
in dealing with Quesnay, had become classic. Men had natural
rights to private property. These went back not to land and other
resources in their natural condition, but to the right each man had to
his own body and thus to the fruits of his own labors. The idea of
exchange value presupposed that of ownership; it was thus natural
that Smith made the tacit transition from "ownership was justified
by the expenditure of effort" to "exchange-value was properly de-
termined by the amount of effort expended."
Moreover, the tendency to look for the yardstick of real price
outside the realm of exchange value showed a similarity to Aris-
totelian thought that could hardly have been merely accidental:
Smith's labor disutility was the reverse view of the position that
the real worth of anything lay not in other things it would buy
but in the satisfaction it itself offered, this now being stated in
terms of the dissatisfaction one would undergo to produce it.
This was not unrelated to Smith's return to the scholastic conten-
tion that real wealth lay not in money or in commerce but in con-
sumable goods. The very title of his major contribution to economic
thought marked this counterrevolutionary character of his position,
in which he shared with Quesnay the attempt to revive scholasticism
in opposition to the reigning mercantilism. There was, of course,
a difference: Smith's thinking was more dynamic than that of the
scholastics, so that he thought of wealth not so much in terms of
consumable goods as of their acquisition in time, and he realized
that populations were not static. Consequently, his definition of
the wealth of a nation made it the ratio of the nation's annual pro-
duction to its population. But this was essentially the Aristotelian
view; and it was a normative, not a factual, idea. It was used to
point out what ought to be a nation's economic objective, on the
assumption that the wealthier the nation the better. The mercantil-
ists were wrong in supposing that the wealth of a nation was a matter
of the size of its favorable balance of trade not because of any mis-
taken description of fact, but because of a false evaluation of what
was truly good.
Along with "wealth" must be placed Smith's concept of the
"sterile classes" as being a valuational, not a factual, idea at heart.
Here, too, he shared with Quesnay a tendency to return to medieval
value thinking: classes were called "sterile" in order to condemn

them for not contributing to the real wealth of the nation. It is true
that Smith was not quite as narrow-minded as his predecessor in this
matterâhe did not condemn manufacturers nor even merchants by
this designationâ, yet his attitude toward those he did so denomi-
nateâthe professional classes, personal servants, entertainers and
people of their ilkâwas basically the same.
Another related idea of his was that of a "labor fund." He
thought of the wealth of a nation as something the nation must
purchase; this purchase was made ultimately not by money but by
the labor that produced the flow of goods constituting the nation's
wealth. Goods purchased abroad were paid for, in the last analysis,
by other goods produced at home and thus by the labor that went
into the latter. So, by definition, it behooved a nation to maintain
a large labor fund.
It would be indeed a work of supererogation to point out how
directly useful for his practical purpose of overthrowing mercantilist
policies these Aristotelian-type concepts of Smith were. Since the
wealth of a nation lay not in money but in the acquisition of con-
sumable goods, the flow of treasure into a country should be replaced
by a flow of consumable goods as the nation's objective. Hence,
bounties on exports, duties and other restrictions on imports and
various other governmental regulations of trade under the mercan-
tilist program should be eliminated in favor of free trade.
Destined to become far more effective as propaganda devices,
especially when the classical school gave its practical allegiance to
the interests of the industrialists, were those ideas of Smith that
reveal primarily the scientific strand in his thinking. It should be
noted that his law of supply and demand really presupposed free
competition among buyers (to select the one who would pay the
highest price) and sellers (to bring out the one who would sell at
the lowest). Such competition required a governmental policy of
laissez faire. On the whole, perhaps, Smith's major tendency was to
argue for laissez faire on the basis of its beneficial consequences.
The individual was the best judge of what was to his own interest.
The selfish interests of the majority, under the mechanism of the
free market, coincided with the best interests of the country. Hence,
government should keep its hands off the working of the market.
This argument suggests that Smith thought that governments could
interfere with the law of supply and demand; on occasion, however,
there seems to have been present the idea that government could
[3] Scientif1c Revolution and the Age of Reason 173
only slow up the functioning of this law, not overthrow it entirely.
But even this was a strange idea and hardly avoided the anomaly of
condemning an interference with a scientific law, which, as suggested
earlier, surely must have sprung from a confusion of "law" in its
normative and its factual senses.
The shift in class loyalties which the classical school displayed is
easily accounted for. In 1776, the year of publication of Smith's
Wealth of Nations, the agricultural revolution was at full intensity,
but the industrial revolution was only in its early stages. By 1817,
the year of publication of Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy,
the agricultural revolution was weakening, whereas the industrial
revolution was in ascendancy. We may, somewhat arbitrarily, date
the beginnings of the latter around the middle of the eighteenth
century. It exhibited a phenomenon similar to that marking the
commercial revolution, namely, the invention and rapid perfecting
of new instruments and contrivances, in this case, however, devoted
to increased productivity in the manufacture of goods as contrasted
with reliability in navigation and efficiency in transportation. Simi-
lar causes may be supposed to have produced it.
Fundamental, of course, was the spread of the experimental atti-
tude which was fostered by the capitalistic desire to keep labor costs
down and production up. The success of the new science also helpe-d
to create a social atmosphere favorable to this experimentalism.
Indeed, it should not be forgotten that part of the effort of the
national scientific societies was devoted to inquiry and experimenta-
tion in the area of industrial production: the French Academy of
Sciences published twenty volumes of proceedings between 1761 and
1781 given over to the useful arts and crafts; in England there was
founded in 1754 "The Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manu-
factures, and Commerce in Great Britain" which offered prizes for
various improvements and inventions in industrial production. In
the early stages of the industrial revolution, however, the new con-
trivances were for the most part inventions by men directly con-
nected with the manufacturing processes themselves. Once an im-
provement was instituted it stimulated effort to bring about others
to keep the whole system of production coordinated. A case in point
can be found in the manufacture of cloth. At an early stage there
was great pressure to increase efficiency in the spinning of yarn, since
one weaver could handle the yarn produced by four to ten spinners.
With the invention of the spinning jenny, however, there came to be

an abundance of yarn, and pressure was directed toward increased
efficiency in weaving. This led to the invention of power looms
which would not break the thread. It was not until the nineteenth
century, when the industrial revolution was well under way, that
there occurred a widespread and systematic appeal to scientists to
apply their new knowledge and method to industrial problems.
When this did occur, however, it gave a tremendous impetus both to
science and to industry.
Living in the twentieth century, we have become accustomed to
inventions due to applied science which have put entirely new
products on the market and have created wholly new demandsâ
witness the cinema, radio and television. This phenomenon was not
characteristic of the industrial revolution proper. It saw only im-
provements in the production of goods already on the market. These
were of two sorts. On the one hand, there were machines that al-
lowed skilled labor to be replaced by unskilled and usually also
multiplied the amount produced per worker. Instances of this were
the spinning jenny, which was essentially a multiple spinning wheel
allowing a single operator to work from eight to eighty spindles,
and the stocking frame, which removed knitting from hand work to
the operation of a machine comprising a whole series of knitting
needles. On the other hand, there were machines that produced
power for the operation of the first sort of machines. Instances of
this were the improvements in water wheels brought about by the
studies of John Smeaton and the invention of the atmospheric engine
by Thomas Newcomen and its development into a double-power-
stroke steam engine by James Watt. Incidentally, in the evolution
of machines of this latter type we can already make out the influence
of science: Smeaton was himself a scientist reporting his experiments
to the Royal Society, and Newcomen and Watt had the advice of
scientists, the former, of Robert Hooke, the latter, of Joseph Black.
The application of power to the new machinery of production had
tremendous social repercussions. Consider again the manufacture
of cloth. Under the domestic system workers were hired but were
allowed to work in their own homes, spread about as they might be.
The application of power, in the spinning "mule" and the power
loom, changed this. The water wheel had to be set up where there
was water power; the steam engine, naturally, was installed near
coal mines. Thus, there developed the factory system and there arose
the factory town, especially in the English midlands, where large

numbers of workers were herded together in proximity to the ma-
chines they tended. The new machines allowed semiskilled or un-
skilled labor to replace skilled; power allowed women and children
to be utilized in the labor force.
Thus, by the early nineteenth century there were two large groups
of workers completely without security in their means of livelihood
âthe farm laborer, produced by the agricultural revolution, depend-
ent upon wages and subject to seasonal loss of income and complete
loss of it in bad years; and the factory worker, produced by the indus-
trial revolution, likewise wholly dependent upon wages and subject
to the loss thereof whenever low prices for products or an increase in
the size of the labor-force occurred. Such social conditions were con-
ducive to the quiet shelving of the Aristotelian idea retained by
Smith that the wealth of a nation lies in the ratio of its production
of consumer goods to its consuming public, to the treatment of labor
as just a cost item, to the candid statement of Ricardo's "iron law of
wages," whereby the natural price of labor was bare subsistence.
However, if we feel a sense of moral revulsionâas indeed the present
author doesâagainst the "dismal science" of political economy that
was bred in these diseased waters, it may be well to remind ourselves
that it was out of this immoralism that a truly scientific, a value-free
(not a value-denying) economics was destined to arise.
England, it should be added, did not allow widespread starvation
of her poor without any attempt at alleviation. The nineteenth
century carried over two forms of poor-relief from the eighteenth.
One was the workhouseâthe usual form in the city. It was based
on a contract whereby an overseer was paid so much per head by the
government for inmates. In good capitalistic fashion this manager
tried to save as much as possible on his costs and to get as much work
out of his inmates as he could in order to keep his profits up. The
other was the Speenhamland policy of out-reliefâthe usual form in
rural districts. By it, a poor man's wages were made up to a certain
low minimum, depending upon the size of his family. Various set-
tlement acts prevented a man on relief from seeking work in other
parishes. It was of advantage to the farmer in keeping farm wages
down; it also effectively pauperized the farm worker. Both forms of
relief were targets for objections by rate payers, who saw themselves
directly taxed to support others in at least partial idleness.
With these social conditions in mind, we should not find it
difficult to understand most of the changes which Ricardo introduced

into the political economy of Smith, especially in their practical
bearings. In particular, it is easy to see why there should have been
a more callous attitude toward labor, and a shifting of allegiance
from the interests of the agriculturalists to those of the industrialists.
But we might be led to wonder how the same ideology could be
used, and even the same political policy advocatedâthat of laissez
faireâfor such a divergent purpose. We can, of course, point out
that the landowner whom Smith favored was perhaps almost as truly
a modern capitalist as was the industrialist who was the object of
Ricardo's loyalty. But this does not go far. It is to be remembered
that traditional mercantilism generally supported commercial and
manufacturing interests: Why then was there a shift from the pa-
ternalism of that school to Smith's laissez-faire policy?
First, rather paradoxically the very success of mercantilism in
England had made its abolition possible and beneficial. Through
it England had come to commercial and colonial leadership. Add to
this the earlier occurrence in England than elsewhere of the indus-
trial revolution and it can be seen why she could undersell other
countries on foreign, as well as domestic, markets. Mercantilist poli-
cies of governmental aid and protection were no longer necessary:
in fact, by engendering ill-will and the demand for reprisals by other
nations, they were something of a liability.
Second, by the early nineteenth century English landlords, despite
the arguments of Adam Smith, had largely adopted mercantilist
policies in their own interests. To some extent they had benefited
from earlier corn laws prohibiting imports of grains or putting high
duties on them whenever domestic prices fell too low, and granting
bounties on exports; but it was in the corn law of 1815 that their
advantage came most clearly into focus. The landlords, probably
quite correctly from their standpoint, feared an influx of grains from
Europe at the close of the Napoleonic wars. This was to be expected
not merely from the changed condition of Europe as it passed from
war to peace, but from the fact that England had grown in popula-
tion, thus keeping the prices of food excessively high during the
period when it could not be imported from Europe. The 1815 law,
passed by a Parliament still controlled by the landlords, virtually
prohibited the importation of grain. Although this did not prevent
losses to the landlords and farmers, it did appreciably add to the
miseries of the poor, especially during a series of years of bad crops.

Opposition came, however, not from paupers, the unemployed or
even employed workersâall of whom were as yet unorganized, un-
represented and socially inarticulateâbut from the rising industrial-
ists, who needed a large urban working class who could be fed at low
cost. Free trade in foodstuffs was decidedly in their interest; they
needed no protection for their own products; they consequently felt
favorably disposed toward a theory that justified, on apparently a
scientific basis, complete laissez faire.
From the theoretical standpoint, David Ricardo's importance lay
in his purification and systematization of Adam Smith's position. By
and large, and certainly in his own eyes, this meant a development
of economics toward the attainment of a more rigorously scientific
form. Although he wrote many politico-economic tracts, and his
chief work bore the title, "On the Principles of Political Economy
and Taxation," this practical emphasis probably did not involve in
his thinking any disparity with the scientific.
Ricardo has been severely criticized, however, as having omitted
almost entirely one element of the new scienceâits integration, in
its experimental procedures, of observation with logical deduction.
Ricardo, it is said, made economics wholly deductive: he denned
his concepts, set up his assumptions or axioms and deduced his laws
but never put the whole to any observational test. It cannot be
denied that there are grounds for this criticism; it is, nevertheless,
somewhat unfair to him. Ricardo did apply his theoretical deduc-
tions to specific cases, although it must be conceded that most of
them were purely hypothetical and all of them greatly simplified.
But it should be recalled that the new physics in its early stages re-
vealed somewhat the same tendency; the more thorough testing by
experimental observation came with the maturation of that science.
We may also assume that the success of Ricardo's own stock-exchange
operations, which was so phenomenal as to allow him to retire at
twenty-five, furnishes at least some basis for supposing that his hypo-
thetical cases were not completely lacking in observational grounds.
Moreover, experimentation in the sense that would integrate ob-
servation with mathematical simplification was not available in the
area of economic phenomena at the time, as indeed it is not today
(a few feeble efforts to the contrary notwithstanding). Even the use
of statistical methods was in its relative infancy. Thus, in his his-
torical situation, it is probably fair to say that Ricardo's use of

highly simplified and purely hypothetical cases to test his theoretical
assumptions was the most reasonable way to bring in the factor of
observational verification.
There is another criticism that seems to me far more damaging,
although I must admit that it may be a subtle form of the one just
mentioned. Ricardo attempted to build his science on the basic
concept of labor value, which he took over from Smith, clarifying it
so that it meant unambiguously what we have called "labor disutil-
ity." The criticism is the now familiar one that labor value was not
a concept of exchange value at all. How then could it be used to
measure exchange value? It could be only if there were a law con-
necting it with exchange values. But for this to be meaningful, one
should be able to determine the magnitude of the exchange values
(the real prices, not the merely nominal ones) independently of the
law. But this was impossible, for only labor value correctly measured
exchange value on Ricardo's, as on Smith's, account.
Ricardo used the concept of labor value to state a basic "law" of
his science: "Possessing utility, commodities derive their exchange-
able value from two sources: from their scarcity, and from the
quantity of labor required to obtain them." However, Ricardo
omitted from consideration all forms of scarcity save those due to
man's dislike of labor. Thus, the supposed law just quoted virtually
amounted to the statement that commodities derived their exchange
value from the labor that went into their production: but this was
no law, it was simply a tautology. To have been a law, the magni-
tude of exchange values would have to have been determinable in
some other way than by the labor that went into the production of
the commodities possessing them, which was precisely what Ricardo's
doctrine of real, as distinguished from nominal, price denied.
Ricardo's consistent identification of labor value with what we
have called "labor disutility," thereby avoiding a tendency exhibited
by Smith toward confusing it with "labor price," brought to atten-
tion the basic difficulty involved in trying to use this concept for
stating the fundamental law of economics. On the other hand, this
consistent distinction made it possible for Ricardo to give a far more
cogent theory of wages and rent than that of his predecessor. The
clear recognition that labor, taken as a commodity, fluctuated in
value, that labor price just as grain price or any other price, was a
market phenomenon, led Ricardo to do firmly what Smith only
timidly suggested: he applied the law of supply and demand to

wages. There was the market price of labor and the natural one.
The market price tended to oscillate about the natural. The natural
price was the average or normal. What was this and how was it
determined? Here Ricardo got a great deal of help from Malthus'
theory of population; it is thus necessary for us to retrace our steps
historically in order to undertake a brief consideration of that
theory.
Like Adam Smith, from whom he received much of his inspira-
tion, Thomas Robert Malthus combined zeal for social and political
reform with the desire to make political economy a science after the
model of Newtonian physics. In his An Essay on the Principle of
Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society, Malthus
translated circumstances that he observed around him in England
and Ireland at the close of the eighteenth centuryâhigh prices for
food and near-famine conditions generally for the lower classesâinto
a universal law; but, by so doing, he unconsciously anticipated the
effects of the industrial revolution in producing what Marx was to
call "the army of the unemployed." In imitation of the new science
as he understood it, he cast his famous law of population in a
quantitative form: population, he held, tended to increase in a
geometrical or multiplicative ratio (as in the series 1, 2, 4, 8, 16),
whereas available food could increase at best only in an arithmetical
or additive ratio (as in the series 1, 2, 3, 4, 5). His verificatory data
for this law were scanty and highly conjectural, to put it mildly. As
to population, he rested his case largely on the fact that in America,
during a period of about two hundred years, the white population
doubled approximately every quarter century. As to food, he appar-
ently based his law on self-evidence: it could at best increase only by
a fixed increment for each equal interval of time. It is interesting to
speculate whether his essay would have had the immediate and tre-
mendous influence it enjoyed had his "law" been stated, not in its
pseudo-quantitative form, but in some such unpretentious fashion
as that population always tended to increase more rapidly than the
food supply.
The ultimate check to the growth of population, wrote Malthus,
was the direct action of the limited food supply, that is, starvation.
But there were, on his view, other checks that operated before this
extremity was reached. He classified them as "preventive" and
"positive." Preventive checks served to keep the birth rate down
and were of two sortsâmoral restraint (he meant celibacy) and vice
and its diseases (he had in mind promiscuity which he thought
lowered the birth rate). His failure to anticipate our modern prac-
tice of birth control is of great importance in assaying the propa-
ganda value of his "law," but it hardly touches its theoretical signifi-
canceâindeed, as an Anglican clergyman, he probably would have
put it under the heading of "vice" and been content to condemn
the wholesale spread of that kind of population check. Positive
checks served to keep the death rate up and were designated by him,
"misery." They included such items as war and sickness.
In Malthus' thought, preventive checks were of less consequence
than positive: vice should not, and moral restraint could not, operate
on a scale broad enough to meet the problem. Positive checks had
to carry the main load, and they bore down most specifically upon
a single classâ-the poor. Thus, he had, he was confident, established
scientifically that the poor had always to be with us. Any attempt to
alleviate their miseries would only put the bars down for an increase
in population leading to renewed misery on a wider front. Malthus'
argument here was obviously an application of Smith's account of
the operation of the free market after the analogy of a disturbed
gravitational system, such as a pendulum, coming to equilibrium.
There would be an oscillation about a "center of gravity"âin this
case, the maximum population that could be sustained by the food
supply. If the population exceeded this, wages (that is, food avail-
able to labor) decreased; this activated the positive checks upon
population. When these checks became effective, wages went up
(that is, with a smaller population, more food per laborer was avail-
able), causing an inhibition of the checks. This, of course, had a
tendency to go too far, and the cycle was repeated.
Malthus, as was to be expected of a clergyman, had undertaken his
investigation primarily out of sympathy with the lower classes in
their poverty and misery; his purpose, he said, was "to examine the
probability of the total or partial removal of the causes (of their
sufferings) in the future." The outcome of his inquiry was the in-
sight that any attempt on our part to lessen this distress only in-
creased it. Poor-relief or any other tampering with nature was
wrong: nature's own laws should be allowed to take their course.
Ricardo wholeheartedly concurred in this politico-moral conclu-
sion. But he also gained theoretical assistance from Malthus' specula-
tions. The latter's self-regulating population mechanism allowed
Ricardo to determine the natural price of labor: it was the bare

subsistence of the laborer plus just enough to enable him to replace
himself in the next generation. Whenever the market price of labor
went above this, the labor supply increased; this eventually produced
the opposite tendency, which, again if carried too far, such that the
market price fell below the natural, resulted in another reversal,
and so on. This was Ricardo's "iron law of wages": wages oscillated
about and could never deviate far from the level of bare subsistence
of the worker.
To understand Ricardo's theory of wages we must add to this iron
law his rigorous application to wages of Smith's distinction between
real and nominal price. The real price of labor, he said, was not
to be measured in money or commodities but in labor value ("labor
disutility"): the real cost of labor, what it was really worth, was that
effort without which the labor would not have been available. This
was to be found in the labor necessary to produce the bare sub-
sistence of the laborerâin the main, the minimum food he required
to keep himself able to work. As we shall see immediately, it was
Ricardo's view that as population grew, poorer land had to be
utilized, so that more labor became necessary for each equal increase
in food production. Thus, as the natural price of labor stayed fixed
at bare subsistence, real wages tended to rise and the condition of
labor to worsen as population increased. This sounds paradoxical to
us now because we no longer think in terms of labor value: for us a
rise in "real wages" means an increase in commodities that actual
wages will buy. But for Ricardo the "real wage" of labor was the
real as against the nominal price paid, and this was determined by
labor disutility, that is, the labor that labor cost. As poorer lands
were cultivated, more labor was necessary to produce, on the average,
a given unit of food; thus that unit was really worth more and, if
paid to labor, meant that labor's real price or wage went up, even
though, in accordance with the iron law, labor was still paid only
enough to allow bare subsistence. But if labor was thus paid more,
in this sense, it was paid more labor; that is, in the whole working
class longer hours had to be devoted to achieving bare subsistence as
that class increased in size. Here again the classical school had
cleared the way for Marxâin this case, for his "law" that under
capitalism the conditions of labor tended always to worsen.
This leads to a consideration of another contribution Ricardo
made to the systematization of classical economicsânamely, his ac-
count of rent whereby he attempted to fit it into the labor theory of

value. Here again he got significant help from Malthus; in this
instance it came from the latter's tract, The Nature and Progress of
Rent. This pamphlet was written during the agitation resulting in
the corn law of 1815. In it, Malthus was clearly on the side of the
landlords. His immediate objective was to refute the position of a
David Buchanan, as stated in the latter's 1814 edition of The Wealth
of Nations. Smith had treated rent (paid of course to the landlord
for the use of his land) as a monopoly phenomenon, curiously, how-
ever, not condemning it as he did other monopolies. But Buchanan
spoke of monopoly in land "as prejudicial, and as depriving the
consumer of what it gives the landlord." In the course of answering
Buchanan, Malthus pointed out that it was a most valuable quality
of the soil that it produced a surplus above that necessary for the
subsistence of the workers on it; without this surplus there would
have been none of the conveniences, luxuries or learning of polite
society, which extended their beneficial influence through the whole
mass of peopleâan idea reminiscent of Quesnay's "net product"
and its assignment to the landlord. This surplus, on Malthus' ac-
count, furnished the basis of rent. It differed for soils of different
fertility. Suppose, in a particular country, land was put under cul-
tivation in a sequence that accorded with its fertility, the most fertile
first, then successively lands of decreasing fertility. There would
then arise a disparity: the land just put under cultivation would only
pay wages to the worker and profits to the farmer, but the more
fertile land would yield moreâthis more was rent. Rent, then, was
the necessary consequence of the difference of fertility of different
parcels of land.
Incidentally, this phenomenon of "diminishing returns," as we
now designate it, not only justified rent, it also furnished Malthus a
foundation, which he lacked in his Essay, for the claim that increase
in food production could not proceed in equal ratio with the in-
crease of labor. The best lands being cultivated first, ever poorer
lands, demanding ever more labor to produce a given amount of
food, had to be utilized as the population increased.
Ricardo adopted Malthus' theory of rent and translated it into his
language of labor value. Suppose there were three parcels of land
of differing fertility each producing turnips sold on the market for
the same price. Let us assume that on Fertile Fields it required one
man-hour of labor per peck of turnips produced; on Stony Acres,
two man-hours; on Barren Mountain, three. Since the turnips sold

at the same price, their worth must have been equal. This must be
figured at the highest labor disutility, namely three man-hours per
peck. Hence, the turnips produced on Fertile Fields furnished a
surplus of two man-hours per peck, those on Stony Acres, of one,
after their actual labor cost had been deducted. This surplus so
calculated in terms of labor disutility gave the real value of the rent
on the parcels of land involved.
At first glance, this account may appear to have put the ideas of
Smith and Malthus into an admirably lucid pattern, but a little
reflection brings to light a fatal defect. The labor value of anything,
for Ricardo, measured the true worth of that thing because it was
constant, quite independent of any fluctuations in the actual market.
But if labor value was thus independent of actual market prices
when the latter fluctuated, it must have been so when they did not,
when they happened to have been the same. Thus, it did not follow
that, because the nominal prices of turnips from Fertile Fields and
from Barren Mountain were equal, their real prices, as measured by
labor value, were also equal: clearly they were not; turnips from
Fertile Fields were really only worth one man-hour per peck,
whereas those from Barren Mountain were really worth three. The
argument that Ricardo used in this connection, that once on the
market the turnips from these different farms were indistinguishable,
was irrelevant; it simply served to strengthen the point already
granted as part of the hypothesis that these different lots of turnips
would command the same nominal price. Here again Ricardo's con-
sistency serves to bring to our attention Smith's mistake in going
outside exchange phenomena entirely for his basic yardstick to
measure exchange values.
In the logical development and application of the concept of labor
value, Ricardo did not make as much progress in the matter of
profits as he had in that of wages and rents. Indeed, he simply
restated, with perhaps a little added clarity, Smith's own suggestion
that profits were a payment to farmers for waiting for their returns
on their investment of stock or circulating capital. He did not show,
as he ought to have, how the value of such waiting could be meas-
ured in terms of labor (the labor that went into it, of courseânot
that which it would purchase).
The next step in this direction was taken by one of Ricardo's
disciples, Nassau William Senior. Senior said that the farmer's (or
in general, the enterpriser's) waiting involved an abstinence: the

stock paid out as food or other commodities to labor might have
been directly consumed by its owner. Abstaining from this consump-
tion was a form of discomfort similar to that caused by the expendi-
ture of effort on the part of labor. (Unfortunately, our own use of
"labor disutility" to distinguish "labor value" clearly from "labor
price" or "wages" has probably given the impression that Smith and
Ricardo anticipated Senior in this matter more than they actually
did.) This, of course, did not strictly assimilate profits to labor
value, but it indicated a suggestive analogy (perhaps we should speak
of "man-hours of abstinence" as interchangeable with "man-hours of
labor") and was a step toward a happiness-unhappiness theory of
value. Senior also added a propaganda angle to the matter. On
Ricardo's iron law of wages, the worker had, on the average, to
produce enough for his own sustenance, but not more than enough.
This he did during the first hours of his working day; the last hour
or hours he worked producing profit for his employer. On this basis,
Senior opposed legislation fixing a maximum length of working day
and combatted the whole trade-union movement, then, of course, in
its infancy. Any lessening of the working day, he said, robbed the
employer of his profits which were rightfully his because of the pay-
ment of abstinence he had made in turning his stock into wages.
Our discussion of the classical school of political economy has
carried us well into the nineteenth century. To this, I feel sure, the
reader has not objected, for the division of our subject by centuries
has been a crude device at best. The spirit of the classical school was
throughout its history that of the Enlightenment, of the extension
of Newtonianism to the realm of economic behavior. We have seen
that the classicists were not completely successful in this, that they
retained Aristotelian elements in their thinking. But, in comparison
with the next major development in economic thought, they were
clearly the champions of the concepts and methods of the new
science. As such, their views, with the Aristotelian components
gradually eliminated, were to be revived in the later nineteenth and
the twentieth centuries. This involved a bitter struggle with a char-
acteristically nineteenth-century movement that was opposed to the
spirit of the Enlightenment and its whole attempt to extend further
the victorious conquests of the new science. Our discussion of this
carries us into a new chapter.

CHAPTER 4
Romanticism and Science
The Counterrevolution in Economics
7/5 Social and Cultural Causes
Starting in the late eighteenth century and reaching its full
strength in the first half of the nineteenth, although effective
throughout that century and indeed present with us even today,
there occurred a reaction against the Enlightenment and, to some
degree, the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century of which
it was the popularization. Following a tradition now quite well
established, we shall speak of this as the "romantic movement."
Taking this development to be characteristic of the nineteenth
century brings us into conflict with a popular view that would have
that period "an age of science" (a book published just at its close
and dealing with its scientific achievements bore the self-revealing
title, The Wonderful Century}. This popular conception cannot be
put aside as a mere myth; there was enormous progress in science
throughout the nineteenth century. In the physical sciences there
was no lull, no backtracking; the Galilean-Newtonian kind of in-
quiry was pushed ever further. We have already seen how the type
of simplification that was offered by the new science was carried on
into the nineteenth century in the case of the formulation of the
principle of the conservation of energy. Perhaps an even more strik-
ing example occurred in the perfecting of the atomic theory by John
Dalton, who, through a study of the combining weights of various
elements, was able to take an ancient philosophical theory and cast
it in the new quantitative form. It probably does not need explicit
mention that Dalton's atom was not something itself observed, but,
through the notion of the constancy of its valency or chemical
attractiveness and of its weight, permitted the tying together theo-
retically of a large number of chemical laws.
Probably the nearest approach to a scientific revolution in the
nineteenth century occurred in the field of the biological sciences

and was associated with the name of Charles Darwin. Here again
there is a misleading popular view. It is that the scientific signifi-
cance of Darwin lay in his description of the evolution of life on our
planet that was able to piece together in one great historical account
the unique process by which the totality of living species had origi-
nated from one or a few primitive forms and developed into the
present complexity with man at the summit. As a historical recon-
struction of a particular series of events, this description was not
"scientific," in the sense in which we have been using that word. In
any case, the significant contribution of Darwin to the development
of the biological sciences lay elsewhereânamely, in shifting them
from a basis that was essentially classificatory and directly observa-
tional to one which was experimental, not merely utilizing the new
science by applying results of the new method adopted in physics
and chemistry but itself embracing the same kind of laws stated in
terms of the same kind of concepts as had been developed by Galileo
and Newton.
Although there was no counterrevolution in physics in the nine-
teenth century, there was one in social science and specifically in
economics. The economic views of the classical school and partic-
ularly their more scientific components were fundamentally chal-
lenged by the counterrevolutionists and either discarded or greatly
modified by them. This antiscientific tendency in economic thought
was embedded in a larger popular revolt against the whole spirit of
the Age of Reason, just as the economics against which there was
now a strong reaction had been part of the popularization of the
new science in the Enlightenment.
However, we must be careful to avoid misapprehension: by "popu-
lar" here, as in our discussion of the eighteenth century, we do not
refer to the thought of the massesâof factory workers, peasants, farm
laborers and people on relief. We have in mind, rather, the attitude
of the educated classes generally, and especially of the literati. As
we noted in the last chapter, the eighteenth century witnessed the
beginnings of a new class of journalists, poets, novelists, essayistsâa
free intelligentsia able to support itself by the sale of its writings on
the general market. It was in the writings of this growing class that
there appeared the first signs of the romantic revolt against the Age
of Reason, against the vogue of Voltaire and Alexander Pope.
Romanticism was really an amalgam of many tendencies, united
fundamentally perhaps only by a common opposition to the spirit

[4] Romanticism and Science 187
of the Enlightenment. Against the Enlightenment's clarity and
reason we must put romanticism's feeling and subtilty, even turgid-
ity; against the former's optimism and forward look, the latter's
somber tone and orientation toward the past; against the earlier
sense of emancipation from superstition and the dead hands of
custom and ancient privilege, the later glorification of whatever has
been, turning at times into medieval affectation; against the skep-
ticism of the Age of Reason, a rebirth of religious faith; against a
cosmopolitanism of men of the world moving easily from one coun-
try to another and carrying their common culture with them, a
fervid nationalism grubbing in the antiquities of each people's own
peculiar cultural heritage; against an abstract individualism that saw
all men as equal at birth, a pseudo-individualism that found the in-
dividual's potentialities, worth and status in the peculiarities of the
society in which he was born; against physical nature viewed as a
mechanism whose relations to humans were mainly those of an ob-
ject of curiosity and a set of materials and instruments for practical
utilization, a nature that was endowed with soul and was to be
approached poetically with a sense of deep fellow-feeling or of
mystery and awe. Probably in no single person did all these revolu-
tionary tendencies of romanticism unite: we must think of the move-
ment as a sort of atmosphere, certainly not as self-conscious nor as
organized and directed as was the popularization of Newtonianism
in the Enlightenment by Voltaire and Diberot.
As might be expected, the beginnings of this counterrevolution lay
deep in the Age of Reason itself. In England we might, not too
arbitrarily, place them in the religious revivalism of John and
Charles Wesley. Although the theology of these men was largely
that of Luther and St. Paul, there was present a new spiritâthat of
"enthusiasm," called forth by opposition to natural religion and
rational theology. Salvation, which was a gift of divine grace, came
only through a cataclysmic experience of conversion, whereby from
an overpowering sense of guilt one was led into a sudden transport
of ecstasy over purification from all evil and a consequent unity
with God.
Although avoiding the extreme emotionalism of the Wesleyans,
the early romantic poets in England revealed the same dissatisfaction
with a purely rational religion. William Cowper, himself a convert
to Wesleyanism and frequently under the acute sense of sin, might
be taken as the first of the English romantic poets. The rejection of

the whole spirit of natural religion could not perhaps be better illus-
trated than in his familiar hymn:
Oh! for a closer walk with God,
A calm and heavenly frame;
A light to shine upon the road
That leads me to the Lambl
Robert Burns furnishes a good example of the element of nation-
alism in English romanticism. His use of the Scotch dialect and
Scotch subjects and his revival of old Scotch songs displayed the
sense of identification of the romanticist with the folklore and folk-
ways of his people.
If we were to pick a single work as marking the manifesto of the
English romantics, it might well be the Lyrical Ballads of Words-
worth and Coleridge, published just at the close of the eighteenth
century. In it, the one chose to oppose rationalism in poetry by
poems (such as "Tintern Abbey") expressive of deep feelings em-
bracing commonplace and familiar things, the other, by verse (such
as "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner") embodying the emotions of
fear and awe of the supernatural. Wordsworth later added a preface
explaining the point of view of the authors, in the course of which
he gave his famous definition with its emphasis on feeling and its
entire neglect of the formal elements: "poetry is the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recol-
lected in tranquility."
The historical novel was another of the characteristic literary
progeny of romanticism. Its creator, Sir Walter Scott, in his Waver-
ley novels painted in imagination a glorified past and tried to cap-
ture again its spiritual atmosphere.
Now it might be claimed that all these elements in English roman-
ticism, although different from the literature of the Age of Reason,
were in no sense in conflict with it. As art, with which we are not
concerned, this is no doubt true: different styles of artistic expression
can hardly oppose one another; the only conflicts involving them
that ever arise are not artistic but practical, for example, competition
for public favor. Indeed, the characterization that I have used
(namely, of a "counterrevolution") is far more appropriate to roman-
ticism in economics (where it ordinarily goes under the names "his-
toricism" or "institutionalism") than to romanticism in literature.
But the latter revealed and even helped create a spirit favorable to
the former. Moreover, there can be no question but that the literati
whom we have just mentioned thought that they were opposing
certain beliefs, that they were correcting certain mistaken approaches
to the world. Thus, Cowper contended that "God never meant that
man should scale the heavens by strides of human wisdom" and that
"never yet did philosophic tube [that is, the telescope], that brings
the planets home into the eye of observation, and discovers, else
not visible, His family of worlds, discover Him that rules them.
. . ." Wordsworth condemned "our meddling intellect" that mur-
dered to dissect and the probing scientist who would peep and
botanize even on his mother's grave.
How are we to account for this revolt against rationalism and sci-
ence? In the first place, despite what was said in the preceding para-
graph, the romantic movement embodied an artistic emancipation.
In the eighteenth century literature had been largely conceived as a
mere tool for the expression of ideas and the propagation of an
attitude. As one historian of the nineteenth century has put it: "the
eighteenth century was a period of prose. . . . The next period was
an age of poetry." Poetry was the freeing of literary art from bondage
to knowledge, allowing the feelings their natural and spontaneous
expression. With this servitude went the external trappingsâthe
rigid canons of literary form which had kept what purported to be
poetry in obvious submission to the intellect. All this, of course,
could logically have occurred without being accompanied by opposi-
tion to science or reason in any further sense, but in the artistic
mind many things are usually mixed together (indeed, this may
enunciate a mere tautology).
Again, the intellectualism of the Age of Reason was probably too
extreme, too rigorous in its demands to be permanently satisfying to
the average man. In the writings of the rationalists and skeptics, the
universe had too suddenly lost its congenial aspect, had too abruptly
ceased to be a home planned by a personal God whose primary con-
cern was man's individual destiny. Tennyson's In Memorium ex-
pressed this loss and this resentment:
And all the phantom, Nature, standsâ
With all the music in her tone,
A hollow echo of my own,â
A hollow form with empty hands,
And shall I take a thing so blind,
Embrace her as my natural good,
Or crush her, like a vice of blood,
Upon the threshold of the mind?

It is but a step further to speculate that the romantic poets were
struggling to articulate in their own way some widespread sense of
opposition to a kind of science which, by the nineteenth century, had
quite thoroughly set aside all consideration of values in its pursuit
of factual uniformities. Perhaps the loss of the medieval mixing of
description with evaluation was now for the first time keenly felt and
was aggravated by the mistaken sense that, in order to purify de-
scription, evaluation must never be allowed to occur.
Furthermore, the novel and baffling set of social conditions which
were closely connected with the new science and its associates, the
revolutionized agriculture and industry, and which represented the
loss of the old, intimate relation between religion and man's social
status and security, were found by the romantics to be most un-
desirable. Large numbers of people, for example, were flowing from
the country to the city where they were being packed into factory
towns of unmitigated squalor. Cowper condemned the change: "The
town has tinged the country; and the stain appears a blot upon the
vestal's robe, the worse for what it soils," and in no uncertain words
ascribed the blame: "God made the country and man made the town."
This was no mere aesthetic outrage; it was a sin against man. A
great army of workers had lost all security of feudal rights and
privileges, were exploited as so much labor on the marketâa cost
item in the machinery of production, not a group of human individ-
uals. The romantics showed a very definite attachment to the cause
of the lost individual in the lower classes. John Wesley, while still
a student at Oxford, started his life career by preaching to the prison-
ers in jail and to the sick and poor in the city. Later he dedicated
his efforts to spreading his gospel to colliers and to working classes
generallyâa group that could not appreciate the arguments of the
Deists but were overwhelmed by the emotional release of being
"washed in the blood of the Lamb."
The romantics revolted against a system that perpetrated such a
crime against humanity, that destroyed the sense of social responsibil-
ity and exploited workers for profit. In their minds the new science
was bound up with all this; they viewed it as the ally of the forces
that had "rationalized" production through the new machinery
and thereby destroyed men's fellow-feeling, just as in a more recent
popular reaction science was condemned as the producer of the
atom bomb and thus as implicated in the havoc of its employment.
There was also a more subtle social factor favoring the romantic
revolt against science. The industrial revolution spelled the end for
the nobility; power was now taken over by the industrial capitalists.
But the nobility put up a grand fight. The abolition of the corn
laws in 1846 (protecting the interests of agriculture where the
nobility held whatever wealth it still possessed) and the Reform Bill
of 1832 (widening the franchise so that the House of Commons be-
came essentially middle class) were clear defeats for the Tories, but
they struck back. They saw that they could no longer fight directly
for their own interests, so they adopted indirect tactics. In particular,
they attempted to win the support of the growing class of dispos-
sessed industrial workers in conflict with their employers. Thus, it
was to a great extent the Tories who put through the series of fac-
tory acts, especially under the leadership of Lord Ashley, Earl of
Shaftesbury.
It was probably no historical accident that perhaps the greatest
political figure among the Tories, Benjamin Disraeli, who was also
a literary man of no mean attainments, wrote a novel, Sybil or The
Two Nations, which was meant to be a damaging assault upon a social
system that separated into such extremes the lives of the rich and
the poor and forced the latter to live under intolerably inhumane
conditions. The novel was somewhat favorable to the Chartist move-
ment, which sought not only to remove property qualifications upon
the franchise, but also asked remuneration for service in Parliament
so that even workers might be elected. Nor was it a mere coincidence
that possibly the most potent literary figure among the romanticists
in England, Thomas Carlyle, should have combined his condemna-
tion of the evils of a machine age with nostalgic praise of the great
men of the past, and have appealed to the old religion and morality
against the sinfulness and godlessness of the new capitalism and of
the science that bred it. Again, it was no fortuitous circumstance
that Cardinal Newman, representing, in his Grammar of Assent, the
most articulate form of romanticism in the area of religious thought,
should have turned back to the most ancient authority, the Roman
Catholic Church, nor that one wing of the romantic movement in
art criticism and appreciationâ namely, the pre-Raphaelitesâshould
have gone "all out" for medievalism.
A complex of factors, then, favored the romantic counterrevolu-
tion in England. However, it was in Germany that romanticism
found its true home. Indeed, as something more than an artistic
movementâthat is, as an articulate general philosophy, as a legal,

social, economic, historical point of view and methodâthe romantic
counterrevolution against science came to England only as borrowed
from Germany and never did become truly indigenous. It was the
romantic poet Coleridge who acted as the original host in this infec-
tion of English thought by German antiscientific philosophy. His
studies in Germany led him to an enthusiastic but rather confused
adoption of "transcendentalism," which he tried to present to the
English in his Biographia Literaria. Other writers, notably Carlyle,
and quite a group of philosophers were influenced by this transplan-
tation, which, however, finally failed to displace the Newtonian in-
fluence to be found in Locke, Hume and their followers.
To understand why romanticism in this more serious ideational
form was characteristically German, it is perhaps necessary that we
remind ourselves of certain outstanding political developments.
The French Revolution of 1789 was, it need hardly be said, the
end result of very deep forces set up by the commercial revolution
in conflict with the outworn forms of medieval feudalism. Ideation-
ally, however, it can be traced rather directly to the work of les
philosophes and their opposition to the old order. It seemed quite
clear that the inequalities in French society, the barriers to the men-
tal and cultural as well as the material progress of everyman, as
envisaged, for example, by Helvetius, were due to the repressive
measures of church, state and aristocracy. The means of throwing off
these repressions were furnished when Louis XVI, in desperation for
funds, called the Assembly of the States General in order to force
the aristocracy to relinquish its privileges as to direct taxation. The
Assembly was taken over by the bourgeoisie. It adopted a new basis
of government in the concept of the natural liberty and equality of
all men, as expressed in the "Declaration of Rights."
We need not review the various stages of the Revolution, but only
note that it resulted in the "liquidation" of the royalty and the
aristocracy, the confiscation of church property and the breaking up
of large landed estates. It also gave rise to a new army and a new
method of conducting war. The older nobility were replaced as of-
ficers by young men drawn from the lower middle classes. Soldiers
were no longer professionals but recruits drawn from the people,
some volunteers but mostly drafted men. Without financial support
from the government, which was bankrupt, they were forced to live
off the country. As a consequence, there was a tremendous increase
in the mobility of fighting units and an absolute requirement of

rapid maneuver and quick decision of military issues. A certain
general, Napoleon Bonaparte by name, with a genius for this kind
of improvisation, came out on topânot only of the French army,
but of French government and indeed of Europe. Only the English
channel saved England; only the vast distances of Russia and the
poverty of her people, which made Napoleon's tactics impractical,
finally defeated him.
It should be noted, however, that although Napoleon grasped the
reins of power in France, claimed the title of "emperor" and gen-
erally tried to centralize the government in himself, he retained and
even developed and imposed on conquered territories certain funda-
mental principles of the French Revolution. The church did not
receive back her lands nor did the nobility. Before the law, all men,
of whatever estate, were equal, and civil liberties were protected.
These reforms were basic in the code Napoleon, which the victorious
general imposed on other lands as well as France, and which ex-
pressed the spirit of the Enlightenment not merely in the respects
just indicated, but in that it was a codification, a rational organiza-
tion of laws and not a mere set of traditional rights and privileges.
Thus, when Napoleon was finally defeated in 1814, the pendulum
swung back from world empire and cosmopolitanism to nationalism,
from civil rights and liberty to censorship and tight controls. The
Restoration era, inaugurated by the Congress of Vienna, was a period
of return, as far as possible, to the "Old Order," under the astute
guidance of Prince Metternich of Austria. The principle of legiti-
macy was established according to which the "legitimate" hereditary
rulers were to recover and be protected in their pre-Napoleonic
possessions and powers. This was supplemented by the principle of
intervention, by which the great states justified their armed actions
in other countries to suppress popular uprisings. Thus matters
stood until the revolutionary period of 1848, although with many
minor explosionsâthe greatest of which was the July Revolution of
1830 in Franceâindicative of the fact that the old order had not
really put down the demand for "liberty, equality and fraternity."
German romanticism was born as a reaction against the dominance
of Franceâfirst in the cultural sphere against the vogue of French
letters and art in the Age of Reason under the enlightened despotism
of Frederick the Great, then in the military and political sphere
against the victories of Napoleon in the early nineteenth century.
It flourished during the Restoration era and was allied in spirit with
that reactionary period. With such affiliations it was of course far
more nationalistic in emphasis than its English counterpart. It went
back quite self-consciously to the German language, to German lit-
erature and to German folk tales and songs. This Germanicism came
out most clearly after the impact of military defeat in the Addresses
to the German Nation of the philosopher Fichte, which appealed to
the folk spirit and language as a bond that could overcome the politi-
cal division of the Germans and subordinate the selfish desires of
the individual to the will and feeling of the people. It was carried
on by Arnim and Brentano in their Boy's Enchanted Horn, a treas-
ury of German folksong that was to inspire German poets and com-
posers for years to come. It was continued in the folk tales of the
brothers Grimm, in which they were following the lead of Herder,
who had, toward the close of the eighteenth century, published his
Voices of the Nations in Song. Even in Lessing, who shared some of
the characteristics of the Enlightenment and perhaps should not be
grouped with the romantics, one may find a distinct break with
French literary canons, especially in the drama. Goethe's early pe-
riod, when he wrote The Sorrows of Werther and the first part of
Faust, was one of romanticism. In a sense this latter work can be
conceived as a declaration of emancipation from the whole ideal of
the Enlightenment. The new scientific knowledge, in whatever large
amounts, could never give ultimate satisfaction to man; only life in
its fullness could do that.
Gray and ashen, my friend, is every science,
And only the golden tree of life is green.
The expression, "literary romanticism proper," is ordinarily con-
fined in reference to such men as the Schlegels, Tieck and Novalis.
These were rather definitely second-rate figures, concerned to repro-
duce medieval moods of mystification, to compose in literary symbols
and translate into language the vague yearnings of an imagination
not too closely connected with real life.
The more serious impact of the romantic counterrevolution came
in philosophy and the writing of history. Fichte, Schelling and
Hegel succeeded in turning the scientific picture of the world inside
out. Hegel's rejection of scientific understanding ("Verstand") in
favor of a mystical reason ("Vernunft") was typical. The under-
standing, he said, was abstract, concerned only with general laws
and left out all that was unique in the individual case. Reason, by
contrast, grasped the whole, the concrete and the individual as well
as the universal. It operated by means of a dialectic that carried one
step by step from such empty abstractions as "being" and "nothing"
to the concrete fullness of the whole universe, uniting physical na-
ture, human society, knowledge, art and religion. It culminated, of
course, in the Prussia of Hegel's time, in the University of Berlinâ
indeed, in Hegel's own lecture room and his "Absolute Notion."
Hegel's own excursuses into history were remarkable for their
bold identification of periods and peoples with controlling ideas and
attitudesâa tendency which, in somewhat watered-down form, was
to become the "Zeitgeist" of later German historians. The whole
romantic movement encouraged a new interest in history, and it
was in the Germany of the first half of the nineteenth century that
there occurred the birth of modern historical research and writing
with its development of methods of historical criticism of documents
and its study of ethnological, institutional, social and legal aspects
of a people's life (as well as the traditionally emphasized political
and military ones). Probably the outstanding names here were
Niebuhr in ancient history and Ranke in modern.
It was in this setting, then, that there arose a counterrevolutionâ
a revolution against the revolution that purported to reconstitute
economics as a science after the model of Newtonian mechanics.
This counterrevolution started in Germany and its first form was
historical: economics was not a science but a branch of history; it
could not be studied abstractly, apart from particular peoples in
particular stages of their development. But we must not picture this
strife in economic thought as merely one of method in ascertaining
the facts or even of general outlook on the issue whether there were
universal laws of economic phenomena; it was also a conflict over
goals, over values to be achieved. The classical school fought for
world-wide free trade; the historical, for German protectionism.
The practical allegiance of the historical school changed during the
course of its evolutionâat first devoted to the interests of the landed
aristocracy, it later came to favor the cause of the industrial capital-
ist and finally gave rise to what has become the most potent ideology
on the side of the worker. But throughout it revealed a tendency
to confuse broad issues of value with supposed investigations of fact.
The clear separation of these two matters in economics did not oc-
cur until the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.
When it did, however, it was by developing the scientific strand in

classical thought, in opposition to the whole outlook of the historical
school.
The Historical School
In our brief genesis of economics, the first man in the historical
school, as in the classical, was an "Adam"âin this case Adam
Miiller. Although a Prussian by birth, Miiller held various state
positions in Austria, was entrusted by Prince Metternich with sun-
dry diplomatic assignments and while in Austria embraced the
Roman Catholic faithâsufficient outward evidence of his reactionary
inclinations. He adopted the romantic position as an ideological
defense against the new and socially disturbing economic notions
of Adam Smith.
Fichte had already, at the very beginning of the nineteenth cen-
tury, published a work, The Closed Commercial State, in which he
had opposed free trade; in fact, he had gone to the extreme of ad-
vocating the entire abolition of foreign trade and thus the complete
economic self-sufficiency of the nation. The ideal state would see to
it that each of its citizens had property in proportion to his contribu-
tion to the whole. To carry out these proposals Fichte advocated
the suppression of metal coinage ("World-money"), because it was
with money of this form that world trade was transacted and its
fluctuations in value were outside state control, in place of which he
urged the use of "national" money alone, that is, paper currency of
legally determined value.
Although Miiller himself reviewed The Closed Commercial State
critically when it first appeared, he soon came to accept its doctrines
and to furnish them with a romantic basis. He argued that Adam
Smith's ideas should not be accepted in Germany. Smith had gen-
eralized from the English situation; German conditions and needs
were quite different, demanding a different economic theory. Smith
had made the selfish individual, the "economic man," the basis of
his system, generalizing to his law for prices on the whole market
from the behavior of the individual buyer and seller. In place of
this economic man as a theoretical basis, Miiller put the "folk total-
ity"âthe state as a spiritual organism in which individuals were
mere cells, so to speak. The concept of the individual was a vicious
abstraction; the true reality was the totality of civic life in its actual
historical development.
In line with this approach Miiller condemned Smith's tendency to

find the motives of economic activity in self-interest. Men should
be economically productive not in order that they might have more
goods to consume, but because they were God's stewards and be-
cause a powerful state required wealth. To overcome the tendency
toward selfish materialism, wars were periodically necessary. A
strong state, one whose citizens subordinated their individual inter-
ests to the common good, was of necessity a warlike state. Its wealth
lay not merely in goods for consumption nor in the means of their
production, but in that greater valueâthe unity of the whole.
Thus, besides the material capital one must reckon the spiritualâ
namely, the nation's past as a cultural heritage. If one looked thus
to the past one found that the greatest social unity was achieved
under feudalism. Miiller wished to transplant medieval, agricultural
feudalism with its three estates of clergy, noblemen and burghers
into nineteenth-century Germany, ignoring the historical fact that
it was the strong nation-stateâhis own supposed objectiveâthat had
overthrown feudalism (historical realities never have troubled too
much those who would turn back the hands of the clock). The
unity of an organic state was threatened, in Miiller's eyes, by the
separation of persons and things. The whole concept of private
property was based on such a separation. It should be replaced by
the feudal notions of rights and obligations in connection with the
use of the land. Thus Miiller constructed a theoretical basis for
defending feudal landownership and the older aristocracy against
the power of the middle classes threatening to invade Germany from
across the North Sea.
The essentially antiscientific tendency of Miiller's thought is fairly
easy to discern. His opposition to the individualistic basis of clas-
sical economics was not that the laws constructed on it did not
square with observable economic facts but that acceptance of it
tended to undermine the unity of the stateâthat is, it was to be
rejected not because it was false to the facts but because it was im-
moral in outcome. As the historical school developed, this value
criterion was retained, but its usage was more refined and subtle so
that, although the nonscientific orientation of the movement re-
mained rather obvious, there came a time when one might suppose
the issue between the historicists and the classicists was one of fact:
Do economic phenomena ever repeat themselves so that laws can be
formulated, or are they always unique, restricting us to historical
description? I am myself convinced, on the contrary, that the issue

never reduced to this. The romantic concern with the wholeâthe
"folk spirit," the "national culture" or whateverâwas never merely
an interest in fact. Although it may be granted that there was some-
thing designated by such terms that could be observed in some vague
way, still the tenacity and strength of conviction concerning it dis-
played by the romanticists argues a fundamentally nonobservational
ground of its acceptance. This was, I think, valuational. The whole
was good; the individual ought to subordinate himself to the nation.
If my analysis here be correct, then we may take the romantic
historical school of economics to have been involved in a basic
confusion of fact and value. In this respect it was like scholastic
economics. In another, however, it was essentially different: the
fundamental concepts it used were not Aristotelian; it did not simply
systematize the commonsensical ideas of everyday life, but appealed
to esoteric, mystical notions concerning the role of the whole in the
part, the nation in the individual, general cultural realities in spe-
cific events and so on. Thus, although I have called the movement
a "counterrevolution," it was not strictly an attempt to return to a
viewpoint current before the revolution in economic thought in the
Enlightenment. Perhaps our brief discussion of the social and cul-
tural factors forming its context has furnished some indication why
such a simple revival of the medieval position was out of the ques-
tion.
Friedrich List, unlike Adam Miiller, was opposed to the reac-
tionary forces in Germany during the Restoration era. He stood for
constitutional monarchy, the abolition of various feudal burdens,
a single, direct income tax and trial by jury. The government of
Wurttemberg, where he was a member of parliament, was displeased
with his political position and sentenced him to ten months' im-
prisonment. He was allowed his liberty only on his agreeing to go
to America. Nevertheless, his thought was in opposition to that of
Adam Smith. Favoring the development of German industry, he felt
that free trade was not the way.
At the close of the Napoleonic wars Germany was still a group of
small provinces, closed to one another commercially by high tariff
walls yet open to foreign wares, English goods especially flooding
in. Yet the shock of foreign conquest and occupation had aroused
a strong wave of nationalistic feeling. List took the lead in urging a
commercial union of the German states and a policy of protection
against foreign imports, after the example of America and directed

primarily against England, for the purpose of promoting the indus-
trialization of Germany.
List's practical program brought him into conflict with English
classical economics and its support of the policy of free trade. Adam
Smith's economic theory rested on the individualistic doctrine that
each person was the best judge of his own interests and therefore
should have complete freedom to buy and sell without governmental
interference. But this abstract view of man, argued List, failed to
recognize the fact that every individual belonged to some nation,
that nations were in different situations and thus had different eco-
nomic interests. As indicated by the title of his chief work, Na-
tional System of Political Economy, List believed that there was an
economic theory suited to each particular nation "which, emanating
from the idea and nature of the nation, teaches how a given nation,
in the present state of the world and its own special national rela-
tions, can maintain and improve its economical conditions." He
thought that nations passed through a sequence of different stages of
cultureânamely, the savage, the pastoral, the agricultural, the agri-
cultural-manufacturing and the agricultural-manufacturing-commer-
cial. The last of these was the normal or ideal: only when a nation
had reached this complete development could it be said to be truly
a nation, for only then could it have a navy, colonies and a large
population with a maximum development of science and the arts.
England had, but Germany had not, attained this last stage; Ger-
many should be allowed to take those measures, such as protective
tariffs, necessary to achieve it.
Moreover, Adam Smith had assumed that the wealth of a nation
consisted in the ratio of its annual production of consumer goods to
its population and on this basis he had argued for free trade. Against
this, List contended that a nation's wealth lay not in the actual pro-
duction of such goods but in its capacity or power of production, by
which he meant to include the possession not merely of capital goods
but also of skills, of the "know-how" (to introduce an American-
ism) and even of a high level of cultural scientific development.
Arguing from this assumption he claimed it was proper for a nation
to make some sacrifice in the immediate wealth of goods available
for consumption when that would increase the power of creating
wealthâspecifically, it was right to forego the immediate advantages
offered by free trade and to impose protective tariffs in the case of

nations that had not achieved the maximum development of their
productive capacities.
The chief advantage brought about by the industrialization of a
nation, however, was not economic in the narrow sense but cultural.
The spirit of striving for a steady increase in mental and bodily
requirements, of emulation and of liberty, characterize a state devoted
to manufactures and commerce. ... In a country devoted to mere
raw agriculture, dullness of mind, awkwardness of body, obstinate
adherence to old notions, want of culture, of prosperity and of liberty
prevail.
Thus, in the thought of Friedrich List we see historicism and
nationalism deflected from the defense of feudal reaction to the jus-
tification of policies favoring commercial and industrial capitalism.
The historical school in its mature formâas represented by the
teachings of Wilhelm Roscher, Bruno Hildebrand and Karl Kniesâ
took essentially the common emphasis to be found in Miiller and
List but formulated it in a wider theoretical manner; there was less
nationalism of the direct sort and the movement took a more gen-
eralized form. By the time these men wrote, the failure of any such
attempt as Metternich's to stem the tide of liberalism was apparent;
consequently they did not carry on Miiller's reactionism. Yet the
historical and nationalistic tendencies of romanticism were retained
in their thought. This reflected the fact that German industry and
commerce had not caught up with English and needed legal protec-
tion and governmental aids. Thus, the classical theory, with its con-
demnation of any tampering with the free market, was from a prac-
tical standpoint unavailable.
Adam Smith and his followers had tried to formulate economic
laws holding universally, independently of time and country. This
was a mistake, according to the historical school: economic phe-
nomena changed as social conditions were modified. In this respect,
then, economics differed greatly from physics, since the phenomena
studied by the latter were the same in all places and times. There
was lack of agreement among the Germans as to whether there were
historical laws of economic evolution common to different peoples,
as suggested by List's stages of economic development; some held
there were, some that there were only rough parallels. But even for
those admitting such laws, they were peculiar in being historical or
developmentalâthese men "took time seriously" (to use a phrase of

A. N. Whitehead's) by ruling out the possibilities or reversal or
repetition of a sequence in the same individual system.
Not only were the phenomena studied by the economist historical,
his own ideas, his set of concepts dealing with them were so likewise.
The "laws" of the classical school were so many dogmas of its mem-
bers, and in general economic theories were the products of histori-
cal conditions and therefore relative to them. Knies, perhaps, came
closest to an outright acceptance of historical relativism, that is, of
the view that the truth of an economic theory was nothing more than
its historical appropriateness.
The conditions of economic life determine the form and character
of economic theory. Both the process of argument employed and the
results arrived at are products of historical development. . . . The
generalizations of economics are simply historical explanations and
progressive manifestations of truth. Each step is a generalization of
the truth as it is known at that particular stage of development.
In economic theory, Smith had assumed that men were dominated
wholly by self-interest. The historical school, however, held that
even in economic activities men were moved by a great variety of
motivesâcustom, vanity, pride in workmanship and so on. It like-
wise criticized Smith and his followers for using a purely abstract,
deductive method; economic phenomena, it held, were actually
concrete and had to be investigated observationally, historically and
in process. But if they were to be studied thus, they had to be taken
in their larger social settings: thus economics was a form of sociology
and, as stressing the uniqueness of these contexts, a branch of his-
tory; in relation to organized social action, it was a part of politics
and of law.
With this emphasis upon concrete observation it was natural that
economics should sooner or later develop in the direction of descrip-
tive, statistical studies, although this led away from the romantic
holism of the historical school proper. We find this tendency ex-
emplified in the work of Gustav Schmoller. It was his conviction
that the historical school should turn from polemical criticisms of
the classical theory to actual, concrete, historical investigations. To a
great extent it was through his leadership that economic history
came into existence. Schmoller was not an extremist; he thought
that there was a place in economics for deduction from the general
properties of human nature as well as for historical observation.

Thus, it was something of an anomaly that he was one of the two
chief figures in the "Methodenstreit" or methodological controversy,
the other being Karl Menger, the publication of whose Investiga-
tions concerning the method of the social sciences and of political
economy in particular in 1883 inaugurated that conflict. This in-
volved a revival of the scientific emphasis of the classical school and
will engage our attention in the next chapter.
It is interesting and historically relevant to note Schmoller's practi-
cal affiliations. He was prominent in the Union for Socio-politics,
founded in 1872 or about a decade after the rise of a strong social
reform movement in Germany that was to become one of the causes
of Bismarck's social legislation some ten years later, giving to Ger-
man labor compulsory accident insurance paid for by employers and
sickness and old-age benefits whose expense was borne jointly by
employers, employees and the state. In this Schmoller was mildly
pro-labor and in favor of a paternalistic social state.
However, the next group of economists in the romantic counter-
revolution, the communists, were most vehemently on the side of
labor. Although historical in their basic orientation, they repudiated
the nationalistic emphasis that had characterized at least the earlier
members of the historical school. On the other hand, like all Ger-
man romanticists they advocated the subordination of the individual
to the group. The group they had in mind, however, was not some
segment of Germany but the workingmen of the world, the inter-
national proletariat. They claimed to be scientific, and Marx actu-
ally borrowed most of his key theoretical concepts from the classi-
cists; fundamentally, however, their approach to economics was not
scientific but romantic. The unraveling of their confusions of fact
and value provides a most interesting challenge for analysis. But to
understand their thought historically it is necessary, in a sense, to
digress in order to have before us another important influence upon
their thinkingâthat exerted by the French socialists.
The "Utopians"
The rise of communism was closely connected with what may be
called "the Second French Revolution." The French Revolution of
1789 was essentially a revolt of the middle classesâof merchants,
industrial capitalists, professional men and peasantsâagainst the
feudal aristocracy and the church. The Revolution of 1848, spread-
ing throughout Europe but starting in Paris and attaining its great-
est momentum there, was a rebellion of industrial workers and the
propertyless groups against a middle-class government (namely, the
so-called "July Monarchy" of Louis Philippe). The chief causes in
this shift in the cast playing the leading roles can be found in the
effects of the impact of the industrial revolution.
The industrial revolution occurred in France later than in Eng-
land. Two important reasons for this were that France's manufactur-
ing had traditionally been more weighted toward those products
(such as laces and the finer cloths) that could not so easily be shifted
from hand to machine production and that the Revolution of 1789
and the decade of political turbulence and consequent financial
instability which it produced put a temporary halt upon industrial
development. However, Napoleon Bonaparte, with his "continental
system," did much to encourage French industrial growth. This
system was an attempt, as a war weapon, to close the ports of Europe
to English goods. Then, too, the July Monarchy was sympathetic
with the interests of industrial capitalism. As a result there was by
1848 an appreciable class of industrial workers in the larger cities
of France and particularly in Paris, although they were still greatly
outnumbered by the peasants. Their lot was deplorable: their
average working day was fifteen hours, in some cases eighteen; their
pay was small; their jobs were insecure; they had no representation
in the government.
On the other hand, the Revolution of 1848 bore the positive im-
press of the earlier one of 1789. It showed a similar reliance on the
method of violence or insurrection. More particularly, this violence
took the like form of Parisian mobs used as a threat against the gov-
ernment. Since these were composed largely of propertyless workers,
it can be said that the direct weapon of revolution in both instances
was an aroused proletariatâas was also true in the establishment of
the July Monarchy. In each case the incitement of the mob to action
came finally from a small group of intellectuals acting as propa-
gandists.
However, the propagandists in the two instances were different.
In 1789 they were the Jacobins, a group greatly influenced by J. J.
Rousseau and les philosophes, adopting as their motto the former's
catch phrase, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." Although they used
the Paris mobs to help overthrow the monarchy and establish the
First Republic, they were middle class in sympathies and not funda-
mentally interested in the permanent improvement of the prole-

tariat. The propagandists for the Revolution of 1848 were the
utopian socialists, who were genuinely and idealistically concerned
with the conditions of the workers. Their ideological weapon was
not "liberty" to the individualâwhich had been used by the capital-
ists to justify a laissez-faire policy prohibiting any improvement in
working conditions by governmental actionâbut the "injustice of
private property" and of "unearned income" in the form of profits.
For the most part, the utopians were aware that the interests of the
proletariat were linked with industrialization, although this never
dawned upon Fourier. For the most part, they were pure theorizers
who had had almost no practical political or industrial experience,
although this did come rather suddenly and disastrously to Blanc.
We may begin our survey of the utopians with a consideration of
the thought of Count Henri de Saint-Simon and his followers.
Saint-Simon formulated the doctrine, to become central in Marxism,
of the coming atrophy of the political state. Government was an
anachronism in an industrial society: if France were to lose its most
important professional, industrial and agricultural leaders it would
degenerate immediately into barbarism, but if it should lose all the
royal family, all ministers of state and all high-ranking governmental
officials, it wouldn't cause the least inconvenience, said Saint-Simon.
With the elimination of this deadwood all class distinctions would
disappear (incidentally, Saint-Simon was born a nobleman but died
in penury) except for the difference between workers and idlers.
Saint-Simon did not deny differences in ability, nor did he advocate
the abolition of differences of income or of property. What he did
argue was the remaking of France into an immense industrial organ-
ization: "France is to be turned into a factory and the nation organ-
ized on the model of a vast workshop."
Saint-Simon's followers were more radically utopian. Their most
characteristic innovation was a vigorous attack upon private property
and a bold advocacy of state capitalism. Private ownership of capi-
tal, they contended, put into the hands of a few the right of levying
a toll upon the industry of others. What the capitalist received as
a return upon his investment was obviously produced by othersâit
therefore rested on exploitation due not to the incidental abuse of
the system by an occasional capitalist but to an organic and necessary
defect of the capitalist system itselfâan idea that was similarly des-
tined to become one of Marx's cardinal doctrines. They did not,
however, oppose the profits of the entrepreneur except when ob-

tained by an unnecessary depression of wages: profits were a reward
for the labor of direction.
Not only was private property socially unjust in the eyes of the
Saint-Simonians, it was also, they said, inefficient from the standpoint
of the industry of the country as a whole. The accident of birth,
they contended, concentrated capital in the hands of those who fre-
quently did not have the rare ability required for its effective useâ
that of properly allocating the different "factors of production," as
we now call them. This defect was the source of industrial crises.
Each individual [capitalist] devotes all his attention to his own im-
mediate dependents. No general view of production is ever taken.
There is no discernment and no exercise of forethought. Capital is
wanted here and excessive there. This want of a broad view of the
needs of consumers and of the resources of production is the cause of
those industrial crises whose origin has given rise to so much fruitless
speculation. . . .
Another of the arguments of the Saint-Simonians was that private
property was an institution that had come to be historically; it was
not an eternal entity, an inviolable necessity; it could be changed or
completely done away with; it was a social fact which, like others,
would have to submit to "the laws of progress." As this last phrase
suggests, the Saint-Simonians believed there were historical laws,
especially of economic development. They thought they could, with
scientific reliability, predict future human developments in the area
of social and economic relations; in particular, they foresaw in-
creased industrialization, the elimination of private property and
an international federation.
It is, I am sure, unnecessary to point out that the theories of
Saint-Simon and his followers were not scientific in the sense of the
new physics. Despite a tendency to speak of "laws" and to try to
predict on their basis, these men are properly grouped with the
"utopians," although for the present point it is unfortunate that that
term has unpleasant overtones which, no doubt, were what induced
Marx to apply it to his socialist predecessors. They were utopian in
the sense that they were primarily concerned not to describe facts
and to verify statements of factual uniformities, but to condemn
evils and to point the way to a better society. If this is not so notice-
able in the case of the Saint-Simonians, who, after all, were quite
aware of the outstanding social trends of their time, it is unmis-
takable in the later utopians, and particularly in Charles Fourier

who was, by contrast, remarkably insensitive to historical realities.
As contrasted with the ideas of the Saint-Simonians, Fourier's no-
tions, so far from anticipating Marxist doctrines, clashed with them
on almost every point. Only in that he opposed traditional capital-
ism in favor of a system promising a better lot to workingmen and
eliminating a separate class of capitalists may he be said to have
been a forerunner of communism.
Fourier turned back in disgust from the evils of an industrialized
society to a rural Arcadia exemplifying in many important respects
the manorial organization of the Middle Ages. Society was to be
composed of small, economically self-sufficient, agricultural units,
each cultivating 400 acres of land centered in a village of 1600
people housed in a sort of grand-apartment hotel. These units (or
"phalanxes," as he called them) were not communistic but rather, to
use a later terminology, joint-stock corporations. Everyone was to
own stock in the unit and to receive dividends declared upon it;
but everyone was also to work. Managers were to be elected by
universal suffrage. Class differences were to be minimized, even the
poorest participant being a capitalist with money invested in the
common concern. Thus, the solidarity and self-sufficiency of the
medieval manor were to be reinstituted but with capitalistic notions
of ownership and an approximation to equality of status. Essentially,
Fourier's phalanx was a utopian escape from the social problems of
industrialism. Fourier himself was unable to establish any, but after
his death short-lived ones were set up in America.
To the question, "What is property?", which formed the title of
one of his chief pronouncements, Pierre Joseph Proudhon answered,
"Property is theft." In doing so, he essentially followed the radical
orientation of the Saint-Simonians, although he added a theoretical
foundation by utilizing the labor-value theory of the classicists. Re-
turn on investment, said Proudhon, was income to the capitalist for
which he had done no work. Capital by itself was unproductive and
interest on it was literally payment for nothing. "Society is built up
as follows: All the raw material required is gratuitously supplied by
nature, so that in the economic world every product is really begot
of labor, and capital must be considered unproductive." Thus the
capitalist was simply "a kind of toll-gatherer who demands a toll
from every commodity that passes his way. Property is the real
thief."
This thievery was not noticed because the employer paid his
workmen in proportion to the individual values of their labors,
quietly pocketing the extra value arising from the combination of
their efforts. To show what he meant by this "extra value" Proud-
hon cited the instance of the erection of a statue which could easily
be accomplished by 200 men working for one hour, but could not,
even with the greatest exertion, be achieved by one man working
200 hours or even 200 days.
However, although income from capital in the form of rents or
interest was, he thought, unjustifiable, Proudhon did not wish to
destroy private property itself. He considered it accumulated labor
or savings of the fruits of labor, and he wanted to guarantee com-
plete freedom to all workers to dispose of the fruits of their labor as
they saw fit. Only on the basis of such complete liberty could an
economic system function. Thus, Proudhon refused to accept com-
munism, which he dubbed "the religion of misery." He did, how-
ever, wish to see the ownership of property spread as widely as possi-
ble, in order that the robbery of income from it might be eliminated.
I should like everybody to have some property. We are anxious
that they should have property in order to avoid paying interest, be-
cause exorbitant interest is the one obstacle to the universal use of
property.
Strangely enough, this did not lead him to propose a redistribution
of property; rather, his solution was "free credit." Free Credit, that
is, the free use of capital without payment of interest, was, on his
scheme, to be attained through an Exchange Bank which would re-
place money by exchange notes in the form of promises of future
delivery of goods. With such a medium of exchange there would be
no need to advance money, therefore no need to pay interest. Sup-
pose a farmer needed money for seed and fertilizer. Instead of bor-
rowing it and paying interest on the loan, he could give a note of
promise to pay to the bearer a certain amount of his next harvest,
which note could be circulated like money when validated by the
signature of the Exchange Bank.
Proudhon saw that all bank notes, whether backed by metallic
money or not, really depended for their value upon public confi-
dence, that is, upon acceptance in exchange transactions. He did not
see that postponement of payment was a "disutility," by which I do
not mean some Seniorian man-hours of discomfort, but the simple
fact that people would exchange greater future goods for less present
ones. Proudhon attempted to set up a Peoples Bank, not with free
credit but with low interest rates; he failed, however, for want of
subscribers.
As indicated by the title of his major work, "The Organization ot
Labor," Louis Blanc turned from the financial to the social sphere
for his panacea of industrial ills. He found the chief evil of the cur-
rent economic system to lie in the competition between producers;
its cure, he felt, was a cooperative method of production. More con-
cretely, his proposal was a cooperative producers' association called
"the social workshop." This was to be composed of workers in the
same trade who would own in combination the instruments of pro-
duction. All the industry of the country would be organized into
such social workshops in one over-all association built on the princi-
ple of mutual support rather than rivalry. It would be necessary in
starting the scheme to have the government step in to furnish the
necessary capital and to lay down some regulations. Thus Blanc
advocated a form of state participation, as contrasted with laissez
faire, although the state was "just to give ... a push: gravity and
the laws of mechanism (would) suffice for the rest." If such inter-
vention were opposed on the grounds that it conflicted with indi-
vidual liberty, Blanc was ready with the retort that such liberty was
an abstract illusion.
The "rights of man" proclaimed with pomp and defined with mi-
nuteness in many a charter, has simply served as a cloak to hide the
injustice of individualism and the barbarous treatment meted out to
the poor under its aegis. Because of this practice of defining liberty
as a right, men have got into the habit of calling people free even
though they are the slaves of hunger and of ignorance and the sport
of every chance. Let us say once for all that liberty consists, not in
the abstract right given to a man, but in the power given to him to
exercise and develop his faculties.
This reply to the propagandists of the French Revolution of 1789,
and to the ideologists of the Glorious Revolution of England behind
them, was, as everyone knows, to be adopted as a characteristic de-
vice by the communists.
Perhaps Blanc's greatest importance for the Revolution of 1848
lay not in the ideological but in the political sphere. That this
revolution was not even nation-wide but involved only workers in
France's chief city, leaving the peasants untouched and in fact in
early opposition, was one of the reasons of its abrupt failure. Others
were that the workingmen were not organizedâthey were treated
simply as recipients of governmental benefits; that leading socialists
were not in agreementâeach had his own private panacea (the
Luxembourg Commission was a sort of debating society for the pro-
motion of these various schemes); that the socialist leaders were
politically ineptâthey were writers, not politicians.
Blanc, as head of the Luxembourg Commission, held a very im-
portant post. He successfully urged upon the Provisional Govern-
ment the establishment of national workshops on the principle in
the decree: "The Provisional Government of the French Republic
undertakes to guarantee the existence of every worker by means of
his labor. It further undertakes to give work to all its citizens."
This was a guarantee of employment to everyone. It was utilized by
the antisocialists (one of whom was put in charge of the workshops)
to oppose the socialists. This was accomplished first by allowing all
the riffraff to benefit by its guarantee of wagesâthere was no system-
atic plan for the state's entry into or control of production so that
the unemployed could be effectively put to work; second, by the
attempt to force those enrolled in the workshop into the armyâ
this failed but only at the cost of riot and bloody street fighting, the
reaction to which was the scrapping of the whole workshop under-
taking. Thus discredit was cast upon Blanc's social workshop idea
and in fact upon socialism generally, although even Blanc's idea had
been quite different from what was actually tried (it was one of co-
operative production, not of governmental guarantees of employ-
ment). The Luxembourg Commission made other recommenda-
tions, but none of them was put into effect.
The widespread reaction against the Revolution of 1848 was a
great setback to the socialist movement both politically and ideation-
ally. Perhaps its most important single effect was that it caused a
sharp break of Marx and Engels with the utopians: Marx did not
want to be associated with a movement that had failed. Moreover,
the reaction in Europe against socialism and all its leading figures
forced Marx into virtual seclusion in England where he wrote the
most influential socialist book of allâDas Kapital. Here, although
he devoted most of his time to a study of the writings of the classical
school, he could not fail to be influenced by developments of signifi-
cance for the working class. Hence it seems justifiable to carry
further our digression into the backgrounds giving communism its
distinctive characteristics within the romantic-historical movement

by turning briefly to the evolution of the trades-union movement in
England in the nineteenth century and to the contributions both
practical and ideational of the greatest of the English socialists of
that period.
Although the Revolution of 1848 did not extend into England,
the conditions of labor were not improved there without some
violence. At first there was opposition to the new machines them-
selvesâas labor-saving and thus as contributing to unemployment:
knitting frames were wrecked; sporadic rioting occurred. In response
the government suspended the Habeas Corpus Act in 1817. In
1819, after the "Manchester Massacre" or "Peterloo," the Six Acts
were passed, depriving workers of civil liberties. Some laborers
resorted to terrorism, but most turned to peaceful organization.
"Friendly Societies" or "Benefit Clubs" were formed offering sick-
ness and unemployment insurance to their members. As early as
1832 there were 500 cooperative societies.
The Combination Acts forbade any combination of workers to
seek improved conditions or higher wages; not only strikes but mere
petitions stating grievances were punishable by imprisonment.
Nevertheless, trades unions secretly grew. Finally in 1824 Francis
Place induced Parliament to repeal the Combination Acts. This was
followed by a wave of strikes that so frightened the government that
Parliament passed a new act in 1825 prohibiting "molestation or
obstruction," that is, picketing. In 1834 Robert Owen formed a
"Grand National Consolidated Trades Union." It attempted to call
a general strike in answer to the government's punishment of six
laborers for joining it, but this failed.
From about 1850 a new type of trades union, modeled on the
Amalgamated Society of Engineers, grew up. It had large accumu-
lated reserve funds capable of financing long strikes. Also there grew
up strong trades councils in various cities. By 1874 the campaign
for direct representation of labor by the election of trades-union
leaders to Parliament was successful.
In this whole labor movement an outstanding figure was that of
Robert Owen. Besides furnishing practical leadership, Owen was
important in stimulating the development of socialistic ideas in
nineteenth-century England.
Like his French contemporary, Fourier, Owen advocated what
amounted to joint-stock companies and was therefore no collectivist;
but he was unlike Fourier in many ways. Fourier, a poor worker,

was never able to set up his phalanxes; Owen, a rich industrialist,
was able to establish his cooperative villages. Fourier advocated a
return to an agrarian economy; Owen favored village life and the
breaking up of the wretched English industrial cities but did not
oppose industry: on his scheme factories were simply to be moved
into the country where ideal conditions could obtain. Finally, Owen
was far more vigorous and versatile in his practical activities in
favor of the working class than his French contemporary.
Owen was an outstanding leader in the movement for factory
legislation that reduced maximum working hours from seventeen
to ten per day, prohibited the employment of children under ten
years of age, allowed peaceful association of workers, and assured
many other benefits to labor. He was also in the forefront of the
movement to organize labor. As already stated, it was he that formed
the "Grand National Consolidated Trades Union" which attempted
to call the first general strike in English history. He furnished the
inspiration animating the cooperative movement in retail stores,
dating from the Rochdale Society. It was he who set up a "National
Equitable Labor Exchange" in an effort to eliminate profits by re-
placing money with labor notes as the medium of exchange (goods
being exchangeable, on this arrangement, for notes showing the
exact amount of labor involved in their production). This currency
experiment failed, but all his other activities in promotion of the
interests of the workingman had important effects, even his model
factories with their adjoining villages not being without influence
upon recent community-industrial planning.
From the standpoint of theory, Owen's most striking idea, perhaps,
was his socio-educational determinism, according to which an in-
dividual was not responsible for his moral character: his goodness
or badness were determined by the way in which he had been
brought upâby his social environment. Marx was to develop this
into a wider determinism, not merely of the individual by his social
environment but of the social environment itself by the historical
development of the physical means of production. On the basis of
his determinism, Owen argued that, if men were to be improved, it
was necessary to control their education and social environment.
Such control, among other things, would eliminate Christianity and
profits. Christianity was wrong in condemning men for their sins;
profits were wrong since unjust. Profits made it impossible for a
worker to repurchase the product of his own toil or the product of

an equal amount of toil of another worker. This was unjust since,
on the labor theory of value, which Owen accepted from the classical
economists, the true value of any product was the labor that went
into it.
The Communists
It was upon the background of socialist ideas and the working-
men's movement sketched in the preceding division of this section
that there developed a new form of romantic-historical economic
thought. Communist theory was almost entirely the work of two
Germans transplanted into EnglandâKarl Marx, the dynamic labor
organizer and accredited founder of the school, and Friedrich Engels,
a modest manufacturer who became the real brains of the movement
but always subordinated himself to Marx. Of their many works
perhaps the most important were The Communist Manifesto (by
both men), Capital (by Marx), Anti-Diirhring (by Engels) and The
Dialectic of Nature (also by Engels).
Marx and Engels criticized all earlier socialists as "utopian," in the
derogatory sense mentioned earlier. Through some particular, ideal
economic scheme perfected in the head of some intellectual, the
workingman's lot was supposedly to be improved and the social in-
justices of capitalism destroyed. The utopians thought that by a
mere appeal to the intelligence and social conscience of people gen-
erally they could institute their reforms and bring about the elimina-
tion of class differences and conflicts. All this was quite unrealistic,
according to Marx and Engels. The lot of the workingman would
improve only as he organized, became class conscious and fought for
his interests as against those of the capitalist. Moreover, the socialists
portrayed their ideal systems as things that ought to be worked for,
thus revealing themselves to be moralists, resting their cases on an
appeal to men's sense of duty. A far more effective position was the
"scientific" one: the "laws" of historical development proved the
inevitability of the overthrow of capitalism, not by some outside
force, but by its own internal development.
Hence Marx and Engels, much as they were indebted to Owen
and the French socialists (which was far more than they would ac-
knowledge), needed a fundamentally different ideological framework
from theirs. They required a position that would justify the case of
the workingman scientificallyâa basically self-contradictory require-
ment unless our whole analysis of "science" in the modern sense has
been mistaken. To satisfy this need they turned, not to any of the
forms the new science was takingâtheir use of ideas of the classical
economists was, I hope to show, not scientific nor did it constitute a
basic framework for their thinkingâ, but to the philosophy of the
arch-romanticist, Hegel. (Incidentally, Marx had himself studied
philosophy at Berlin and had been a member of the younger
Hegelian school.) Hegel, however, had to be transformed in order
to be of use to the communists.
Formally, the dialectic of Hegel was quite acceptable as it stood.
It was a "process" in which something, called a "thesis," engendered
an opposing force, its "antithesis," which finally became strong
enough to overthrow it. But this victory was never final; the anti-
thesis was itself too one-sided, and hence was in turn overcome by a
"synthesis" that included characteristics of the original thesis. This
constituted a new thesis, however, and the cycle was repeated at a
higher or more comprehensive level. Such, most unromantically
stated, was the form of the Hegelian dialectic. To serve communist
purposes it needed to become a deterministic law of history. For
Hegel the dialectic process was always considered a necessary one;
sometimes, however, it appeared to be simply a change in our way
of apprehending things, rather than a change in the things them-
selves. It might be pointed out that, interpreted as a procedure of
human understanding, the dialectic was not without precedent. Its
prototype was an educational method of disputation in the Platonic
academy revived in the medieval university. In this procedure a
thesis was assigned to one student, another had to argue it down by
upholding its antithesis, the teacher finally concluding the debate
and drawing the moral in the synthesis. Hegel had only to drop out
students and teacher to attain his dialectic, a "bloodless ballet of
categories," as it has been aptly described.
The remaking of such a dialectic into a law of concrete historical
change was comparatively easy. Hegel himself, especially in his
Philosophy of History, had made a definitely historical application of
his dialectic, and the younger Hegelians had developed this empha-
sis. More important for the communists, it was necessary to give a
socio-economic interpretation to the dialectical process in history.
Hegel talked as though ideasâspecifically ideas of freedomâcon-
trolled history and that it was their conflict and synthesis that con-
stituted the dialectic. Marx and Engels were aided in making the
modification they wanted by the example of Ludwig Feuerbach. He

was a Hegelian who, largely because of the impact of nineteenth-
century science, felt that it was necessary to "turn Hegel upside
down." Instead of saying that the world and its processes were de-
termined by ideas, he came to hold that ideas were determined by
the world, by matter in its lawful changesâparticularly by the modi-
fications in the matter composing the thinker's body. This view,
however, was too individualistic, too "abstract," for Marx and
Engels; it omitted the significance of social context and historical
change. So in place of Feuerbach's individualistic and physiological
determinants they put a social and economic one. Men's ideas and
ideals, they said, were historically necessitated by the class relations
of their proponents and ultimately by the modes and tools of eco-
nomic production. Thus, material relations, specifically those in-
volved in the production of material goods, determined man's social
organization and thereby his intellectual and cultural life.
This meant that ideas were "epi-phenomena," were ineffective
offshoots of social, historical and economic conditions. Frequently
Marx and Engels went so far as to embrace a relativism such as we
have seen suggested by Knies: an idea was true "relative" to the
economic and social conditions giving rise to it but false relative to
others. Thus, to disprove an idea it was only necessary to show that
the conditions producing it had changed. This view was a powerful
weapon in overthrowing capitalist ideas: although taken by their
middle-class believers to be absolutely and eternally true, it was
shown that they could only arise in a bourgeois society and it was
tacitly supposed that they could become false when that type of
society had passed away.
Besides the idea of necessitated change another aspect of Hegel's
thought was carried over by Marx and Engels into their dialectic of
historyâthe idea of conflict and of the rise of new conflicts out of
the resolution of old ones. However, the character of the conflict
was shifted from the contradiction of ideas to the struggle between
social classes. This they applied to their own age: "Society as a whole
is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two
great classes directly facing each otherâbourgeoisie and proletariat."
The reason for this was that by the very nature of the system capital
was piling up in the hands of ever fewer people. The result was that
small capitalists (tradesmen, shopkeepers, skilled workers and peas-
ants) were being forced into the proletariat. Not only were other
classes being absorbed into the working class, the latter was organ-
izing and becoming self-conscious of its interests in conflict with
those of the bourgeoisie. The inevitable result would be the suc-
cess of the proletariat and the destruction of the bourgeoisie. This
was the pattern of the dialectic of history: just as the medieval serf
and petty freeman had become the modern capitalist, eliminating
the feudal noble, so the modern worker was to become society's
ruler, liquidating the capitalist.
Here, peculiarly, the dialectic was to stop. The proletariat as rul-
ing class would engender no opposition to itself; no new class con-
flict would arise. For the first time the majority would be in power
and they would be able to absorb all other classes. With this disap-
pearance of class struggle the state would wither away, because gov-
ernment was nothing but a mechanism for keeping subject classes
in slavery. When there was no subject class, the need of this mechan-
ism would vanish. (If any reader has felt reluctant in agreeing that
the communists' "law" of history was romanticânot scientificâthis
outcome, whereby the law was to abrogate itself, so to speak, should
convince him.)
The "dialectical materialism" just summarized had been formu-
lated in its essentials by Marx and Engels by 1848. The failure of the
socialist revolution in that year strengthened the position of the
"scientific" communists, whose criticism of the "utopians" was in-
creasingly effective. But Marx was not satisfied. He realized that
capitalism had its own effective ideology in the economic theories of
the classical school and that these needed refutation before his task
as intellectual leader of the communist movement could be con-
sidered complete. So he utilized his forced seclusion in England after
the events of 1848 to make a careful study of Ricardo and Senior for
the purpose of overturning their position. The outcome was the
publication of the monumental work, Das Kapital, which almost
immediately became the virtual bible of communism.
In this work Marx avoided the direct attacks upon classicism
characteristic of the earlier historical school. He saw that it was
much more effective for his purpose ostensibly to accept the basic
ideas of his opponents but to develop them in such a way as to make
them destructive bombshells to be exploded within the enemy camp
itself. Moreover, the line of opposition taken by his historical prede-
cessors was unavailable to him, for it involved the denial of the pos-
sibility of a scientific economics. This Marx wanted to avoid at all
costs, since, in his mind, it involved the abandonment of determin-

ism and consequently a return to some sort of utopianism or moral-
istic argument for the overthrow of capitalism. So instead of object-
ing to the scientism of the classical school, Marx decided to capitalize
on it for the cause of the proletariat.
There were two chief lines of attack in Capital, each utilizing
classical concepts but each developed dialectically, so that one sees,
if one takes the trouble to look, that, although the clothes were
Ricardian, the living body that animated them was that of Hegel:
one was via a theory of surplus value; the other was by means of a
theory of capitalist accumulation or "appropriation." We shall start
with the former.
The use value of a commodity was something intrinsic to it, being
relative only to human wants. Its exchange value, on the other hand,
would appear to be wholly relative, a matter of what it could pur-
chase in other commodities. But if one looked below the surface one
could see that exchange value also must involve something intrinsic
to the commodity. Suppose one took such quantities of any two
commodities as would actually exchange for each other, say one
quarter of corn and x hundred-weight of iron. Clearly there was
something equal here; but nothing could be observed in the two that
was the same, nor did they satisfy the same wants. It followed that
there had to be a third something differing from each yet somehow
common to both. This was the labor used in their production. But,
once more, there was no actual, observable labor common to both:
cultivating corn was quite different labor concretely from mining
iron. Thus, what was common to the exchangeable commodities
was not the concrete labor of their production, but labor in the ab-
stractâsimply so many man-hours of labor as such. However, there
was no such thing as labor in the abstract; all labor was concrete
labor in the production of specific commodities. But there was a
particular commodity that could function as the measure of all
others, the labor of whose production, consequently, represented the
abstract equality of all labor: this was money.
We thus unmistakably recognize the Hegelian dialectic at work:
for his thesis Marx put the concrete labor involved in the produc-
tion of a given commodity; his antithesis was labor in the abstract,
which was the same for any two commodities that would exchange
for each other; his synthesis was the concrete labor involved in the
production of money, since money served to measure the equality in
value of any exchangeable commodities. Of course, however, the

dialectic did not stop with the completion of this single cycle. Let
us follow it further.
Money, said Marx, was a medium of exchange as well as a measure
of it. It allowed the broadening of the field of exchange so that in
place of direct barter of two commodities (which Marx designated
by the expression, "Cj â C2"), one commodity could be sold for
money which in turn would purchase another commodity (as ex-
pressed by "C1 â M â C2"). This form of exchangeâreminiscent
of the "legitimate" exchange of Aristotle and St. Thomasâcould be
understood as due to the different use values of the commodities as
related to the different desires of buyers and sellers. In this exchange
there could be, and normally was, an exact equivalence of exchange
value. But now a new form of exchange appearedâreminding one
of the "illegitimate" exchange of Aristotle and St. Thomasâ: money
was used to purchase a commodity which was in turn sold for money
("Mi â C â M2"); that is, the commodity was bought not for con-
sumption but for resale. Here money acquired a new function: no
longer a mere measure and medium of exchange, it had become the
goal of the process as well; it was now "capital." But clearly no one
would indulge in this kind of exchange without the expectation
that the resale price would be greater than the purchase ("M2 \
MI") and thus that there be an increment in the money factor (as
indicated by the formula, "M1 â C â MI -+- AM"). This increment
Marx called "surplus value" and the whole process, "capitalistic ex-
change."
Looking back for a moment, we note that we have traversed a new
cycle in the dialectic: for thesis there was barter ("C1 â C2"); for
antithesis, noncapitalist money exchange ("C1 â M â C2"); for syn-
thesis, capitalistic exchange ("M1 â C â MI + AM"). But we must
somewhere have left Hegel's "ballet of the categories" behind, for
now there is definitely the smell of blood in the air. It will not take
long to track it down.
Where did the increment or surplus value in capitalistic exchange
come from? It was not due to any cheating or dishonesty, for, al-
though this might happen, it was exceptional, and capitalistic ac-
tivity as a whole could not be explained in such terms (Marx wanted
no "moralistic" condemnation of capitalists). Thus it was to be
assigned neither to the original purchase nor to the resale of the com-
modity. Its only other possible source was the commodity itself. If
that commodity remained unchanged, it naturally could not be the

source of any increment of value. Now, the only kind of change all
commodities underwent was their consumption. Thus the incre-
ment must have arisen from the consumption of some commodity
which served to increase the exchange value of the commodity so
consumed. Since all exchange value was constituted by the labor of
production, the commodity sought as the source of the increment
must have been one whose consumption used up laborâmore labor,
indeed, than went into its own production. Such a commodity could
be found only in the capacity for labor, in labor power; this was
"consumed" by the capitalist, that is, it was turned into actual labor.
The capitalist purchased labor power from the laborer; he consumed
it by putting it to work producing something; the product of this
work was then sold for more, since actually worth more, than the
labor power whose consumption produced it. What was the value
of the labor power purchased by the capitalist? It was the labor
necessary for the production of such power, namely, the bare subsist-
ence of the laborer, as Ricardo had shown in his iron law of wages.
But the labor power when set to work could produce more than this.
This "more" was the increment forming the basis, the raison d'etre,
of the whole capitalistic economy.
It is easy to see, I think, that Marx's concept of surplus value was
Ricardo's theory of rent put into the framework of Hegel's dialectic.
Actually Marx adopted the terminology of Senior and affirmed that
the laborer worked part of the day simply to maintain himself, the
rest of his day being devoted to the production of surplus value for
his employer. But Marx added that not only did the capitalist get
these last hours of the day's work for nothing, he even forced the
laborer to advance him credit on the original cost, for he paid wages
to the laborer only at the end of the work period!
The process of capitalistic exchange, said Marxâagain curiously
reviving scholastic ideasâwas without any natural termination, its
goal being the accumulation of money rather than the acquirement
of goods for consumption. Turning this around, it was proper to
suppose that any purchase price the capitalist paid for labor power
was the end result of a long series of capitalistic exchanges, each
adding its increment to the money available for the next one. Thus,
whatever the magnitude of the increments, the money the capitalist
used at any given time to purchase labor power was almost wholly
composed of accumulated surplus values, or, as Marx rephrased it,

the capitalist's purchase of labor power was by means of his previous
exploitation of labor.
This brings us to Marx's doctrine of capitalist accumulation. Here
he built upon Adam Smith's distinction between circulating and
fixed capital, modifying it, of course, to suit his own ideological pur-
pose. He identified circulating capital with labor power, which was
consumed directly in any production; fixed capital, with everything
else the capitalist had to buy in order to make production possible,
such as machinery, tools, even raw materials. It was Marx's conten-
tion that surplus value was realized only on the circulating capital
invested, for in its use alone was labor power consumed. Therefore,
the capitalist naturally tried to keep the ratio of his circulating to his
fixed capital as large as possible, but here he was frustrated by an
inherent feature of the capitalist system. Each capitalist found him-
self in competition with other capitalists. To attract buyers, he
tried to undersell his competitors. This required that he lower his
costs by using labor-saving machinery, improving the efficiency of his
labor and adopting similar means. But this necessitated the appor-
tionment of less of his funds to circulating and more to fixed capital
investment.
The result of this was, on the one hand, that labor became rela-
tively superfluous in the process of production. This could actually
be observed, said Marx, in an "industrial reserve army"âthe unem-
ployed, which was a glut on the labor market and served to keep the
wages of those who were employed down to an absolute minimum.
It was, of course, an advantage to the capitalist to have this reserve
army ever at hand so that in times of increased demand he would
have readily available a cheap source of additional labor. But it also
paid the capitalist to employ as few as possible at the longest possible
hours, for surplus value arose only in the consumption of labor
power over and above its cost, that is, that portion of the labor day
necessary for maintaining the worker.
Thus the increased accumulation of capital meant a deterioration
in the condition of labor. On the other handâand here Marx
played his trump cardâthis accumulation, furnishing as it did the
very motive of capitalistic exchange, also produced a worsening of
the condition of capital; indeed, it was destined soon to destroy the
capitalist entirely. The argument was this. Surplus value came only
from the use of circulating capital. Competition between capitalists

required an ever-increasing allocation of funds to fixed-capital invest-
ment. As the latter became larger, fewer capitalists would be able to
attain any increment and those, with fabulously mounting invest-
ments but rapidly declining returns, would finally (since they had
nothing to anticipate but their own failure) fall before an aroused
proletariat who would take over the machinery of production and
devote it to the making of a maximum of goods for consumption by
the many rather than to the creation of surplus value by exploitation
of labor for the benefit of the few.
No extended or abstruse analysis is needed to bring out the non-
scientific character of Marx's use of the ideological weapons he had
taken from the arsenal of his opponents. The doctrine of capitalist
accumulation was, at best, applied science, being a prediction of a
unique series of events with a singular outcome unlike anything that
had previously occurred. It therefore required, if the claim of its
being "scientific" was to be made out at all, that it be the conse-
quence of the application to a particular situation of scientific laws
in the strict sense. The only candidates for such a role involved
Marx's concept of surplus value. No doubt he thought that in this
idea he had a truly scientific concept. Unfortunately his romantic
instinct had led him astray, for he had chosen, as the kernel of his
idea, precisely that element in the thought of the classical school
which was, as we have already noted, entirely extra-factualâthe con-
cept of "labor value" or "labor disutility." Any supposed "laws" of
surplus value were thus not factual at all but definitional (or for
present purposes we could equally well dub them "dialectical"). One
could never verify nor disverify that surplus value arose only in
capitalistic exchange or that it was due wholly to the consumption
of labor power, for these statements were tautologies. This was
somewhat masked by the tendency, most natural in terms of the
history of the concepts, to confuse surplus value with profits and
rents. But these were observable exchange phenomena (albeit they
had to be calculated as differences between other prices and so were
experienceable indirectly only); it, however, did not fall into this
category. It was not a price nor a calculable relation between prices;
it was the true measure of a factor in capitalistic prices because it had
a constancy guaranteed quite independently of actual prices and
their fluctuations. Thus, "laws" stated in terms of it were them-
selves entirely independent of variations in observable prices and
consequently neither needed nor obtained any confirmation by them.

The criticism just offered is, so to speak, "for the record." To the
less meticulous reader the nonscientific character of Marx's concept
of surplus value is sufficiently shown by its whole context, which was
not that of functional invariances in measurable features of events
but of the culminating stages in a dialectic of opposites.
The Scientific Revolution in Biology
Probably the outstanding single event in the history of nineteenth-
century science was the publication in 1859 of The Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin. It had an impact on popular thinking compara-
ble to that of Newton's Natural Philosophy according to Mathe-
matical Principles. Indeed, in a sense, it was more striking, for
whereas Newton was accepted on all sides and even exerted a posi-
tive influence on religion (as shown in the spread of Deism), Darwin
stirred up violent controversy and was excoriated by a large number
of religious thinkers. We shall inquire as to the causes of this pres-
ently. In science itself his importance was far below that of Newton;
yet it was much greater than is sometimes thought.
The popular view is that Darwin's importance lay in establishing
the fact of evolution by accumulating a vast array of observations to
substantiate it. His theory of the mechanism of evolution, so it is
thought, was something of an aberration on his partâin any case
dated and so of antiquarian interest only. What was this "fact" of
evolution according to the popular view? That all forms of life on
the earth sprang from one or two simple, primitive types; that they
can be arranged in a grand hierarchy according to the history of
their development; that it is possible and proper to reconstruct this
as a majestic story telling how, despite many blind alleys, man, the
crowning glory of it all, finally emerged.
This, it seems to me, is quite wrong, almost as wrong as the popu-
lar conception of the Copernican revolution. It will be my conten-
tion that the basic significance of Darwin lay not in that he wrote or
made possible such a history of life but that he brought into biology
on a broad basis the concepts and methods of the new kind of sci-
ence, or perhaps more accurately, that he led biology out of the
desert up to the very borders of this promised land. In this journey
the notion of the mechanism of evolution was vital, the very guiding
beacon.
If our account of it has been correct, the new type of science did
not itself aim to reconstruct unique eventsânot even an event as

complex and baffling as that of the development of life on our planet.
Such workâand it remained important and probably far more in-
teresting than that of the pure scientistâwas to be given to the
detective, the historian. It required for its successful pursuit a well
f1lled kit of scientific knowledge. But, inasmuch as its aim was the
telling of a story (of unique events in one little corner of the uni-
verse), not the formulating of laws (of uniformities in abstract fea-
tures of events everywhere and everywhen), it was not science.
Interest in the story of life on our planet was characteristic of the
nineteenth century. It was, indeed, not without relation to the
romantic movement. We have seen how the romanticist, skeptical
of the abstractness of the new science which did not "take time seri-
ously," turned to history, to explanation not by reference to scien-
tific laws but by delineation of unique developments culminating in
the concrete phenomena to be explained. This kind of approach was
not confined to the explanations of peoples and periods in human
history but was extended to organic life as a whole and even to
physical nature.
The German philosopher, Schelling, devoted his energies as a
young man to building a philosophy of nature on this sort of ro-
mantic foundation. He saw all things as in some mystical and sym-
bolic sense evolving into the human spirit with its highest develop-
ment in art and religion. Physical nature was just a low form of this
spirit, not yet aware of itself. In the polarity of its forces of attraction
and repulsion it everywhere revealed the conflict found in man be-
tween his awareness of himself, of his own freedom and creativity, on
the one hand, and the outer world and its restrictions upon him, on
the otherâa conflict overcome only in artistic achievement and reli-
gious experience. Starting with the lowest power in nature, gravity,
this evolutionary force worked its way up through such manifesta-
tions as light, magnetism, electricity and chemical process to organic
life, where gradually the distinctive characteristics of spirit emerged.
Hegel's dialectic presented another instance of this romantic evolu-
tionism. It portrayed the development of organic life as just one
stage in the evolution of the forms of nature, which, as a whole, was
in turn simply a step in the over-all unfolding of Everything.
The later romantics in philosophy and literature embraced Dar-
win's evolutionism with eagerness as giving observational corrobora-
tion of their standpoint. True, they did throw out his theory of the
mechanism of evolution, Nietzsche, for example, substituting a "will

to power" and Bergson an "elan vital." In this their instincts were
right: it was precisely the mechanism that carried the scientific
dynamite. It is, of course, undeniable that Darwin contributed to
the evolutionary point of view a wealth of confirmatory observations
painstakingly accumulated over many years and in so doing helped
to lift evolutionism from the disrepute of its association with the
wild and uninhibited speculations of the earlier romantics. Nor
should this service be underestimatedâyet it alone was not science;
it could be incorporated in a romantic picture like that drawn in
Bergson's Creative Evolution without in the least transforming the
romanticism into science.
It is my contention that Darwin's contribution to the development
of the biological sciences was far more revolutionary than that as-
cribed to him in the popular view just sketched. Although the new
scientific approach had already been adopted in dealing with certain
specific biological problems, perhaps most notably by William
Harvey in his theory of the circulation of the blood, it was Darwin's
work that allowed a thorough reorientation of the sciences of life
in conformity with it. These sciences had remained up until his
time essentially classificatory and directly descriptive. In the shift
from this to the modern experimental basis I think we can distin-
guish three important services Darwin rendered.
Negatively, his criticism of the tacit presupposition of the tradi-
tional approachâthe notion of clear-cut, fixed speciesâwas emi-
nently successful in showing that the classification of living forms
had to be replaced by something else as the major objective of
biological science. Positively, his suggested mechanism of evolution
did two things. On the one hand, it directly stimulated the ten-
dency to replace ordinary observation by experimentation. Darwin
did not himself use experimental procedures, but one of the corner-
stones of his theory of the mechanism of evolution was the work in
experimental breeding of domestic animals introduced in the agri-
cultural revolution of the preceding century. Moreover, certain
problems connected with "natural selection" but unresolved by
Darwin, particularly those associated with the inheritance and vari-
ation of characteristics, demanded and soon elicited an experimental
approach. The stimulus which Darwin gave to this development can
hardly be overestimated. On the other hand, Darwin was able,
through the idea of the evolutionary mechanism that he proposed,
to save for the biological sciences the concept of organic usefulness

while denuding it of its teleological connotation, thereby remaking
it, so to speak, from a value concept into a factual one.
The doctrine of the fixity of species went back to Aristotle, who
held that offspring were always of the same species as their parents.
That this idea dominated the thinking of biologists down into the
nineteenth century was due not so much to the weight of Aristotle's
authority as to the fact that it was everywhere corroborated by direct
observation. Without this basis in experience, the Christian dogma
of special creation, that is, that God created each species of life by
a separate act, would probably never have been formulated in the
first place and certainly would not have displayed the historical te-
nacity it did. v
The recognition of this forces us to put the doctrine of the fixity of
species in the wider context of the whole method in biology. Here,
as in mechanics, Aristotelian concepts were directly related to ob-
servation, being simply abstractive of some feature of everyday
experience. It was the objective of biological science to find the
natural classes of living beings as these could be observed by anyone,
and to construct a system of names and definitions that would mark
them out. In this Aristotle had to oppose what might be called the
"logical" method of Plato.
Plato's approach was based on the principle that any individual
either had or did not have a given property. Thus, an appropriate
classification of living forms could be constructed by "dichotomous
division." You started with some property and divided up all in-
dividuals into two classesâthose that possessed it and those that did
notâ; then you took the former group and subdivided it with re-
spect to another property and so on. For example, you could divide
all animals into those that lived on or in the water and those that did
not; you could then subdivide the former into those that breathed
water and those that did not; by selecting a further property you
could again split up the "left-hand" class and so on. This method of
division, obviously, was the expression of a logician-mathematician
at work, desiring completeness and symmetry above all else.
In contrast, Aristotle used a more commonsensical classification
that took several properties at a time as its basis of definition and
tried to follow the divisions of nature as these were open for every-
day observation. In so doing he found, he thought, natural classes
that were removed from one another by whole groups of properties
and whose members were characterized by distinctive systems of

organs each of which had a function useful to the individual as a
whole. Nature was not interested in illustrating all possible com-
binations of vital organs, but in putting together and preserving
forms that were functionally appropriate to the kinds of life to be
lived.
This Aristotelian approach probably reached its apogee in the
work of the eighteenth-century Swedish botanist, Linnaeus. He
based his classification of plants on characteristics of their sex or-
gans, which he neatly divided into twenty-six parts, allowing him to
speak of the "vegetable alphabet." He also invented the modern
system of nomenclature which united a generic with a specific name,
thus systematically applying the Aristotelian form of definition, "per
genus et differentia."
This whole classificatory basis of biology was challenged indirectly
by the so-called "fact" of evolution, which, by destroying the idea of
the fixity of species, took away much of the motivation leading
biologists into sheer taxonomy and allowed it to flow into other
channels; it was directly opposed by the demonstration of the
arbitrary character of its distinctions between genera, species and
varieties.
In the first regard, Darwin was anticipated by several men. In
biology proper the work of two Frenchmen should be mentioned.
Buffon's Natural History gave a detailed exposition of eighteenth-
century knowledge of living species arranged as a cosmic epic, from
the lowest and simplest forms to man. Its author, perhaps due to
fear of the church, apparently wavered in his belief between the
doctrines of evolution and special creation.
In Lamarck's Zoological Philosophy, appearing in the first decade
of the nineteenth century, there was no such wavering. Lamarck
boldly asserted that the more complex species had evolved from the
simpler, and that species were not fixed. He stated, moreover, a
definite and consistent theory of the mechanism of evolution which,
although not confirmed by experimental results nor even by any
very extended accumulation of data of direct observationâLamarck
being satisfied with a few striking yet essentially casual corroborating
instancesâ, was yet capable of being subjected to the most rigorous
scientific testing. In outline, his theory was that changed environ-
mental conditions developed new wants in organisms living under
them; these new wants gave rise to new habits of action which, in
turn, developed new organs from the use of old ones or, contrariwise,
atrophied old ones through their disuse; finally, these acquired
organic changes were inherited by subsequent generations. It was
thus that the giraffe, in need of higher foliage for food, developed
its long neck; water birds, stretching the digits of their feet to swim
more rapidly, acquired webbed feet; the mole, living for long pe-
riods underground, almost lost its eyes. We may, if we wish, smile
smugly at this theory, and it must be admitted that Lamarck's no-
tion of empirical verification was rather naive; yet it might be well
to search our own minds to see whether our superiority has not
arisen from the fact that it was the Darwinian, not the Lamarckian,
theory that, as a matter of historical fact, actually proved successful.
For some reason, perhaps not unconnected with the casual and com-
monsensical character of the corroborating instances Lamarck used,
the Lamarckian theory did not have the stimulating effect upon
biological experimentation produced by the Darwinian.
In historical geology and paleontology, two English predecessors
of Darwin should be mentioned. James Hutton, in his Theory of
the Earth, did for the geologic past something very similar to what
Newton had accomplished for the celestially distant. Just as the
earlier thinker had united heavenly motions with terrestrial by
assuming the uniformity of nature, so his later compatriot united
historically remote processes in the earth's crust with present ones
by means of the same assumption. Hutton argued that only those
processes presently observable as producing effects upon the earth's
surfaceâsuch as sedimentation, erosion, volcanic action and earth-
quakesâshould be used to explain the records of the past which the
geologist found in the rocks. This view was successful in overthrow-
ing the reigning doctrine that the rock strata were to be interpreted
as the signs of a series of extraordinary catastrophes. It helped
Darwin combat the allied doctrine of the special creation of each
species of life. 'Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology was based on an
acceptance of Hutton's principles of uniformity and, by its consistent
application, succeeded in working out, in its main outlines, the his-
tory of the earth, identifying the main geological eras and establish-
ing their sequence by means of the criterion that an age was nearer
our own if, as evidenced by the fossil remains, more species were to
be found in it that were extant in the present. This did not presup-
pose evolution, but it did open a tremendous storehouse of cor-
roborating evidence for it.
Darwin marshaled many arguments in favor of the proposition

that existent species had developed from others. Breeders of domes-
tic animals had been able to effect sufficiently great modifications in
varieties as to make it plausible that man during his whole history
had without intention bred some new species. The very great
similarity in the basic processes of life, and the particular likenesses
of so-called "homologous structures"âsuch as wing, foreleg and
armâof different species made it reasonable that different forms of
life had had a common origin. Rudimentary organs, of no use to
their possessors but similar to useful, fully developed organs of lower
species, also seemed to argue for a transformation of species. Fossil
records, despite many gaps, offered many instances of forms inter-
mediate between species now distinct.
Perhaps the chief argument Darwin used against the fixity of
species was that the distinction between species and variety was
arbitrary and vague. Everyone admitted, as indeed the facts of selec-
tive breeding demanded, that some varieties of a given species had
evolved from others. Darwin showed that in many cases differences,
recognized as simply marking out varieties within the same species,
were more profound than those admittedly distinguishing different
species. Naturalists had never reached agreement on a criterion of
species difference; even the widely accepted mark of sterility upon
crossing was not accepted universally as separating species difference
from variety difference.
By these and similar arguments, bolstered by a wealth of instances,
many drawn from his own extensive observations, Darwin corn-
batted the doctrine of the fixity of species and the dogma of special
creation. But of more importance for the history of biology and
even, as a matter of fact, for the acceptance of the transformation
of species was Darwin's account of the mechanism of evolution.
Darwin got his clue from breeders: they did not create variations;
they simply selected them for breeding when they spontaneously
occurred; the mechanisms of heredity did the rest. The breeder, of
course, had to be patient; he had to select small deviations in the
direction desired over many generations. But the long history of life
on the earth as revealed by the paleontologists indicated that nature
had had sufficient time to carry on selective breeding on a grand
scale. But here Darwin found himself stopped. What was the me-
chanism of natural selection? In the case of artificial selection the
breeder's purposes and his ability to control mating sufficiently ex-
plained the results, but Darwin refused to ascribe design to nature,

as this would involve the acceptance of final causes, which, he real-
ized, would be out of harmony with the whole approach of modern
science. The solution came to him upon reading Malthus on popula-
tion. All life, not merely human, tended to reproduce itself beyond
the available food supply. This pressure of numbers set up a strug-
gle for existence. On the average only the fittest survived, the unfit
being extinguished before they could reproduce themselves. This
struggle, then, furnished the means of natural selection. The most
fit mated, and the mechanism of heredity could be expected to pre-
serve the characteristics that had been the basis of their selection,
and through a repetition of this process over many generations large
differences could arise.
Of the many problems Darwin's theory raised, the most immedi-
ately pressing centered around the occurrence and inheritance of
variations of characters. In this connection I shall mention the work
of two men in order to give concrete force to my argument concern-
ing the true significance for biology of Darwin's account of the me-
chanism of evolution.
The Dutch botanist, Hugo de Vries, found that the small, fluc-
tuating variations between individuals that Darwin thought could,
by a sort of cumulative effect over many generations, give rise to
new species were not inheritable. On the other hand, he discovered
that large variations (or "mutations" as he called them) which oc-
curred very infrequently were inheritable, and that strains exem-
plifying them showed no signs over many generations of reversion to
the primitive forms, as was generally thought to be the case. He
argued that the occurrence of such mutations could account for the
rise not only of new varieties but even of new species. For the his-
tory of biology, however, his methods were more important than
his findings. He observed the variations of a single species (La-
marck's evening primrose) under particularly favorable field con-
ditions. Then he transplanted weaker varieties for special cultiva-
tion, sowed wild seeds in his garden for more careful observation
and, through a sequence of several generations, selected seeds from
plants showing some specific variation. In short, he introduced
experimentation to solve a biological problem.
As a matter of fact, but not of general knowledge at the time, de
Vries had been anticipated in the use of experimental procedures in
genetics by the Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel. Mendel was unsatis-
fied with Darwin's explanation of the formation of new species and

set about to study crossbreeding, which Darwin had considered of
little significance for evolution, by experimental procedures of rigor-
ous scientific design. He found that when tall edible peas were
fertilized by tall, all offspring were tall; when dwarf ones were mated
with dwarf, they produced dwarf plants only. When dwarf were
crossed with tall, all plants resulting from this union were tall; but
when the latter were self-fertilized, individuals in the following gen-
eration were tall only in three out of four cases. Continuing with
the process of self-fertilization upon this last-mentioned set, he found
that the dwarf bred true in all instances, but that only one third of
the tall plants had tall offspring which bred true, whereas the re-
mainder produced tall plants only in the ratio of three out of four
(this group thereby duplicating the genetic phenomena of the first
generation after crossing).
With the help of certain assumptions, Mendel was able to put
these data into the framework of a strict scientific law. The assump-
tions he made were that the inherited characters of an organism were
determined by the combination of pollen cells and egg cells pro-
ducing it; that incompatible characters, such as tallness and dwarf-
ness, were genetically "units," that is, were inherited pure so that
the organism had one or the other, not something halfway between;
that of such characters one was "dominant" and one "recessive," that
is, the union of a pair of egg and pollen cells which individually
were hereditary determinants of incompatible unit characters always
produced an organism displaying one of the two, namely, the domi-
nant (tallness in his study), but left the hereditary determinants in
the egg and pollen cells produced by this organism equally divided,
so that, under suitable combination, its offspring could inherit the
other or recessive trait; and finally that the combination of a unit
determinant with the same unit determinant, whether of a dominant
or a recessive character, always bred true. With these assumptions
Mendel was able to formulate a very simple genetic law covering his
observations to the effect that the combination of hereditary deter-
minants in crossbreeding (that is, breeding from parents themselves
possessing incompatible unit characters) was a matter of chance, that
is, for large numbers of instances the division of cases according to
the various possible combinations of these determinants would ap-
proximate an equal distribution. (That his findings, as summarized
above, did agree with this law can be easily grasped visually by con-
sulting Fig. 28.)

[4]
I. UNCROSSED OR SELF-FERTILIZED
Pollen cells A") fA, A a") fa, a
cÂ®-\
Egg cells Aj [.A, A
II. CROSSED
i . First generation â crossing of pure strains
PÂ°llen cells A") fA, a
Egg cells
aj (.a, A
2. Second generationâself-fertilized from above crossings
Pollen cells
Egg cells
3. Third generation,
again self-ferti-
lized (^ Same as under 1
as under i~)
Note:
"A" refers to the determinant of a dominant character,
"Â®" to an individual exemplifying a dominant character,
"a" to the determinant of a recessive character,
"Â®" to an individual exemplifying a recessive character,
"âÂ»" indicates temporal direction.
Fig. 28. Mendel's Genetic Scheme
It is important that we appreciate the scientific character of
Mendel's law. It was, of course, quantitative, although in the some-
what looser sense of being enumerative rather than mensurational.
But this alone, as the reader is now persuaded, would not guarantee
its scientific nature. It had the further property of uniting observa-
ble, quantitative variables (namely, the numbers of individuals
possessing dominant and recessive characters in various generations)
in an invariant uniformity, itself not directly observable but cal-
culated from observations made under appropriate conditions. The
idea of chance distribution was not one amenable to direct experi-
ential check, for the distribution involved was not one of observed
characters but of their determinants through the schema of heredi-
tary dominance and recession: it was, I think, a concept of the
Galilean type.
The remarkable stimulus given by Darwin's theory to the adop-
tion of the methods of experimental science in the biological field
was not confined to genetics; it rapidly spread to embryology, cy-
tology and related studies. If, perhaps, in these other areas there was
no set of problems quite so intimately connected with the mechanism
of evolution proposed by Darwin as were those genetics tried to solve,
yet the leaven, once introduced, quickly animated the whole mass.
Moreover, the mere fact that Darwin had been able to present a
plausible theory acted almost like the release of a trigger; the idea
of natural selection could replace that of final causes in explaining
the apparent purposiveness of biological phenomena. It seemed, in-
deed, as though Darwin had shown biologists how they could eat
their cake and have it, too. They could now use such obviously
teleological concepts as "the preservation of the species," "adapta-
tion to the environment" and "organic function" without really
committing themselves to any Aristotelian notion of an immanent
purpose or a Nature-does-everything-for-the-best, since they were only
"as if" (to borrow Hans Vaihinger's pregnant expression). They were
just shorter and more picturesque ways of asserting that the process
or form involved had been naturally selected through the long eons
of evolutionary struggle. By and large, then, it could simply be
assumed without special investigation that a given biological phe-
nomenon "served a purpose," and inquiry was increasingly directed
toward the mechanism of the phenomenon, toward the discovery of
uniformities in its occurrence, especially uniformities of the physico-
chemical variety.
It must be admitted that there have been some reactionary move-
ments, the most notable, probably, being the attempt of Hans
Driesch to rehabilitate Aristotle's "entelechy" or organic governor;
but these have only served to agitate the surface waters and thus
contribute to the public turmoil stirred up originally by the Darwin-
ian theory. Indeed, if anything, Newtonianism has been carried
too far or, perhaps I should say, has been followed too blindly in
biological investigations, so that the overwhelming success that has
accompanied the attempt to find the physical and chemical laws ex-
emplified by living phenomena has prejudiced investigators against
the possibility that there may be laws of the truly Galilean variety
which are irreducibly organic or biologic, that is, which cannot be
translated into a complex of merely physical and chemical laws. But
the reader will keep in mind that his author is a philosopher and
that the warning just issued is in all likelihood merely a philosophic
idiosyncrasy. But this, I think, can be accepted without any hesi-
tancy: the biological sciences have adopted the new pattern and will
never return to that of Aristotle. This means that in the area of life
itself science has abandoned the attempt to give value answers to
factual questions and has successfully applied the method of gaining
knowledge of nature's regularities instituted by the revolution of the
seventeenth century.
As intimated at the beginning of the present section, the analogy
between Darwin's work and that of Newton in the history of oc-
cidental thought can be pressed further: not only did each give a
tremendous stimulus to the adoption of the new scientific method
in the areas directly involved, that is, in biology and physics, re-
spectively, but each had an almost overpowering influence upon
more distant investigations and, indeed, upon the public mind in
general. In illustration of the former, let me mention the spread of
Darwinism in anthropology, sociology and psychology in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Four years after the appearance of The Origin of Species the en-
thusiastic Darwinian, Thomas Huxley, published his Man's Place in
Nature, applying, as Darwin himself was to do a little later in The
Descent of Man, the evolutionary theory to the human species. He
argued that man had evolved from an ancestral type from which the
anthropoid apes had likewise sprung. Huxley's comparative studies
of skulls led to the animated and phenomenally successful search for
the "missing links" in this sequence; it also led directly to the estab-
lishment of the science of physical anthropology.
The application of the theory of evolution to man brought about
a completely new attitude toward primitive peoples. Instead of being
treated as superstitious heathen, to be converted to the ways and
religions of western Europe, or again as noble savages uncontami-
nated by the artificialities of civilization, they came to be looked
upon as human beings at a lower stage of social evolution than
civilized man, their customs, religions and institutions being viewed
as the ancestors of our own. Even more specifically, Darwinian con-
cepts were (rather uncritically, it must be admitted) applied to
them: for example, William G. Sumner, in his Folkways, published
at the turn of the century, said that the moral customs and class
structures characterizing a given primitive group had been "selected"
through their superior "survival value" for the group in its struggle
with other groups and with its physical environment and that their
persistence was a sort of "social inheritance." Incidentally, this ap-
proach easily degenerated into a kind of ethical relativism (present
in Sumner's book but more articulately stated in the writings of
Edward Westermarck) holding that a custom or institution was
morally good or justifiable if it possessed survival valueâfor exam-
ple, that infanticide and the killing of the aged were right in con-
ditions of chronic scarcity of food. Such a view, parading as "scien-
tific" in presumably the modern sense, was really a reversion to the
medieval confusion of fact and value for it attempted to answer a
value question (What institutions and customs are morally jus-
tified?) by stating a factual uniformity (groups possessing such and
such institutions and customs under such and such conditions tend
to survive).
The reigning psychology at the time Darwin published his major
work was associationism, which was modeled, as we have seen, upon
Newtonian mechanics. The appearance of the evolutionary theory
had an enormous effect, amounting to an almost complete change of
direction, in this science. In place of sensory elements and the laws
of their combination, psychologists came to study the behavior pat-
terns of man considered as an animal trying to survive in and adapt
himself to an external environment. Laws of his behavior common
to that of other animals were sought and were viewed as having been
selected by the evolutionary mechanism much as had the morpho-
logical features marking out surviving species. Darwin himself gave
great encouragement to this tendency in his Expression of the Emo-
tions in Man and Animals, in which he tried to show that normal
emotional reactions are the result of natural selection, that, to cite
a single illustration, the "freezing" of the frightened rabbit made it
more difficult to see and hence less apt to become the prey of one of
its natural enemies. This approach furnished direct stimulation to
such a physiological psychology as that of W. N. Cannon's Bodily
Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear, and Rage. It also spurred the de-
velopment of animal psychology on the part of such men as G. J.
Romanes, Lloyd Morgan and H. S. Jennings. This, in turn, aided by
the work of I. P. Pavlov as reported in his Lectures on the Condi-
tioned Reflex, gave rise to present-day behaviorism, which insists on
"objective" methods in psychology, finding its laws through experi-
mental observations of the external behavior of organismsâ"rat
psychology" as it has been somewhat unsympathetically designated.

The effect of Darwin's work upon modern philosophy was perhaps
second only to that of Newton's. A word must suffice to explain.
Two major tendencies were encouraged by Darwin's theory. On the
one hand, the idea of evolution was extrapolated from the biological
sphere to the cosmic. An instance of this emphasis in its more me-
chanical form is the rather crude system of Herbert Spencer,
"knocked together out of cracked hemlock boards" (as it was ap-
propriately described by William James). Spencer thought he could
formulate a single, all-embracing law asserting that everything in
the universe has evolved from a simple, unorganized state to a com-
plex, highly organized one. Our solar system on the Laplacean
hypothesis was a case in point; a second was life on earth according
to the Darwinian theory; a third was the evolution of society from a
relatively undifferentiated condition to the complexity of industrial
organization. Another instance of this cosmic evolutionism is offered
by the more sophisticated views of the emergentists, for example, by
those of Samuel Alexander in Space, Time and Deity and Lloyd
Morgan in Emergent Evolution. They insisted that evolution on the
cosmic scale required the occurrence of novel developments un-
predictable on the basis of knowledge of earlier eventsâcosmic mu-
tations, so to speak. To illustrate from Alexander's system: the
universe at first was composed of colorless, inaudible motions; then
there emerged, in sequence, sensory qualities, life and conscious-
ness. Deity was still to come.
The second philosophical current set in motion by Darwin's
theory went in an oblique if not contrary direction. Instead of ex-
panding the idea of evolution from a biological theory to a total
philosophy, it condensed philosophic systems into biological phe-
nomena that had arisen in the evolutionary process and were selected
by their utility in the particular environments (social, of course, as
well as physical) in which their proponents lived. Logically, on this
account, philosophy was to become a subdivision of biology; its
theories were to be judged simply in terms of their biological func-
tions. (The curious fact is to be noted that biologists did not ap-
pear to be much taken by this extension of their science; it is pos-
sible that they felt that it was not a scientific achievement at all!)
The outstanding leader in this movement was John Dewey and, of
his many works, perhaps The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy
might be cited as most relevant to the present point.
Finally, we must glance very hurriedly at the impact of Darwin's

thought upon the public mind in general. As already intimated,
there is a striking contrast here with the parallel case of Newton.
Popular response to Newton's gravitational system in the eighteenth
century was uniformly favorable; the like cannot be affirmed of the
general reaction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
to Darwin's evolutionary theory. Without for a moment intending
to underestimate the force of the favorable response, which by now
is overwhelming, I would like, particularly since I believe the answer
to be relevant to the main theme of our discussion, to raise the ques-
tion why there was an immediate and vociferous opposition to his
ideas.
As an initial clue, we should note that the opposition was based
mainly on religious grounds, secondarily on moral and value con-
siderations generally. There was of course a clash with a specific
Christian dogma, the literal inerrancy of the Bible: if the account of
creation (or we should say, if either account of creation) given in
Genesis had been transcribed verbatim by Moses from the lips of
the Creator, then Darwin's theory was blasphemous. There was, by
contrast, no such undeniable collision between the Bible and New-
tonian mechanics, and so far as the latter did conflict with the Aris-
totelian position of the Church, the struggle had come to a head
with Galileo.
This source of objection should not be underestimated, but it
must not be taken as the complete explanation. On the one hand,
the literal inerrancy of the Biblical story had been subject to a long
and increasingly widespread questioning. Aside from the accumula-
tion of scientific findings incompatible with it and the growth of
Biblical criticism applying the same methods to the text of Holy
Scriptures as to any other historical documents, there was the tradi-
tion of allegorical interpretation which was certainly as ancient and
respectable as the doctrine of literal truth. We must, I think, look
for some further grounds for the intensely unfavorable reaction to
the idea of evolution.
We may perhaps get a lead from the vulgar misapprehension that
Darwin held, as against the Christian view that man had been made
in God's image, that we were descendants of apes: the theory of
evolution belittled man. But again we must remember that man
had already been belittled in the scheme of creation; indeed, the
Newtonian world picture itself quite successfully accomplished this.
So we must press our analysis further still.

I think we come very close to bedrock when, once more turning
from the "fact" to the mechanism of evolution as the cardinal matter,
we bear in mind that Darwin challenged the appeal to final causes
in the last great citadel of its strengthâthat of life itself. As long as
there was still a "Why?" about fact that could be answered by an
assertion of some good, the familiar and commonsensical type of ex-
planation, so characteristic of pre-scientific thought, could be re-
tained. If the fact of the possession of such and such organs or the
occurrence of such and such physiological processes could be satis-
factorily accounted for by reference to the perpetuation of the
species or the attainment of the species type by the individual, then
there was still at least tacitly present the assumption that "Nature
does everything for the best." I think it is not too subtle and
strained an interpretation to say that, along with other causes, the
negative reaction to Darwinism was motivated by this perhaps
largely subconscious attempt to protect the sphere of life from the
methods of the new science which required that factual questions be
answered factually only, keeping issues of value entirely aside.

CHAPTER 5
Science in the Present Age
Extension of the Method of Modern Science in Physics:
The Theory of Relativity
There is a widespread impression to the effect that, whereas in
the nineteenth century physics extended and consolidated its vic-
torious conquests under the Newtonian regime, in the twentieth it
was rent by internal upheavals: the first being that instituted by
Einstein's theory of relativity; the second, that brought about by
the quantum theory associated with the name of Max Planck, which
have succeeded in overthrowing Newtonianism completely or at
least in changing its fundamental direction. Contrary to this view,
the position I shall attempt to make plausible is that the theoretical
agitation in twentieth-century physics, which I grant to be consider-
able, has been that accompanying a further eradication from New-
tonian physics of commonsensical concepts unwittingly retained from
the Aristotelian tradition by the scientific revolutionists of the seven-
teenth century. On this interpretation, physics in the present cen-
tury has simply been pushing further the break with common sense
instituted by Galileo; and the feeling of intellectual strangeness of
the new concepts has been due to the fact that even the physicists, to
say nothing of the literate public generally, were never completely
at ease with the new "functional" type of idea.
Quantum mechanics started with the idea that expenditures of
energy were not continuous in amount, but were made up of mini-
mum units. This was not itself so radical, but it led theoretically to
the idea that the smallest physical entities participating in energy
changes could not be identified before and after such changes, that,
indeed, there were no persisting subjects of the changes. This chal-
lenged the fundamental and highly commonsensical notion of Aris-
totle that in any change there was always something that changedâ
for example, in locomotion, there must be a body moving. Such a

step was radical, but it was taken precisely for the sake of protecting
and advancing the conquests of the new type of science.
Something very similar can be said concerning the theory of rela-
tivity: it questioned the everyday notion of simultaneity of distant
events which, it must be granted, was deeply embedded in Newton's
own thinking, but its purpose was not to overthrow Newtonianism
but to free it for further advances by eliminating what, if stated in
its terms as originally formulated, would appear as a contradiction
between observed facts. In this instance, more definitely than in the
case of quantum mechanics, popular misapprehensions have entered
to distort the picture. It is commonly thought, for example, that
Einstein managed to destroy the distinction between space and time
and to establish, behind the screen of immediate appearances, a
mysterious Space-Time where one could, by some dark art of manip-
ulation of motions, shorten the length of meter rods or lengthen
time beats of chronometers. Even more beside the point, the theory
of relativity has frequently been confused with ideas of the relativism
of knowledge and value springing from romantic historicism and
having nothing in common with the rigorous scientism of Einstein's
theory.
Since the very inception of modern science in the seventeenth cen-
tury it has been natural for the public to misjudge its contentions, to
translate its functional regularities into directly perceivable mech-
anisms or entities. So it should cause no surprise that the popular
view translates Einstein's eminently relational theory into an asser-
tion of a kind of queer substance that is difficult to experience sim-
ply because we lack the appropriate perceptive organs. But I think
that other causes have also operated to produce the profound and, to
me, disturbing chasm between what the physicist of the present cen-
tury has, in broad outline, been effecting and what the public pic-
tures him as doing.
One of these, I think, has been the confusion introduced by the
romantic counterrevolution, with its mistaken attempt to "save"
values, especially human values, from their supposed annihilation
by scientific analysis. This misdirected suspicion has been aided by
a most unpropitious development in man's practical affairs. The
twentieth century has already seen two world wars and is witnessing
vast preparations for a third. These have been peculiarly shocking
to mankind for two reasons over and above the number of nations
involved.
[5] Science in the Present Age 239
In the first place, they have been total wars; wars not of soldiers
alone but of total populations. This can be credited to the impact
of the industrial revolution upon the business of fighting. The
weapons of war have come to be produced on a mass basis: that side
wins which can put out the most in the shortest time. This has
carried with it a change in military objective, which no longer is
merely to check or overcome the enemy's armed forces but also to
hamper and destroy his productive capacity. The perfecting of long-
range artillery in the form of airborne bombs and guided missiles has
made this objective practicable. The result has been a kind of sys-
tematic devastation that weighs as a pall upon the conscience of man-
kind.
In the second place, these wars have been equipped and engineered
by scientists; they have been conflicts between the best brains, each
side racing to outdo the other in the application of physical theory
to the problem of wholesale destruction. The intimate connection
between science and warfare has been, as we have noted, no peculiar-
ity of the present century, but we are, I believe, experiencing it in a
novel form. At its very birth in the labors of Galileo it was stimu-
lated by the practical problems of the arsenal, but these were at-
tendants upon this new life, whose heart was the use of experimenta-
tion to satisfy pure curiosity (and of course reverent contemplation).
The roles have now been interchanged: pure science, secure in its
own tremendous achievements, has come to play the nursemaid to
the progeny of war. It is symptomatic that President Roosevelt con-
sulted Albert Einstein on the practicability of the use of atomic
energy in war and that the very best theoretical physicists were
utilized in the billion-dollar business of the atom bomb.
The summation of these two aspects of contemporary war has
given us a public whose reaction to science, although not yet hostile,
is, shall we say, not wholly one of adulation. Unhappily the scientist
has not done much to counteract this. True, some physicists in
America have recently organized a political lobby to retain the direc-
tion of atomic energy development in civilian hands, and their col-
leagues generally are beginning to sense that they are face to face
with a problem of public relations. But these activities have been
largely confined to the area of scientific applications and their prac-
tical effects upon society. I note that many scientists are honestly
convinced that nothing, literally nothing, can be done to show the
educated public what science itself is and what its aims are. It would
be presumptuous to consider the present book a refutation of their
pessimism, but it furnishes quite adequate proof that one individual
considers them mistaken.
The attitude just deplored has been effectively reinforced by an
unconscious mechanism. The scientist, particularly the physical
scientist, has been able to attain great prestige by "producing the
goods." Highly specialized research, both in pure and applied sci-
ence, has paid such large dividends that everyone successfully en-
gaged in it has been able to attain high status by this fact alone. Why
then, should he attempt the difficult and unrewarding task of clarify-
ing in the public mind the nature of the enterprise called "science"
âsupposing he himself to be clearâor even informing fellow scien-
tists in unrelated fields about his methods and his theories? Here
again we meet a consequence of the industrial revolution. It may
pay us to investigate its growth a little further, not merely for the
sake of bettering our apprehension of the public's attitude toward
science but also, and conversely, to improve out understanding of
the development of science itself.
The names already mentioned as outstanding in the challenge of
the twentieth century to the elements of Aristotelianism in the
physics of the nineteenth indicate that Germany had come to rival
England in pure science. This can hardly be unconnected with the
expansion of industrialism to that country. Well up into the second
half of the nineteenth century, Germany was still quite largely under
the sway of hand methods of production and of guild restrictions. A
law of 1840 in Saxony required that a village could have only one
craftsman in each of such guild trades as those of tailors, shoemakers,
butchers, bakers, carpenters and blacksmiths. With the establish-
ment of the Empire in 1871 and under the active encouragement of
Bismarck and his state socialism, the industrial revolution remade
Germany economically. She soon took the lead in Europe indus-
trially and rivaled Englandâindeed, outdistanced her in the produc-
tion of iron and steel. Here, perhaps even more self-consciously
than in England, science and the methods of science were used to
solve the problems of large-scale production and transportation.
Before the end of the nineteenth century some of the larger in-
dustrial organizations in England had set up private research labora-
tories. Germany soon caught up with England in this development,
again, however, under the more direct aegis of the state, thanks
largely to the enlightened paternalism of Bismarck. The Reichs-

anstalt was founded by the state to promote science and its indus-
trial applications, and several technical colleges, encouraged by this
example, were established to serve the same purposes. Universities
increasingly responded to the demand for the enlargement of scien-
tific knowledge. In two important respects they supplemented indus-
try in fostering science, sharing these functions with the newly
developed institutes and technical colleges. On the one hand, the
research they supported tended on the whole to point more in the
direction of pure science. This of course was vital; without it the
more directly practical research supported by industry would have
petered out. On the other hand, universities more and more as-
sumed the responsibility of selecting and training the men to go
into research.
The theory of relativity was formulated early in the present cen-
tury. It was a time when Germany was at the zenith of her power.
Under the leadership of Bismarck she had won the Franco-Prussian
war, gained national unityâat the cost of Prussian supremacyâ
and made phenomenal progress industrially, technologically, and
scientificallyâat the price of state control. The romantic movement,
although still strong in literature, was no serious block to the pur-
suit of the most abstract science. It was into this sort of world that
Albert Einstein was born. His father represented the union of in-
dusty and applied scienceâhe was the owner of an electro-technical
works at Munich. Albert attended the Polytechnic School at Zurich.
He developed the theory of relativity in its first or special form while
examiner of patents at the patent office in Berne. He was later ap-
pointed Professor of Physics at the University of Zurich, and sub-
sequently made director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Physical Institute in
Berlin and given a stipend sufficient to allow him to devote his en-
tire time to research.
We speak of "the" theory of relativity, but actually there were
two, the special, appearing in 1905, and the general, published in
1915. As indicated by its designation, the latter attempted to carry
further a principle involved in the former; because of this and of
the chronological sequence of their formulation, it is plain that we
should try to understand the special theory first.
This theory was developed in order to eliminate what otherwise
would have constituted a contradiction in Newtonian physics. The
troublesome facts appeared as the results of a famous experiment in
1887 by two Americans, Michelson and Morley. They had no in-

tention of producing such a theoretical disturbance; they were simply
trying to discover and measure the earth's drift through the ether.
To grasp their problem and to sense the impact of their findings it
is necessary to glance back historically upon a development we have
up to this point ignored.
Newton had theorized that light was made up of tiny corpuscles
shot out in all directions from a source. The paths these particles
took could be changed in direction by their passing from one me-
dium into another, but their form within any one substance was
always rectilinear. This theory could account for the facts of refrac-
tion and the observation that rays of light were never curved. It
held first place in the thought of physicists until Thomas Young,
about a century later, reanimated the wave theory of Newton's older
contemporary, Christian Huygens.
On this latter view, light was composed of waves spreading from
a center much like those caused by a stone's falling into a quiet pond
except that they were three-dimensionalâthat is, spherical rather
than circular. In 1801 Young read a paper to the Royal Society of
London in which he showed that the phenomena of interference,
with which he had been experimenting, beautifully fitted the wave
theory but could not be accounted for on the corpuscular. He had
observed that if a beam of light was broken up and its parts, after
having traveled slightly different distances, were allowed to fall on
the same screen, regions of brightness would appear interspersed
with bands of darkness. This appearance could be explained on the
hypothesis that when the waves of light joined on the screen, some
were "in phase" and some were "out of phase," the former rein-
forcing one another, the latter interfering. Suppose by analogy
one observed the seas to leeward of a tiny island during a storm.
In the region where the waves from the two sides met, the seas
would be particularly disturbed, a crest sometimes joining a crest
to form an extraordinarily large wave, but again a crest meeting
a trough to produce a flat spot. The big waves would correspond to
the bright bands, the flat spots to the dark.
Young succeeded in completely winning over nineteenth-century
physics to the undulatory theory, but not without arousing some
serious misgivings. As was admitted from the first, waves require
some medium, such as water or air. To furnish such a medium for
light, Aristotle's fiery substance, the "luminiferous ether," was
revived, with the qualification, however, that it was never itself

visible. This alone should have given pause: an unobservable sub-
stance should have easily been recognized as a hybrid concept unit-
ing the mathematical functionalism of the new science with the
commonsensical approach of the old, but it must be remembered
that we are dealing with a century in which heat fluids and electric
substances were still retained. However, as a commonsensical stuff
the luminiferous ether was rather extraordinary quite apart from
its invisibility. It had to fill all space, so that light could be propa-
gated anywhere, even across the great voids of astronomical distances.
It also had to be incompressible, like water rather than air. Water
waves were seen to be transverse: the medium itself moved up and
down but the waves traveled across its horizontal surface; this could
not happen in a gas capable of compression. The observed facts of
polarized light, which need not here be recapitulated, required that
the motion of the ether be perpendicular to the direction in which
the light was being propagated; the ether therefore had to be in-
compressible.
A paradox then appeared. It would seem that any body moving
through such a substance would have to be affected by it, would
necessarily push some of the ether ahead of it and drag some behind,
just as a ship disturbs the water in its passage. To admit this, how-
ever, would have "raised hob" with the whole Newtonian account
of celestial mechanics: the planets would have had to be progressively
retarded in their journeys around the sun. Moreover, certain rather
recondite observations on double stars would not agree with this
assumption. The twin-sisters in these double stars had been observed
to rotate with a constant velocity about their common center, in
accordance with Newtonian gravitational theory. If, however, they
had dragged the ether with them even to a slight degree, the one
coming toward the earth should always have appeared to be moving
faster than the one receding by the amounts of the motions of the
medium of the light waves, just as the motions of the waves on a
river are affected by the river's flow. So it would seem that bodies
moving through this incompressible ether were not affected by it at
all, did not drag it along with them as they moved. This of course
was strange, but unobservable substances might well be strange.
Therefore, the ether was endowed with a combination of properties
that were queer indeed from the commonsensical standpoint.
Then came the bombshell. If the earth did not drag the ether
with it, in any appreciable amount, its own motion through the
ether, relatively slow as it was, could be observed. It was only neces-
sary to measure the apparent difference in the speed of light in the
two directions, that of the motion of the earth and that at right
angles, to detect the "drift" of the earth through the ether. Relying
on Young's interference phenomena, Michelson and Morley set up an
apparatus that should have very easily detected any such discrepancy
in the relative velocities of two rays of light. They could find no
such difference! It would seem that the earth must drag the ether
with it at its own velocity. This was intolerable. To say that moving
bodies both do and do not drag the ether with them was not merely
to utter a paradox for common sense, it was to assert a logical con-
tradiction.
It was, of course, possible to throw out the ether, to replace it by
functional concepts of invariant mathematical relations between
observable light phenomenaâthis indeed has been done with a con-
sequent purification of Newtonian science. But this could serve to
eliminate one contradiction only at the cost of introducing another.
Let us concentrate on the double-star phenomena and the result of
the Michelson-Morley experiment. In the ether language these were
expressed in the contradiction, "Moving bodies do and do not drag
the ether with them." This contradiction could be eliminated by
dropping the ether and recognizing that both sets of phenomena
agreed with the following maxim: "In determining the apparent
velocity of light, disregard your own motion relative to that of the
light itself." This maxim would be sufficiently paradoxical if judged
simply on the basis of common sense; in the analogous case of water
disturbances, for example, it would disagree violently with the ob-
served difference of speed with which a boat hits the waves when it
heads into the wind and when it runs before it. But to adopt the
maxim would have a worse consequence from the standpoint of
physical science. Although not itself embracing a contradiction, it
would introduce one into traditional dynamics because of its con-
flict with the parallelogram principle that Galileo and Newton so
successfully used to analyze ordinary motions, and which, indeed, had
been tacitly present in the whole Copernican approach, which rested
on the assumption that observed celestial motions were compounded
of the real motions of the observed bodies and the unnoted motions
of one's point of observation.
Granting, as he had to, that theoretical contradiction must be
eliminated at all cost, the physicist was faced with two alternatives.
He could retain unchanged the Galilean parallelogram principle
but treat light as an exception; or he could attempt to reformulate
it so as to bring it into harmony with the proposed maxim. To
have chosen the first would have been tantamount to an admission of
failure in his fundamental objective of a mathematical simplification
I Galilean transformation principle:
H Facts of light:
HI Lorentz transformation principle:
a For low velocities, same as I
b For light, same as E
c. For intermediate velocities:
Note:
_^> - Â» is velocity stated on frame I.
))) K is velocity of frame 1 relative
to frame 2.
---*. is velocity stated on frame 2.
Fig. 29. Lorentz Transformation Principle
of nature: it would have necessitated his acceptance of two differ-
ent and irreducible laws governing the combination of motions. He
elected the second.
This choice was actually implemented as early as 1893 by H. A.
Lorentz. He constructed a new principle for combining motions
which, for ordinary velocities, was practically equivalent to the old,
but as speeds approaching the speed of light were involved, the mo-
tions deviated more and more from the old until, with light, added
motions produced no change of velocity whatever. Like the ellip-
tical planetary orbits of Kepler relative to the circular ones of Co-
pernicus, this "transformation principle" of Lorentz's was somewhat
less simple and certainly less "intuitive" for everyday thinking than
Galileo's principle; but it squared with the conviction that nature
was precisely invariant in her processes in a way which was open to
mathematical formulation. (It is not necessary for our purposes to
state Lorentz's principle; I have tried to indicate its purport visually
in Fig. 29.)
If Lorentz had saved dynamics from an internal contradiction, he
still had to assuage an affronted common sense. He tried to accom-
plish this by a radical proposal, but one not quite sufficiently radical,
since, although in a way trying to stay in harmony with everyday
notions, it also virtually disavowed them. He said that as relative
velocities approached the speed of light, bodies by which they could
be judged became shorter, until in the extreme they had no length
whatever, that is, no distance traversed per unit of time could be
added to that of light. It seems undeniable that Lorentz was trying
to give his transformation principle an interpretation in common-
sensical terms, so that combinations of motions, especially those of
high velocity, actually did something physical to the moving bodies.
Unfortunately, there was no way of testing this by observation, be-
cause one's tools of measurement would undergo the same changes
as those of the bodies one attempted to measure.
Einstein's contribution grew out of his willingness to make a more
radical break with common sense than Lorentz. Lorentz conceived
high velocities as physically affecting bodies and through them the
ascertainable distances (and times) of motions. Einstein resolutely
denied any such pseudo-observational change. He accepted Lorentz's
transformation principle for the amounts of the changes involved,
but said that these occurred in the spatial and temporal units them-
selves. More accurately, he said that they were to be located not in
the spatial and temporal units of any given observer but only in
those used for translating his observations of particular motions into
statements of how another spectator, moving relative to him, would
observe them. That is, Einstein claimed that in translating state-
ments concerning observed motions formulated in terms of one sys-
tem "taken as at rest" (say the earth) into equivalent ones expressed
in terms of another (say the sun or a double star), we were not
to suppose that our spatial and temporal units would behave in the
same fashion as they did when we continued talking in terms of a
single "frame of reference." One observed, in any particular sys-
tem, whatever one observed, and this gave one the true facts; one
was not to indulge in any magical juggling of space and time. But
calculation of how the other fellow, writing up what one saw but
putting it in terms of another "system of coordinates," would de-
scribe it was another matter. Here Lorentz's transformation equa-
tions had to be used.
However, is there no truth at all in the popular conception that
Einstein somehow destroyed the sharp demarkation between space
and time? Yes, there is: it was restricted, however, precisely to the
translation of statements as just described; it did not enter the ori-
ginal formulation of them. Moreoverâand it is here that Einstein's
philosophical genius (which had, of course, to be united with his
extraordinary mathematical ability to make the whole tiling "come
off") was exhibitedâ, the rules for this translation were not left
merely arbitrary, something invented ad hoc to get dynamics out of
trouble; they were founded upon the introduction of a new Galilean-
type concept. Galileo and Newton had never tried to define "simul-
taneity"; they took from direct experience the facts that some events
occurred at the same time, whereas others did not. Einstein pointed
out that to determine the simultaneity of distant events we must
rely on signals sent us from them: it was a matter of calculation, not
of direct observation. If these signals were sounds, we would have
to add our own motion relative to them in order to ascertain, from
what we sensibly experienced, whether the distant events were
simultaneous; but if they were light flashes, then, on Lorentz's prin-
ciple, we would not. So, with signals traveling with the speed of
light, one could stipulate by definition that a pair of distant events
were simultaneous if, situated midway between the places of their
occurrence, one received signals from them at the same time no
matter what one's own constant motion.
This definition, quite unobjectionable in itself, had the startling
consequence that the simultaneity of distant events was "relative to
the observer" (or, more precisely, was "relative to the coordinate
system used for its statement"), that is, a pair of events that were
simultaneous for one observer would not be for another moving
relatively to him. This consequence was not commonsensical, but
Einstein accepted it and the definition yielding it, not, of course, in
order to be different but to save Galilean-Newtonian dynamics and

to further the cause of that kind of science which it had instituted.
Let us note how the consequence was entailed by the definition.
This can best be done by considering a hypothetical example. Sup-
pose we were on a railroad right of way and noted that two distant
lightning flashes, one up the track the other down, appeared to
occur at the same time. Suppose, moreover, that we measured up
and down the track to the points of occurrence of these bolts and
found that we were midway between them. Then, on Einstein's
definition, we would be entitled to conclude that the lightning
strokes had occurred simultaneously. Finally, suppose we imagined
an exceedingly long train, reaching from one of these points to the
other, to have been speeding by us just at the time the lightning
bolts struck. We might then think of a passenger passing us at that
moment. We, of course, could not literally have his experience; we
would have to be content with a translation of our observations,
stated in terms of the right of way, into his, stated in terms of the
speeding train. The train, we would rightly assume, would have
moved before either flash reached him; therefore, from our stand-
point he would not have been at the midpoint and the flashes would
not have reached him at the same time. But, from his standpoint, he
would still be at the midpoint, since he would use the train as his
frame of reference (the places of the lightning bolts being the two
ends of his train). Now Einstein would ask us to apply his definition
again. This would require the admission that for the passenger the
lightning bolts would not have struck simultaneously. It is exceed-
ingly important to avoid a mistake here: Einstein's theory would
have nothing to say about two sense observations as such, namely,
our experience of the flashes and that of the passenger; it rather
would concern the translation of our statement (that the distant
events were simultaneous), made relative to the right of way, into a
definitionally equivalent statement of the passenger (that they were
not simultaneous), made relative to the train.
Thus, Einstein's definition of the simultaneity of distant events
had the consequence that, when translating a description of some
motion made in terms of some particular frame of reference into an-
other formulated in terms of a frame moving relative to the former,
not only must the velocities come out different, the times must also.
In general, any such translation would increase the time values (in
the direction of the relative motion of the two frames) so that, as the
relative motions of the frames approached the velocity of light, the

translation would approach the assignment of infinity to the time
factor. This has sometimes been expressed by saying that in rapidly
moving bodies processes would take longer, that clocks, for example,
would be slowed down. This sounds as though Einstein claimed
that something which ought to be observable happened to clocks
upon being moved rapidly. It was precisely this that Lorentz had
claimed and Einstein's theory was admirably aimed to avoid, as I
hope I have succeeded in making clear.
A comparable statement should be made for the shortening of
distances (in the direction of the relative motion of the frames in-
volved) on the Einsteinian account: it was a lessening of certain
values when one translated descriptions of motions from one lan-
guage basis to another, not a physical deformation. Actually the
lengthening of time and the shortening of space required by the
special theory were very small for relatively slow motions of the
frames involved, but increased as one approached the velocity of
light. When this limit was reached, no other velocities would show
up at all to be added to that of light, which accorded with the fact
that no differences in the apparent velocity of light could be detected
by observers moving relative to one another. Thus, although Ein-
stein's concept of the simultaneity of distant events was certainly
not an Aristotelian kind of idea, it was not completely out of rela-
tion to observable fact: it expressed a complicated functional relation
between observable facts. Incidentally, it might be noted that be-
sides serving to bring Newton's laws of motion into accord with
the startling discoveries as to light already mentioned, Einstein's
use of this new concept has squared with observations of the masses
of free electrons. These masses should be increased by the high
velocities of the electrons (to use the improper or Lorentzean type
of formulation), for, combining Newton's second law, concerning the
force required to increase the velocity of a body, with the Lorentz
transformation equations, it would be necessary to suppose that, as
a body's motion approached the velocity of light, any increase in it
required a force approaching infinity.
The stimulus to the formulation of the special theory of relativity
was furnished by certain newly discovered facts that would not fit the
Newtonian scheme in its accepted formânamely, the paradoxical
results of the Michelson-Morley experiment; the spur to the develop-
ment of the general theory was given by a deeply embedded anomaly
present at the very inception of Newtonian mechanics, to wit, cer-

tain peculiarities of gravitational force. Newton, we recall, refused
to make any hypotheses concerning the action of gravity. It seemed
necessary to admit that it could span enormous distances without
consuming any time; yet it was not, so to speak, indifferent to space,
because it varied inversely in strength with the square of the dis-
tance over which it acted. But most peculiar of allâthough this
apparently had not disturbed Newton, no doubt because of an am-
biguity in his concept of "mass"â, gravitational force was always
exactly adjusted to compensate for differences in inertial mass of
the bodies upon which it acted. The fantastic instance cited earlier
may bring this back to attention. Suppose a liner, a tugboat and an
outboard motorboat at rest and in perfect formation start a race. At
the starter's gun they surge ahead, but, despite their differences of
size, they keep their perfect line-up as they continue to accelerate
and they finish the course in a dead heat. We would consider this
rather remarkable, and would speculate that someone had adjusted
the motors to compensate for the different inertias. Now we take
the three boats up the leaning Tower of Pisa and drop them at the
same moment. The same paradoxical phenomenon occurs, except
now their motion is vertical and, in place of engines, gravity fur-
nishes the motive power. Someone, we conclude, must have adjusted
the gravitational attraction in each case to compensate for the differ-
ence in inertial mass.
The special theory gave Einstein the clue to the method of elimi-
nating the need of any such ridiculous assumption. If gravity were
taken not as the cause of the accelerations traditionally ascribed to
it, but as a translation of them into a language with a suitably differ-
ent frame of reference, the whole paradox would become a truism.
Let us utilize once more the approach through imaginative exam-
ples. A few years ago an airplane crashed into an upper floor in the
Empire State Building causing some of the elevators to fall down
their shafts. Suppose one of them contained a party of physicists.
What better occupation (they might have asked themselves) in such
exceptional circumstances than to put the general theory of relativity
to the test? One, perhaps, jumped and found no gravity pulling him
back; he continued upward, hitting his head against the ceiling of
the cage; another held out his watch which, upon release, remained
suspended in mid-air; a third tossed a coin very lightly toward the
side of the elevator and found it did not trace out a parabola but
continued in a straight path until it hit the wall. Looking out, they
glimpsed horrified spectators of assorted sizes, chairs, desks and
filing cabinets all rapidly ascending with exactly the same accelera-
tion, whatever their respective weights. "Einstein is right," these
scientists would have concluded, "gravity is just another way of de-
scribing acceleration. Taking the elevator cage as at rest, we can
describe all the gravitational phenomena out there in the building
as just cases of a common, uniform acceleration upward; we being at
rest experience no pull of gravity."
Now it might be that there was an intelligent, although of course
not scientific, business executive on a lower floor that overheard the
physicists drawing this conclusion. He probably would have replied
(and in this allied himself with the commonsensical strain retained
in Newton himself), "You are wrong, for I can see that you are
really falling and that that is why you don't note the ordinary effects
of gravity; or, to put it in your odd way, my description of what is
going on is correct, yours is not, and this is shown precisely by the
fact that my use of the building as a language basis for describing the
motions brings in the force of gravity."
Unfortunately our physicists, we must suppose, did not have time
to answer this sane objection, but perhaps this was just as well, since
in science properly constructed experiments speak louder than
words, however persuasive. In any case, our scientists a moment
later discovered themselves in a heavenly cage, far from earthly at-
tractions. Somewhat to their astonishment they found that all the
normal gravitational phenomena had returned to their little abode:
an unsupported watch fell and was smashed, jumping did not serve
to keep the portly member of the party long out of contact with the
floor. Something must have happened; they decided to investigate.
One agile participant in the experiment crawled up on the roof,
where he found a hook to which was attached a steel cable stretched
taut as far as he could see above. "This explains it," they agreed,
"what we took as gravity when we used the cage as our frame at rest,
we can now translate into uniform acceleration, produced only God
knows how, taking these heavenly regions,, which of course them-
selves are gravitationless, as our language basis."
Now a happy thought struck one of the partyâthough everything
agreed so far with Einstein's theory, it could also be explained on
the traditional point of view, but in the circumstances providentially
provided a test was possible that would decide the issue. On the
accepted view, light had no weight; gravity did not affect it; but on
the relativity theory, it, like any motion, could be described in terms
of a gravitational frame. Quickly he drew a flashlight from his
pocket and sent a beam across the cage. Sure enough, it did not
travel in a straight line; it was deflected downward by the force of
gravity (talking as though the cage were at rest), or was slightly over-
taken in the upward surge (speaking as though the heavens through
which they seemed to be ascending were quiescent).
Actually, in this last detail we have left fantasy and entered sober-
ing reality: the flashlight was a distant star, its beam, a ray of light
that could be observed, as it passed close by the sun during an eclipse,
to be deflected toward that enormous mass in an appropriate
amount. The general theory, invented to avoid an intolerable para-
dox in Newton, succeeded in meeting a special observational test.
However, serious objections arose to the general theory, not from
common sense but, surprisingly, from the special theory itself. In
the first place, the special theory prohibited any description of mo-
tions assigning them a higher relative or observed velocity than that
of light. The general theory, however, demanded that light itself
be deflected in a gravitational field, that is, that it undergo an ac-
celeration. To avoid a flat contradiction here, Einstein said that the
special theory must be taken as applicable only in special circum-
stancesânamely, when the translation involved did not take one
from a given language basis to another whose frame of reference was
accelerated relative to the first: wherever the shift was "inertial" or
"non-gravitational," that is, wherever the relative motion of the two
frames taken as at rest was one of constant velocity (whatever the
amount or direction), the special theory held and was entirely com-
patible with the general.
A second objection, however, was far more serious and called for
more radical measures. We can come to it by recalling Newton's
twirling pail. Newton's own objection can be dispensed with rather
quickly. He said that the piling up of the water around the outside
edge proved a real motion in the pail. Einstein could meet this by
saying that there was no objection to translating this into a gravita-
tional attraction outward from the center of the pail, which, of
course, would then be taken not as twirling but as at rest. The
trouble for the general theory arose when the special theory was
applied to such instances.
Suppose an inquisitive bug were placed on a large pail, or better
yet, on a cart wheel, which was turning rapidly. The bug has meas-
ured the rim and one of the spokes and found that they stood in the
orthodox relation (of 2rrr). We must remember that these measure-
ments were taken by the bug, who used the wheel as his frame taken
as at rest. So we, on the outside and not sharing his rotation, would
translate his results into our language with its earthly frame. Since
the rim was moving very fast in a tangential direction at any given
point, the special theory would require that our translation shorten
the distances in this dimension, but no such motion occurred in the
radial direction; therefore, no such shortening in that dimension
would be called for. The startling consequence would therefore
emerge that when the bug's measurements were thus translated into
our language, the orthodox relation between the rim and the spoke
would no longer obtain.
This predicament demanded another courageous break with com-
mon sense and Einstein made it. He said, to put it misleadingly,
that in strong gravitational fields Euclidean geometry did not hold;
or, to state it more correctly, when translating distances describing
motions in a strong gravitational field into a language where the
gravitational force was replaced by a suitable acceleration or vice
versa, the resultant description would not square with Euclidean
geometry.
To determine what type of geometry Einstein needed, we must
think of our bug as making further measurements. Suppose the
wheel had a fairly large hub and that the bug determined its circum-
ference in relation to its radius; he of course would again come out
with orthodox results, but these when translated into our language
would not deviate so much from Euclidean requirements as did the
earlier ones. The reason for this would be that the tangential vel-
ocity of the circumference of the hub was much less than that of the
rim, therefore on the special theory would not require as much
shortening of distances in that dimension when translated into our
language. Thus, the geometry Einstein needed was one in which
there were no fixed values for the relation between the circum-
ference and the radius of a circle or for any dimensions of any figure.
To use the mathematician's designations, he substituted for the tra-
ditional "Cartesian coordinate system"âbased on Euclidian geom-
etry and specifying fixed distances in each dimensionâa "Gaussian
coordinate system"âdemanding only that points of intersection of
different dimensions stay in a constant order. It is as though he had
found that the world's designer had used some rubberized material
for his graphing paper allowing distances to be stretched out of
shape, particularly in regions of high gravitational force, but never
permitting the order of the intersections to be disturbed.
In taking this radical step, Einstein was motivated by the desire
to avoid a contradiction between the general and the special theories
of relativity, but it had some consequences open to observational
test. In stating his laws of motion, Newton had relied on Euclidian
geometry. Although for most cases Einstein's reformulation did not
differ sufficiently to allow a choice to be made on the basis of actual
experience, in a few instances (for example, in the case of the so-
called perihelial motion of Mercury) a difference sufficient to serve
as an observational check was involved. It is my understanding that
Einstein's views have so far been successful in meeting these tests.
We may, if we wish, say that the general theory added gravity to
the list of properties that the special theory had shown to be relative
to the frame of reference chosen for their statement. That is, it
denied meaning to the question: What is the gravitational force
acting on some particular body? To make sense, this question had
to be qualified by a clause stating the frame of reference to be used,
for on different frames the description of this force, just as the state-
ment of the body's mass, its distances from other bodies, and the
period of its motion, would be different. Any such frame was as
good as any otherâyou could choose your dynamical language as
freely as you would choose French or English for ordinary communi-
cation. This does not mean that, for Einstein, you might assign any
values you pleased to gravity, mass, time and distance without any
regard to the facts of experience. It means rather that on his account
these concepts had become even more indirect in their relation to
sense observations. The facts which they designated were extraor-
dinarily recondite functional relations between variant observations
made (or capable of being made) from an indefinitely large number
of different standpoints, with no need of any reduction to a single
"correct" statement of them.
Einstein's theories of relativity thus constituted a bold extension
in the twentieth century of the new kind of concept introduced into
dynamics in the seventeenth; they marked a further break with the
commonsensical standpoint so admirably systematized in the Aris-
totelian physics of the Middle Ages.
However, if physical science was able to make new strides forward
on the basis of a revolution long since successfully achieved, eco-

nomic thought still had before it, as the present century opened, the
task of establishing a truly scientific approach, in the modern sense,
to the phenomena constituting its subject matter. Our method re-
quires that we turn our attention to developments in this region.
The Achievement of Scientific Method in Economics
Put in the framework of the present historical study, contemporary
economic theory may be described as having advanced toward a
truly scientific approach to its subject matter, as compared with the
procedures of the classical school, in two important respects: it has
succeeded in stating price laws without the use of such Aristotelian-
type concepts as that of labor value, and it has made great progress
toward formulating these laws so that they are not restricted to com-
petitive systems, but hold for markets that are, to varying degrees,
monopolistic. It has moved away from directly observable phe-
nomena toward functional relations between perceptible events in
order to state regularities of greater accuracy and wider scope. In
doing so, it has, very nearly at least, abandoned entirely the use of
value concepts (such as the disutility, the badness to the laborer, of
labor as constituting the true yardstick of exchange value).
Here a minor historical anomaly comes to light. This virtual
eradication of value thinking from economics as a science was made
possible through the development and modification of the classical
position at the hands of theorists who, certainly in one sense, intro-
duced an even greater element of value thinking than their prede-
cessors. The contemporary mathematical school was made possible
by the extension of the concept of marginal utility to apply to all
major factors determining prices. An indispensable step in this di-
rection was taken when the idea of diminishing returns, embodied in
the theory of rent of Malthus and Ricardo, was applied to consum-
ers' wants and their satisfactions. This of course carries one outside
of exchange values and into use values. It will be my contention
that the motivation behind this attempt to explain economic phe-
nomena by noneconomic was not, at least wholly, to secure a psycho-
logical foundation but to attain an ethical one.
Marginal Utility
Although marginal-utility economics experienced an indigenous
growth in England, most notably in the work of W. Stanley Jevons,
its greatest refinement was produced in Austria under the leadership

of Karl Menger and his disciples, Friedrich von Wieser (who coined
the phrase designative of it) and Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk. These
Austrians lived and wrote well into the present century; nevertheless
it must be admitted that their thought was formulated in the nine-
teenth and that, indeed, it is only properly understood in the con-
text of its opposition to the position of the historical school. Men-
tion has already been made of the so-called "Methodenstreit" or con-
flict as to method in social science, particularly economics, in which
Gustav Schmoller and Karl Menger were prominent combatants.
It will be recalled that the historical school stressed the necessity of
viewing economic phenomena in their concrete settings in the life
of societyâin society's material, legal, social and even cultural and
spiritual development. Against this, Menger argued that economics
could be a science, and that as such it required that economic
phenomena be abstracted from other aspects of the whole social
scene; they were, indeed, to be approached deductively, with one's
axioms stated in terms of the conduct of individual men engaged in
economic activities. This of course was reminiscent of Adam Smith's
"axiom," as we formulated it, that every buyer seeks to buy at the
lowest, and every seller to sell at the highest price obtainable. In
a sense Menger's individualistic and deductive approach went be-
yond Smith's, for the latter, in analyzing his "natural price" toward
which all market prices gravitate, had utilized the notion of the de-
termination of price by profits, rents and wages. This actually was a
generalization, as we have seen, of the social structure of rural Eng-
land after the agricultural revolution, with its managerial farmers,
landlords and farm laborers. Menger realized, as under the criticisms
the historical school directed against the classicists he could hardly
avoid realizing, that this social structure was a peculiar historical
manifestation that could not justifiably be universalized for all
societies. Thus, there arose the problem, what feature or features of
economic behavior are common to all cultures? It seemed clear that
the answer could not be found in the region of social organization
for production nor in that of the distribution to different social
groups of goods and services produced, for these differed notoriously
in different societies. Rather, Menger thought, the objective should
be sought in the area of individual consumption, since this offered
something common to all ages and civilizations.
Combined with this attempt to meet what seemed a legitimate
historical criticism of the classical view was a desire to correct an

obvious theoretical fault in that position. Menger was acutely aware
that the labor theory of value, if considered as a law (rather than as
a tautology, in which form we criticized it above), simply did not
agree with the facts: actual market prices did not tend toward the
proportions of the amounts of labor of production of the goods in-
volved. In point of fact, this failure in classical theory remained
even if one subtracted from it the labor-value notion, for that theory
was essentially, to use more recent terminology, a "cost" theory of
prices. Smith's "natural price," as we have just recalled, was de-
termined by the natural or average rates of profits, rents and wages
required for the production of the item in question. But prices
patently diverge in a vast group of cases from costs. To use an ex-
ample from near-contemporary events: at the close of World War II
the U. S. government found that its surplus war goods, even those
adaptable to civilian use, would not command a fraction of the price
they had cost. Classical economics was too concerned with supply;
it gave only a passing nod to demand, not appreciating that price
laws can only be correctly formulated by giving this determinant a
central place.
Costâparticularly in the form of the labor of productionâwas
something objective and quite easily quantified. Demandânotably
as that was interpreted in terms of consumers' wants and their satis-
factionsâwas manifestly subjective and recalcitrant to quantifica-
tion. Thus, it was natural that members of the marginal utility
school, in seeking to state price laws by reference to consumers'
wants, should turn to the psychology of motivation. Jevons found
help in the ethical writings of Jeremy Bentham and the hedonistic
psychology of David Hartley and James Mill. Men's desires, these
men taught, had only two objectives: to attain pleasure and to avoid
pain. Mill went to the extreme of defining desire as anticipated
pleasure; aversion, as anticipated pain. Bentham had made himself
the butt of ridicule on the part of later romantics by attempting to
set up a "hedonic calculus." He did not argue that there were, in
any strict sense, units of pleasure or pain, but he did contend that
that pleasure which is longer, or more intense, or more immediate
in time or experienced by a larger number of people is larger in
amount. Menger said that desires and satisfactions are not measur-
able but their relative strengths do furnish a basis for the ranking of
goods by consumers.
It seems almost a truismâindeed, it frequently is no more than

oneâto say that a consumer will choose a good for which he has a
stronger desire in preference to one for which his desire is weaker.
This "axiom," however, was supplemented by a second which gave
the marginal utility theory its distinctive character and constituted
its real contribution to the maturation of economics as a science.
As already intimated, this second axiom amounted to the application
to consumers' wants of the principle of diminishing returns forming
the core of Ricardo's theory of rent.
As more land in a given area is put into production, poorer soil,
giving a smaller yield, must be cultivated. The last plots added, the
"marginal" ones, are associated with the highest costs (figured by
Ricardo in terms of labor, but this is here irrelevant). These highest
costs must, on the average, equal prices that can be obtained for the
products, for if they were higher the marginal lands demanding
them would go out of cultivation; if lower, further, previously sub-
marginal, regions would be worked. It is to be assumed, moreover,
that on the market all goods of a given kind and quality command
the same price; the products of marginal lands are in no way dis-
tinguished once they are on the market. On this analysis, then,
capital will be invested and rent demanded on land just up to the
margin.
This pattern of analysis Menger and his associates applied to the
very different subject of the satisfaction of consumers' wants. The
consumer has certain economic resources (his "capital"). He is, let
us suppose, hungry. He is willing to spend his resources for food,
but discovers that the more food he buys and eats, the less satisfac-
tion he derives from further increments. Granting him sufficient
means, there comes a place where he refuses to buy more food. Just
as capital will not flow into farm land that is submarginal and can
command no rent, so the purchasing power of the consumer will not
flow into food beyond the margin as to satisfaction. The margin
here (as in fact in the case of rent) need not be zero. What it is is
determined by alternative satisfactions obtainable with one's re-
sources. As soon as the consumer can get greater satisfaction from
spending any given amount of money for clothing, amusement, or
some other good than from the purchase of food, he has passed the
margin as to food.
We are now in a position to understand the second "axiom"
mentioned above. It is to the effect that the consumer will distribute
his expenditure of funds so that the marginal satisfaction he obtains

from each purchasable kind of commodity is equal to that of every
other. Back of this is the supposition that he will attempt to maxi-
mize his satisfactions, as the hedonistic psychologists had argued.
On this supposition, if some sort of good actually purchased by the
consumer were beyond the margin, he should have transferred some
of his funds from the purchase of this to that of other commodities;
if some were short of the margin, he should have shifted his re-
sources from other goods to the obtaining of more of the short kind.
We have formulated the distinctive axiom of the school of mar-
ginal utility as though prices were already in existence. This is mis-
leading, for, were we to state their position as a little geometry after
the manner of Galileo, prices would appear in the theorems, not in
the axioms. Let us note the sort of argument used.
Suppose there are two individuals each possessing a limited supply
of two kinds of commoditiesâsay books and pies. If the relative
marginal satisfactions or utilities of these two individuals differ (sup-
pose Mr. Sage gets more pleasure from his last book than from his
last pie, whereas the reverse situation obtains in the case of Mr.
Goodfellow), they will exchange until the relative marginal utilities
of these commodities are the same (on our supposition, Mr. Sage
will exchange some of his pies for some of Mr. Goodfellow's books).
This can be generalized to cover all the demands of all the con-
sumers, and we get the law that exchange occurs until that equilib-
rium is reached where relative marginal satisfactions furnished by
different goods are the same for all, and thus that prices tend toward
that ratio which holds between the marginal utilities for everyone.
A problem that may immediately arise in the reader's mind relates
to capital goods, such as farms, factories and tools. Since these goods
do not themselves yield satisfaction upon consumption, how can the
theory of marginal utility account for the determination of their
prices? Menger attacked this difficulty by distinguishing different
orders of goods. He spoke of consumer goods as being of the "first
order." Goods whose value lay in their ability to help produce first-
order goods he called "second-order" goods, and so on. His conten-
tion was that goods of any order higher than the first obtained their
value from the values of the goods it was anticipated they would
help produce; their value, as he said, was "imputed" to them.
It seems to me undeniable that the marginal utility school made
a distinct contribution toward the achievement of scientific form in
economic thought, in the Galilean-Newtonian sense of "scientific."

This will perhaps be even more obvious when we advance from the
description of this position in itself to a recognition of its incorpora-
tion in the theory of the mathematical school. In essence, this con-
tribution lay in extending the concept of the "margin" from a rela-
tively restricted application in the area of supply, to a broader use,
destined to centrality in dealing with all important elements de-
terminative of prices. As has been already hinted, however, a non-
Galilean element was retained in the thought of the marginal utili-
tarians. This is found precisely in their concept of utility and in the
sort of thinking that led them to use it. This thinking is exactly on
a par with that which led the classical school to choose the labor of
production (I called it "labor disutility" in anticipation of the pres-
ent comparison) as the true and undeviating measure of exchange
value. Let me try to show this.
In the first place, the consumer's satisfaction, like the laborer's dis-
comfort, is not an exchange value at all: it is quite clearly a use
value. It is present in cases where no exchange occurs. For example,
Bohm-Bawerk illustrates the central idea of marginal-utility eco-
nomics by the case of a colonial farmer in a primeval forest who has
five sacks of grain. What is the value of each sack to him? It is the
value of the marginal one, used for feeding pet parrots to keep him
amused, not, for example, of the one he reserves for seed for the
coming year. Now undoubtedly the men we are discussing had
vaguely in mind a law uniting prices with consumer satisfactions
(just as the classicists in some degree were thinking of a law joining
prices with the disutility of labor). But had this been all and had
they been clear about it, they would have seen that the statement
and verification of such a law required the independent determina-
tion of real prices. This, however, was ruled out by their thinking
and speaking of marginal utility as the true measure of exchange
value. Bohm-Bawerk, for example, wrote that "the value of a good
is measured by the importance of that concrete want . . . which is
least urgent among the wants that are met from the available stock
of similar goods," and Menger spoke of value as somehow "imputed"
to goods of higher order, not of course meaning that prices were
merely imputed to them but that their true value was. Now if the
true nature and measure of exchange value is marginal utility, then
it is no observable regularity but a mere truism that marginal util-
ities always agree with prices. Moreover, had these men seriously
viewed this relation as a factual law, they would have seen that it
was required of them to establish it by appropriate observations.
This would have necessitated psychological studies of relative satis-
factions (at the margin) to see whether they agreed with relative
prices. They apparently were not impelled to undertake such in-
quiries, resting content, from the observational standpoint, with
studies of effects on prices of changing quantities of available goods
of various kinds.
There must, then, have been some further motivation leading the
marginal utilitarians to leave the sphere of exchange value for their
basic concept of consumer satisfaction. I think it was the same moti-
vation that led the classicists to their basic concept of labor value.
Exchange value is not a good in itself; a thing has it only when
treated as a means, a means of acquiring something else. The good-
ness here is derived; to obtain at all there must be something that is
good in itself from which the exchange value receives its derivative
sort of goodness. Some such reasoning, I think, was tacitly present
in the thought of these men. I do not for a moment wish to ques-
tion its soundness; I want only to point out that it is value thinking,
not factual thinking, that it reveals that those indulging in it had not
yet attained that rigorousness in abstracting factual matters from
value questions necessary for the successful construction of a science
on the Galilean-Newtonian model.
The Mathematical School
The mathematical school may be said to have nourished in two
rather widely separated periods: at the end of the nineteenth and in
the thirties of the present century. In the first case, it was really a
branch of the marginal utility school with a shift from a psycho-
logical to a mathematical emphasis. As a consequence of this change
it became possible to drop references to amounts of consumers'
satisfaction and replace them by equations or curves showing, in
terms of prices that would be paid, buyers' indifference as between
different marginal goods or the marginal substitutability of goods.
This amounted to a dismissal of all appeal to psychological or value
considerations; prices and quantities of goods alone were allowed.
The revival of this point of view in the thirties and its expansion
in method was probably the result of two main causes. On the one
hand, the severe depression starting in 1929 turned attention to the
evils of the current capitalist system, particularly extensive unem-
ployment and such a surplusage of goods for consumption that con-

sumers had to do without them. This critical interest was deepened
by the communist experiment in Russia and the rigidly controlled
systems of Italy and Germany. Economists increasingly asked
whether it was not possible to base an economic system on the mo-
tive of welfare rather than private profits. Thus, a somewhat des-
ultory controversy between some of the later marginalistsâfor
example, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek, and some of
the disciples of Pareto, such as Barone and the socialist economists
influenced by himâtook on new significance. This controversy was
over the question: Is it possible in a state-owned or at least state-
controlled economy to come to any rational decision as to quantities
of various products to be produced? Von Mises in a most vehement
condemnation of all forms of socialism claimed no rational decision
could be made, whereas completely free enterprise did decide the
matterâby the democratic "vote" involved in the consumer's dollar.
Barone, Taylor, and others, claimed that this same criterion could
be used in a socialist state. By the thirties it was evident that this
method was in general being actually used in Russia, although per-
haps a sufficiently well-founded answer here was not forthcoming
because of Russia's secretiveness and her emphasis upon the produc-
tion of capital goods and war materiel. In any case, a new impetus
was given to the problem posed by the historical school: Can any
universal economic laws be found? Only if they can would it seem
to be possible for the economist to advise the socialist politician on
rational methods of attaining his welfare administration.
The thirties also saw a vast development of monopolistic tenden-
cies, such as cartels and governmental corporations and similar de-
vices (especially in Germany and Italy) restrictive in various ways of
free competition. This, of course, turned the attention of economists
in England and America to the noncompetitive aspects of their own
economies. Now the contention of the classical economists, that
there can be a science of economics, still persisted in England (and
had been carried across to America). Therefore, the problem of find-
ing laws that would apply to monopolies and to systems that fell
away to various degrees from perfect competition became impera-
tive. To find such laws that would obtain all the way from free
competition to absolute monopoly it was necessary to use a power-
fully abstract tool of analysis, to wit, mathematics. Thus, economists
turned to the earlier foundation laid by the mathematical school
and sought to perfect and develop it.

Since we are so close historically to this whole movement, it is
impossible to pick out a single man as historically most influential.
Perhaps the following names will indicate the kind of position the
author has in mind: E. H. Phelps Brown, Joan Robinson, Edward
Chamberlin and J. R. Hicks.
As already indicated, the mathematical school holds (as against
the historical) that a strict, universal science of economics is possible.
Such an economics will be highly abstract; it will not attempt to do
justice to any concrete historical phenomena. It will consider eco-
nomic aspects of men's behavior quite without regard to historical
periods or epochs. It will likewise abstract from the social and insti-
tutional aspects of behavior. Whether or not Marx was right about
class struggle and the exploitation of subject classes by dominant
ones is not a question for economics to try to answer, being a socio-
logical problem. Likewise, such doctrines as the atrophy of the state,
government as always a tool of the ruling social class, or, to use ex-
amples from the older historical school, the advisability of tariffs,
customs unions, price controls by government and so onâthese are
considerations for political science and practical ethics, not econom-
ics. Of course, any such "law" as that of dialectical materialismâ
stating that class divisions are determined by modes of production,
ideas and art forms, by class conflictsâis entirely outside the domain
of scientific economics. In fact, the whole subject of the physical
processes of manufacturing and transportation of goods is foreign to
economics, falling in the area of industrial engineering.
Scientific economics is concerned only with exchange values and
their laws, stated in terms of quantities of goods supplied and de-
manded. And it is concerned with them as suchâit is not interested
in their psychological causes or effects, in the pleasures and pains,
the utilities or disutilities with which they may be connected. Since
exchange values are always, in a money economy, expressed in terms
of money prices, this may be put as follows: scientif1c economics tries
to find the laws of prices in relation to quantities of goods placed
on the market. Since laws, to be such, must be universal, the sup-
position is that there are price laws that hold for all economic orders.
Immediately certain objections come to mind. First, a rather
superficial one: How can price laws be said to hold for economic
orders not based on money as a medium of exchangeâfor example,
for barter economies or state socialism using ration points or certifi-
cates? In answer it can be said that in the latter the certificates are
the money, and prices can be expressed in terms of them; in the
former, the prices would have to be stated in terms of commodity
ratios. An objection from the classical school would be that price
laws, stated in terms of money, would involve a hidden fluctuation,
since the unit of measure (money) itself is a commodity and thus is
not fixed in value. The answer is that this is not serious in dealing
with laws for a given market (on the assumption that one is con-
sidering only instantaneous changes). Moreover, this can be gener-
ally avoided by taking "real prices." Real prices are found not by
going out of the market (to labor input or to psychological utility)
but by determining the real value of money by reference to a price
index. Price indices are found by ascertaining the money prices of
selected key commodities, weighting them in a certain way, and thus
finding a composite of prices which may itself be used as a yardstick.
Now we must turn to the most fundamental objection. It is the
criticism of the historical school directed against the classical to the
effect that the laws of the latter held only for a free-market system
and therefore were not universal and, even more extreme, that there
never had been a completely free-market system; hence, its laws were
only ideal.
That the price laws of the mathematical school are ideal (never
actually exactly realized concretely) is no serious objectionâall
scientific laws are thus ideal. However, they should be such that
they are approximated more or less, and greater deviations should be
taken care of by the laws themselves. But to be laws they must be
universal; sheer exceptions cannot be tolerated. Is this challenge
met by the laws of the mathematical school? The answer requires a
study of the laws, at least in crude, outline form.
Before turning to this sketch of the laws we must note that, for
the mathematical school, economic orders, no matter how diverse,
have certain elements in common. These common elements are
based on the fact that every price has a twofold aspect, since it is an
exchange value. It is a price for a seller and for a buyer. Thus it
expresses supply (the seller's standpoint) and demand (the buyer's).
(In barter, both parties are both buyers and sellers, both demanders
and suppliers.) Thus every economic order must have two com-
ponents: a system of production and a system of distribution. But
we must be particularly careful concerning the former (there is not
quite the same danger of confusion as to the latter). The economist
is not concerned with the physical processes of manufacture and

transportation of commodities. He is simply concerned with their
pricesâbut he is concerned with their prices as determined by the
seller (producer) as well as by the buyer (demander). Every pro-
duction issues in an article or service for which there is a demand
(that is, some price will be paid; if not, it may be "production" in
some other sense, but is not economic production). Every produc-
tion thereby involves the use of some factor of production. "Factor
of production" refers to any of the chief types of things or services
necessary for production for which a price must be paid. In an in-
dustrial economy the factors of production are: (1) land or other
scarce natural resources, (2) capital goodsâfor example, machines
and factories, (3) labor and (4) management or direction.
It is possible to think of societies where factor (2) is absent (as in
hunting and fishing economies) and even one where factor (1) is, but
factors (4) and (3) are probably always necessary. For the economist,
this is not of significance. All he requires is that there be some
factor of production; otherwise the buyer would not pay any priceâ
all goods could be had free. To say that a price must be paid for a
factor of production does not require another exchange besides the
one between producer and consumer, although in our industrial
society it ordinarily does; for example, the manager of an automobile
plant must buy labor, metal, etc., in order to make and therefore to
sell an automobile. But even a monkey exchanging coconuts for
scratches on the back is paid a price (scratches) for combining two
factorsâlabor and direction!
The system of distribution in one sense has to be geared to, and
so is dependent upon, the system of production in any economic
order. Every price paid must have been received from some other
sale or sales (in a money economy). More generally, all goods for
consumption must have been produced. The total income of a
closed economic system must equal its total expenditures. The
classical school thought that income had to be distributed to various
classes according to their ownership of various factors of production;
as we have seen, this was the basis of Adam Smith's analysis of cost
into profits, rents and wages. The mathematical school sees that
this is not necessary. The total income must equal the total spent
for produced goods and services. There are certain laws for the allo-
cation of the total price paid to various factors of production, but
this is fundamentally a matter of determining rates at which these
factors will be used in the production of different kinds of goods

and need not be the basis of the distribution of income to various
classes in society.
The laws of prices involve those elements common to every
economic order. In general, prices are determined by quantities sup-
plied and demanded (supposing a given distribution of income).
Following the school of marginal utility, the mathematical school
assumes as a kind of "axiom" a double law of diminishing returns.
(a) From the standpoint of demand: as more goods of a given sort
are supplied (in a given time period) to a group of demanders, the
demand diminishes. This however requires no appeal to subjective
experience of utility or pleasure. It is simply the statement that
they will pay less for any additional units of that sort of thing, (b)
From the standpoint of supply the statement can be put in a very
general form, much like the account of rent in Malthus and Ricardo:
as more goods of a given sort are produced in a given period of time,
the costs per unit increase. This takes on, however, a more special
shape: starting with one unit produced per time period, costs per
unit at first decrease with increase of production but, after a certain
critical point, they increase continuously.
The mathematical school also assumes a second "axiom," relating
to motives of the managers of production. Let us first consider it as
the following: every manager seeks to maximize his profits, and be-
haves rationally to that end. We now can derive a universal law:
every manager will produce that quantity of goods such that his
marginal costs will equal his marginal receipts.
First, we must be clear as to the meaning of these terms. The
"marginal cost" for any given quantity of production means the
additional expense for factors of production required to produce
one more unit per time period. This, as we saw, is assumed to differ
as more goods are produced and, after a critical point, to increase
continuously. The "marginal receipts" for any given quantity of
production mean the additional receipts for goods sold if one more
unit is produced per period of time.
A significant difference arises between different modes of produc-
tion. First, consider what this school calls "perfect competition." It
is supposed that there is a sufficiently large number of managers
producing the same thing such that the amount produced (and sold)
by the given manager will not be large enough to affect the price.
That is, the given manager can disregard diminishing returns in
terms of demand and suppose the price the public will pay is un-
affected by the amount he produces. Thus, each new unit will yield
the same marginal increase no matter what the total quantity (see
Fig. 303). But the case of monopoly is different. Here a single man-
ager produces the total goods of a given sort for a given set of buy-
ers. The axiom of diminishing returns as applied to demand cannot
be disregarded. As the manager increases production, demand will
decrease, as revealed in the price his customers will pay. His mar-
ginal receipts will go down as production goes upâthey will in fact
go down faster than prices (see Fig. gob).
would subtract this
by decreasing output
Price or average receipts
would add this
by increasing
output
Output Â»-
a Perfect competition
would subtract this
by decreasing output
would add this
by increasing
output
O Output -
b. Complete monopoly
Fig. 30. Rationalizing Production (Individual Firms)
Now let us see the argument for the law. Each manager seeks to
maximize his profits. He therefore will increase production if, but
only if, the marginal cost is less than the marginal receipts. He will
decrease production if, and only if, marginal cost is greater than
marginal receipts. Putting these two together, we find that he will
change production until marginal costs and marginal receipts are
equal.
We then have a common law. Yet this law gives different prices
for the same quantity of goods produced (or different quantities for
the same prices) under competition and under monopoly. The dif-
ference is due to the different values of marginal receipts. For
perfect competition, marginal receipts always equal the selling price.
One more article produced per unit time will increase total receipts
by just what it sells for, since producing it does not decrease the
price obtainable. But this is not true under monopoly. One more
article produced per unit time will affect the demand, because the
one producer is supplying the whole market. Therefore, the new
unit not only itself sells for less but brings down the price on all
units produced. Thus, its sale increases total receipts by less than
the amount that it brings in. This means that under monopoly
marginal receipts are less than the selling price. Since, under both
perfect competition and monopoly, quantities are produced up to
the point where marginal costs and marginal receipts are equal, this
means that more will be produced under competition than under
monopoly, because marginal receipts, relative to selling prices, are
higher. Inasmuch as greater production brings down the price, this
likewise means that prices will be lower under perfect competition
than under monopoly.
A possible misapprehension must now be cleared up, and in so
doing we may help to make sharper the concepts being used. The
law that managers will produce up to the point where marginal costs
equal marginal receipts does not mean that they will forego profits.
Profits may be defined as total receipts minus total costs. By pro-
ducing up to the point where marginal costs equal marginal receipts,
the manager has not eliminated profits but maximized them. If
marginal receipts are greater than marginal costs, an increase in
production will bring in more profits. If marginal receipts are less
than marginal costs, a decrease in production will bring in more
profits.
There is an important corollary to this. As we have seen, under
monopoly quantities are lower and therefore prices are higher than
under perfect competition. Thus, individual managers under com-
petition in their desire to maximize profits will try to gain monopoly.
In fact, the mathematical school argues for an even more radical
conclusionânamely, that under perfect competition all profits are
necessarily eliminated. Let us try to understand this paradoxical
conclusion.
We have seen that the law governing the behavior of individual
managers is that they will produce up to the place where marginal
costs equal marginal receipts. This law also holds for the total
production of all managers under monopoly, since there is only one
producer, but it does not hold for total production under perfect
competition. To make clear why we have here a new law (for the
group, not for individual firms)ânamely, that average receipts must
equal average costsâwe must specify another assumption as to per-
fect competition. Not only are there a large number of actual pro-
ducers, there are an indefinitely large number of possible producers
each willing to undertake production as long as there is opportunity
for profit. So we will suppose average costs to be less than average
receipts (price). Then there is a profit in producing. Therefore,
more managers will undertake production. Suppose average costs
are greater than average receipts. A loss will result and some man-
agers will drop out. The point of equilibrium will be where average
costs equal average receipts for the total market. Thus under perfect
competition profits are eliminated (although there will be a cost
for management as a factor of productionânamely, the wages for
direction).
Moreover, costs will be at a minimum under perfect competition.
If more efficient firms are possible, they can produce at lower average
costs; therefore, they will come into production since a profit is pos-
sible. But we may suppose an indefinitely large number of theseâ
sufficient to produce the total quantities necessary; the price will
then go down and the quantities up. The less efficient firms can
only produce at a loss and will cease production. Thus on perfect
competition only the most efficient firms (with the lowest average
costs) can remain in production.
We are now in a position to seek more intelligently an answer
to our question: Has the mathematical school succeeded in giving
economics a truly scientific character? In the first place, we can
answer affirmatively so far as its method is concerned. It uses func-
tional concepts, such as "marginal costs" and "marginal receipts,"
that are ultimately based on experience (on observed prices and
quantities of goods), but are themselves calculated as relations of
these elements. From assumed axioms stating uniformities in terms
of these concepts, the school draws various consequences (under
perfect competition and monopoly). It then attempts to see whether
these consequences obtain under the conditions specified (or more
accurately, whether they are approximated when the assumptions in-
volved are approximated in actuality). In this last step, however, lies
the most serious difficulty. No economy has come very close to per-
feet competition or absolute monopoly. Although attempts have
been made to deal with intermediate orders, called "competitive
monopolies," the situation theoretically is too complicated for any
very decisive test.
That perfect competition is an ideal limit quite removed from
actual conditions should be apparent. The motive of maximizing
profits leads theoretically toward monopoly wherever possible, as
we have seen; and actually this can be observed. I refer not merely
or even mainly to trusts, cartels, etc., but to advertising and product
differentiation. In perfect competition there would be no advertis-
ing, trade names or trade labels. The whole purpose of advertising
is to get consumers to believe that the product of a certain firm is
different from and better than others, that is, to create a monopoly.
Salesmanship is directed to the same end. The cutting of costs under
perfect competition would eliminate both advertising and salesmen
(but not retail outlets). We may thus say with confidence that no
economic order has approached perfect competition. But absolute
monopoly has not been attained either. No differentiation of goods
of a single firm has been so complete that no threat from other pro-
ducers has remained. Some substitute has probably always been
available. This does not mean that the mathematical school cannot
claim any empirical verification of its laws. But it does mean that
this verification cannot compare as yet with that for the laws of
mechanics. Economics is not yet a science, but in the mathematical
school it is well on the way.

PART II
Toward an Independent
Investigation of Values
Prospect and Retrospect
We have now reached, as it were, the great divide in our study of
science and values. If the climb has been long and at times tortuous,
the reader has his reward if he will but look back over the country
through which he has been transported and thereby attain a proper
appreciation of the heights upon which he has been placed.
Value-free thinking about the facts of his universe and his own
behavior has been a costly attainment for man. To acquire it, he
has had to give up his comfortable commonsensical picture of na-
ture's regularities as directly expressible in terms of things and
processes open to ordinary observation and explained by reference to
what would seem to be their obvious objectives. Modern science
portrays a world whose laws are exceedingly subtle, decipherable
solely by the mathematical experimentalist using concepts that send
their tentacles into experience only at some deep level of elemental
measurements of space and time (or of exchange ratios and ex-
changed quantities of goods). Most of us tolerate this type of thing
not because we understand it or sympathize with it, but because we
are aware that such an approach has paid large dividends in the kind
of cash that we can useâpractical applications. This forces at least
a vague and perhaps unwilling admission that the scientific picture
must in some very real sense be true, despite the fact that it is
painted in the new mode of abstractions so strange and confusing to
ordinary folk.
Far more disturbing than its unfamiliarity, however, is the absence
of values from this representation. It doesn't help much to be told
that the painter had his values. It has, indeed, been one of the im-
pressive features of the rise of modern science in the survey we have
made that the Galilean type of concept was born, in part, of a pro-
found faith in the geometrical perfection of nature. Although this
may involve a historical paradox, it engenders no contradiction when
united with the insight that contemporary science describes the
world, in its unfamiliar but somehow potent language, without the
use of value terms. A contemporary philosophic sect confuses mat-
ters by arguing that, since scientists are so obviously themselves
animated by values, they cannot delineate the facts and particularly
the uniformities in nature's processes without importing their own

motivating values into this account. The argument is very weak in-
deed; it is almost on a level with saying (although this may involve
a bit of hyperbole) that, since a painter must have a rich flow of good
red blood in his arteries, he cannot paint in greens and greys.
There are, it must be admitted, some instances of contemporary
scientistsâSir James Jeans and R. A. Millikan are cases in pointâ
who still believe that nature or nature's God must be a mathema-
tician. I do not wish to belittle any sense of religious assurance or
aesthetic uplift this faith may afford its devotees; I want only to
insist that, however closely associated with modern science, it is an
associated faith and not an ingredient in that form of investigation
in the way in which values, in the shape of final causes, were a part
of its medieval predecessor.
The immediate danger, however, lies in an opposite direction, in
the facile conclusion that "science has read values out of the world,"
that somehow it is just being naive in this, the mid-twentieth cen-
tury, seriously to believe that anything is any better or any worse
than anything else. It is in truth an odd quirk of a portion of the
contemporary mind to suppose that, since science has been successful
in separating its factual conclusions from considerations as to values,
the latter have no significance in their own right. It is but an ex-
tension of this peculiar blindness in certain human beings that rules
out all value judgments as "senseless" on the grounds of not meeting
a criterion of meaning which amounts to verifiability by scientific
methods. It really does not take exceptional acumen to see that a
scientific procedure that has purged itself of value reasoning cannot
establish or overthrow a single assertion concerning value. But this
restriction may well represent a division of labor, not a usurpation
of powers. Indeed, if there were only facts, it would be strange that
it took these centuries of struggle for science to get them by them-
selves, unmixed with values.
However, the matter is not quite as simple as the preceding re-
marks might suggest. If, besides the facts, there are values in the
world, if only in that portion made up of human minds or behavior
patterns, it would seem reasonable to suppose that some relevant
method of ascertaining them should be attainable. Unfortunately,
the long struggle, constituting the reverse aspect, as it were, of that
traced out in the first part of our study, whereby value questions
have been separated from factual, has not been accompanied by a
comparable success in the construction of a method of ascertaining

Prospect and Retrospect 275
them. Nothing like Galilean science has emerged in the investiga-
tion of values; we must, so to speak, be content to manage with con-
cepts that are still quite medieval in character if we do not wish to
go over into the camp of the skeptic and say that there is no great
advantage in believing in values if we have no reliable method of
identifying them in concrete instances.
Can we hope for a revolution in the value disciplinesâwhether
in this century, the next or in any foreseeable futureâin any sense
equivalent to that in the factual that occurred in the seventeenth
century? I am not myself too sanguine; but if it be at all possible it
is due in part to the clear distinction we are now able to make be-
tween value issues and questions of fact. There are those who no
longer undertake the impossible task of deriving value answers from
factual information, who see the need of a logic and methodology
of values quite different from, although not unrelated to, those of
fact, and who have not, as yet, given up the job in despair. It is from
these men that whatever faith we have must spring.

CHAPTER 6
Medieval Outlook on Values
Ideas on the Good
The sense of utter foreignness that was engendered when we tried
to apprehend thirteenth-century ideas on motion will probably not
return to plague us as we attempt to appreciate the outlook of this
era on questions of morals. Nothing at all comparable to the scien-
tific revolution of the seventeenth century has come in to reshape
our ideas on the good life: the medieval standpoint to many seems
a real alternative even today. Yet there is here an obstacle that must
be overcome before any true grasp of the thirteenth-century view-
point can be attained. I refer to the popular half-truth to the effect
that medieval ethics was basically and thoroughly dualistic. The
present world, so this interpretation runs, is completely evil, and
the soul's sojourn in it is an incarceration in a wholly vicious and
contaminating body. The true Christian will attempt to get through
his life with as little damage as possible, his goal being to free him-
self from the body and its corrupting appetites and to escape into
the life hereafter. Asceticism, with its mortification of the body, is
thus the proper mode of livingâor shall we say of dying in order to
live?
This perverse account of the medieval ideal usually reflects the
disapprobation of the one formulating it. He thinks that that ideal
runs counter to everything observable about actual life and its satis-
factions. Only in the modern world, and indeed in recent times and
as a result of our newly acquired scientific knowledge of human be-
ings and their requirements, have we been able, so he thinks, to
throw off the incubus of that debilitating outlook and to define the
good life unashamedly in terms of human and indeed bodily satis-
factions.
I have called this a "half-truth," and indeed I think it almost
completely wrong as far as the theoretical ethics of the thirteenth
century and specifically the new-Aristotelianism of the scholastics

[6] Medieval Outlook on Values 277
and of Thomas Aquinas are concerned. In the degree in which it
contains a partial truth, it applies to certain popular medieval atti-
tudes and a certain voluntaristic strand in medieval thinking to
which we shall turn our attention presently. To the extent in which
it thus had currency, the fact may be all too easily explained in terms
of congenial social conditions, which puts it in an extremely favor-
able light in the eyes of some of our popularizing historians.
Let us briefly recall certain salient features of medieval society.
By our standards Europe was extremely poor. Our comforts were
almost completely lacking. At the lower end of the social scale, in
the person of the serf and petty freeman, daily life offered little be-
yond toil and bare subsistence. So, we may speculate, men were sus-
ceptible to the psychological mechanism of escape from the real
world's harshness into a dream world's blessedness, and of condemna-
tion of what they could not get in any appreciable amountsâto wit,
bodily ease and enjoymentâas worthless. Also, if we may advance
a bit in our sociological reconstruction, men in authority were anx-
ious, if only subconsciously, to keep the lower classes content with
their lot and unenvious of the material advantages of their betters;
and so the comforts of the flesh were portrayed as base and as ulti-
mately ephemeral and unrewarding.
Perhaps somewhat less contrived is the explanation through the
effects of Europe's poverty upon the intellectual class and its activi-
ties. This group was of necessity small, and, in an age that was
otherwise local in social organization, it was, through economic
necessities, international. It was thus amenable to effective control
by the one operative international institution, the church. It was in
the interest of this institution to maintain a monopoly on ideas, to
discourage novelty, to uphold orthodoxy. Thus, as we have seen,
ideational conservatism was the order of the day. This attitude was
also encouraged by the fact that, due to the scarcity of books, most
of J;he time and energy of intellectuals had to be devoted to the
sheer transmission of past culture and learning with only incidental
elaboration and a modicum of alteration to fit orthodox doctrine.
Thus, in ethics, as in physics, there could hardly have appeared a
fundamentally new standpoint.
Granted all this, however, the question remains unanswered by
these sociological considerations: Which of the ancient views was to
be adopted and assimilated to the Christian tradition? In the realm
of physics we observed the success of St. Thomas in reviving the

ideas of Aristotle and incorporating them into the body of Christian
ideology. We noted that this achievement was possible not through
any inherent, striking affinity between the one and the other but be-
cause of the essentially commonsensical character of the former,
their conformity with everyday observations. Much the same thing
can be said of Aquinas' appropriation of Aristotelian ethics. But in
a sense he had a greater task here because of the existence of a con-
flicting element in the Christian tradition.
One strand in Christian thought was, of course, Jewish. The Jews
had, from the earliest times, been greatly concerned with evil and
its relation to the will. They were a small nation and had suffered
a series of disasters at the hands of their more powerful neighbors.
The priests had made use of these misfortunes to bring the people
back to traditional religious practices by developing the doctrine (in
concrete historical applications) that these calamities were punish-
ments that Jehovah had inflicted upon his people for apostasy. Suf-
fering was, then, due to a defection of the will (a doctrine most
poignantly challenged in the book of Job).
This view, it must be admitted, had affiliations with the idea that
sensuous gratification is evil. But its sources can be traced to a
deeper layer of conviction, one that carries us back to the great
change which occurred when the Israelites moved into Palestine
from the desert and gave up a nomadic way of life for a settled, agri-
cultural mode. The austerities of the former were reflected in
religious practices sharply contrasted with the fertility religion of
the indigenous Baal-worship, involving temple prostitution and cul-
minating in orgiastic festivals. The dramatic stories of the conflict
of Elijah with Jezebel have this setting.
It should be noted, however, that this clash was conceived pri-
marily as a battle between the worship of Jehovah and of Baal, not
as a struggle between spirit and body; that the field of action was
social politics, not personal morality; that the whole context was
this-worldlyâit was not a strife between the palpable allurements
of the present world and the promised blessedness of the next. The
Jews did come to develop a strong sense of sin, but the guilt was
communal, not individual, and its punishment was in this life, in
the historical vicissitudes of the whole Jewish people.
This Hebrew strand in Christian thought did, then, furnish an
emphasis on will and upon the sense of guilt accompanying the
perverted will. It needed, however, to become individualized and

other-worldly. These elements were added by quite a different in-
fluenceâthat of the popular mystery religions sweeping in from the
Near East. As early as the sixth century B.C. in the form of the wor-
ship of Dionysus these had had influence upon the Greek mind, and
by the time of Christ and of Saint Paul they were potent deter-
minants of the Hellenistic outlook, especially in the popular mind.
They saw in the cycle of life here, in the wheat, for example, which
growing from seed finally matures to die but leaves new seed for
another life, the promise of rebirth to the individual into a future
existence. He must of course be initiated, purified, and finally al-
lowed to participate in a sacred meal at which he literally eats and
drinks his god and thus becomes one with him and acquires his
powers of resurrection from the dead. Thereupon he has assurance
of escape from the mortality of the body.
The Near East also furnished an ascetic strand, treating the body
as essentially evil. Indeed, it was only with the greatest difficulty
that the early Christian church kept free from the extreme dualism
in which this was embedded. Zoroastrianism in Persia taught that
there are two conflicting deities: Ormazd is the god of goodness and
of light, Ahriman of evil and of darkness. Manicheism, the spiritual
descendant of this view, was long a threat to Christian orthodoxy.
It held that there are two great forces in the universe, light and
darkness. The first it identified with spirit, the last with body. The
body is contaminating and at best a prison; the saint ever seeks to
free himself from it. Only the few, those especially elect, achieve this
desirable outcome.
The Christian devil, original sin, and the whole ascetic idealâ
variously reflected in anchorite, monastic and mendicantâshow the
impact of these movements upon the Christian outlook. One cannot
deny (and I certainly have not meant to do so) that vows of poverty
and celibacy, flagellation of the body and all the other practices of
asceticism were present in the great sweep of Christian usage and
that they all imply, as clearly as actions can imply a theoretical com-
mitment, a dualistic ethics. But this, it seems to me, only makes
the achievement of St. Thomas in reviving the ethics of Aristotle
and uniting it successfully with Christian orthodoxy all the more
remarkable. How was he able to do it?
It is true that Aquinas had to make some concessions to the
dualistic and voluntaristic thread we have been tracing. A striking
instance is his contention that the highest good for man can be at-
tained only in the next life, when spirit has been freed from body.
In this particular case, he was aided by a lucky circumstance. Aris-
totle had himself developed an idea which, although not ascetic in
its implications, made the life of a certain sort of recluse (the specu-
lative philosopher) ideal for man, and even suggested that such a
life might be more fully lived if the soul were separated from the
body. But such accidental parallels cannot explain, it seems to me,
the phenomenal success of St. Thomas' undertaking. It must be
credited to something far more fundamental. This is to be found,
in my estimation, in the same kind of characteristic of Aristotle's
ethics as we discovered in his physics and used to explain St.
Thomas' success in reviving that aspect of "the Philosopher's"
thought. I refer to its commonsensical basis, the fact that it fit more
obviously and readily than any rival ancient view the facts of every-
one's everyday observations.
I recall some difficulty in convincing my readers that it was com-
monsensical to see inanimate processesâthe rising of a column of
smoke on a still evening, the fall of a dead branch dislodged by some
motion of the tree, the precipitation of water in a summer's squall
âas purposive. But, having been successful in that more arduous
project, I ought to run into no very serious psychological blockage in
the present undertaking; it should not be hard to disabuse my reader
of scientific concepts concerning life and get him into the common-
sensical attitude of observing living processes in the contexts of their
goals. It is surely easy in this realm to be convinced of nature's wis-
dom: she does nothing uselessly. Not that there is some detached
designer with an imaged end for every changeâthat of course is not
observed. But the processes of life themselves have goals that are
inherent and conspicuous. Nutrition is required for growth and
for the replacement of worn-out tissue; reproduction serves the
maintenance of the species; the power to move about joined with
sensitivity to environmental differences seems obviously to aid ad-
justment, to help the individual to find and utilize more favorable
conditions for existence. Intelligence, moreover, when we see it,
clearly has a function: not merely (as we tend to stress today) the
service of the appetites, the discovery of ways and means of getting
what we want, but the balancing of animal desires against each
other, the necessary bridling of some not just for their own sakes, but
so that other wants may gain satisfaction, too. Similarly, if we wish

to comprehend the parts of organisms as alive, we must see them in
action and this action in the context of the organism's whole life. As
Aristotle said, a dismembered hand is not a real hand. Likewise, if
our observations are sufficiently extensive, we come to apprehend the
adult in the child, the mature form in its earlier adumbrations. The
infant cannot use his feet to walk upon, but we can see that use
ahead; if they do not develop as he grows, we sense a blockage.
All of this is Aristotle, who simply summarized, systematized and
carried somewhat further the observations made by everyone. This
transparently correct interpretation of "the Philosopher" is some-
times obscured, however, by a terminological complication. Aris-
totle speaks of living processes as "souls." So the modern English
reader is confronted with a hierarchy of souls: the nutritive, the
reproductive, the sensitive, the rational. Surely, he thinks (and
quite rightly), no one observes in himself or others, such a set of en-
tities. If "psyche" had been translated "function" rather than "soul"
(and this would have been closer, with one possible exceptionâthe
active intellectâto Aristotle's thought), this impediment would have
been avoided.
All of this, I say, is common sense. Put aside your scientific
sophistication and you see the tiger stalk its prey; you do not see
ether vibrations setting in action electro-potential changes on the
surfaces of nerves, and so on through to muscle innervations. More-
over, in one's own case, one frequently images the end before it has
been reached and when it comes a feeling of repletion is there too.
One can call this "pleasure," but that is misleading. It is pleasant-
ness accompanied by a sense that "this is it," "this is what I all along
was after." Aristotle was not animistic; he did not say that blades of
grass and sea anemones enjoyed pleasures. But in us (and sensitive
life in general) the successful performance of a normal function was
accompanied by a pleasurable sensation, which was a mark at least
that it was something proper to be done.
It is in this "naturalistic" (although not in our sense "scientific")
context that Aristotle's ethics must be placed. For each major type
of life there is, he thought, a fitting goal determined by its nature
and open to remark. The parallel to physics was not accidental: for
each simple substance there is a proper place which it seeks out when
moving "naturally." So for each type of life there is a fitting end,
which is just its own peculiar form or grade of living. With some
lower sorts of organism, this might be no more than feeding, grow-
ing and the reproducing of its kind. For others there is added mo-
tion and sensation.
When we come to man we strike a higher level of life, including
all the lower functions but keeping them subordinate. Man possesses
reason. Its activity is twofold. On the one hand, it serves the lower
functions, not merely as a tool in gaining satisfaction (Aristotle
wasn't much concerned with thisâwhich shows perhaps a serious
defect in his thought), but also as a regulator. It is in this aspect
that intelligence gives rise to "moral virtues." They are not so much
single acts as habits, but habits that originate in choice and not by
accident, and involve an element of consciousness, of appetition or
volition. Their form is pretty much the sameânothing in excess,
the "golden mean," a balancing of opposite desires to fit the situa-
tion and its consequences.
On the other hand, intelligence has a purpose of its ownâthe
gathering of knowledge. The modern Deweyan would say that this
is false: the Greek, unfortunately, was unaware of all the satisfac-
tions history had in store for those who were to utilize "pure"
knowledge. But Aristotle was a Greek with their shortcomings; so
he thought he saw in reasoning a special sort of process, peculiar to
manâindeed, man's glory. Its successful operation involved the
virtues he called "intellectual." Of these the topmost was the highest
sort of knowing, which he found (and here I do not doubt that he
was right) in philosophic speculation.
St. Thomas took this system (call it "naturalistic" if you will) and
united it with the great stream of Christian thought. He did, I must
admit, add certain "theological" virtues to the list (faith, hope and
charity from St. Paul). But even these he cast in Aristotle's form;
although they are only ascertained by revelation, they are still a kind
of knowledge, their object being God, and, like the other virtues,
they have their basis in man's nature and are a kind of action yield-
ing pleasure.
It is also true, as I pointed out before, that St. Thomas taught that
the best life for man was that beyond the grave. Here our thinker
did an even better job; it is difficult to note the seam uniting Chris-
tianity with Aristotle. Essentially his device consisted in translating
the life of the Athenian philosopher into that of the medieval saint
and theologian (that is, of replacing Aristotle by himself) as defining

the highest good for man. God, Thomas said, is the end of all ac-
tivities in nature.
Let us recall a bit of medieval physics. All natural motions are
just so many attempts to reach the changeless. Sublunar substances
seek re-establishment in their proper places. But even when they
reach them they are liable to disturbance. This insecurity is a kind
of imperfection. Celestial motions cannot falter; they return upon
themselves in perfect circles. Nevertheless they still are motions.
Only in the deity is there changelessness. He is perfection itself
which, since it cannot be improved, could only change for the worse,
but perfection must exclude not only evil but its very possibility.
Thus, all things, seeking each in its own way the changelessness
appropriate to it, "desire" God. Since God defines the good for all,
to know Him is the highest knowledge.
So far, this is Aristotle. St. Thomas needed little more; he said
that in this life we never gain complete apprehension of Godâour
knowledge always can be amplified. Moreover, the best that we can
do comes late in life, and it can hardly be ideal to live essentially
for such a brief enjoyment.
The remarkable thing here, as I look upon it, is the way in which
Aquinas preserved the spirit of his master. Although looking toward
the life beyond the grave, it was not as an escape but as a culmina-
tion. The Jewish sense of sin and guilt and of the wrong will, the
dualism of soul and body, the looking at oneself as evil, the spying
out one's motives, ever on the alert for a defectionâthese, although
present in the sweep of Christian thought, are absent from St.
Thomas. He was a rationalist in ethics. The good is somehow
normal, to be found by observation, to be seen by apprehending
what life is.
As I have said before, Aquinas' success was due to Aristotle's com-
mon sense, to put it paradoxically, to the this-worldliness of his
ethics. The good for man was formulated in terms of "facts," of
what could be observed. Now, of course, these facts were also values;
the distinction of the two had not been clearly made. Physics and
biology were not apart from value disciplines. From our twentieth-
century point of view this is quite wrong. The sciences are value
free. We no longer see any purposes in nature. The description of
living processes, even in the case of man, cannot itself tell us what
life ought to be, or whether it is good for it to be at all. This, of

course, defines our problem: whether there is value in the world at
all, and if there is, how it is ascertained. But for the medieval ration-
alist like Aquinas the content of the good for man was set by man's
whole place and function in the universe, by his peculiar "soul," by
what he was. It was in part the very challenge of the dualistic view-
point he left out, the stress on will in its twofold nature, sometimes
good but often bad, that finally led (assisted by the rise of modern
science) to the skepticism that we witness in our day. This rival view
was not without its theoretic formulation in the Middle Ages.
The weakest aspect of Thomistic ethics from the Christian point
of view lay in its account of evil. Indeed, rationalism seems par-
ticularly vulnerable in general at this point. If good is ascertained
by what is natural, if it means conformity to the kind of life in-
volved, then evil can only be the unnatural and abnormal. This
could never satisfy a mind obsessed with guilt, nor anyone convinced
of the magnitude of moral ills. St. Thomas' account of evil was at
best a rather pallid one. Every ill consists in a privation, a lack, an
incompleteness in a given type of life. Blindness is just such an evil
(in a species that has eyes). Moral corruption is a lack in human
beings in their activity as men. It is always a deficiency in reason,
whether functioning in its own sphere of knowledge or in its regula-
tion of the appetites or will. Whenever man falls short of his high
calling (that of knowing God) he has, just so far forth, been heir to
sin.
All of this seems pretty weak to one obsessed by guilt. For him
there is a power in evil, a substance that requires a positive act for
explanation. Where could this be but in the will, which has the
choice of virtue and of vice? Man is inherently in conflict with him-
self. He is both good and bad, perhaps more bad than good. He is
not merely deficient, incomplete, but positively wicked. He is re-
bellious, and while knowing what is good is frequently against it.
"For," laments St. Paul, "the good that I would I do not: but the
evil which I would not, that I do." This recalcitrance he ascribes to
the flesh, and to its power to seduce the will from the spirit. "O
wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this
death?" His answer is a special act of faith in Jesus Christ. And so
he divides all men, not in a continuous hierarchy from those most
like the beasts up to the saint and scholar, but into damned and
saved; the one has set his will against the deity, the other in con-
formity therewith. It was not to take much to define the good as

simply what God wills, and evil as rebellion in man's heart. When
this occurred, ethics had started down the road to skepticismâbut
that is a future story.
St. Augustine likewise felt this sense of guilt, of inability to will
the good. Like St. Paul, he traveled far toward making moral good
submission to God's will, and evil, insubordination. But he was
more sophisticated than his predecessor, and so did not go quite as
far toward speaking of two wills, of separating flesh and spirit. He
saw that if in man there are an evil will and a good, it is difficult to
hold that God is one and to escape the Manichean dualism. He in-
sisted that man's will is one and contended that the inability to do
the good one wills is evidence that one has not fully willed it. Man's
single will itself embraces dual tendencies.
We are not concerned with orthodoxy, but we must admit, it
seems to me, that such voluntarists in ethics as St. Paul and his suc-
cessors grasped a feature of our moral life that St. Thomas hardly
saw. The bad man is just as positive a man as is the good (often,
indeed, more colorfully so). To speak of moral evil as a lack is pay-
ment of too high a price to keep one's ethics in the framework of
one's science. By making acts of will his basis, the voluntarist has
somehow sensed that values all are polar in a way that facts are not.
A fact is just a fact, whether of inanimate nature or of human life.
Its only opposite is its nonoccurrence. But good has a contrary in
evil, which is just as positive as itself. So it is just like willing which,
although it may not occur at all, may when it does occur be in either
of two opposite directions.
To some extent St. Thomas recognized this situation. The highest
good for man lies not in simply knowing God (and evil in its ab-
sence), but in loving him as well. But he hardly grasped the possi-
bility of man's hating Him. Indeed, he seemed to feel it impossible
not to love God if one knows Him. Love and will, he said, are subse-
quent to knowledge. You cannot will something without knowing
what you will; and, in the case of goodness such as God's, the will
follows naturally upon the knowledge.
The rationalism of Aquinas did not long remain unchallenged.
It forced, indeed, a careful formulation of the voluntaristic stand-
point. For our consideration there were two men of importance.
First and very briefly we must notice John Duns Scotus in the late
thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. He was educated at Ox-
ford where he also taught. He shows the influence of the Franciscan

286
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Modern Science and Human Values
order, of which he was a member. In general, this order stood for
a revived Augustinianism as against the Aristotelianism of St.
Thomas (although it was not averse to the use of Aristotle's name).
From our standpoint this meant a re-emphasis upon will in matters
both of faith and morals.
Scotus held that the will is prior to the intellect. He granted to
St. Thomas that will presupposes intellect in that willing requires
Eve
II Duns Scotus
Fig. 31. Conflict of Priority: Intellect vs. Will
knowledge of the object willed; yet it is equally true that knowledge
presupposes will. One can know something only if one has the will
to know it. As we would say today, motivation is necessary for any
theoretical activity. Moreover, although to will requires a taking
thought of the object willed, thought is here a necessary condition,
not an active cause. In fact, the peculiar mark of Avill is precisely
that, in the presence of an object known, it can adapt a positive or a
negative attitude; it can will it or nill it. Will, in this respect, is un-
determined by its object; it is active; it determines itself. Intellect,
on the contrary, is passive; when its object is present it cannot avoid
knowing it. Thus, will is really superior to intellect. (Fig. 31 may
help the reader visualize this conflict.)

This turning of the tables has important consequences, the more
extreme of which were reserved for another man to draw. In line
with his voluntarism, Scotus said that man's greatness and goodness
consist in his willing, not simply in his knowing, what is best. It is
quite possible to think of what is best without actively seeking it.
The goal for man is thus to seek and to know God, not merely to
know him. The highest discipline, theology, is not just a form of
knowledge, it is a type of action; it is practical. Its function is to
get men to will and to act in the proper way. Even in beholding
the perfect and complete good, namely God himself, man can refuse
to will it.
Scotus did not take as extreme a position here as he might. He
could have said that the perfect good is simply whatever God wills,
but he did not. He agreed with Aquinas that the supreme goodness
is God's essence. God does will this, however, and He could have
refrained. Secondarily He wills the creation of other beings to imi-
tate it to various degrees; and here also He is free. But He is free
only to will or not; His willing does not create the goodness of its
object.
When we come to William of Ockham we find a man courageous
enough to go the whole way with voluntarism. He was an English
Franciscan of the fourteenth century who championed the spirituals
in their advocacy of ecclesiastical poverty against Pope John XXII.
As we shall note, he contributed to the development of a voluntaris-
tic position on law, although in that sphere he was eclipsed in his-
torical importance by Marsiglio of Padua. But in ethics his espousal
of this view can hardly be overemphasized.
Aquinas had placed the perfection of God in God's changeless
essence. Scotus had accepted this, merely adding that, although God
does will this supreme good, He is free not to. Ockham takes a
further step. The very essence of God is His absolutely free will. In
doing this, he shifts the basic emphasis from the changelessness of
God to His omnipotence. To believe that God's will is confined in
any fashion is to detract from His greatness. If God were to will
something because that something is good, His will would be re-
stricted, would not be completely self-determined. Thus, it is neces-
sary to say that nothing is good apart from God's willing it. A type
of behavior, such as love toward God or one's neighbor, is made
good by God's willing it.
Even more than this, the very nature of goodness is itself created
by God's will. That to be good is to be a freely chosen act in har-
mony with God's will is itself determined by His will; it is not some-
thing independently the case which God could not change. This
extreme voluntarism in ethics is a reflection of Ockham's general
outlook. Not merely is everything indebted to God for its existence;
it is similarly obligated as regards its very nature. All essences are
just what they are simply because God wills them. Squares would
not be square, nor would they be related to circles as they are, apart
from the divine decree. All general truths, even of logic and mathe-
matics, depend thus upon God's free choice. Ockham admits only
one limitation, that of contradiction: ". . . everything which does
not involve a manifest contradiction is to be attributed to the divine
power."
The implications for ethics of such a view are rather startling, as
the church was not slow to see. The whole content of morality be-
comes contingent, supported wholly by an arbitrary matter of fact.
Since God has actually ruled against stealing, adultery, and hatred
directed against Himself, these forms of behavior are evil. Had He
decreed in favor of them, however, they would have been good,
without any other change in their natures or consequences. More-
over, the Deity has commanded for all men equally that these types
of conduct should be avoided. But this again is simply an arbitrary
fact as to his free choice. Had He willed that Tom, Dick and Harry
abstain from them but that George, John and Henry perform them,
then they would be evil for Tom, Dick and Harry but good for
George, John and Henry. Again, God requires abstention from
them at all times; but had He ordered avoidance on Tuesdays,
Thursdays and Saturdays along with performance on Mondays,
Wednesdays and Fridays, they would be evil if occurring on Tues-
days, Thursdays or Saturdays but good if happening on Mondays,
Wednesdays or Fridays. Let us also consider the future. God's past
will does not bind Him for the future. Just because He has in the
past decreed the evil of stealing, adultery and hatred of God, it does
not follow that these will be sinful in the future. He may change
His mind. If so, these same sorts of acts that were vices may become
virtues.
But the most astonishing consequence is still to come. Goodness
is harmony with what God commands. This is so because God wills
it. Suppose God ordered that goodness be whatever conflicts with
what He rules, that harmony with His will be the essence of evil. In
that case, to do what God would have us do would be evil; and to

do what He opposes, good. This, to put it mildly, is a rather para-
doxical view for a theological ethics to countenance, but it is the
logical outcome of the position that makes God's arbitrary, free
choice the absolute and sole ethical basis. It is voluntarism freed of
all rationalistic restrictions.
Peculiarly, Ockham could argue that this view was the only one
which properly emphasized the importance of the church in matters
of morals. It is clear that, on this basis, what is right and what is
wrong morally are not subject to rational proof, as they had been
for St. Thomas. What is right and what is wrong are determined by
God's commands and they are simply matters of fact. No necessity
binds His choice. Therefore, we cannot know what He wills by mere
reason, even where aided by sense. We must turn to supernatural
revelation. Here the church is the sole authority. It alone can in-
fallibly decide what are the facts; hence, it alone can speak with
finality on matters of morals. The most learned and acute scholar
can simply bow the head and acquiesce. Actually, as we shall see,
Ockham was a spokesman for the conciliar party. This meant that
what is good and what is bad morally are determined by the vote
of church councils, not by papal pronouncements. This democratic
turn to ethical authoritarianism, however, does not in the least
affect its basic irrationalism. The mechanism of ascertaining God's
will may be exceedingly important in any practical attempt to apply
and carry out Ockham's ethical theory; it has, however, little theo-
retical significance.
By dropping out the theological basis of Ockham's ethics and re-
placing supernatural revelation by a conjectured physiological psy-
chology, Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century was to make the
next great theoretical advance in the voluntaristic position. He re-
placed God's will by man's in defining moral goodness. He thereby so
profoundly shocked moralists that they did not recover for two centur-
iesâbarely in time to receive another overwhelming challenge, with
which they are today still trying to cope. I refer to the positivist's
theory that for some type of conduct to be good is not really any-
thing at all; it is in fact only a confused way of saying that that sort
of behavior is commanded. To will something does not create a new
character, its goodness; goodness is just another name for being
willed.
Such a shift, however, implies that a sharp distinction has been
drawn between factual and normative statements. To say (as the
contemporary positivist does) that a judgment as to what is good or

what ought to be is simply a confused way of stating a fact, a fact
as to an act of will, supposes that one has clearly separated out fac-
tual matters, has freed them from value questions in his own mind.
This clear separation was not present in medieval voluntarism, not
even in William of Ockham. That God wills us to refrain from
blasphemy is a fact. That blasphemy is a sin is a (negative) value, a
norm. One could say with Nietzsche: God is just a doddering old
codger, quite fundamentally mistaken on moral matters. Not even
Ockham was clear about this. Fact and value were somehow identi-
fied or confused. It was thought that God's acts of will simply define
or constitute rightness and wrongness. There was no recognition
that the latter are in their nature different kinds of things from con-
formity or disconformity to divine will.
In this respect the medieval voluntarists were at one with their
rationalist opponents. Both confused value with fact, issues as to
what ought to be the case with questions of what actually are. Yet
there was a profound difference. The facts with which values were
confused on the part of the rationalist were quite fundamental (the
nature of man, his basic and unique functions as a living being, the
essence of God and so on), whereas on the part of the voluntarist
they were accidental or arbitrary (what man actually does in rela-
tion to what God demands when either could, just as well as not,
have willed exactly the opposite).
This difference was to contribute to the attainment of a clear dis-
tinction between value and fact. The rationalist of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, in challenging the identification of value
with a purely accidental fact (in this case, Hobbes' identification of
justice and right with what the sovereign in the state happens to
command), came to see that no fact can just be or constitute value.
So this conflict had an important bearing on the major distinction
whose history we are tracing.
Moreover, the battle between these ethical schools was not unre-
lated to a conflict between two allied positions in legal thought,
which I shall designate in similar fashion as "rationalist" and "vol-
untarist." Indeed, ethics, political philosophy and jurisprudence
were not distinguished in any consistent fashion in the Middle Ages.
We shall not here anticipate the forms that rationalism and volun-
tarism took in the area of law, because that will be our concern in
the following section. But it may be profitable at this juncture to
attempt a somewhat more formal definition of these terms, both to
get some perspective on what we have been looking at in ethics and

to prepare ourselves for a better grasp of what we shall be concerned
with in the next section in the field of legal and political thought
(and actually through the remainder of this book in both areas right
up to the present).
My choice of the designations involved was based on an obvious
but rather superficial characteristic. The "rationalist" is one who
has faith that reason can be relied upon to answer correctly ques-
tions of value; he usually goes further and identifies the good life
in the individual or state with one in which reason is in control.
The "voluntarist," on the contrary, puts what trust he has (if any)
Sovereign
I. Rationalism 2. Voluntarism
Fig. 32. Rationalism and Voluntarism in Legal and Ethical Theory
in the good will, and sees the highest values as conformances with
some supreme or sovereign will. I have called this feature "super-
ficial" partly because it really is not too important what faculties (if
you wish to call them such) are primarily involved. Really, the same
issues can be raised, as we shall see, in connection with "conscience,"
"the moral sense" and other human powers. The actual point of
conflict then lies deeper. Those I have called or shall call "ration-
alist" conceive the moral goodness or legal propriety of conduct as
being determined by the nature of the conduct itself (including, in
many cases, its context, consequences, etc.). Contrariwise, those I
refer to as voluntarists find that value (good or bad) attaches to be-
havior extrinsically, as it were, by virtue of some external source
which connects that type of action with its goodness or badness, as
the case may be. (See Fig. 32.)

Perhaps a little anecdote (which I borrow with slight modifica-
tions from Hans Kelsen) may point this up by showing the way each
of these views justifies a value contention.
John and Susan dislike going to school. John has a rationalist
father.
John: Why should I go to school instead of playing all the time,
Daddy?
John's father: So that you can write letters to your friends and
read theirs to you, read interesting stories and, finally, study philoso-
phy, which will make you happy.
Susan has a voluntarist mother.
Susan: Why should I go to school instead of playing all the time,
Mama?
Susan's mother: Because your daddy says you must.
Susan: Why should I do what daddy says?
Susan's mother: Because God made it a commandment that chil-
dren should obey their parents.
Susan: But why should I obey God's commandments?
Susan's mother: Susan!
Ideas on Law and the State
Our separation of legal and political from ethical thought is some-
what unfair to the facts, certainly to the facts of the medieval mind;
yet it is perhaps justifiable in terms of more recent attempts (how-
ever questionable their success) to divide these fields. Their union
is striking in St. Thomas who here, as elsewhere, based his thinking
upon Aristotle's. In the disciple, however, the master's outlook was
colored by intervening developments, two in particular being of
great importanceâRoman law, with the practical significance it
gave to the Stoic concept of a universal law of "nature" or reason,
and the Christian church, with its development of canon law quite
distinct from civil, resting upon a higher, nonhuman authority.
Aristotle classified ethics under the study of politics. This could
be misleading if torn out of context. He did not for a moment mean
to suggest that moral right and wrong are matters of political dis-
cretion (as, I regret to say, Plato at times seemed to imply). Rather,
he meant to say, first, that morals are not merely private concerns,
since man is essentially a social animal and, second, and more im-
mediately relevant, politics is ethical, the state is to be studied in the
light of its goal, which is the good life. The morally good man is no
hermit but one who assumes his social responsibilities in the state,
and the state in question must be itself a good state. So political
science is no "science" in our contemporary sense, seeking mere uni-
formities of fact. It is definitely a value discipline attempting to
portray an ideal and occupying itself with various evil conditions
only insofar as this will reveal dangers against which rulers must be
put on guard.
As has been reiterated, no doubt to the point of tedium, Aristotle's
thought was teleological throughout; he saw purposes in nature
everywhere. This gave him a firm foundation in ethics. The good
man is he who attains the proper end for man, which Aristotle calls
"happiness." This term does not refer to a "sum of pleasures" in
the sense of a set of particular sensations, but to a certain successful
realization of a man's capacities, a kind of full, complete life which
can only be attained in definite social groups, themselves to be un-
derstood in terms of their appropriate goals. Of these the most im-
portant are the family and the state.
The object of the family, though said by Aristotle to be the com-
mon good of its members, seems essentially to be the protection,
sustenance and education (particularly moral education) of the chil-
dren. For this purpose it is necessary to have a single head who will
rule intelligently with this end in mind. This is the father. (The
wife and mother, in consonance with actual Greek custom, is barely
mentioned; she would seem to be little more than a devoted servant.)
Obviously we have here an advocacy of paternalism with a moral
objective.
Aristotle's view of the ideal for the state is very similar. The main
difference is that the family does not need to be self-sufficient,
whereas the state does. Thus, the goal of the state (since it includes
the ends of its member families) is more inclusive, more complete,
than that of the family; otherwise it is essentially the same. The
state is to be kept as small as is consistent with economic self-suffi-
ciency so that all citizens can be personally acquainted with one
another. The basic objective is the protection, sustenance and above
all the moral education of the citizens. It should be noted, however,
that there are to be servants of the state that are necessary to it but
not part of it (just as there are slaves to serve the family, who are
nothing but "living instruments"). These are mechanics, tradesmen
and husbandmen. The citizen class (corresponding to the father and
children in the family) is composed of warriors, priests and rulers.

Just as the status of the child and the parent changes in the family,
these functions are not fixed for life: eventually every citizen will
have his turn at ruling. Thus, although Aristotle's ideal state is
paternalistic, it is not absolutistic or voluntaristic in implication; he
does not advocate a fixed ruler whose rule is law simply because it is
his. In fact, we must constantly remember that the paternalism here
is for a moral objective. Only that rule is legitimate which is aimed
at the maximum self-development of the citizens.
Aristotle divides the actual forms of government into two major
classes: those which are good, where the rule aims at the moral de-
velopment of the citizens; and those which are evil, where the rule
aims at some selfish advantage of the ruler. There are three sub-
divisions of each, in terms of the size and type of class which consti-
tutes the rulers.
Rule of One Rule of a Few Rule of Many
Good
Monarchy
Aristocracy
Constitutional Government
(rule of one for the
common good)
(rule of a few with
greatest ability and
highest purpose)
(a mean between rule
by the rich and rule by
the poor; that is, rule
by the middle class)
[Tyranny
(rule of one for per-
sonal power)
Oligarchy
(rule by the wealthy)
Democracy
(rule by the poor)
Evil
Although St. Thomas preserved the ethical and teleological em-
phasis of Aristotle, he introduced it in discussing God's provident
rule of mankind having expression in a natural law common to all
men. We do not find in Aristotle any such concept of a benevolent
ruler of a world state nor of a law that applies to men as men.
For these ideas to arise it was necessary that the small, inde-
pendent Greek city-state be replaced by a world empire (more
accurately, by an empire coextensive with the then known world).
This was at least anticipated by the military triumphs and the at-
tempts at cultural amalgamation of East and West of Aristotle's
pupil, Alexander the Great. It was of course carried out with more
permanent success by the Romans. The basis of this unification of
the civilized world was military. There was no attempt to force
Roman ideas and customs upon conquered peoples. But with politi-
cal unification and the growth of commerce around the Mediter-
ranean basin, cultural assimilation took place.

The result was the development of a new attitude toward the
state. In place of the identification of the individual's good with
that of his own small, independent city-state with its peculiar insti-
tutions, customs and citizenry, there now developed the ideal of cos-
mopolitanism. A man should be acquainted with the great variety
of human institutions and customs, should not be provincial in
thinking that some, specifically those of his own narrow group, were
better, more natural, more worth fighting for than any others. But
correlated with this cosmopolitanism was an individualism not to be
found in classical Greek times. Since the individual did not in any
peculiar sense belong anywhere, since his good was not the specific
end of any small and well-knit social group, he felt increasingly
alone, thrown on his own resources. This revealed itself in the
masses by the surprising popularity of the mystery religions promis-
ing salvation to the individual as such (whoever he was and quite
independent of his citizenship). It revealed itself among the more
intellectual classes by the popularity of philosophies that promised
inner resources of strength.
Of these far and away the most popular was Stoicism (deriving its
name from the place, the Stoa or porch, where the school first met in
Athens). It taught that nothing external could really touch the in-
dividual. Nothing is good or bad save as one considers it to be such.
The Stoics offered a training which promised the novitiate complete
control over his attitudes toward things. Thus we see that the im-
portance of the individual, destroyed by political events, was re-
established and even enhanced by a philosophy that made him the
free determiner, indeed the creator, in a sense, of all good and evil.
This device, however, might seem to be a little over-efficacious: by
concentrating all good in the individual, it would appear to make
him completely independent of society, to destroy all his duties as
a citizen. As a matter of fact, the precursors of the Stoics, the Cynics
(whose name was a term of contempt meaning literally "dog-like"),
had actually held this. But the Stoics did not push their individual-
ism to this logical outcome. The individual does have a place in
and duties toward a state, but not any peculiar or local one. His
obligations are to a world community, an ideal state ruled by a
world reason. The influence of the Roman Empire upon Stoic
thought is here again obvious. Just as, on the one hand, it had
thrown the Stoic back on his inner resources, so, on the other, it
contributed to the latter a sense of a place in an all-embracing
commonwealth.
In uniting these two attitudes the Stoics argued: external circum-
stances, including social and personal relations, are not good or bad
in themselves, but only as the individual so views them. How then
can one control his own outlook so that nothing appears (and thus
nothing is) evil? Not by a mere fiat of the will; rather by the appre-
hension of everything from the standpoint of the whole. If the in-
dividual views himself as a member of the ideal world-state, he will
see that various apparently evil circumstances are necessary to the
good of the whole; and even where he doesn't achieve this vision,
he will preserve his faith that the benevolent and rational world
ruler has ordered all for the best. Thus is introduced the concept of
a rational world rule designed for the good of all and based on what
is common to all.
This is called indifferently "the law of reason" or "of nature."
The latter phrase was inherited from the Sophists, who had con-
trasted what is by nature with what is by convention. The customs
and laws that differed for different peoples were thought to be
merely conventional by the very fact that they differed; what was
by nature, that is, coming naturally from the very character of man,
must be common to all peoples.
This philosophic concept of a law of nature tended to coalesce
with a Roman legal concept that had arisen out of practical circum-
stances. Roman civil law applied properly only to Roman citizens,
but it was frequently necessary for Roman courts to consider cases
involving Roman subjects who were not citizens. The problem
was acute in those cases where the parties involved belonged to dif-
ferent nations, and where, consequently, their own customary laws
were different. To meet this situation the Roman lawyers developed
a set of principles called the "ius gentium" or "the law of nations."
These were ways in which various customs and laws of different
peoples seemed to be alike, and in accordance with which, con-
sequently, it seemed fair and equitable to adjudicate particular
conflicts. The union of this with the Stoic law of nature gave rise to
the concept of an equity that could overrule special law when the
latter was unjust, that applied to all men equally and whose au-
thority was not some particular legislative act, tradition or custom,
but human reason concerned with the good of man as man.
This concept of a law of nature became the common presupposi-

tion of medieval legal thought. But in the Middle Ages it took on
a theological cast. This was partly due simply to the triumph of
Christianity together with the collapse of the Roman Empire. It
was a natural step to identify the Stoic's ideal world-state with the
Kingdom of God, his world reason with the Christian creator and
his law of nature with divine providence.
This was probably the motivation leading Gratian, in the twelfth
century, to put down at the very beginning of his Decretum, thus to
become the very head of canon law, the statement that the law of
nature is simply the Golden Rule, thus the law of God and of his
Gospel for men, and that consequently it is the church that is its
authentic exponent and interpreter. Similarly, it was an easy step
for Aquinas to say that, although natural law differed from divine as
revealed in the scriptures and interpreted by ecclesiastical authority,
both were essentially God's eternal law, one as grasped through
man's natural reason, the other through special revelation.
Thanks to this small and, I trust, not too fatiguing excursus, we
are now in a position to understand historically the legal and politi-
cal thought of St. Thomas.
In his general political theory expounded in The Governance of
Rulers, the influence of Aristotle is obvious. Man is by nature a
political animal. This means more than that man is gregarious.
Not merely as a fact does man seek the company of others; in order
to live well, to be virtuous, to attain his proper end he must live
with others in a political state. As we have seen, the ultimate goal
of man is happiness, the fullest achievement of his capacities, the
actualizing of all his potentialities. Such a goal can be attained
only in the next life, for only then can man become wholly one with
God. But this consumation presupposes that progress in the form of
a virtuous life on earth has been made. This is possible for the
individual only as he is a member of a well-ordered state, governed
by just law, and existing in a condition of peace. That a state be
at peace requires that it have internal unity. This is most likely
to be found in a commonwealth having the most unified form of
governmentânamely, in a monarchy. In such a monarchy, of course,
the king rules not for his own selfish ends but to promote the moral
self-development of his subjects; he imitates in that governance of
his state God's benevolent regulation of the universe.
It might, at first glance, appear that Aquinas is advocating a kind
of political absolutism and thus of voluntarism. Such an impression,

however, would be quite wrong. Like Aristotle, he favors a sort of
paternalism in government, directed toward and justified by a moral
end. The ruler does command; his commands are properly backed
by force; but the command and the force are not their own justifica-
tion. The state has the right to coerce the individual because and
insofar as that coercion promotes the proper end of the individual
coercedânamely, his own moral self-development. What if it
doesn't? What if, as is at least conceivable, the king turns out to be
a tyrant? Then his rule is no longer justified; he may be deposed by
action of his subjects. Occasionally in the world of brute human af-
fairs (however unfortunate for political theory) a king turned tyrant
may not peaceably accede to such action on the part of his subjects.
Even in such circumstances, however, St. Thomas would not allow
recourse to violence on the part of the people; rather, they must
turn to God and let Him act.
Besides the influence of Aristotle, that of the Stoics and Roman
lawyers, colored by the Christian idea of a kingdom of God, are
manifest in St. Thomas (particularly in his Treatise on Law con-
tained in his Summa Theologicd). Law is a rational measure of acts
and a regulation of them by that measure. Although all law must
be willed or commanded by someone, its legitimacy is finally a mat-
ter of its conformity with the rule of reason. Reason rules for the
common good; therefore, all law must have this objective. Since the
common good is the good of all, law must be made by all or by that
public personage who represents all and seeks the good of all. More-
over, in order to guide the actions of those who are to be subject to
it, law must be known, must be made public. So we have St. Thomas'
formal definition of law as "an ordinance of reason for the common
good, made by him who has the care of the community, and pro-
mulgated."
Already we see in this general account of all law the influence of
the doctrine of natural law, as the rule of reason. But St. Thomas
also has a specific place for it. There are four main kinds of law:
eternal, natural, human and divine. Eternal law is simply God's
providence, his rule of the universe for its own good. Natural law
is the participation by the rational creature (namely, man) in the
eternal law. It is the exemplification of God's providence in the life
of his rational creatures. In it, man, by the natural light of reason,
distinguishes between good and evil. It may, therefore, be spoken
of as the rule of goodness itself, of that which makes for man's hap-
piness and development. Since it is necessary for this goal that man
preserve himself and live in society, the law of nature inculcates
these subsidiary goals. Human law is positively enacted law. It is,
if legitimate, a set of applications or determinations by human rea-
son of the more general law of nature. Human law is necessary
because not all men live in accordance with natural law and thus at
peace with others. Some men are evil in intent. Thus, human law,
by attaching the fear of punishment to the infraction of specific
prohibitions, is able to help curb the viciousness of those whose
actions are not controlled by respect for the law of nature. By divine
law, St. Thomas meant those rules for human behavior that are
known by a special revelation of God's will, particularly as found
in the Old and New Testaments.
It seems to me unquestionable that in legal theory, as in ethics,
Aquinas was a rationalist. All true law finds its binding character
in its content; its legality depends not on its source but on its ob-
jective, in the last analysis. The only possible exception is divine
law, and I do not think it is consonant with the spirit of St. Thomas
to give a voluntarist interpretation even of it. But voluntarism in
legal thought was present in the medieval period, and we must turn
our attention to it, with some brief account of its historical anteced-
ents.
As I use the term, "voluntarism" holds that the legality of law is
not determined by its content but by its source, being conferred on
it by the legislator, that justification of the state's power to coerce
the individual is not established by its goal (the social and moral
good) but by the form of government. The most plausible sort of
voluntarism is that which finds the ultimate basis of power in the
consent of the governed, the true legislator being the people. A
voluntarist could hold that the real foundation in each case is the
arbitrary will of some individual ruler. I think that John Calvin
and Jonathan Edwards approximated this in their view of God. If
God wished to punish everyone eternally, then such damnation was
just; if He wished to exempt a few, the elect, then the exception was
rightânot that the people involved would have given their consent,
not that it would be for their good, but simply in that it was God's
pleasure. Of course, one could put a human ruler in the place of
such a God. But this was too extreme for most legal and political
theoristsâeven the absolutists on the whole did at least lip service
to the idea of consent.

It is difficult, however, to find historical instances of a completely
pure doctrine of consent, unmixed with the rationalistic assumption
of a law of nature. Such an unadulterated view could not appeal to
any social or moral good, defined in terms of the nature of man and
forming the objective of the state and the basis of law. Rather, it
would make both state and law rest on the sheer fact of the peo-
ple's agreement, that is, on specific acts of will. We shall find this
account in Hobbes in the seventeenth century, who used it to
justify a form of political absolutism taking all power and legislative
right away from the people, vesting them in an irresponsible mon-
archâa feat of argumentation we shall pause to admire in its proper
place. In making the consent of the governed through a social com-
pact the basis of the state, Hobbes was reviving an ancient view
which, in its pure form, had dropped out of sight throughout the
Middle Agesâthe view of Epicurus.
Epicurus lived, like the early Stoics, in the Hellenistic period, and
his beliefs, like theirs, show the effects of the cosmopolitanism of
that period. The individual's loyalty to and identification of himself
with a small, well-knit city-state had been lost; he was thrown back
upon his own inner resources. Unlike the Stoics, this did not in
Epicurus engender in imagination a world-state and a world-law
based on reason as something common to all men. Rather, it devel-
oped an attitude of escape from society and its burdens. The good
is the individual's pleasure, not in any sensualistic meaning ("epi-
cure" today means gourmetâalmost an exact reversal of the teach-
ing of Epicurus save for its social irresponsibility): the pleasure that
Epicurus would have the individual seek is simply quiet release
from trouble of mind and pain of body. We might note that he
embraced a kind of materialism to avoid (so Lucretius tells us) all
disturbance of mind due to superstitious fear of the godsâactually
Epicurus was not an atheist but a sort of theistic noninterventionist:
the gods dwell in interstellar spaces where they are quite incapable
of messing up human affairs (decidedly an advance in divine moral-
ity over Homer, I should say).
Epicurus was, of course, aware that human society exists. He
denied, however, that it performs any positive moral function. Other
people are only a threat to one's peace of mind, a source of possible
harm. As people quite selfishly seek each his own quietude, they
see the need of protection against others; hence they enter an agree-
ment with one another: I'll not harm you if you'll leave me alone.
The state is thus set up to see that men live up to their agreement:
its function is to restrain, through fear of punishment, the depreda-
tions of one individual upon another. Social justice is thus nega-
tively defined as the abstention from harming another and is some-
thing not independently given by the nature of man but founded
on an agreement, a compact expressing the consent of all involved.
It can readily be seen why Epicureanism almost completely
dropped out of men's serious thinking in the Middle Ages; it was
so completely out of harmony with the main Christian tradition
that no one tried seriously to integrate the two. It was materialistic;
it denied the providence of God's rule of the universe; it gave a sel-
fish interpretation of men's motives; it claimed that men seek only
pleasure and that this constitutes man's good (the tendency then as
now was to misinterpret Epicurus as meaning sensuous indulgence).
Still, the doctrine of consent, not in this pure form but as mixed
with the idea of a law of nature and of a social good which is the
true goal of the state, was represented in the later Middle Ages
by a group of voluntarists. It was called forth by social conditions
quite different from those obtaining in Epicurus' timeâby the con-
troversies between pope and prince and pope and church councilâ
and expressed one of the earliest attempts to justify representative
government.
First, I would call attention to the very significant book of
Marsiglio of Padua, The Defender of the Peace, appearing in the
fourteenth century. It was written while the papacy was in its
"Babylonish Captivity" at Avignon, a condition that had taken from
it much of the prestige and power it had enjoyed a century earlier.
The immediate occasion was the controversy between Pope John
XXII and Lewis the Bavarian. The pope attempted to intervene
in the election of Lewis as Holy Roman Emperor. Marsiglio was
one of the political writers who espoused the side of the prince.
Actually, however, Marsiglio's book is a broad analysis of govern-
ment in church and state rather than a political pamphlet on mo-
mentary issues. As an Italian, our author was not too interested in
the vicissitudes of a German prince, although he was willing to
accept refuge with him after being excommunicated. Furthermore,
his ideas concerning the state are much more relevant to a small
Italian city than to the sprawling and loosely integrated Holy
Roman Empire. Marsiglio was probably much more animated by
anti-papal feeling than by pro-imperial.

It is also important to note that Marsiglio was influenced by a
strong fourteenth century movement in philosophy and theology
usually taken to herald the breakdown of scholasticismâvolun-
taristic nominalism, with which we have gained some slight acquaint-
ance in the ethics of William of Ockham. It claimed allegiance to
Aristotle; indeed, it insisted that it, rather than St. Thomas, truly
preserved the master's thought, but it denied the possibility of a close
and firm union of Aristotelian doctrines with Christian dogma. In
matters of reason or proof, Aristotle was to be followed, but religion
lay outside this region. It was based on the right willâthe will in
harmony with special revelation, which was not rational, but even
on occasion irrational. This, in the extreme, took the form of a two-
fold truthâone truth established by reason, the other to be accepted
on the sheer authority of a special revelation.
This dualism has its significance for Marsiglio's political theory.
It is revealed in an almost complete separation of church and state,
both as to their ends and to their means. The goal of the church
is salvation for the individual in the next life. The means thereto
is the faith, which is in the special keeping of the church. The end
of the state is the well-being of its citizens here in this life. Its means
are those political instruments which can be shown by reason to be
conducive to this objective.
Marsiglio has us turn first to a consideration of civil government.
The object of the state is the well-being of its citizens. To this end
peace must be maintained and hence government instituted. Man is
by nature social, and government is a social necessity. Marsiglio
gives Aristotle's classification of the types of government and tends to
accept monarchy as the best, although with qualifications. He is
opposed to the hereditary form and tends to favor the elective.
Up to this point Marsiglio faithfully reflects the rationalistic pa-
ternalism of Aristotle, but a fundamental divergence appears in his
contention that political sovereignty rests with the people. The
people constitute the legislator; they make the laws and to them
the laws owe their validity. The people's will can be expressed
either directly by an assembly of the citizens or indirectly through
an individual or group to whom authority has been delegated. This
emphasis upon the people as legislator leads Marsiglio to make a
clear distinction between the executive and the legislative functions
of government. The executive is the instrument of the legislator
and can be punished by the latter. The executive can carry out the
law and interpret it, but not make it. Thus Marsiglio does not leave
room for despotism; the people or their delegates serve as a constant
check upon the king's actions.
Turning next to the church, Marsiglio opposes the doctrine that
the church is composed essentially of the priesthood, and in place
urges that it is made up of the whole body of Christian believers.
Since authority lies here, as in the state, with the people, it follows
that no pope, priest or group thereof has by itself the right to ex-
communicate or determine questions of faith. Supreme power lies
rather in a general council composed of both clergy and laity. Here
Marsiglio anticipates the modern idea of representation. The dele-
gates to this council are to be chosen so that every important prov-
ince shall be represented by a number proportionate to the number
and character of its inhabitants. This general council is to have the
power of excommunication, of regulation of ceremonies of worship,
of interpretation of scriptures, and of appointment to ecclesiastical
office.
We should not gain the impression, however, that Marsiglio's doc-
trine of government by a representative body was wholly without
precedent. In civil politics there were the Spanish Cortes, the French
fistats GÂ£nÂ£rales, and the English Parliament, all of which were to
some degree representative. Then, of course, there was the legal
and commercial regulation of guilds and corporations by representa-
tive bodies. In the church itself in its formative period, councils
had been important (an example is the great council meeting at
Nicea in 325 and settling the Arian controversy by adopting the
Nicene creed), and they were to become important again in the next
century as a result of the Great Schism. What was really novel was
Marsiglio's doctrine of consent as a justification of government by
representative body, and this perhaps can hardly be overemphasized.
Marsiglio keeps the respective authority of civil and ecclesiastical
government completely distinct. The latter is to be concerned with
salvation and hence with the promotion of the true faith. But in
this it has no right to the use of physical force or compulsion; only
spiritual means can be adopted. It can persuade, teach, threaten;
but it cannot use corporal punishment, for that is restricted to civil
government. If the spread of a given heresy is socially dangerous,
the civil government can step in, but even here it must be treated
wholly in its character of threatening the peace; errors of faith are
not as such open to human judgment and punishment.

It is in his treatment of law, perhaps, that Marsiglio most strik-
ingly anticipates future views. There are two aspects of importance
âhis voluntarism and his dualism. St. Thomas, although granting
that law must be willed or commanded, was mainly concerned to
show that true law is rational, that it commands what reason shows
is for the common good, for the attainment of happiness. Human
law is a specification of natural law and an addition of particular
penalties to enforce it in the case of bad men. Divine law is a special
revelation, but it agrees wholly with natural law, both being ways
of grasping God's eternal law, which aims at man's happiness and
good.
For Marsiglio, divine and human laws are strikingly different.
Their objects are different, since one is directed to a life to come,
about which we can know nothing by reason; the other to this life,
about which revelation tells us nothing. Their sources are com-
pletely different: one is God, the other men. Thus, the whole theo-
logical form of the doctrine of natural law is fundamentally
challenged. And there is subtly present an even deeper challenge.
The idea of natural law had always been a concept of a law of rea-
son. It might be ascribed to a world reason or a Christian creator,
but its binding force lay in its reasonableness. A rational being
would obey it because it told him to do what was obviously for his,
and for the common, good. But Marsiglio makes the basis of law,
both human and divine, will or command. He does not say it is
arbitrary, but the change of emphasis is real and significant. His
voluntarism seems unmistakable in his formal definitions:
Divine law is a command of God directly, without human delibera-
tion, about voluntary acts of human beings to be done or avoided in
this world but for the sake of attaining the best end, or some condition
desirable for man, in the world to come.
Human law is a command of the whole body of citizens, or of its
prevailing part, arising directly from the deliberation of those em-
powered to make law, about voluntary acts of human beings to be done
or avoided in this world, for the sake of attaining the best end, or some
condition desirable for man, in this world. I mean a command the
transgression of which is enforced in this world by a penalty or punish-
ment imposed on the transgressor.
Mention should be made of William of Ockham, the English con-
temporary of Marsiglio, who likewise opposed the doctrine of the
plenitude of power of the pope and actively sided with Lewis of

Bavaria against John XXII. He did not work out a unified political
or legal theory, and his scattered views are not as extreme as those
of Marsiglio. However, they are based on the same general philo-
sophical and theological foundation of voluntaristic nominalism
which he developed in a thorough-going and quite shocking fashion
in the area of ethics, as we have seen.
By the end of the fourteenth and the beginning of the fifteenth
centuries, that is, at the time of the Great Schism, the power and
prestige of the papacy were at low ebb. With a pope at Rome and
another at Avignon, each anathematizing and excommunicating the
other and the other's adherents, even those who favored the suprem-
acy of the church realized that the pope could hardly be considered to
have absolute power. Thus, the conciliar movement, claiming that
final authority in the church lay in general councils, was greatly
strengthened. Two important councils were held in the first half
of the fifteenth century, at Constance and at Basle. The former
was successful in removing the scandal of the schism and unifying
the papal office in one man. Both attempted to go farther. They
claimed that the general council was a permanent part of the con-
stitution of the church and that, as representative of the whole body
of believers, it was the supreme authority, to whom even the pope
must give obedience.
Actually the conciliar party was unsuccessful in this project of
setting up a limited form of monarchy in the church. By the late
fifteenth century the papacy was able to claim absolute power and
authority in the church. This was largely due to the growing na-
tionalistic tendencies. The councils were set up by nations, and
the rivalries between national groups made it possible for the pope
to win out as he had done earlier in using the rivalries between
feudal lords. Although this consolidated papal power within the
church, it destroyed the possibility of the adjustment of the church
to the new nationalistic forces and was one of the causes of the
revolution whereby the Protestants set up various state churches.
The ideas of the conciliar party were largely borrowed from
Marsiglio and Ockham, although in somewhat softened form. Per-
haps the most important thinker of the group was the German,
Nicholas of Cusa, who presented his treatise, Concerning Catholic
Concord, to the Council of Basle in 1433. Although an advocate of
the doctrine that government rests on the consent of the governed,
his chief contention, as his title indicates, is that proper government

involves a harmony or coordination of various parts or organs. Just
as church and state should be harmoniously integrated (here his
thought is most removed from Marsiglio's), so within each there
should be an harmonious interrelation of powers. Carrying this
thought out in his account of the best organization for the church
results in some rather amazing results, especially as to the respective
authority of pope and council. A general council must be called by
the pope, but it has the power to depose that potentate. The pope
must adhere to a council to make it legal, yet the council's authority
is superior to his. Apparently Nicholas wished to hold that neither
pope nor council has absolute or final authority.
This from a practical standpoint is quite untenable. But it rests
upon a general theory of some significance. The only true basis of
rule is the consent of the governed, which is given not to a single
bodyâthe representative-âbut is revealed in the proper harmony
of all. This principle he applies to both church and state. Legisla-
tion is properly in the hands of those bound by it; that which con-
cerns all should be approved by all. Thus the individual is obligated
to obey the law because he has himself (at least through some body
representing him) made it. The true prince must rule in accordance
with the laws, that is, in accordance with the will of his subjects.
When he does not, his power can properly be taken away from him
by the people. By nature all men are equally free and of equal
power. In this situation the ruler is naturally equal to every one
else. Hence, the constitution of his power must arise in an election
and comes from the consensus of the whole community.
Curiously and rather significantly for later thought, Nicholas at-
tempts to give his voluntarism a rationalistic basis. The whole doc-
trine that law is binding only so far as it expresses the will of the
people and that government rests upon the consent of men naturally
free, is itself not founded on any act of will, but is grounded in
natural law and is in accordance with reason. It is true that natural
law is identical with God's will; but his will operates not from above
downward, from pope or prince to people, but directly through the
people and their consent.
These concepts of the equality of men in the state of nature and
of government as based on a compact revealing the consent of the
governed were to be taken over almost verbatim by the advocates of
popular rule in the Enlightenment. But at that time they were to
be conceived literally, as the founding by actual compact of many

civil societies especially in the New World and as the insistence on
actual representation and the power of the vote indicate. Nicholas
seems satisfied to find in customs the consent of the governed, and
in various traditional corporations with their social hierarchies a
revelation of the delegated power of naturally equal individuals.
It might be asked: How are these two medieval views, paternalistic
rationalism (of Thomas) and the doctrine of the sovereignty of the
people (of Marsiglio and Nicholas) to be distinguished? Do they
not practically amount to the same thing? I think not: even in their
practical consequences, in the sort of state they justify, they diverge,
one justifying an aristocratic setup, the other a representative. But
their real difference is theoretical. One would have legal coercion
justify itself by saying that it is for your good; the other, by claiming
that really, in some deep layer of yourself, you accept it; you are
coercing yourself (and therefore the compulsion is legitimate).

CHAPTER 7
Renaissance Iconodasm
Ethics: From Saint to Humanist
There are two extremes of thought concerning the significance of
the Renaissance. One finds in this period the real birth of the
modern age, the overthrow of medievalism and the attainment of
modernity. The other sees in it a relapse from the high theoretical
standards of the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries without the
attainment of the modern scientific methods of the seventeenth. The
truth, as in most such cases, probably lies somewhere between. In
dealing with physical science we saw how the Renaissance, even
though it did not itself witness the revolution which brought in our
kind of science, nevertheless did harbor two important movements
that not only helped to overthrow the Aristotelian variety but also,
through their union, originated the Galilean-Newtonian typeâthe
mathematical perfectionism of neo-Pythagoreanism together with
the revival of Archimedes, on the one hand, and the growth of a
practical experimentalism of the engineers and navigators, on the
other. We find something similar in the field of ethics. Here again
the Renaissance witnessed no positive theoretical achievements, but
it was a period during which medieval views were being challenged
and the ground laid, in a certain respect, for a more or less total
change of emphasis characteristic of modern ethics.
Both voluntarism and rationalism in medieval ethics were theo-
logical. By this I mean that the concept of GodâGod's will, God's
intellect, God's essenceâwas central. It will be recalled that volun-
tarism, in its extreme form, defined the moral good as that which
God (quite arbitrarily) wills. Rationalism found in God's activity of
knowing the moral capstone, the goal of all other processes, the kind
of thing man at his best can, at least in the next life, achieve. The
real accomplishment of the Renaissance, in my estimation, was the
destruction of this centering of ethics in God. The concept of man

[7] Renaissance Iconoclasm 309
and his satisfactions quite apart from any connections with the
deity was to become the new basis.
Along with this, however, there was interwoven another strand. I
am thinking of what has been called the "paganism" of the period,
especially of the Renaissance in Italy. But important as this was
in changing popular moral ideals and attitudes, I think it was of
only minor significance in ethical theory. Indeed, there are grounds
for supposing that if it be taken as a reaction against medieval ethical
theory, as that found expression in scholasticism with its Aristotelian
orientation, it must rest largely on a misapprehension to the effect
that that theory was dualistic, defining the good for man as involving
essentially a denial of bodily appetites and gratifications of sense,
however refined. In popular thought, as we have seen, Christianity
did include such a dualistic tradition, so that in this sphere we may
say that the forthright acceptance, by the humanists of the Renais-
sance, of sense gratification as good was in conflict with one strand
of the medieval outlook.
Let us try to put this, very briefly, in its social setting. It is un-
necessary to resume at length our survey of the social forces affecting
the course of human thought. We recall that this period saw the
beginnings of the great commercial revolution that was to shatter
feudal society. Out of it finally was to emerge a new dominant class,
the commercial capitalist, to take the reins of power from prince
and priest; out of it was to arise a new institution, the nation-state,
to fill the place of the church; out of it was to be born competitive
individualism and a fluid class structure to take the place of the
medieval, hereditary hierarchy; out of it were to come new geo-
graphical explorations and discoveries that were destined not merely
to widen men's geographical horizons but to stimulate their desire
for adventuring into new intellectual regions. The odd customs
and moral outlooks of the distant peoples were to have their effects
upon the ethical views of western Europeans. Outweighing every-
thing else, science was to arise and bring the profoundest challenge
of all.
The Renaissance was only transitional, however. Much of the
old order was still present. The commercial revolution was largely
confined to Italian cities, where the new wealth grafted itself to the
older nobility. Men had not yet turned to science, although an atti-
tude of repugnance toward medieval scholasticism was widespread.
Art and scholarship flourished, but mainly as prestige symbols of the

newly acquired affluence. Men sought old styles and ideas that had
been lost in the Middle Ages; they escaped into a paganism that even
entered the church itself.
With this emphasis it was natural that theological ethics should
give place to humanistic. The good life was no longer defined in
terms of the saintly scholar and his absorption in God, but of the
connoisseur and patron of art, the cultured gentlemen who displayed
at their highest the human "virtues," that is, the utmost in man's
capabilities and acquirements. The good life became centered in
man, in this life, and largely in emotional and bodily satisfactions.
There arose a frank insistence that the life of the saint is too high
and rigorous for man; it denies too sweepingly his physical needs.
Thus, we find a widespread criticism of the evils of monasticism, of
the vows of celibacy, poverty and discipline.
Perhaps in some vague sense it is correct to say that Renaissance
humanism was rationalistic in its ethical outlook. Granted that it
found the abstract reasoning of St. Thomas most distasteful; never-
theless, it shared with him the conviction that the good life for man
is not determined by some arbitrary command but is founded on
man's nature; it is simply man at his highest development. What
this is, of course, was very differently conceived; in place of the life
of speculation, of absorption in the knowledge of God, the humanist
placed the cultivation and satisfaction of man's nature as an animal.
Even here, however, granting the actual conditions of Europe and
of Italy at the time, there emerged a striking, common, practical con-
sequence. The saintly life obviously was only available to the few;
if Aquinas did not really feel this, it was due to his own social in-
sulation as a scholar. The ideal of the cultured gentleman, however,
immediately found its place in the lives of those who were more
directly active in social affairs; and no doubt part of its appeal lay
in the aspect of its social exclusiveness, its prestige character. But in
both, the good life was open only to a favored minority.
To a great extent the humanistic movement was literary, not
conceptual. It depended for its effect upon a happy choice of words
rather than a rigorous form of argument. In fact, part of its revolt
against scholasticism was directed against the crabbed style of writing
of the latter. As was natural for a literary movement, it tended to
eulogize the sort of experience and achievement characteristic of
the poetâhis keen emotional sensitivity and artistic superiority to
ordinary men and their narrow standards.

The Italian poet Petrarch, living in the fourteenth century, is
frequently cited as the first of the group. He cannot with any pro-
priety be called an ethicist. But he did exemplify certain broad
emphases that were to characterize much of Renaissance ethical
thought. He sought to revive a pagan past, when the sensibilities
of the cultured gentleman and poet furnished the ideal for human
aspiration. In place of the subtle disquisitions of medieval scholas-
tics, he sought, successfully, to revive a knowledge and love of
classical Roman literatureâHorace, Virgil, Cicero. This revival has
its own intrinsic interest for the literary historian; from our stand-
point it signals a change in ethical outlook. No longer was the sys-
tematic, prosaic analysis of Aristotle set up as the type for ethical
writing; no longer was the good life to be delineated by rational de-
duction and elaboration. Rather, the way is shown by emotional
sensitivity revealing itself outwardly in the literary perfection of the
classical stylists.
Petrarch was no historian trying to unearth a past; he was a
humanist, attempting to revive a tradition of the good life. This is
borne out by his own creative work, his sentimental sonnets to Laura.
They pretend to no ideas; rather, they exemplify a nicety of feeling
that is authoritative and sufficient in itself. Here is a new way of
lifeânot that of the saint and scholarly recluse seeking union with
God, but that of the poet, delighting in human feeling and cultivat-
ing it for its own sake. Yet, this new life has much in common with
the older one. It is clearly open only to the few, to the cultured man
of wealth and power and the retinue of writers and artists he sup-
ports. If it offers anything for the common man, it is only by
means of a reflected glory coming from being a member of a species
that can attain such heights.
In Boccaccio, another Italian writer of the fourteenth century, we
find the pendulum swinging farther away from the saintly ideal.
The Decameron is not in praise of delicate sentimentalities; it glories
in wholehearted lust. And the difference of Boccaccio's ideal from
that of the medieval saint is not left to inference. The Decameron
is filled with stories of the immoralities of clergy and monastics.
Boccaccio clearly wished to say that the saintly ideal, with its renun-
ciation of the satisfactions of bodily appetites, makes too great a
demand upon human nature; it is utterly unrealistic. Although
Boccaccio never tired of ridiculing the lasciviousness and downright
stupidity of the "men of God," we must not suppose he was simply

a satirist. His obvious delight in sensuality for its own sake shows
he was no mere reformer. Laying aside the exaggeration due to the
literary form used, we yet seem to find in Boccaccio a genuine con-
viction that the good life is one of maximum satisfaction of the
physical appetites. Contemplative union with God or submission to
His will are empty and necessarily inefficacious goals for human
effort. Still Boccaccio retained one element of the saintly ideal.
His way of life is only for the minority with the leisure necessary to
live a life of sensual indulgence. It is an escape from the drudgery
and monotony that are the inevitable lot of the many, just as the
stories making up the Decameron are recounted as a means of
escape for a fortunate handful from the horrible realities of the
Black Death.
In contrast with Boccaccio's sensualism, we may note briefly the
sort of purified Christian humanism advocated by the Dutchman
Erasmus at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth
centuries. Like all the humanists, Erasmus was interested in clas-
sical literature. In his case this interest took the form of collating
and critically editing both Greek and Latin manuscripts of the New
Testament. For our purposes this scholarly activity may be ignored
in favor of what was, no doubt, its motivating basis in Erasmus' own
life. He was a Christian with a missionâto bring a nominally
Christian world back to the ethical Christianity of Jesus and the
early disciples. He saw about him a world steeped in superstition,
mechanical reliance on rites and ceremonies, vice under the thin
mask of ecclesiastical propriety, and ignorance on the part of those
who paraded as religious leaders. Thus, we find in The Manual of
the Christian Knight a plea to return from superstitious formalism
to a simple religion of ethical behavior as taught by Jesus.
The full strength of Erasmus' convictions comes out clearly in the
biting satire of his Praise of Folly. In the dedication of this work to
Sir Thomas More we find the key expressed in the sentence: "For,
as nothing is more trifling than to treat serious questions frivolously,
so nothing is more amusing than to treat trifles in such a way as to
show yourself anything but a trifler." And how seriously did he
trifle! Writing in the person of Folly, he claimed the allegiance of
his offspringâcorrupt ecclesiasts, narrow theologians, degenerate
monks, pedantic scholastics and all who traffic, for their own profit,
in the superstitious credulity of the common people. The self-
laudations of Folly's children furnished an excellent medium for

Erasmus' witty yet wholehearted condemnation of the tendencies he
had set himself to reform. Here again, then, there appeared, at least
tacitly, the claim that the saintly ideal is too high for human nature,
that it tends to degenerate into mechanical requirements if not
worse. But as a substitute we have, in place of Boccaccio's frank
sensualism, an appeal to Christ-like love and humility.
Erasmus seems to have tried to modify the saintly ideal from a
life of contemplation of God, open only to those rare souls who have
dedicated themselves to this special calling, to a simple pervasive
attitude of humility and kindliness open to all. If so, we may be
greatly attracted by his idealism while yet feeling its fundamental
failure to come to grips with the actual status and problems of the
lower classes of his day that had, for example, to pass through a
period of Peasant Wars to throw off the yoke of serfdom. Moreover,
we must remember that Erasmus, like all the humanists, failed to
get down to the basic ethical questions: What is goodness? What
determines which acts are good, which bad? Erasmus evaded these
issues by simply returning to a great tradition.
Rabelais, living in the first half of the sixteenth century, was prob-
ably the greatest of the French humanists. As a youth he became dis-
satisfied with education in the monasteries and turned to medicine.
Here he seems to have been very successful, receiving his bachelor's
and doctor's degrees at the University of Montpellier, where he also
taught. He edited several medical works, including some by Hip-
pocrates and Galen. But his fame rests upon his literary satires,
Gargantua and Pantagruel. These works, like all satires, have a
moral message; but in them there seems to be more whole-souled
humor for its own sake, more poking of fun at man's weaknesses
simply for good-natured enjoyment therein, than in Erasmus, whose
humor was always trenchant criticism of some rankling abuse. At
least part of Rabelais' moral message lies in what he calls "Pan-
tagruelism"âthe ability to laugh at life heartily and na1vely. Gar-
gantua and Pantagruel are giants, sprung from a race of giants, and
many of their exploits reveal the Renaissance tendency to burlesque
the giants of medieval literatureâwith their exaggerated muscular
and alimentary capacities.
Perhaps that aspect of the society of his day against which Rabelais
revolted most was its stereotyped, formal, pedantic method of edu-
cation and ideal of learning. Repeatedly we run across one to three
solid pages of citations, in abbreviated Latin, of authorities to con-

firm some ridiculous or minute point. His opposition to traditional
monastic education is perhaps most clearly brought out in the con-
trast between Gargantua's first and second education. Under the
great sophister-doctor, Holofernes, Gargantua studied upwards of
forty-six years, at the end of which, the teacher dying, Gargantua's
father found his son more foolish, doted, and blockish than ever.
Under the Greek teacher, Ponocrates, Gargantua not only made good
use of every moment of the day, but his body was exercised and
trained along with his mind, his games were used as stimuli to arouse
his interest in intellectual matters, he was taught practical arts,
thereby gaining theoretical knowledge, and, wherever possible, he
was made to fill out his book learning by actual experience with the
things being studied. It is no wonder, then, that he was glad to help
his good friend Friar John in establishing a new sort of monastery,
where all the old regulations and restrictions were overthrown and
a new system of education, based on the individual's own interests
and self-discipline, was instituted.
Rabelais loved to satirize clerics and monks, especially in the
figure of gigantic Friar John, who had all the evil traits of the most
degenerate monastics of his time, but possessed one redeeming
feature which overcame all his bad onesâthe complete lack of ordi-
nary hypocrisy. Friar John is wholly frank in his acceptance, as
good, of all those things which by the rules "good" friars should
abhor. On the other hand, the ordinary monk is a cheat and a fraud,
a mockery to God and a thing detested by men. It is plain that
Rabelais shared the humanistic revolt against the saintly ideal of a
life separated from ordinary human affairs and devoted to the
achievement of union with God.
It is, then, as transitional that the humanists were important in the
development of ethical thought. There was in them no glimmer of
the naturalism of the Enlightenment that sought to make ethics a
science of human behavior. They were still thinking of an ideal
for man in terms of a certain sort of life open only to the fortunate.
But by implication they criticized the ideal of medieval ethical
thought as they conceived it. I say "by implication" because, al-
though they were forthright enough in condemning the sort of life
actually led by most "men of God" of their time, much of this could
be interpreted as not so much a condemnation of the saintly ideal
as of men's failure to live up to it. There were critics, however, who

were explicitly skeptical of this ideal and of the whole theological
centering of medieval ethics. Let us consider two.
The Italian, Pietro Pomponazzi, living at the end of the fifteenth
and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, directed his skepticism
against the doctrine of immortality. Like St. Thomas, Pomponazzi
was an Aristotelian. The significance of his doubt of immortality is
clear when we recall that it furnished the apex of the system of
St. Thomas, who held that it is only in the next life, when intellect
is finally freed from the senses, that that complete assimilation to
God which defines the supreme good for man can be attained.
It is characteristic of the return to ancient, pagan classics that
Pomponazzi's argument rests on an appeal to Aristotle divested of
all medieval, Christian coloration. Aristotle had held that all intel-
lectual knowledge arises from sense experience by way of abstraction
and generalization. Thus, when one sets up the principle in physics
that earth tends to move toward the center of the universe, this is
no purely rational speculation but a generalization from observa-
tions of stones, metal objects, and so on. Thus, an intellectual ac-
tivity purified from all dependence upon the senses and the body is
impossible for man. Moreover, not only is it impossible to conceive
man's blessed immortality, the latter is unnecessary ethically. Lead-
ing a good life here in the body is sufficient. Such a good life is
inherently attractive and needs no promise of a reward in a more
perfect experience when the soul is freed from the body. Thus,
Pomponazzi seems to imply that an ethics independent of theology is
possible at least on this key issue, but he does not work it out. He,
in fact, admits that the Christian faith requires us to accept the
doctrine of immortality and is willing to bow to the church's au-
thority, simply insisting that natural knowledge does not agree.
The skepticism of the French essayist of the sixteenth century,
Michel de Montaigne, is far broader than that of Pomponazzi. Mon-
taigne would avoid all assurance of certainty, whether in natural or
supernatural knowledge. We are not to deny the existence of God,
but we should avoid wishful thinking by disclaiming all positive
knowledge of Him: God is an incomprehensible power. Likewise,
we should shun all dogmatic theology especially, as that tends to
issue in intolerant behavior. All supposed knowledge, we must
remember, is only human belief, and humans are notoriously fallible.
We must hasten to add that for Montaigne this attitude of doubt

should be directed not merely toward supernatural revelation, but
toward the senses and the intellect as well. Man has no completely
reliable guide.
Thus, no indubitable basis for any ethical system is available. If
we look about us we see that men do not agree in their moral eval-
uations. Morals seem to be a matter of time and place. But we must
be careful not to read more into Montaigne than is warranted. He
was no relativist, maintaining that that which is good differs for
different people. Nor was he an ethical skeptic in the strict sense,
holding that nothing is good, that there is no such thing as goodness.
These are positive, dogmatic positions. Montaigne simply reported
that a thoughtful, honest man, Montaigne himself in particular, has
no reliable ethical knowledge. It was characteristic that he expressed
his outlook not in the form of an assertion or even of an imperative,
but in the shape of a question: "What do I know?"
Here again we have an attitude typical of the Renaissance. It was
not the scientist's skepticism of traditional belief, a skepticism itself
confident that uniformities in events can be discovered if the proper
intellectual tools, in the form of concepts, and the appropriate
physical tools, in the form of experiments, can be devised. It was
literary skepticism. In fact, it was simply the revival of a classical
point of view in place of medieval scholasticismâthe view of the
Greek skeptics, as summarized, for example, by Sextus Empiricus at
the end of the second century A.D., whose works, incidentally, had
just been republished in Latin translation. Thus, although in a
sense a precursor of the Enlightenment, Montaigne was a true hu-
manist.
This is revealed in another aspect of his thoughtâhis occupation
with himself. "I study myself more than any other subject." In
moral questions he found a final authority, namely, the inner touch-
stone of his own judgment. "Clearly thou thyself canst judge thy
actions." If one listens to the inner monitor, inner conflict vanishes
and true satisfaction is found. It is apparently through this inner
"patron" that we are brought into contact with nature, whose law,
if followed, leads to the good life. This concept of life in accordance
with nature reminds us of the Stoic law of nature from which it
seems clearly derived. And, just as for the Stoic, only the few can
achieve the ideal of the sage, since all one's energies must be devoted
to it, so for Montaigne this looking within was not advocated for
mankind generally but only for those few sensitive literary geniuses
âlike Montaigne himselfâwho have the leisure to devote them-
selves to self-culture and self-analysis.
Political Theory: The Rise of Absolutism
In the area of political thought as in that of ethics the Renaissance
witnessed no really important theoretical events. The significance of
this period lies rather in the challenge it presented to the whole
medieval approach and in certain preparations it furnished for
developments that were to occur in the seventeenth century. The
next major theoretical contribution was to be that of Thomas Hobbes
who, as already intimated, ingeniously made popular consent the
basis of the most extreme sort of legal and political absolutism. As
we shall see, some of his tools in this interesting project were forged
by thinkers toward the end of the sixteenth century. We shall begin
our consideration of the Renaissance, however, by noting a negative
tendency, a tendency to break quite radically with the whole me-
dieval outlook.
I choose here an Italian writer of the late fifteenth and early six-
teenth centuries, the deservedly notorious Niccolo Machiavelli. He
occupies a place in the history of political ideas roughly analogous to
that of his compatriot, Boccaccio, in ethical. He was scarcely more
of a theoretician than the latter and was vastly less of an entertainer.
I think to some extent both men tried to gain popular attention by
being shocking. Yet they meant seriously to challenge the hypocrisy
of medieval speculation, carried on in the elevated atmosphere of
idealities. They tried to present a goalâin personal morals and in
political maneuversâthat would fit the human animal as he actually
is (in their eyes): carnal, full of lust, selfish, avid for power and
political success.
To understand Machiavelli's political writings more specifically,
however, we must cast a brief glance at social conditions.
Machiavelli lived at a time when absolute monarchical power was
making its greatest achievements against the older order and was
bringing new unity and prestige to the states in which it was ad-
vancing: witness Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain; the Tudors, espe-
cially Henry VII and Henry VIII, in England; Louis XI and Francis
I in France. But in Italy, despite all its past glories, political, reli-
gious and cultural, this integration was not forthcoming. Italy was
the football of foreign powers. Although some unification had oc-
curred, yet, at the time of Machiavelli, the country was still broken
up into five separate states. There were two major causes of this
condition. The first, which Machiavelli was quite unable to grasp,
was that, with the commercial revolution, the center of the world
was shifting from the Mediterranean to the North Atlantic. Italy
had reached the zenith of her commercial wealth and power and was
destined to decline. The other cause Machiavelli comprehended
clearly and opposed in no uncertain termsâthe papal policy of en-
couraging invasions of I taly by foreign powers partly to secure their
allegiance but mainly to weaken the other Italian states and thereby
strengthen the papal.
Machiavelli wrote two treatises on politics, The Prince, and Dis-
courses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livius (the Roman his-
torian). In neither one is there revealed any theoretical interest in
the problems of government or law. For example, there is not so
much as an allusion to the theory of natural law. In The Prince he
characteristically brushes aside the question of the place of good laws
in the state so that he may get on to what is for him the important
matter: "The chief foundations of all states . . . are good laws and
good arms; and as there cannot be good laws where the state is not
well armed, it follows that where they are well armed they have
good laws. I shall leave the laws out of the discussion and shall
speak of the arms." In the Discourses he is not quite so brusque, but
he treats law and justice simply as natural phenomena like eating
and drinking whose nature and justification are not matters for
serious inquiry.
It is sometimes said that Machiavelli was the first realist, that he
abandoned speculation about an ideal justice in favor of scientific
observation of men's actual political behavior. Philosophic specula-
tion is, however, actually replaced in him not by science but by a
plentiful, yet essentially casual, set of observations on the part of a
practical man not interested in finding strict uniformities but in
presenting a worldly wise set of maxims or rules of thumb for those
actively engaged in government. In fact, The Prince is frankly a
handbook of practical dodges written expressly for Lorenzo de'Medici
(the Younger) after the Medici had regained power in Florence (and
Machiavelli, as Secretary of the Republic, had been forced into
exile). It was designed to gain favor for its author in the eyes of
this prince. The dedication concludes: "And if your Magnificence
from the summit of your greatness will sometimes turn your eyes to
these lower regions, you will see how unmeritedly I suffer a great
and continued malignity of fortune." Apparently Machiavelli did
not think highly of the reading habits of princes, for he congratulates
himself for dedicating his Discourses, written about the same time,
to two humble men, thereby departing "from the hackneyed custom
which leads many authors to inscribe their works to some Prince,
and, blinded by hopes of favour or reward, to praise him as pos-
sessed of every virtue; whereas with more reason they might reproach
him as contaminated with every shameful vice." But this duplicity
in forwarding his own interests is hardly to be condemned in one
who praises such methods in governmentsâif they succeed. We
should recognize another very real and compatible notion of Mach-
iavelli in writing The Princeâthe hope that a strong and crafty
prince will be able to unite Italy; witness the last chapter, which is
"an exhortation to liberate Italy from the barbarians."
Nevertheless, although The Prince is clearly just a practical hand-
book written for a specific occasion, it does have a permeating gen-
eral attitude toward government, an attitude that was to be very
effective in the practical procedures of several of the more absolutistic
monarchs and not without influence upon the thinking of such men
as Bodin and Hobbes, whose doctrine of political absolutism may in
some degree be considered a theoretical justification thereof. This
attitude is one of complete admiration for success, by whatever
means. Machiavelli is not quite so na1ve as to advocate duplicity,
cruelty and ingratitude for their own sakes; he admits that they are
on occasion bad, since they thwart the prince in getting what he
wants; the successful prince knows when to use them and when to
use honesty, kindness and gratitude. Machiavelli is in favor not of
immoral means but of favorable results. Success legitimatizes any-
thing a prince may do; failure, from whatever good motives or
principles, makes his rule null and void. Actually Machiavelli does
not say this; he makes no assertion as general as this; yet this state-
ment is fair to the pervasive spirit of The Prince. But success in
what? Victory in warfare and in the acquisition of new territory,
plus, of course, the destruction of all disaffection in territory already
held.
It is sometimes claimed that the Discourses present quite a dif-
ferent Machiavelliâa true Machiavelli really interested in promot-
ing government by the people and opposed to political absolutism
and opportunism. This I think is incorrect. First, it must be remem-
bered that Machiavelli was in exile as Secretary of the Republic of

Florence. It is thus not out of character for one who prized success
as the final standard in politics to continue playing up to the repub-
lican party, at the same time lauding the Medici in The Prince. Sec-
ond, the methods advocated in the Discourses for a republic are not
appreciably higher in ethical character than those for a prince in
The Prince, save in that a representative government does not have
available the same arsenal of duplicity, craft and large-scale cruelty
that is available to an absolute potentate. For example, one chapter
bears the significant title, "That our country is to be defended by
honour or by dishonour; and in either way is well defended." It
should be remembered that the Discourses were designed to be a
practical commentary on the first ten books of Livyâthat is, the
history of Rome as a republic. So, if they are largely concerned with
showing how republics are to be governed successfully, it is at least
in some measure due to this fact. Incidentally, Machiavelli does not
introduce the historical method in the Discourses, as some have
claimed. There is here no attempt to get at the characteristic forces
or conditions in a given period and attempt to show how they deter-
mine legal and political developments. Rather, he simply uses
Roman history to give him a large number of illustrations of the
various practical maxims he offers. Finally, where he does, on oc-
casion, compare republican with aristocratic and monarchic rule, he
does not unequivocally favor the former; he favors it only under
those conditions where it promises more likelihood of fortunate
outcome. He points out that a republican government will not seek
to dominate its subjects, as will an aristocratic; but, on the other
hand, it tends to develop endless disputes and thus to sacrifice good
order. He concludes that an expanding state, eager to increase its
domain is best governed by the people; a state that is more static and
mainly interested in retention of power already attained and thus
in good order internally is best governed by a small class of aris-
tocrats.
Basically The Prince and the Discourses are not inconsistent:
Machiavelli did not have sufficient theoretical orientation to be able
to contradict himself. He advocates no particular form of govern-
ment nor source of law, being content to extol success in war and
diplomacy and to point out practical devices for securing it. Mach-
iavelli was a political opportunist, not a legal theorist. Had he
been theoretically self-conscious and articulate, it is possible he might
have said: Positive or actual law is not based upon, nor need it be
justified, by any natural law, that is, by a law binding universally,
grasped through reason in apprehending man's nature and directed
toward his proper goal: all this is a pious fraud foisted on us by the
church for its own selfish ends. Rather, law is simply the arbitrary
will of some particular individual or group that happens to be in
power. Reason comes in not to determine what law ought to obtain,
but simply to ascertain how best to make given laws effective in par-
ticular situations. That is, if he had been theoretically inclined, I
assume Machiavelli would have been a voluntarist, not a rationalist
in legal theory. But he was not so inclined. In any case, in his con-
ception it is not law that is the basic political reality but military
force and its adjunct, diplomacy.
As already hinted, I am not unwilling to grant some impact of
Machiavelli upon later theoretical developments, at least indirectly
through his influence upon the thought and practice of certain mon-
archs and by way of encouraging a frank justification of political
absolutism. He said, in effect, "Drop the high moral tone!" and they
were quite ready to listen.
By the end of the period we are considering, there occurred cer-
tain developments that anticipated (in a rough way and mixed with
medieval doctrines of a rational law of nature) the kind of volun-
tarism to be found in Hobbes. As several times already avouched,
Hobbes ingeniously justified the most anti-popular absolutism by
founding it on a doctrine of popular consent. He was able to do this
by means of several devices, among which were the ideas that con-
sent may be given in perpetuity, so that it is binding upon posterity
and that sovereign power may be vested in someone through popular
agreement such that the sovereign has no responsibility to the parties
in the agreement, since he was not himself one of those making the
contract. For the former, Hobbes was indebted to Richard Hooker,
for the latter to Jean Bodin; both men, however, contributed an
anti-popular slant or general attitude which nevertheless was com-
bined with a terminology of the "law of nature" and the "consent
of the people" reminiscent of medieval theory. In Bodin this was
more than an anti-popular slant: it was an advocacy of political
absolutism as extreme, although not as clever logically, as in Hobbes.
It is perhaps significant that all three menâHooker, Bodin, Hobbes
âwere much upset by the conflicts of their times and rather ob-
viously were seeking a way toward peace, security and social stability
through an absolute, authoritative governmental power.

I turn first to Richard Hooker who, although writing a few years
after Bodin, was not as extreme in his advocacy of political au-
thoritarianism.
We must remember that nationalism had become a significant
force and that national kings, especially in France and England,
backed by the rising class of commercial capitalists, had been success-
ful in their struggle for supremacy, as against both the feudal aris-
tocracy and the church. The Protestant Reformation, allied with
these forces, had broken the universal authority of the Roman
Church in ecclesiastical and spiritual matters. This had, however,
taken a somewhat peculiar form in England. It was there in the
first instance a political and legal break with no essential change in
doctrine or ceremony. Henry VIII viewed his differences with the
papacy as having no theological implications. It was simply part of
his claim to absolute sovereignty in England to be head of the church
as well as the state (and quite incidentally, as it were, to transfer the
extensive property holdings of the church to himself). This, of
course, established a wholly unprecedented situation in Christendom
âa temporal power as absolute head of the church.
This situation still basically obtained under Queen Elizabeth,
when Hooker wrote. Furthermore, it particularly irritated the
Puritans. Under Calvinist ideas the Puritans not only opposed the
ceremonies and doctrines of the Roman Church retained by the
Church of England, they also opposed any subjugation of church to
state. In Geneva, the state was wholly subordinated to the church.
They were not thus successful in other places, where the best they
could hope to attain was that the (Calvinist) church should have
complete independence (a device I have noted in use by others:
when in power, demand conformity, when not, tolerance). Legally
this meant that the Puritans recognized as the supreme, often as the
only, law, the divine law, that is (since they did not accept papal
decretals and other forms of canon law of the Roman Church),
revelation as found in the Bible.
Thus the Puritans stood as a distinct threat to the Church of
England, the absoluteness of the monarchy and the unity of the
realm. In the eyes of some they furnished a threat of religious wars
in England comparable to the bloody conflicts between Huguenots
and Catholics in France. It was as an attempt to meet this threat
by an appeal to the patriotism, the respect for law and the reason-
ableness of the Englishman that Richard Hooker wrote his Of the
Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.
Hooker decried the bibliolatry, the narrow scripturalism of the
Puritans. In their appeal to scripture they were simply following
"the law of private reason, where the law of public should take
place." "When they and their Bibles were alone together, what
strange fantastical opinions soever at any time entered into their
heads, their use was to think the Spirit taught it them." Hooker
saw in the doctrine of some of the Puritansâthat the individual
had liberty in all those matters upon which there were no scriptural
regulationsâthe implication of civil anarchy, the destruction of all
civil authority.
From these excesses, as he viewed them, of the Puritans, Hooker
turned back frankly to the balanced system of St. Thomas, "the
greatest among the School-divines." In answer to the challenge that
he had put Aristotle and the schoolmen above Holy Scripture,
Hooker answered (in his Christian Letter published just before his
death) somewhat bitingly: "If Aristotle and the Schoolmen be such
perilous creatures, you must needes think yourself an happie man,
whome God hath so fairely blest from too much knowledge in them."
Hooker recognized the four kinds of law distinguished by Aquinas:
eternal, natural, human and divine. The three other forms are
derived from, or are really just different applications of, the first, the
eternal law that "is laid up in the bosom of God." As ordering nat-
ural agents it is called natural law; as made known by special revela-
tion, divine law; as men enact it as expedient, human law. The law
of reason is God's law as applied to his rational creatures, and is
evident of itself to reason; it is therefore in no need of special revela-
tion. It is common to all men. Its basic function is to distinguish
good from evil, "the beseeming" from "the unbeseeming."
Up to this point, our "judicious Hooker" was certainly ration-
alistic in outlook: there now crept in, no doubt quite unawares, a
rather definitely voluntaristic element. Laws of commonwealths
are human laws which arise when men set up societies and seek to
end the injuries men inflict on one another, a doctrine strangely
reminiscent of Epicurus. They rest upon the actual agreement or
consent of men, although they must not be contrary to the law of
reason.
It might be supposed that this emphasis upon the consent of the

governed would not be to Hooker's purpose, that it might be taken
to imply that the English government had no power over the Puri-
tans save as they consented to it. Our judicious thinker is able,
however, to qualify the doctrine of consent to make it suitable. In
the first place, the consent need not be given directly; it may be
given through a representative, such as the British Parliament. In
the second place, once given, it is binding upon all posterity "be-
cause corporations are immortal." He draws the analogy between a
political institution and an individual. If I give my consent to be
governed by certain laws and magistrates, my agreement holds not
merely while I am giving it, but subsequently. So in setting up a
church or a state, the consent of the governed is binding not merely
upon the original members but upon their posterity as members of
the church or citizens of the state. The institution set up by the
original consent has become a sort of individual obligated by that
consent.
Bodin's Six Books Concerning the Commonwealth was published
in 1576. That is, like Hobbes's Leviathan three fourths of a century
later, it was written in a time of civil war. The man on the horse,
as we now refer to him, apparently promised domestic order and
unity to timid political theorists.
In France the civil wars of the second half of the sixteenth century
were particularly bloody because they combined political controversy
with religious. The massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve in 1572,
when thirty thousand protestants were killed, was simply an extreme
symptom of the malady. France had remained Roman Catholic as a
state, but a rather strong minority, the Huguenots, had accepted Cal-
vinist doctrines and sought religious liberty in certain cities where
they were strong. The crown, under the direction of the Queen
Mother (Catherine de' Medici)âCharles IX being but a boyâ
sought to suppress them by force. Besides this, two other families,
the Bourbons (later successful) and the Guises, were attempting to
take the title to the crown from the house of Valois, that then held
it.
In this situation it is not astonishing that a party arose, the
Politiques, seeking internal order in France under a strong mon-
archy. They were not advocates of religious toleration; most of them
were Catholics, and toleration is always sought by minority groups.
But they did see that the Reformation had come to stay, that some
sort of compromise, some modus vivendi, was necessary if the state

was to be saved from complete disruption. Bodin was one of their
number. It is not clear whether he was a catholic or a protestant in
his sympathies, although he was certainly religious. It is clear that
he sought in an absolute sovereign a power capable of uniting the
warring elements in Franceâwhatever their religious and cultural
differences.
Bodin denned a state as "a just government of many households
and of that which is common to them having sovereign power." The
key ideas here are the first and last termsâ"just government," that
is, government ruling in accordance with the law of nature, and
"sovereign power." But we might start, as Bodin thinks the state
starts both historically and logically, with the household or family.
In dealing with this institution, Bodin consciously followed
Aristotle; in fact, as we shall see, he frequently let his predecessor
follow him. All other forms of society are based on the family. It is
the natural unit God has ordained for human association. In order
to have unity here at the basis of all society it is necessary to have a
single head with complete authority. That head is (you may have
guessed) the father. Although he did not justify slavery, Bodin
otherwise surpassed Aristotle in subjecting the rest of the family
to its head. In fact, whereas Aristotle's family is paternalistic for a
moral endâthe self-development of all and particularly of the chil-
drenâone gets the sense that Bodin's family simply exists in order
that the father may unify it, that he may exert his will, which, of
all the wills in the family, alone is complete and perfect. In a most
illuminating analogy, Bodin says that in the unity of marriage, the
husband is the spirit, the wife the body; the husband is reason, the
wife appetite. "Behold the first and ancient commandment which is
that reason should control bestial appetite." As regards the children,
the father not only should have the right to disinherit them but
even, on good cause (which of course is to be determined by the
father) to put them to death. "If the father is not insensible, it will
never come to him to kill his child without cause: and if the child
merits it, the magistrate ought not to interfere."
Besides a number of households and "what is common to them"
(a certain territory), there must be in a state sovereign power. At
first flush this seems, again, to be Aristotle. The sovereign power is
necessary to give the state unity and direction that it may achieve its
proper goalâthe development of virtue in its citizens. But it does
not take long to realize that we are entirely out of the spirit of Aris-
totle, which was rationalistic, and immersed in a voluntaristic con-
ception: law is justified not by its goal and outcome but by its
source. In order that there be a state at all, it is necessary that there
be a definite individual or body whose command is law and without
which there is no law.
Any divided authority or any restriction of it destroys the state.
"Now sovereignty is limited neither in power, in jurisdiction, nor
to a certain time." This develops a paradoxâlike the man who gets
so strong he is muscle-bound. Just because the sovereign is thus un-
limited it has certain limits. It cannot alienate its own authority,
that is, it cannot legally give it up or place it in another; it cannot
limit itself. It cannot agree to obey the laws of another; it cannot
be bound by its own laws; "The sovereign cannot tie his own hands."
Consequently a given individual (or body) in whom this final au-
thority rests cannot limit his successors, for they are to become the
sovereign. Sovereignty does not of course change as those in whom
it resides die; it is perpetual and utterly untouched by the vicissi-
tudes of its human bearers. A strange doctrine, remembering that
sovereignty is simply authoritative will or command!
How does this perpetual power arise? Bodin is not clear. Strictly
he should not have admitted that it ever came to be. But in one
place he suggests that it was conferred by the people (although ab-
solutely and irrevocablyâa doctrine to be developed by Hobbes):
"The people or nobles of a state can make a pure and simple grant
of sovereign and perpetual power to someone to dispose of the goods,
the persons, and the whole state at his pleasure . . . ; and this is a
true donation without conditions, being at once perfect and com-
plete. . . ." It is in this connection that Bodin affirms that, although
a sovereign gains his power by an original consent of the people, it
is not limited by any responsibility to the people, since the sovereign
was not a party to the agreement. It was a gift without any strings
attached.
Formally, Bodin distinguishes the state from the government. A
state can have only one sovereign. But this authoritative will may
have different sorts of human mouthpieces. Vested in one, it is a
monarchy; in a small group, an aristocracy; in the majority, a de-
mocracy. However, it is clear that he really believes that the notion
of absolute sovereignty for all practical purposes demands an abso-
lute monarchy as its vehicle. Indeed, the whole idea that sovereignty
can be vested in a number of people is a fiction: the will of a group

is always changing, never really one; its commands are really com-
promises, never actually the will of anyone. The unity necessary for
a state and its law must arise from a single actual will which is, and
is alone, authoritative. It is here that his theory most effectively
agrees with his practical objective: a unification of various religious
parties and ideological groups in France under an absolute monarch.
This does not mean that Bodin denied to lesser corporate bodies
in the stateâmunicipalities, the church, guildsâall political status.
Nor does it imply that he denied legal status to customary or com-
mon law or to enactments of legally constituted bodies other than
the state. It means that these all gain their authoritative status only
as recognized by the absolute sovereign and are thus (whatever their
historical origins) caught up in the one system based upon the one
authoritative will.
Now we must recall the first phrase in Bodin's definition of a
state, "a fust government." By "just" Bodin means "in accordance
with natural law," and so his whole contention in favor of absolute
sovereignty, with its basis in a voluntaristic view of law, is brought
to naught, since his insistence that law to be law must be just is no
superficial bow to tradition but a profound conviction: "the absolute
power of princes and sovereign lords does not extend to any degree
to the laws of God and of nature."
The contradiction here is not simply between a completely un-
restricted potentate who nevertheless must obey the will of another,
as the theological language of Bodin may suggest; it is that of (posi-
tive) law taken to be merely arbitrary will which must notwithstand-
ing be reasonable, must achieve the end of all lawânamely, justice
(a contradiction of which Hobbes was never to be guilty). In discuss-
ing an unjust command given by a sovereign to officers of the state,
Bodin admits that they are not bound to carry it out. That is, the
sovereign's command is not law in this case; thus his authority is
limited. Justice demands that the sovereign abide by his promises.
Bodin roundly condemns Machiavelli for advocating irresponsibility
in fulfilling treaty obligations. One of the central elements in jus-
tice, in the law of nature, for Bodin, is that no one has the right to
take what belongs to another. This leads him to the highly paradoxi-
cal positionâfor one supposedly believing in absolutismâthat there
can be no legitimate taxation without consent.
In fact, besides divine and natural laws, Bodin admits that im-
perial laws limit the potentate. Here however his claim is that their
limitation grows out of the very character of sovereignty. This is
hard to make out in the case of the law of succession to the throne.
But in the other chief case he givesânamely, that the sovereign can-
not alienate the domain of the stateâhe does have a general argu-
ment. It is that this territory is an essential part of the state: a state
is composed of several households and their common territory and
possessions. Destroy this and the state is destroyed and thus the
sovereignty itself. It may well be, however, that the motivating idea
in Bodin's thought here too is that property is a natural right that
cannot be touched by the sovereignâin this case the property of the
group of families constituting the state. Indeed, one might wonder
whether it was not property itself that had absolute sovereignty in
Bodin's thinking, a doctrine with which we are not wholly unfa-
miliar in democratic America.
It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the thinking of Bodin
was terribly confused. Not only did he fail to unite various elements
in his thinking into a coherent argument for political absolutismâ
he does not seem to have been consistent even in his adherence to
that doctrine. He was a fumbler. Yet it cannot be denied that he
had great influence upon seventeenth-century political theory and
particularly upon an advocate of political absolutism who (since he
was a philosopher and philosophers are not tumblers) was no fum-
bler. This philosopher was Thomas Hobbes.

CHAPTER 8
Values in a Scientific Age
Theoretical Conflict between Political
Absolutists and Popularists
In some theological version the idea of natural law was present
throughout the Middle Ages; in a secular form it became the pre-
vailing concept in the legal thought of the seventeenth and eight-
eenth centuries. There were several reasons for this retention of a
medieval notion in an intellectually revolutionary period. No doubt
the very phrase, "natural law," had its strong appeal in a rational-
istic and scientific age. It seemed to suggest that there is some uni-
versal law, holding of all peoples without exception, behind
the multiplicity of actual positive systems, which are by contrast
somehow artificial and accidental. As we now see, of course, this
involved a confusion of two basically different meanings of "law": as
science uses it, referring simply to actual uniformities in occurrence
âfor example, Newton's laws of motionâand as denoting rule in
some legal sense.
An identification of the law of nature with nature's laws was
legitimate in the Middle Ages. At that time all law was considered,
in a broad sense, to be regulatory. What we call scientific laws were
phases of God's providential governance of his creation. To under-
stand nature was to find the purposes, the ends to be achieved, by
uniform sequences of events. This, we recall, sums up the whole
spirit of Aristotelian (and Thomistic) physics. But with the Galilean
institution of modern scientific method, specific purposes in nature
were no longer sought. Thus one might have supposed that the
Enlightenment would achieve a clear-cut distinction between how
governments ought to function (the law of nature) and how they
actually do (a scientific law), perhaps with a loss of interest in the
former relative to the latter. That this was not so was perhaps due
primarily to the fact that the Enlightenment was an age of political
revolution. Men were seeking to overthrow absolutistic forms of

government. They wished to stigmatize them as bad and unreason-
able, so they said they were out of accord with the law of nature.
If "the law of nature" had meant simply actual uniformity in men's
political behavior, this appeal would have been ineffectiveânay
impossible (there can be no exceptions to a scientific law). "Law of
nature" must retain its moral and purposive significance as stating
an ideal that ought to obtain. Yet the prestige of Galilean-New-
tonian science, particularly by the eighteenth century, was so great
that a fusion of the two senses of "law" served admirably the pur-
poses of the political revolutionists.
In indicating why the medieval concept of natural law was re-
vived in the seventeenth century, I have incidentally suggested at
least one of the causes of its secularizationânamely, the lessening of
the effectiveness of the theological way of thinking in favor of a
more naturalistic attitude. But more immediate and practical causes
operated here, too. The chief conflict out of which political and
legal speculation arose was no longer that of church versus state but
of absolute monarch versus a representative parliament.
The commercial revolution and rise of the modern nation went
hand in hand. The merchant-capitalist was glad to strengthen the
national king in his struggle against church and feudal aristocracy,
since both these institutions interfered in all sorts of ways with large-
scale and long-distance trade. Once this victory was won, however,
the commercial enterpriser put his power behind representative
political bodies. These had, at the close of the Middle Ages, been
almost wholly composed of the aristocracy, but by the seventeenth
century and increasingly in the eighteenth they represented the
middle classesâcapitalists and professional men. This shift in align-
ments was an important contributing cause of the great "liberal"
revolutions of the period (1688 in England, 1776 in America, 1789
in France).
Questions of the power of the pope, the jurisdiction of ecclesias-
tical courts, the status of canon law no longer were live issues, hav-
ing been replaced by controversies over the power of the king, the
jurisdiction of the king's courts, the status of royal edicts as against
parliamentary enactments. The Protestant Reformation was a po-
tent factor in this change. The state had everywhereâor at least in
northern Europe and Englandâbecome supreme over the church.
In fact, in most countries a national church, protected and supported
by the state and thus of course under its control, had taken the place
[8] Values in a Scientific Age 331
of the one universal and autonomous body. In a sense, however, the
old controversies arose in a new formâthat of religious tolerance.
The new protestant churches were no more tolerant, perhaps even
less so on the whole, than the medieval. Where they had gained
status as state churches they frequently insisted on the prohibition
by the civil authorities of divergent doctrines and forms of worship.
Did the state have the right to prohibit by threat of physical punish-
ment any form of belief or worship (so far as not involving a dis-
turbance of the peace)? In general, the advocates of representative
government were also champions of religious tolerance, finding in
natural law a protection of civil liberties.
Although the concept of natural law was secularized in substance,
its verbal form was not greatly modified. "God," "God's provi-
dence," and similar phrases still appeared, as did the other key terms
in the medieval formulation. There was no doubt greater stress in
the Enlightenment upon the idea of a social compact as the source of
all authoritative law and legitimate government. This, in turn,
carried with it a greater emphasis upon the condition antecedent to
such a compactâa state of nature where the law of nature was the
only law, where all men were (politically) equal. Probably few if
any meant to hold that there ever was historically a pure state of
nature. The purpose was to increase the emphasis upon an act of
the people, its consent, as the only proper basis of political rule.
In the earlier controversy, both sides were largely rationalistic.
Positive law is justified by its reasonableness, that is, by the degree
to which it can be shown to promote the common good. The real
issue, leaving out theological complications, was whether this end
is more likely to be attained if the people or an absolute monarch is
the legislator. Certainly good arguments can be offered on either
side. But Marsiglio and Nicholas of Cusa had thrust in the edge of
a new and revolutionary idea: positive law is legitimate not in terms
of its reasonableness but in terms of its sourceâwho wills it? They
argued that natural law justifies only that positive law which rests
on the consent of the people.
The development of this voluntaristic emphasis was to bring a
basic contradiction into the legal theory of the liberals in the En-
lightenment. The reasonableness of law and its expression of the
will of the people are independent matters, and often, in particular
cases, in conflict. But worse than this, the liberals had to face, in
Hobbes, an enemy clever enough to take their new weaponâthat

law rests on the consent of the peopleâand use it most devastatingly
in favor of the most extreme absolutism, an absolutism that claimed
that whatever the monarch wills is right simply because he wills it,
quite independently of whether it is reasonable.
By the time of Hobbes, the idea of a social contract had become
widespread and, united with the concept of natural rights, furnished
a strong ground for the representative position. The notion of a
compact goes back, as we have seen, to Epicurus. There was a re-
vival of Epicurean materialism in the seventeenth century, but this
did not carry with it any significant reanimation of the Epicurean
political outlook and was not a sufficiently popular movement to
explain the currency of the contract idea. Where, then, did the
latter gain its renewed strength? The concept of popular consent
had, as we noticed, been used by the conciliar party in the fifteenth
century, specifically by Nicholas of Cusa. Despite the fact that this
thinker had used the phrase "social compact," however, it is to be
doubted whether "consent of the people" meant more than the plac-
ing of supreme power in the hands of a representative bodyâa gen-
eral council, estates general or parliament. In any case, the notion
of an original setting-up of a politically organized society by a
specific contract between individuals was not a central concept.
A further source for the currency of this idea in the seventeenth
century must be discovered. I think it can be found in the impor-
tance of the contract in private law due to the spread of the commer-
cial revolution. In feudal times men's economic relations were
determined by the whole set of obligations and rights inherent in
their various statuses. With the coming of world trade and a money
economy these were swept aside, to be replaced by specifically
adopted contracts, entered into voluntarily by the contracting indi-
viduals. Furthermore, it should be noted that many of these con-
tracts were agreements between individuals of different nationalities.
With the collapse of canon law and church courts, this meant that
they bound individuals who recognized no common, positive law.
It thus seemed eminently appropriate to suppose that the right to
private property, to contract that property and the duty to abide by
such contracts should fall under natural law. Here was something
which, in an increasingly commercial age, must have seemed trans-
parently reasonable to all men. It was thenâI am arguingâan easy
step to transfer this concept from private to public law, from com-
mercial transactions to the theory of the state.

Tliis was not without precedent. In the theory of one public
body, the church, this was already virtually accomplished by certain
belligerent, although not quite respectable, sectsâfor example, the
Anabaptists in Germany and the Independents or Congregationalists
in England. They held that a church can be instituted simply by the
voluntary agreement of individualsâa shockingly radical doctrine,
fraught with all manner of threat to authority and tradition, and
willingly taken up by those political writers who were concerned to
justify popular revolution.
In any case and from whatever causes, by the early seventeenth
century when the German jurist Johannes Althusius published his
Politica or Systematic Politics, the doctrine that organized society
is based on a contract was sufficiently current to be used as the basis
of a whole system of political thought. Although a German, the
sympathies of Althusius were with the Dutch in their revolt from
Spain. He dedicated his work to the Estates of Friesland, one of the
United Provinces, and considered their revolt from Spain a realiza-
tion of the theory he presented. This revolt had both religious and
political significance. It was a revolt of Reformers against the at-
tempt of their Spanish king, Phillip II, to force them, by inquisi-
torial methods, back into the Roman Catholic Church. It was also a
revolt of nationalists against a foreign prince and of republicans
against an absolute monarch. On both scores it was a revolt against
constituted authority. Although the system of Althusius forms a
complete political theory, it nonetheless in appreciable degree was
directed toward the justification of revolt.
The state is only one form, albeit the highest, of social organiza-
tion or, as Althusius calls it, association. It does not exist save as
lower forms of association unite to form it. This sounds much like
Bodin's view of the relation between the state and the family (and
Althusius gained much from his French predecessor). But there are
two important differences. First, for Althusius every association is
based upon an express or a tacit contract, the basic or primary associ-
ations being instituted by a contract between the individuals com-
posing them. This contract truly unites those entering it, giving
them a common life and a common end. It also sets up a ruling
power to carry out this intention. This power, however, is only a
mode of service to the association in promoting its purpose, and thus
rests on the contract giving rise to it. Second, for Althusius the rela-
tion between the lower units and the state is clearly thought out,
whereas for Bodin it was very vaguely conceived. The basis is again
a contract. In this case, however, it is a contract not between indi-
viduals but associations. These form a hierarchy: families unite into
communities (villages, towns, etc.), communities into provinces, prov-
inces into states. Each of these unions is instituted by a contract
between the constituent associations. Since the members of the
state are the provinces, we can understand the meaning of Althusius'
definition of the state as a "general association in which a number
of cities and provinces . . . contract to establish, maintain and de-
fend a sovereign power."
It should be noted that this hierarchy of associations (as its con-
tractual basis implies) has a one-way dependence of the higher upon
the lower. The state could not exist without the provinces that
contract to set it up; the provinces, however, could exist without the
state. (Thus, Phillip II's kingdom could not have being without the
Netherlands, but the Netherlands could exist without the kingdom.)
The higher body exists only to carry out the common purposes of
the lower, having no authority to interfere in the achievement of
specific ends. (Thus, Phillip II had no right to try to force Roman
Catholicism upon the Netherlands or to determine the internal gov-
ernment of the latter.)
As his definition shows, Althusius conceived the state to have
sovereign power. In this we see the influence of Bodin. Sovereignty
cannot be alienated or delegated; it is perpetual; without it the state
ceases to exist. But, and here he differed profoundly from Bodin,
the sovereign power resides always in the peopleânot as a mere
aggregate of individuals but as a corporate body or hierarchy of
bodies. It never resides in any smaller group, in any officers of the
state, not even in the chief magistrate. The king is no more than an
agent of the people; his power is granted to him by a contract with
the people and is valid only so long as he acts as executive of the
people, in conformity with the law and in the common interest.
Thus sovereignty is retained by the people. If a king does not keep
the contract but acts tyrannically, the other officials of the state,
representing the people, have the duty of opposing him, expelling
him, if necessary killing him; and the associations that are members
of the confederacy which is the state have the right of secession.
In this system, in which contracts play so great a role, it should be
noted that there are really three different types: contracts between
individuals setting up a corporation; those between corporations

setting up a higher one (the most important being the state); and
finally those between the whole state and the chief magistrate. The
second remained peculiar to Althusius, but the first and last were to
play important roles in the controversy between Hobbes and Locke.
We shall call them the associative and the subjective contracts, re-
spectively.
As already intimated, Hobbes was to take the theory of a social
contract and use it as a weapon for absolute monarchy. In doing
this he had to assign a motive to the people leading them to enter a
compact permanently renunciating their liberties. This he did by
a picture of a state of nature, preceding the contract, so unattractive
(a universal and ceaseless war) that anything else seemed betterâa
device which we fathers still use, in a milder form, when faced with
insubordination: "Very wellârun away from home then, and see
how you fare in the cruel world outside." It should be remembered,
however, that the dominant tradition had been to conceive man's
original state as one of blissâa Golden Age or Garden-of-Eden exist-
ence. True, St. Thomas and Richard Hooker had said that human
law was required, because some men would not otherwise abide by
the law of nature. Locke was to develop this; but it clearly was in-
adequate for Hobbes. No doubt the terrible religious wars in
Europe marking the last half of the sixteenth and the first half of the
seventeenth centuries had some direct effect upon his thinking.
Then, too, their effect upon him might have been heightened by
the thought of Grotiusâthat in war nations are in a state of nature
with essentially only the law of nature binding upon them, since
positive or civil law is based upon a compact authorizing a positive
enactment holding only within a state. There are other similarities
which will perhaps justify our pausing for a moment to note some
of the ideas of the Dutch jurist, Hugo Grotius, "the founder of the
study of international law."
Of the Rights of War and Peace was published in 1625âsome
seven years after the start of the horrible Thirty Years' War that
devastated central Europe. Grotius, a gentle humanist who would
accept a religion broad enough to include both Catholic and Protes-
tant, was moved to try not the completely unrealistic task of getting
Christians to settle their differences, particularly their religious dif-
ferences, by Christian means, but yet the Herculean job of attempt-
ing simply to soften some of their inhumane practices in war.
Grotius saw that there was some slight amount of common law,
that is, common practice, recognized in relations between nations,
which he identified with the Roman law of nations (ius gentium)
âwrongly, of course, since that was private, not public, law. But
obviously this was quite insufficient for his purpose: practically, be-
cause of the Machiavellian political behavior of his time; theoreti-
cally, because of his acceptance of the theory of absolute sovereignty
in nations.
He admitted, with Althusius, that the state and civil law are based
on a contract of the people. But he did not admit that the people
cannot alienate its sovereignty. In fact, precisely in the contract they
do: they divest themselves irrevocably of their sovereignty and place
it in their ruler, just as in Roman and Hebrew law a man may volun-
tarily and irrevocably make himself the slave of another. Not that
all sovereignty is based on contractâGrotius explicitly argued
against the doctrine of popular sovereignty. Success in a just war
may give a monarch legitimate rule over his subjects without their
consent. And a monarch's sovereignty does not depend upon his
governing for the common good. It is his, like so much property, to
do with as he pleases. (Grotius wrote the work while in exile in
France, dedicating it to Louis XIII, and even academic souls occa-
sionally see the virtues of political absolutism in such circumstances.)
Sovereignty thus possessed by the monarch Grotius defined as "the
supreme political power vested in him whose acts cannot be ren-
dered void by any other human volition," and he averred, "Even
if we receive injury from the will of the Supreme Power, we are to
bear it rather than resist by force." This forthright acceptance of
political absolutism by a peaceful scholar unfortunately aggravated
his difficulties in trying to set up some international regulation of
the actions of states, for the old fiction of a world-state or church had
been shattered by the Reformation and the rise of nations.
In this extremity it was necessary to find a higher law that was
binding even upon absolute national sovereigns. This Grotius found
in the old law of nature. Nations should feel bound to obey itâto
insure their own future tranquillity and simply because it is natural
for men to recognize a justice written into the nature of things.
Although Grotius ascribed the law of nature to God, it is clear that
his approach was not theological. God could no more change the law
of nature than he could change the laws of arithmetic. The one
like the other is self-evident. The law of nature is rational and is
thus to be contrasted with all positive law, which is volitional. To

find out the latter, you must observe what sovereigns actually will;
but to determine the former requires simply an understanding of
rational necessity. This is patently a compromise: to insure peace
and outlaw civil war within a state, Grotius invoked voluntarism;
to secure at least some decency in international war between states,
he appealed to rationalism.
Note perhaps should be taken of one striking characteristic of this
justice that rationally binds nations. "To this ius [or natural law]
belong the rule of abstaining from that which belongs to other
persons, and, if we have in our possession anything of another's, the
restitution of it, or of any gain which we may have made from
it. . . ." This essentially ownership approach may (as it certainly
should) shock us at first. Was Grotius only concerned with the pro-
tection of property in war? But our moral qualms may be quieted
if we remember that property was very closely connected in those
days of rising capitalism with life, and the protection of property
with the protection of life. The law of nature, still aiming at human
happiness, had become pretty much separated from happiness and
enjoyment of God in the next life and attached to happiness in this,
and enjoyment of one's material possessions. The whole tendency
to build a law of nature, even though applied to relations between
nations, on private law (developed to make commercial contracts
binding between individuals of whatever nationality) led inevitably
toward a statement of natural law in terms of property rights and
contractual obligations. This tendency was to grow before it dimin-
ished.
A state's breaking the law of nature is a just ground for war; lesser
causes do not warrant the making of war. This idea was Grotius'
major contribution toward restricting the occurrence of war.
Thomas Hobbes united in a remarkable and striking system of
political theory the political absolutism of Machiavelli and Bodin,
the associationism of Althusius, and the description of the state of
nature as a state of war suggested by Grotius. To understand
Hobbes' motivation in constructing such a system it is necessary to
glance at seventeenth-century England. It can be characterized as a
period of civil wars growing in part out of the religious conflict be-
tween Catholics and Protestants and in part out of the political con-
troversy between the Stuarts and the parliamentary party. As already
indicated, socio-economic factors were also involved. The increas-
ingly powerful merchant-capitalist class no longer needed the help

of the crown in its struggle against feudal aristocracy. In collabora-
tion with the professional classes, yeomen and smaller landholders,
it sought direct access to political authority in the House of Com-
mons. At the very beginning of the century, in the reign of James
I, the conflict between king and Commons was sharp.
James was unaware of the drift of the times. Swayed by Bodin's
arguments for absolutism, steeped in theological terminology, this
potentate claimed in extreme form the divine right of kings. The
monarch derives his power directly, by a miraculous delegation, from
God. "By [kings] was the land distributed (which at the first was
whole theirs), states erected and decerned, and forms of government
devised and established: and so it follows of necessity, that the kings
were the authors and makers of the laws, and not the laws of the
kings." "The laws of a sovereign prince depend on nothing but his
mere and frank good-will." Thus, Parliament has no law-making
powers in its own right. "Parliament is nothing but the king's great
council." Its privileges are granted by the sovereign and can be re-
voked at his pleasure.
Against these extreme pretensions the House of Commons was be-
ginning to feel confident of its own power. It not only claimed au-
thority independent of royal delegation; it even assumed the right
to restrict the king's power by legislative action. James attempted
to govern without it, but he needed the revenue that only it, by
tradition and by the realities of economic distribution, could grant.
This conflict came to a climax in the reign of Charles I. When
not granted his customs and other usual revenues by the House of
Commons, Charles resorted to various impositions and levies by his
own authority. For eleven years he ruled as absolute monarch with-
out summoning Parliament. Finally the need for money to suppress
the Scottish Revolt led him to call the "Long Parliament" in 1640.
It passed acts forbidding unparliamentary modes of taxation, the
king's extraordinary courts and any suspension of Parliament for
longer than three years. The king refused and civil war broke out
in 1642. Parliamentary forces under Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver
Cromwell were finally successful. A purged House of Commons, the
so-called "Rump Parliament," created a court that tried the king
and condemned him to death. He was beheaded in January, 1649.
It is hard for us today to realize the shock that this eventânot
regicide, which had been common enough, but the legal trial and
condemnation of a king by a representative body for acts performed

as head of a stateâcaused in the feelings of all but the most revolu-
tionary in disposition. And Thomas Hobbes was no revolutionary.
He was a timid man who felt his security fundamentally challenged.
The way out was a monarch with absolute powers. But Hobbes was
more than a timid man; he was also a philosopher. He needed to
justify theoretically this idea of absolute power vested in a sovereign.
How could he do so in a way that would be as nearly unanswerable
as possible?
Here, however despicable we may rate his feelings, we must admit
that Hobbes' intellectual genius is revealed. In the first place, he
took the basic ideological battle-axe of his opponents and forged it
into a rapier for his own use. The doctrine that organized society is
based upon a contract between free and equal individuals, with
which we have become acquainted in Althusius, had been adopted
as a revolutionary slogan of the parliamentary party. Not that they
viewed it as propaganda. They seriously believed that states are
founded on such a contract and proceeded to act in conformity with
that conviction: witness the Mayflower Compact, the Fundamental
Orders of Connecticut, the Newport Declaration. "The Agreement
of the People"âreally a draft of a constitution for the Common-
wealth framed by the army in 1647âdeclared itself the will of the
people and was to be signed individually by each citizen. According
to it, the authority of Parliament was recognized as delegated to it
by the people. It was to be representative of constituencies equal in
size. It guaranteed certain rights of every individual against the
government and gave the people the right to resist any government
that infringed them. The most extreme of these advocates of popu-
lar government were the "Levellers," a party of small farmers, small
tradesmen and artisans that grew up in Cromwell's army. An enemy
paraphrased their position in the following words: "For by natural
birth all men are equally and alike born to all propriety, liberty,
and freedom; and as we are delivered of God by the hand of nature
into this world, everyone with a natural innate freedom, and pro-
priety, even so are we to live, every one equally and alike to enjoy
his birthright and privilege." It might seem indeed impossible for
anyone to use such inherently radical and popular ideas as these to
justify extreme political absolutism. But Hobbes accomplished just
this seeming impossibility with, at least so it seems to me, the obvi-
ous purpose of undercutting entirely the ideological foundations of
his opponents.
Moreover, Hobbes' genius reveals itself in another aspect of his
system. His predecessors in.absolutistic theory had not been able to
break away from theological trappings that had come down from
medieval debates. They seemed to think that proof-texts from
scriptures were the only reliable way of clinching their argument:
witness James I. Hobbes was the first to realize that a new age, an age
of science, was dawning. In place of God's will, the analogy of the
government in the state to God's governance of the universe and
such theological bases, Hobbes put animal spirits whose motions
aided or opposed the vital activity of the heart. This is all the more
remarkable when we realize that the age of Newton was still to come
(Newton was only nine when the Leviathan was published.)
Clearly Hobbes was one of the very first to try to popularize and
to apply to human and social affairs the new scientific outlook of
Galileo and Harvey. In doing this, however, he was not free from
guilt in helping to prolong and, by a pseudo-connection with science,
to aggravate that fundamental confusion which has dogged political
theory, especially in the doctrine of natural law, to this day. This
confusion is seen in the ambiguity of "law," especially when
qualified by the phrase "of nature," whereby it stands, on the one
hand, for a statement of what is right, what ought, regularly, to be,
and, on the other, for a uniformity in what is. Obvious as this dis-
tinction is when stated thus bluntly, many a discussion of juris-
prudence is vitiated by the attempt to answer questions as to what
is just or right by an investigation of facts. And Hobbes was far
from free of this confusion. Whether intentional or not, and I'm
inclined to think it was, Hobbes used the device of justifying politi-
cal absolutism by showing (on supposedly scientific grounds) its
inevitability. Also, it seems that he mixed the idea of a state of
nature, taken in a political sense (that is, as a device for pointing
out by contrast what rights and duties men have by virtue of belong-
ing to a politically organized society), with a scientific account of the
true (but not very nice) laws of human behavior (as contrasted with
the pretty descriptions that alone pass as proper in good society).
In line with William Harvey's new approach, Hobbes treated the
human individual as a machine: "For what is the heart, but a
spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so
many wheels, giving motion to the whole body . . . ?" This mechan-
istic point of view our author carried over from physiology to psy-
chology. There are two main aspects of man's behavior important

for political theory (which can be referred to by the traditional
terms "reason" and "will"). Reason is nothing but a mechanical
calculation, an adding and subtracting of names for that which is
sensibly experienced, and sense experience is simply a motion in the
nerves. Will is simply the last phase, before overt action, in any
conflict of opposing incipient motions (which Hobbes called "appe-
tite" and "aversion"). It is wholly determined in its outcome, as is
any other motion. Appetite and aversion are likewise wholly pre-
determined. Appetite is toward that which will aid the vital
processes and hence the survival of the individual; aversion, away
from that which will harm. Good and evil are just names by which
we refer to certain objects; they indicate nothing as to the natures
of the latter. We call "good" the objects of our appetites; "evil," the
objects of our aversions. Thus, what is good and what evil is relative
to the individual, that is, is different for different individuals as the
objects of their appetites and aversions differ. If I like parsnips and
you don't, parsnips are both good and bad: good relative to my appe-
tite and bad relative to your aversion.
As so stated, however, the example of the parsnips is misleading:
you and I would not conflict, although we would differ, in our de-
sires and therefore our evaluations. But suppose we both have strong
appetites for parsnips and that there is a very limited supply of this
delectable food, say just one lone parsnip. We might both say that
the parsnip is good, but this would not express the situation, since
our appetites would not be in agreement but in conflict. So let us
not say that the parsnip is the object of either of our appetites, but
rather that mine is directed toward my consumption of it, yours to-
ward yours. On this statement, we have incompatible objects of our
appetites, and our judgments of good and bad not merely differ but
conflict, since presumably I would have an aversion against your
consumption of the parsnip and you against mine. More generally,
let us say that my appetites are directed toward my having whatever
will tend to preserve me and enhance my vital processes, my aver-
sions against whatever thwarts or threatens me in these regards, and
the same holds for every other individual.
To this ethical relativism based on a deterministic psychology of
volition Hobbes added the doctrine of his political opponentsâthe
equality of all men in the state of nature or outside of artificial dif-
ferences based on political position. The result was a most forceful
justification of political absolutism. The argument is simple.

Every man in the state of nature has the equal right to everything
that may enhance his vital processes or secure him in his life. There-
fore, I have the equal right to everythingâfood, clothing, shelter-
to which you, in your desire to preserve yourself, have any right. In
fact, since your continued existence under these circumstances is a
threat to mine, and vice versa, each of us has the right to take the
other's life. Thus the state of nature is a universal war "of every
man against every man," where each is subject to "continual fear,
and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short." So an absolute political power is called
for to put an end to this condition and give men at least some
modicum of security.
To get the full impact of Hobbes' account of the state of nature,
we must see it not merely as a description of an actual or possible
state of affairs. As such, in all conscience, it is horrid enough and
might well rush timid people into the arms of an absolute sovereign.
It is also a statement of complete chaos as to what is good, what is
right, what ought to be. Relative to me, your destruction is good;
it is something I ought to effect if I am able. Relative to you, it is
evil, something that ought not to be. These opposing goods and
oughts are equal and ultimate. This mental unsettlement, this irre-
solvable conflict as to what is right, when added to the physical com-
bat, is quite unbearable. Thus, an outsider with absolute authority
must be brought in not merely by his power to end our actual strife
but by some superior authority to determine a common or public
good: ". . . it belongs to the . . . chief power to make some com-
mon rules for all men, and to declare them publicly, by which every
man may know what may be called his, what another's, what just,
what unjust, what honest, what dishonest, what good, what evil; . . .
what the legislator commands, must be held for good, and what he
forbids for evil. And the legislator is ever that person who hath the
supreme power in the common weal, that is to say, a monarch in a
monarchy."
This, then, is Hobbes' argument for political absolutism. It is
now only necessary to put it in legalistic terminology, in fact, the
very terminology of Hobbes' popularist opponents, to make the
theory a superb ideological weapon.
Natural right, ius naturale, belongs equally to every man to have
and to do whatever he conceives to be a means to the preservation

of his own life. This, as we have seen, leads into irresolvable con-
flicts. Inasmuch as it is the law of nature that each must do that
which promises most toward his self-preservation, it is therefore
implied that, as a basic element in the law of nature, each must seek
peace. This seems obviously true since universal war is a threat to
everyone's life. But to achieve peace it is necessary that each lay
aside his natural right to everything and content himself with a
much more limited set of rights. This involves a mutual transfer-
ence: I transfer my right to your life and such property as is neces-
sary to sustain it to you in return for your transference of compara-
ble rights to me. This constitutes the social contract freely entered
into by equal individuals to protect their rights.
As it stands, this engagement is insufficient to attain its purpose of
security through peace. There must be some guarantee that the
contract will be kept. Here, again, the matter is both one of fact and
of right. On Hobbes' psychological account of human nature, an
individual who has been led by his desire for self-preservation to
enter the contract will similarly, by the necessities of his volitional
nature, be led to break it as soon as it appears to his advantage to do
so. He must then be restrained by superior force or presently every-
one will be back in the state of nature. On Hobbes' ethical relativ-
ism, moreover, it is good for the individual, his duty to himself, to
break the contract if such action promises to be to his advantage.
Thus, a superior moral authority must be set up to make it unjust
or wrong for any individual, whatever the prospects of selfish ad-
vantage, to break the contract.
We now have the second step in the compact. In it there is agree-
ment to set up a political sovereign with police power sufficient to
enforce the terms of the contract and moral authority sufficient to
determine that any breach of it is unjust and wrong, not merely rela-
tive to some individual, but in general or as such. The will of this
sovereign is the embodiment of the will of all, who by entering the
contract have united themselves in one body. Here we find Hobbes,
who had up to this point seemed so hardheaded and individualistic,
suddenly succumbing to the sort of mysticism to be found in Bodin.
"This is more than consent, or concord; it is a real unity of them
all, in one and the same person. . . . This is the generation of that
great Leviathan, ... of that mortal god, to which we owe our peace
and defence . And in him consisteth the essence of the common-

wealth. . . . And he that carrieth this person, is called sovereign,
and said to have sovereign power. . . ." (I have portrayed this
romantic conceit in Fig. 33.)
Social
contract
Sovereignty -x
(a gift) Potentate
The Great Leviathan
Fig. 33. Basis of Hobbes' Political Absolutism
Rousseau, without quite the same suggestion of monstrosity, was
to develop this into his "General Will," giving birth to romanticism
in political theory, so that if Rousseau was the father of romanticism,
Hobbes was its grandfather! But perhaps Rousseau was an illegiti-
mate child.
I am indeed inclined to think that Hobbes' lapse into a mystical
identification of the sovereign with the state as an over-individual
person can be eliminated without too much damage to his political
theory as a whole. This is possible because of a clear distinction he
made. The contract setting up the state and creating sovereign au-
thority is, to use the terminology of Althusius, associative only; there
is no subjective contract involved, no contract between subjects and
their sovereign. As I stated previously, the recognition of a sovereign
is no new or second contract, but a part of the original. As in Bodin,
the sovereign is no party to the contract; he agrees to nothing what-
ever. Authority is simply and irrevocably conferred on him by the
individuals entering the contract. They can never retract; they can
never revolt; they can never accuse the sovereign of injustice or mal-
feasance; they can of course never condemn him to death or to any
lesser punishment. It belongs to the sovereign to determine by his
own judgment what will and what will not conduce to that peace
which is the object of the contract, even as to doctrines and opinions
held by his subjects. Of course, the powers of taxation and of ap-
pointment to public office are wholly reserved to him. All of this on
the argument that without such absolute authority there is no assur-

ance that the contract will be observed or ought to be observed and
thus that the conflict of rights and the ensuing warfare of the state
of nature can be permanently escaped.
It was not long before Hobbes' justification of political absolutism
elicited a rejoinder from the liberal party by a philosopher who, it
must be admitted, was far less astute than Hobbes, although emi-
nently more reasonable. Here again it may be well to sketch in
political developments (however well-known) to have the proper
background in mind.
The beheading of Charles I was followed by a decade of English
history under the "Commonwealth." The Commonwealth started
by abolishing the monarchy and the House of Lords in favor of rule
by Commons. It ended by becoming practically a personal, military
dictatorship by Cromwell. At the death of Cromwell a royalist re-
action set in. A new Parliament (royalist and Presbyterian in sym-
pathy) called Charles II to the throne. Although professing to
believe in religious tolerance, the new monarch was sympathetic
with the Roman Catholic cause. The Earl of Shaftesbury, the
patron of John Locke, attempted to use the "Popish Plot" to inflame
anti-Catholic feeling. But the king dissolved Parliament and was
able to rule successfully without it until his death in 1685. James II
was not so successful. Being likewise an ardent Catholic and finding
Parliament out of sympathy with him he tried to rule without it.
William, Prince of Orange and leader of the Protestant cause in
Europe, was asked to cross the channel to free the English from their
new king. He accepted the invitation, and the spontaneous uprisings
all over England in his favor led James II to flee to France. This
was the Glorious Revolution in England of 1688. It guaranteed the
English against any future Roman Catholic king. Religious tolera-
tion was granted to all Protestant nonconformists save Unitarians
(no doubt sufficient latitude to cover all true Christians). Most im-
portant, supreme governmental authority was granted to Parliament.
Political absolutism, as claimed by the Stuarts, was permanently
overthrown.
John Locke was the outstanding spokesman for the victorious
party in this controversy. He had eloquently championed popular
government against political absolutism, Protestantism against Cath-
olicism and religious toleration as opposed to conformity. For our
present concern Locke's most important writings are his two Trea-
tises of Civil Government, especially the second. The first of these

was aimed explicitly to refute Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha. The
second was clearly, although not by explicit statement, designed to
meet the challenge presented by Thomas Hobbes.
Although Filmer is not an important figure in the history of politi-
cal theory, he is interesting as expressing the universal tendency of
royalist supporters to turn down the ideological help Hobbes prof-
fered them. (Hobbes was too clever by half for practical politicians
âa lesson philosophers have to relearn in every age.) It seemed to
Filmer that the use of the opposition's chief ideological weapons was
entirely too dangerous a procedure; consequently he criticized the
whole attempt to found political absolutism on a contract between
free and equal individuals. To be binding on all, he argued, such
a contract must have been entered into by all, but it is highly im-
probable that at any one time all men would have agreed to assume
the restrictions and obligations of civil society. Furthermore, in a
state of nature, that is, before there were civil law, law courts and
police powers, no binding contract could have been written. All of
which, of course, presupposes what Hobbes probably did not believe
and certainly did not think important: that a state of nature and a
general contract actually occurred. Finally, however, Filmer argued
that if the civil state and sovereign authority are based on mere
consent of the governed, it can be dissolved by like consent of all
those entering the contract. They can thus furnish no sure founda-
tion for absolute authority.
If, then, the relation of ruler to ruled is not based upon an act of
consent of the latter, it must go back to the very origin of things, to
God's good purposes in creating man. "Adam being commanded to
multiply and people the earth, and to subdue it, and having do-
minion given him over all creatures, was thereby the monarch of the
whole world; none of his posterity had any right to possess anything,
but by his grant or permission, or by succession from him." The
pitiable state of the cause of political absolutism at Filmer's time
cannot be more forcefully shown than through Sir Robert's attempt
to found it on scriptural authority and the absurd contention that
all the reigning royal houses of Europe can trace their authority
back, on the principle of primogeniture, to Adam. It took no great
acumen on Locke's part to riddle this whole fabric.
Locke was not unaware that, although the royalists had not ac-
cepted aid from that quarter, the real opponent was Hobbes. The
doctrine of natural law and the contract must be saved for the cause
of popular government. Actually Locke's ideas, in his second Trea-
tise of Civil Government, show very little novelty from a theoretical
standpoint. In this respect, he saw no more clearly than did Filmer
that Hobbes had replaced the theological approach by a scientific
oneâalthough he did choose a far more respectable and indeed
plausible form of it. His ideas are very similar to those of the
"judicious Hooker," to whose authority he does not tire in appeal-
ing. They thus stem ultimately from Thomas Aquinas. But the
immediate practical intent, of refuting Hobbes and justifying popu-
lar government, give them a new life and a new color.
In the first place, the state of nature, being a condition of freedom
and equality of rights for all individuals, is not, as Hobbes had con-
cluded, a condition of chaos and universal war. There is in this state
of affairs an inherent principle of restraint, the law of nature, which
is simply reason itself, which "teaches all mankind who will but con-
sult it, that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm
another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions." For Locke, the
equality of all men in the state of nature is not a matter of each
having unlimited rights. It is rather an equality in a limited set of
rightsâto life, liberty and property. To put it differently, the
equality of individuals lies not merely in rights, it consists also of
obligations. "Every one, as he is bound to preserve himself, ... so,
by the like reason, when his own preservation comes not in competi-
tion, ought he, as much as he can, to preserve the rest of man-
kind. . . ." Hence, the state of nature is not one of war but of
peace. Or, to state it in terms of values rather than facts (for Locke,
like Hobbes, is not at all sure there ever was such a condition), in
the state of nature we do not have irresolvable conflicts of rights, so
that the same behavior is both right and wrong, something that
ought to be and also equally ought not.
There are two important implications of this account of the state
of nature. One is that for Locke there are certain limited yet abso-
lute rights, that are not merely relative to the given individual's
appetites but can claim recognition by everyone. These arise from
the nature of man and need only reason for their recognition. There
is of course the right to life and, its close correlate, liberty. Locke
felt it unnecessary to argue or clarify this. It is simply self-evident
that no man has the right to another's life or liberty of action. As
to property, the case is different; Locke here felt the need of argu-
mentation, due no doubt in part to his assumption that originally

God gave the earth to all men in commonâhow then could there be
exclusive or private rights in it and its products?
Locke reasoned: In the state of nature each man has an exclusive
right to his own body and its free activity. Therefore, he has a right
to his own productive labor and its fruits. So far as labor takes some-
thing not wanted and makes of it something desirable, it is the la-
borer's own: he has mixed himself with it. But this applies not
merely to the final product for consumption, such as shelter or food.
It also holds as regards the necessary means for producing such
goods. Thus, to raise food, land must be cleared and cultivated; it
therefore has labor mixed with it and becomes the exclusive prop-
erty of the laborer.
It must be admitted here that a want of consistency is shown when
Locke allows this right to accrue to a man through his having his
servant labor upon the land. That he did not even see this in-
consistency throws a great deal of light on his practical affiliations
âas also his explicit refusal to allow his argument to justify large
estates such as those that had been inherited by the feudal aristoc-
racy. There is a natural limit to the amount of land to which an
individual has exclusive right. A man has a right only to that
quantity whose total product he, and his family, can consume. Locke
also added to this right of acquiring private property the right of
bequeathing it. Whether he was fully conscious of it or not, Locke
was of course justifying a government that would protect the rights
not of everyone indiscriminately but of the new class of merchant
capitalists and those associated with them.
The second aspect of Locke's account of the state of nature to
which attention should be called is that it portrays, essentially, an
ideal situation. This immediately raises a problem which can first
be stated as though "the state of nature" described an actual condi-
tion. Why, under such ideal circumstances, did men ever decide to
subject themselves to a ruler? Hobbes had no comparable difficulty.
He constructed his state of nature precisely so that men would have
every motive to leave it. Locke's answer is the same as that of St.
Thomas and Richard Hooker. Although the law of nature is reason-
able and self-evident, there are a few wicked men who refuse to obey
it. The purpose of setting up a civil state is to enable the punish-
ment of those who break the law of nature to be placed in the hands
of organized society as against any chance observer, and, since that
law is highly general, to specify it by positive enactment so that its

application to the more particular conditions of time and place may
be clear to everyone. The duties and privileges of government are
thereby very narrowly circumscribed, for governments exist simply
to specify and enforce the law of nature.
We may now put this same problem in its value form. If the
rights and duties of men are determined independently of the state,
by the very nature of man, what status can government and positive
law have? The answer as we have seen is that the state and positive
law are the bases of the particular interpretation and application of
natural law. Unlike their position in Hobbes' system, they do not
overthrow another basis of right and set up a new one. Put in this
way, rather than as an historical event, the transition from the state
of nature to politically organized society in Locke's view presents no
serious problemâas though there were a falling away from an an-
cient golden age.
Immediately a new problem faces our author. If positive law and
government are justified in-so-far-forth as they make more articulate
and enforce the law of nature, then we are to judge a state not by its
form of government but by what it does. Popular government
through a representative parliament is no more and no less justified
than absolute monarchy. It is a question of whether the government
protects and specifies men's natural rights. This will never do. Con-
sequently Locke brings in another element from the popular tradi-
tionâthe doctrine of consent and of a contract. Government and
laws positively enacted are legitimate only if, besides protecting
men's natural rights, they are based on a contract and continue to
enjoy the consent of the people.
Here again, of course, Hobbes' position must be refuted. In the
first place Hobbes, like Hooker, had held that the contract once
made is binding upon all posterity, not merely upon the individuals
entering it. This Locke opposed. A contract can only obligate him
who makes it. So every man, upon becoming of age, has the right
to decide whether he shall become a member of a given political
society or not. Usually this consent is given tacitly onlyâby accept-
ing the protection of the laws of the country in which he has grown
up.
In the second place, Hobbes had established his political absolut-
ism on a double basis, as we have seen. By some alchemy the con-
tract amalgamates the many wills of individuals into the one will of
the sovereign. This Locke refused to accept. There are as many

wills in society after, as before, the contract. The contract is sim-
ply an agreement each man makes to abide by the will of the ma-
jority. Hobbes had also argued that the sovereign is outside the con-
tract and thus not bound by it. It is perfectly clear that Locke
meant to reject this idea, but it is not entirely transparent what he
intended to put in its place. Some have claimed he tacitly uses the
concept of a second, subjective contract between the people and
the government. I do not so read him. Rather, he seems to say that
there is just one, the associative, whereby the political state is set up.
Its single essential clause is that each is to be bound by the decision
of the majority. This majority may then delegate or assign certain
functions to certain public bodies or individuals. These latter enter
no contract, and the public has assumed no responsibility to them.
They are simply its agents. Inasmuch as any agent may be shorn of
power whenever he acts out of conformity with the will of the party
he represents, so here.
From this crucial point on, Locke's account of government goes in
a totally different direction from Hobbes'. The legislative is the
fundamental governmental power for Locke; the executive and
federative powers, that is, administration of domestic and foreign
affairs, respectively, derive their authority from it and are responsible
to it . It cannot delegate its legislative authority to any other agency.
Locke, obviously thinking of the House of Commons, favored a
representative body; in any case, the legislative power must act in
accordance with the will of the majority, on the basis of consent, or
its action is illegitimate and the people have the right to alter its
make-up or to remove it entirely. Sovereignty is thus retained by
the people.
There are further and theoretically more disquieting restrictions
upon the legislative body. Since the legislature was set up to protect
natural rights, especially property rights, the laws it enacts and the
administrative acts for which it is finally responsible must all further
this end. Any that oppose it are really null and void and a proper
ground for removal of the legislature.
This clearly brings to light the double basis of Locke's thought.
On the one hand, going back through Hooker to Aquinas, it em-
bodies a rationalistic view of law and political authority. Laws and
governments are justified just so far as they rest upon and carry out
the law of nature; their authority issues from their reasonableness,
their self-evidence. On the other hand, reflecting the more radical
ideas of proponents of popular government, traceable to Marsiglio

and the conciliar movement, it is based upon a voluntaristic founda-
tion. Laws and governments are justified just so far as they express
the proper will, the decision of the sovereign, in this case the will of
the majority of the people. Locke evidently felt no clash here be-
cause he tacitly assumed that the majority will has always, and will
always, be in harmony with the law of nature, that is, be concerned
simply to protect the natural rights of individuals. We are now only
too deeply aware that this, as a fact, is not so. (Fig. 34 is meant to
bring out the basic duality in Locke's thought.)
Ac
. ._ -. ^
Â» J. Turnipseed F Shoemakeo
from
an
arbitrary
act
from the
nature of
things
J. Turnipseed F. Shoemaker
I People as sovereign
= voluntarism
2. Natural Law
nationalism
Fig. 34. Fundamental Contradiction in Locke
Slightly less than a century after the Glorious Revolution, there
occurred the American Revolution. Although the issues were largely
different, the ideological weapons used by the revolutionists were the
sameâthe curious amalgam of rationalism and voluntarism we have
just noted in Locke.
It is unnecessary to specify the basic conflicts leading to the Ameri-
can Revolution beyond pointing out that, in the main, they arose
from the attempt of England to carry out a colonial policy in har-
mony with the reigning mercantilist doctrine. Such a policy in-
evitably engenders revolt sooner or later on the part of the colonies
âwith the American colonies it was sooner. This was because they
were largely populated by Englishmen, claiming the rights and liber-
ties of Englishmen equally with inhabitants of the mother country;

they were at a great distance from the mother country in a land that
had to be wrested from its native inhabitants, thereby encouraging
a sense of independence on the part of the newcomers; they were in
a territory of almost unlimited natural resources crying out for
exploitation, so that economic dependence upon the mother country
seemed more and more unnecessary.
As we have seen, mercantilist theory found a great advantage in
the possession of colonies in the over-all goal of a favorable balance
of trade and a flow of money (specie) to the mother country. Colo-
nies could furnish cheaper raw materials for manufacture in the
mother country and cheaper food for the mother country's workers
than could foreign countries; they could furnish a market for manu-
factured goods free from tariffs and competition; they could yield
income to the mother country by having all shipping restricted to
the mother country's vessels; they could be a source of specie by
requiring payments to the mother country in hard money. In line
with these ideas we find the English Parliament in the late seven-
teenth and early eighteenth centuries passing a series of navigation
acts designed to force the colonies to trade only with England, using
only English bottoms; a set of manufacturing acts designed to restrict
colonial manufacturing; a sequence of monetary and banking acts
to dissolve colonial land banks, throttle the issuance of paper money
in the colonies, and otherwise to halt practices that would threaten
the flow of specie to England; and finally a group of acts that by
direct taxation sought to make the colonies a source of income to
the mother country.
The American Revolution was the colonists' answer to these
policies. The ideas they used to justify their revolt, however, did
not take the form of a challenge to mercantilism. This challenge
did occur and at the same time, but it came, as we have seen, from
Scotland in the person of a professor of moral philosophy, Adam
Smith. The ideas of the revolutionists rather were in the political
form of a reinsistence upon natural rights, government as issuing
from a social contract and based on the consent of the governed.
The Continental Congress in 1774 agreed to a Declaration of Amer-
ican Rights which asserted that the colonists were "entitled to life,
liberty, and property and . . . had never ceded to any foreign power
whatever, a right to dispose of either without their consent."
These ideas clearly form the central principles, the ideological
weapons, in Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. They

are felt to be so closely bound up with the overthrow of absolute
monarchy that we find the list of specific grievances of the colonists
is thrown into the form of a recital of arbitrary acts of an absolute
monarch (George III).
This same curious self-assertion on the part of the ideas adopted
for propaganda reveals itself in the writings of Tom Paine, especially
in his Common Sense. In this work the general frameworkâa state
of nature, natural rights, the contract, government only by consent
of the peopleâis not as explicit as in the later book, The Rights of
Man, but it is there. Especially interesting is its close connection
with a denunciation of absolute monarchy. Paine's invectives
against this institution, and particularly against George III, make
delightful reading, enhanced, if anything, by the realization of their
irrelevance to the basic issues of the time.
In Jefferson's writings subsequent to the Revolution, certain modi-
fications of Locke's ideas appear. It will be remembered that Jeffer-
son was in France when the American Constitution was drawn up.
He was willing to accept it with the addition of the Bill of Rights,
of which Jefferson was essentially the author. Returning from
France, where he had been a spectator of events leading to the
French Revolution, Jefferson was impressed with the growth of a
reactionary spirit. He felt that the Federalists were essentially anti-
republican in spirit, and that their advocacy of a strong central gov-
ernment, as found in Alexander Hamilton's favoring of a United
States Bank, and John Marshall's interpretations that gave to the
Supreme Court the right to review the constitutionality of legislation
by the states, were anti-democratic. He found that many provisions
of the Constitution expressed fear of the people, as in a judiciary
which, by being an appointive office for a life term, was wholly irre-
sponsible to the people. In its practical emphasis, Jefferson's thought
turned more and more toward states' rights and local government.
It is here rather than in the central government that the will of
the people can be found. It is in local government that the people
can gain that experience in politics which is so essential to a democ-
racy.
All this, of course, was something peculiar to the American scene
and not to be found in Locke. But I think we can discover, without
too much reading between the lines, a general change of theoretical
emphasis as well. The concepts of a state of nature, of equality of
men in that condition, of natural rights, especially of rights of

property, of government as set up to protect these rightsâthese con-
cepts tend to fade out. In their place is a larger emphasis upon trust-
ing the judgment of the people, upon the fact that the state's affairs
are finally the people's affairs, and those most affected by a policy
are in the long run the most capable of determining its advisability.
These facts are also true in the choice of those in authority. There
is no aristocracy of birth or of wealth that can be trusted to pick
those who are best able to rule for the public interest. "In every
government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ
of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover and
wickedness insensibly open, cultivate and improve. Every govern-
ment degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The
people themselves therefore are its only safe depositories." Occa-
sional revolts against the government are a good thing; they keep
those in office alert to their insecurity in power, to the need of re-
maining in touch with the will of the people.
One is tempted to go further, to make Jefferson say: the people
are sovereign, not in any occult sense of a natural, inalienable right
residing in them, but simply in that they are the ones most affected
by governmental policy, and thus they alone can be trusted with
the determination of it and the selection of those who will administer
it. But this would probably be pushing Jefferson too far in the
direction of a break with the doctrine of natural rights. Although
Jefferson was something of a philosopher, he was also a politician
and felt the need of familiar slogans too much to give up entirely
the older ideology for the popular cause.
Ethics and the Impact of the New Science
It is of paramount importance that we keep in mind the fact that
the seventeenth century experienced the revolution which was to
bring in modern science, the eighteenth its rapid popularization and
its radical challenge to traditional religious, social and moral out-
looks. It was during these centuries that the commercial revolution
went on to its culmination in the nation-state, in merchant capital-
ism, and in that new intellectual class so valuable to the commercial
enterpriser, the scientists. In all this, England came to take the
lead, and we shall find that the most important ethical thinkers of
this period were Englishmen. We shall also find that their thought
was in each case greatly influenced by the new scientific type of
knowledge. Theology and literary culture were replaced by the

Newtonian sort of universal scientific law as the basis upon which a
definition of goodness could be constructed and an electroscope
suitable for divining which acts are good and which bad.
This change involved a profound shift in the whole notion of
what ethics is to do. It is true that the humanistic ethics of the
Renaissance did, in one respect, break quite drastically with the
medieval outlook. From being God-centered, ethics became man-
centeredâin some of the literary expressions of the Renaissance,
pretty lustily so. Nevertheless, in another sense the ethical outlook
of the Renaissance remained within the same framework as that of
the Middle Ages. In both theological and humanistic ethics, al-
though they were couched in universal terms, the real interest lay
in exploring an ideal type of lifeâthat of the saintly scholar or the
artist and ban vivantârestricted by social and economic necessity to
the very few. In opposition to this, naturalistic ethicsâby which
I mean any ethics based upon or obviously influenced by the new
scienceâwas an ethics of everyman. This does not mean, though,
that it was concerned with improving the lot of the common man,
with setting up the tiller of the soil or the weaver of cloth as a
paradigm. Some of the romantics were to do this, that is, to make
just one more shift in the ideal typeâto replace the cultured gentle-
man of the humanistic tradition by the simple, honest, but unlet-
tered man of toil. The naturalism of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries brought about a more fundamental modification, a change
in the very framework of ethics. "Everyman" was introduced not so
much to set up an ideal as to describe uniformities. Instead of guid-
ing or reforming morals, naturalistic ethics sought to understand
them. This, in the Enlightenment, tended to mean a statement of
the laws of human behavior. Ethics was quite thoroughly confused
with what was to become psychology, the psychology of emotion and
of motivation.
My contention here is meant not as a criticism so much as a simple
exposition of what, under the circumstances, was entirely natural.
Indeed, it is my personal conviction that the confusion just men-
tioned was a necessary stage in the process of attaining a clear dis-
tinction between normative and factual questions. The confusion
was present in medieval thought, but it took a different form after
the scientific revolution. In the Middle Ages, questions of fact were
answered by pointing to goods or values; in the Enlightenment,
questions of value were answered by pointing to facts. In the Middle

Ages, all nature was purposive, was determined by goods to be
achieved; in the Enlightenment nature's ends were replaced by mech-
anismsâwhat, then, is more natural than, in studying human pur-
poses and values, to substitute regularities for goods, to answer men's
normative questions by pointing to the laws of human behavior?
Hobbism and Anti-Hobbism
In this whole development of naturalistic ethics, the initiating
and dominating personality was that of Thomas Hobbes. We have
already considered his views on law and government. We saw that
he was an adroit, although unacceptable, advocate of political ab-
solutism. More important, in the long view, was the fact that he
espoused a voluntaristic view of law. So here. As a matter of fact,
Hobbes' ethical views were, in his own exposition, just a step in his
argument for political absolutism. This is important in understand-
ing his own motivation. More significant, as far as historical in-
fluence is concerned, is the character of these ethical ideas. Two
factors in general should be stressed. His ethical position was volun-
taristic and it was naturalistic. In the former respect he carried on
the emphasis of William of Ockham. In the latter, he anticipated
the new standpoint characteristic of the Enlightenment.
We probably must not suppose any direct influence of William
upon Hobbes. Yet one can speculate a bit. Ockham had made a
tremendous impression on the University of Oxford in the fifteenth
century. That there was still some lingering effect in the early seven-
teenth, when Hobbes was a student there, and that this indeed was
not without consequence upon Hobbes' own thinking are borne out
not merely by the nominalistic tenor of Hobbes' logical views, but
by the use of certain technical expressions peculiar to William's
system (for example, words of "first" and "second" intention). That
Hobbes somewhat misconstrued them proves only that he was not
fully and consciously aware of their sourceânot that there was no
actual historical influence at work. But it is a rather large step to go
from William's nominalism in logic to his voluntarism in ethics.
Therefore, it is highly speculative to suggest that Hobbes' own
voluntarism was a development of William's.
As to Hobbes' naturalism, however, the case is different. By the
end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth,
Newton was to become the idol of all England. In some way, Hobbes
sensed this coming wave and attempted to ride its crest . As a

student, he had developed a distaste for the Aristotelian physics then
current at Oxford. Somewhat later in life, a chance reading of a
mathematical work fired his imagination. This led to an interest in
the problems of motion which, in turn, aroused his desire to become
acquainted with the new dynamics. In a visit to the continent in
1634 he sought out the acquaintance of Galileo and met for some
time with a group of scholars and scientists in Paris under the leader-
ship of Mersenne.
No doubt a more important causal factor was the publication of
William Harvey's work on the circulation of the blood. Harvey
found that in the space of half an hour the heart propelled more
blood than that contained in the whole body, and that in the space
of an hour the weight of the blood so propelled was greater than the
weight of the whole body. He concluded that the blood must return
to the heart, that it must circulate in the body, through arteries and
veins, as in a hydraulic system of pipes and valves. This account
was a striking application of the new mechanics to physiology. It
clearly made a deep impression on Hobbes who tried to found his
ethics on a crude physiological psychology mechanistically conceived.
All psychological phenomena are, at basis, said Hobbes, simply so
many physical motions. They may be divided into two main types,
vital and voluntary. Vital motions continue throughout life and
need no help of the imaginationâthat is, require no idea of an end
to be attained. Examples are the circulation of the blood and breath-
ing. Voluntary motions are more circumstantial and always require
an idea of an objective. This idea, however, is itself simply a motion,
an image of some earlier experience which is itself nothing but "de-
cayed sense," a sort of inertial continuance of sense impulse after
the external cause has ceased. Such an idea becomes voluntary if it
leads over into muscular action. In its first, incipient stage this sort
of muscular activity aroused by imagination is called appetite, if
toward the external cause; aversion, if away from it. All men's mo-
tives then can be reduced to these two. That Hobbes had no very
clear notion of the exact machinery here, and that he accepted the
then current idea of animal spirits, since replaced by the concept of
nervous impulses, is quite irrelevant to any consideration of his
general ethical position.
So far we have psychology, not ethics. The transition comes
through an account of how men use moral terms. "But whatsoever
is the object of any man's appetite or desi^ that is it which he for

his part calleth good: and the object of his hate and aversion, evil;
and of his contempt, vile and inconsiderable. For these words of
good, evil, and contemptible, are ever used with relation to the per-
son that useth them. . . ." Even here we have as yet strictly nothing
ethical; we are in the region of the factual, not the normative.
Hobbes was simply (so it seems) trying to state a uniformity in the
way in which men use certain terms. But the above passage is com-
pleted as follows: "there being nothing simply and absolutely so
[that is, good, evil, or contemptible]; nor any common rule of good
f!^- .â¢--\
/^- rWhite,*-
ft
1 \\\ â -{'Gosh'r-
1 \ \ s^. ^.^
' \ \ N ^-----^
\^/
ii
L\ x \ t
\ sv^-:
v v\ ^I'Gee whiz }
^ /â¢ _ _v.
â¢Q
\V
refer to
something
refer to
nothing
which?
-which?
Fig. 35. Fundamental Ambiguity in Hobbes
and evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves. . . ."
This is clearly normative. It is stating, negatively, something about
good and evil, not simply about how men use certain words. Of
course, for Hobbes no such distinction was present. To ask what is
good and what evil is just to ask how men use the terms "good" and
"evil." Speaking makes it so. "For moral philosophy is nothing else
but the science of what is good, and evil, in the conversation and
society of mankind. Good, and evil are names that signify our ap-
petites, and aversions; which in different tempers, customs, and
doctrines of men, are different. . . ." (The ambiguity in Hobbes'
thought is indicated in Fig. 35.)
In understanding Hobbes here we must be careful. It is possible,
although I think improper, to interpret him as saying that nothing
is good or bad, that there are no normative questions or answers.

On such a view we would still have the words "good" and "evil"
and could study their usage. But all this would be purely factual.
In short, Hobbes, on this interpretation, was an ethical skeptic in
the strict sense of denying that good and evil are present in the world
under any conditions. I do not however believe this is a correct
interpretation of him. In the first place, it implies a clearly devel-
oped distinction between normative and factual questions for which
we have no evidence in Hobbes and which is foreign to the whole
period in which he lived. It is, in fact, a distinction not clearly made
and systematically applied until the twentieth century. In the sec-
ond place, it would destroy the effectiveness of Hobbes' whole argu-
ment for political absolutism. It will be remembered that that
argument runs somewhat as follows. Since good and evil are relative
to individuals so that what is good for me may be evil for you (re-
member the parsnip), morals are in a state of utter chaos until a
sovereign is set up. In the state of nature, not only is there actual
war, there is a conflict of morals: each man has the right to every-
thing he wants. The will of an absolute monarch thus is indispensa-
ble to the attainment not merely of a peaceful society but also of an
objective set of values. The sovereign creates justice and nonrelative
good, a single set of nonconflicting rights.
I suggest, then, that Hobbes confused value and fact. When he
said that moral philosophy studies what is good and evil in the con-
versation of men, he did not mean to deny that it studies what is
good and evil. He intended to say that, since "good" is used uni-
formly by men to designate something desired, any object of any-
one's appetite is really good, and conversely for evil. Thus, a
science of ethics is possible. It studies the regularities in men's ap-
petites and aversions, for the objects of these are good and evil and
are the only things good and evil.
It follows from this, and it was important to Hobbes for his gen-
eral argument that this consequence be pointed out, that the same
thing can be both good and evil, that a certain act, for example, can
be both virtuous and vicious. "And therefore, to speak properly,
nothing is good or evil but in regard of the action that proceedeth
from it, and also of the person to whom it doth good or hurt. Satan
is evil to us, because he seeketh our destruction, but good to God,
because he executeth his commandments."
A further paradoxical consequence is likewise involved. Taken in
relation to one and the same person the same act may be both vir-
tuous and vicious. This is due to the fact that our desires change,
and good and evil are relative not to persons but to their appetites
and aversions. Strictly speaking, Hobbes could not admit that the
same thing is both good and evil relative to a given person and a
given instant of time, since he denied that one can have simultane-
ously an appetite and an aversion toward the same object. But in
the process of deliberation, appetite and aversion toward a particular
thing succeed one another rapidly, and hence the thing fluctuates
rapidly between being good and being bad. Moreover, a thing may
be good relative to a given person at a given time even though its
attainment would be extremely harmful to that person, since we
frequently have appetites whose fulfillment would be harmful to us
and would in fact immediately set up an aversion in us to the object
of the original appetite.
Finally, there is the strange eventuality that a person can never
desire what is evil; appetite is like the hand of King Midas, whatever
it touches becomes goodâa most deplorable outcome for it would
eliminate all the pleasures of temptation! Ordinarily we suppose
that there are sinful appetites that should be extirpated, and that the
objects of such appetites are evil. A Hobbist might say that an ap-
petite can itself be the object of an aversion, and thus, relative to
that aversion, be bad. Therefore, when I observe from your actions
that you desire to eat my food, I may have an aversion toward your
desire. But on Hobbes' view there would be, in the state of nature,
no way of determining which of theseâyour desire or my aversionâ
ought to take precedence. No appetite is intrinsically bad.
That in these various quixotic implications (and with a little in-
genuity many more could be derived) Hobbes' ethics does not square
with our everyday ethical convictions did not disturb him. This was
no doubt partly due to the fact that he was a philosopher and so,
more than most men, would rather appear queer than be it. Also,
he seems to have desired the public interest that notoriety brings.
But the really important reason for his unconcern was that he
wanted this disconformity with everyday ethical outlook to carry on
his argument. He wanted to say that, since on this relativistic basis
an ethics emerges that does not square with everyday thought, some
other foundation must be brought in. This he found in the will of
the sovereign. The latter determines what is morally good and bad,
just as it also determines what is legally right and wrong (the two
are not finally separated for Hobbes) in any politically organized

society. In no civil state is any act both good and bad, and many
acts are bad (in the sense that excludes being good) even though
desired by individuals. There would still be paradoxical conse-
quences as far as everyday ethical views are concerned (correspond-
ing to the paradoxes of Ockham's position, with the sovereign's will
replacing God's), but clearly Hobbes meant to say that the sovereign's
will (as "bearing the will of all") must be made the determiner of
all good and evil in order to avoid the moral chaos of the state of
nature and achieve at least some semblance of the ordered moral
world with which we are familiar in ordinary life.
As we shall see, one of the aspects of Hobbes' position that called
forth the most vehement reaction was his acceptance of the selfish-
ness principle. Here again the psychological and the ethical are not
distinguished. All motives, for Hobbes, are actually selfish: ". . . of
the voluntary acts of every man, the object is some good to himself."
Considered as a psychological law, there was no attempt on Hobbes'
part to verify this statement observationally. As with his whole
physiological psychology it remains a purely speculative construction.
Nor is there any very clear line of theoretical argument leading to
it. Apparently he felt that he was simply drawing the consequences
of his concepts of "voluntary act" and "good." So far as that was
what he had in mind, I think that Bishop Butler adequately refuted
him by an analysis of "object of desire" to which we shall presently
turn our attention.
Such then, are the views of Hobbes on ethics. Not only are they
embedded in a political theory; they were clearly meant to be simply
a step in establishing it. Thus, the division between the relativistic
ethics of a state of nature and the absolutistic ethics of a politically
organized society is fundamental in Hobbes' thought. Historically,
however, almost no one took him seriously on the latter. He came
to be known and decried as the author of a system of universal self-
ishness and relativism. We can hardly, in fact, overemphasize his
negative importance. Almost all the ethical thought of the Enlight-
enment is a reaction against him.
The reason for this almost universal opposition to Hobbism is not
far to seek. Hobbes managed to affront practically every important
group in English public life (it is no accident that his few supporters
came from the continent). By advocating that civil power be given
absolute jurisdiction in matters of moralsâand even of faithâas
well as in legal and political affairs, Hobbes really undercut the

principle of ecclesiastical authority entirely. Thus he won the disap-
proval of both the Anglican and the Roman churches. The dissen-
ters were of course allied with the parliamentary party with whom
Hobbes was in basic conflict in the matter of political absolutism.
Royalty itself, in the persons of Charles II and James II, was allied
with the church and was, in particular, favorable to the Roman
Catholics; hence, it could not accept Hobbes' justification of its
cause. The common Englishman joined all these groups in being
affronted by our philosopher's low opinion of human natureâ
namely, the view that all human motives are selfish and that men
act for the social good only under the threat of superior force.
Although Hobbes was violently opposed by his English successors
in the Enlightenment, there was one aspect of his thought that was
not challengedâhis naturalism; there was no very serious attempt to
return to theological ethics. Several causes combined to this effect.
First, the Reformation had occurred. A result was that incompatible
bases of revelation were recognized by different churches, so that an
ethics founded on a supernatural knowledge of God's will, as in
Ockham, could no longer make a wide social appeal. Moreover,
there was a growing emphasis within theological thought itself upon
a purely natural religion (that of deism). Such men as Lord Herbert
of Cherbury, John Tillotson, Matthew Tindal and John Toland
tried to found religious faith upon a study of this world, such as that
offered by the new Newtonian science. God's will was not something
arbitrary, to be determined by special revelation. Thus the good
for man was sought through a scientific knowledge of man. Of
course, most basic was the simple fact that the Enlightenment was an
age of science, a period when the new type of knowledge introduced
by Galileo fired all men's imaginations and set the ideal for all forms
of inquiry. In the face of this universal spirit, men could not com-
bat Hobbes by turning back to medieval scholasticism. If Hobbes'
ethics was unsatisfactory, it must be because his science was somehow
wrong.
The two main ethical schools in England in the Age of Reason
were called forth by opposition to the voluntarism of Hobbes. One
was the intellectualism of the Cambridge platonists; the other, the
sentimentalism (if we may use this term without prejudicing the
issue) of the advocates of a moral sense. We shall consider briefly the
position of each and then turn to the heated selfishness controversy
likewise elicited by our bete noire.

The group of philosophers known as the Cambridge platonists
flourished at the University of Cambridge mainly in the second half
of the seventeenth century. Two outstanding members of this school
were Ralph Cudworth, Master of Christ College, Cambridge, and
Samuel Clarke, chaplain to Queen Anne. Both of these men were
animated by the desire to defend religion against the growing skepti-
cism of the Enlightenment, but to defend it by intellectually respect-
able means, which they found in a revival of platonism. Cudworth's
True Intellectual System of the Universe was written to refute
atheism and determinism, and his A Treatise concerning Eternal
and Immutable Morality was published in large part to overthrow
ethical voluntarism, particularly as formulated by Hobbes. Samuel
Clarke's Discourse upon Natural Religion was an attempt to base
religion on a rational foundation that was compatible with the new
science. The tendency of the Cambridge platonists was to emphasize
reason to the neglect of sense, abstract essences or concepts to the
disparagement of observable fact. It was the mathematics in the new
scientific movement, not its experimentalism, that caught their in-
terest.
Let us consider first the negative element in the thought of these
menâtheir attempt to disprove Hobbes. Clarke's arguments were
somewhat more specifically directed against the actual form of
Hobbes' thought. For example, he argued that Hobbes involved
himself in a contradiction in saying that in the state of nature two
men can have full right to the same thing (recall our lone parsnip).
This would amount to saying that the same behavior is both right
and wrong. Again, Hobbes said that each man in the state of nature
will attempt to destroy others in order to secure his own preserva-
tion. But, argued Clarke, isn't a universal war of individuals a most
absurd means for gaining self-preservation universally? These and
similar refutations indicate that Clarke found Hobbes' individual-
istic relativism unacceptable, but they do not show that he really
came to grips with it. It was precisely Hobbes' view that no behavior
in the state of nature is good or bad in itself (therefore not both
good and bad at once) but only in relation to the appetites and
aversions of individuals. Also, universal self-preservation constitutes
no good in itself: only the single individual's preservation does (and
only to him; it is evil to all others, since he constitutes a threat to
them).
Another of Clarke's refutations applies to Hobbes' position con-

cerning the will of the sovereign in a politically organized society.
To determine questions of moral duty by appeal to the arbitrary
command of the civil authority is just as absurd, writes Clarke, as it
would be to determine mathematical questions by that method.
Suppose a veritable devil were in absolute power. Hobbes would
then have to say that such a sovereign's cruelties and inequities de-
fine what is right, simply because that individual has the power to
enforce his commands. Such an overturning of the very meaning
of right and wrong must be absurd in the eyes of any normal person.
Cudworth's refutations of Hobbes are more penetrating than
Clarke's; they strike nearer the very heart of Hobbes' positionâhis
voluntarism. Hobbes supposed that an object is made good simply by
being willed or desired. This fails to see that the unique property,
goodness, is in nature eternally just what it is and is related to other
properties just as it is entirely independently of anyone's act of will-
ing. Consider, by way of analogy, the sense of power a child acquires
when he learns that he can paint. Anything he wishes he can make
redâthe apple in his picture book, his father's lecture notes, the
living-room wall; it is all a matter of his will, or so he thinks. But
when father comes home and takes away the red paint, the child
finds that sheer will is not sufficient to turn things red; one needs
red paint as well. To make our analogy completely fitting, however,
we must push it a step further. Suppose the frustration caused by
removing the paint develops a psychosis in the child: he can now
make things red (in what we call hallucinatory states) without any
paint. But even in this dream world, Cudworth would point out,
nothing is made red by sheer desire or will: the color, redness, is also
required.
This is true also for goodness and other moral properties. My will
may cause me to perform an act, but that that act is good is a matter
of its having the property of goodness, and this is not in any degree
created by me. And we must not be fooled here by our power over
names. We can call any act, even an evil one, "good." This no more
gives us the ability to change evil into good than the power to call
green "red" endows us with the capacity to metamorphose colors.
Hobbes was wrong, argued Cudworth, in holding that an act is
made good, in the state of nature, by being desired by any indi-
vidual. But Cudworth did not quite make this out. A clever
Hobbist could retort: you cannot make red paint or red color by
desire or will, but once you have them you can make anything, what-
ever its other properties, red by mere volition. Likewise, Hobbes
could admit that being the object of an appetite is not itself good-
ness, but goodness (which is just goodness) can be attached to any-
thing by sheer will. It is unlike smoothnessâyou can make smooth
only by sandpapering (and sometimes not thenâit depends on the
materials used). Granted that such a position is odd; nevertheless it
is logically possible.
Hobbes was likewise mistaken (to continue Cudworth's refuta-
tion) in saying that, in a politically organized society, an act becomes
one's duty simply by being commanded by the civil authority. We
are not morally obligated to obey a command simply because it is
a command or because it is a command of someone with power to
enforce it. It is true that we frequently are morally obligated to
obey certain orders, but this is only because there is, over and above
the act of giving an order, a general moral obligation to follow direc-
tives of a certain sort issuing from an authority with some appropri-
ate standing. The obligation arises not from the command as such
but from the moral status of its source.
This last line of refutation was carried to its striking, logical out-
come by Richard Price, writing three fourths of a century later:
"Right and wrong ... do not signify merely, that such actions are
commanded or forbidden. . . . Were not this true it would be
palpably absurd in any case to ask, whether it is right to obey a com-
mand, or wrong to disobey it; and the proposition, obeying a com-
mand is right, . . . would be most trifling, as expressing no more
than that obeying a command, is obeying a command. . . ."
We may now turn to the positive statement of the Cambridge
platonists. Desire, will, command do not make an act right or just.
It is right or just through exemplifying righteousness or justice. We
do not create these properties by willing the act; we discover them
by our intellectual nature, says Cudworth, by our conscience in ap-
prehending the fitness or reasonableness of the act, says Clarke. That
an act is right (or not) is simply a given truth to be apprehended
by us exactly as we would apprehend any mathematical truth, such
as that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is equal to 180Â°.
Indeed, like its mathematical analogues, it is a necessary truth. We
may think of Cudworth or, with complete historical verisimilitude,
Richard Price, as answering our clever Hobbist in the following
vein: Moral qualities are less like colors than like mathematical
properties, for their attachments, as well as their inner essences, are

independent of anyone's volition. Although we cannot create red-
ness we can decide what articles shall be painted red; on the other
hand, we not only do not bring quadruplicity into existence, we can-
not by an act of will either establish or disestablish that two and two
shall be four. Like the laws of motion (which Newton himself called
"axioms"), there are self-evident moral truths, such as "It is fitting,
and therefore obligatory, that one keep his promises." Price came
close to saying that there is a moral property (a relation of fittingness-
to-be-done) which is necessarily connected with the possession of cer-
tain factual properties of human conduct.
Clarke analyzed the eternal law of righteousness into three seg-
ments. Respecting God "the highest possible Honour, Esteem, and
Veneration" is due. Respecting one's fellowmen the rule takes the
twofold form of equity (the Golden Rule) and benevolence (uni-
versal love). Respecting oneself the law requires that one perform
faithfully the duties to which his station in life, as assigned by God,
obligates him, and that one do so with contentment.
This statement of our moral duties may give the impression that
we are really back in theological ethics. In a certain sense this is
true, but in another it is not. What concretely are our duties is
largely stated by Clarke, and to a great extent by Cudworth as well,
in terms of God and God's will. But let us note first that there is no
appeal to special revelation. Let us note second that the use of God
is to specify particular duties, never to define the nature of duty (or
any other general moral concept). If God should die, to use
Nietzsche's blasphemous terminology, that would destroy our duty
to obey His commands, but it would not touch the general nature of
duty. This is something "eternal and immutable," to use Cudworth's
phrase. True to the Enlightenment, these men would have ethics a
"science"âbut a purely rational one like mathematics. "The Rea-
son which obliges every Man in Practice," writes Clarke, "so to deal
always with another, as he would reasonably expect that Others
should in like Circumstances deal with Him, is the very same, as
That which forces him in speculation to affirm, that if one Line or
Number be equal to another, That other is reciprocally equal to It."
The moral-sense school of ethics opposed Hobbes as vigorously as
did the Cambridge platonists, but on a different basis. Whereas the
latter used the weapon of logical analysis and attempted to make
ethics a sort of mathematical science, the former accepted Hobbes'
own psychological approach (albeit without the physiological slant),

but used it to refute him. The school of moral sense contended that
human nature contains more than the selfish propensities of Hobbes'
description. There are unselfish desires, and a moral sense capable
of reflecting upon them and pronouncing them "good." The contro-
versy thus becomes essentially factual.
There were two outstanding proponents of this point of view.
One was Anthony Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury. He was the
grandson of the first Earl of Shaftesbury, who was the patron of the
philosopher John Locke. It will be recalled that Locke attempted
to overthrow Hobbes' political and legal theory. The third Earl of
Shaftesbury was himself tutored by Locke. He was a Whig in poli-
tics, but devoted most of his life to writing. Important to us is his
Inquiry concerning virtue or merit, reprinted in Characteristics of
men, manners, opinions and times. He lived in the late seventeenth
century and the early eighteenth. Francis Hutcheson was younger;
his life fell largely in the first half of the eighteenth century. For us
his most significant works are Inquiry concerning the original of our
Ideas of Virtue or Moral Good and Illustrations upon the Moral
Sense. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he also studied theology
but devoted his life to teaching moral philosophy at the University
of Glasgow. With this background of political and religious liberal-
ism it is easy to see why these men opposed Hobbes' political ab-
solutism and its foundation in moral relativism.
The term "moral sense" is characteristically Hutcheson's. Shaftes-
bury tends to use the phrases, "natural affections" or "social affec-
tions," although he also occasionally speaks of "our sense of right
and wrong." Sometimes Hutcheson makes "moral sense" practically
equivalent to "benevolence," and he contrasts it, as Shaftesbury does
"natural affections," with self-regarding desires or "self-love." How-
ever, Hutcheson frequently employs "moral sense" in a more special
meaning (occasionally present in Shaftesbury's "sense of right or
wrong"): "Moral sense" is not benevolence itself but a sentiment of
approval we feel toward benevolence whenever we observe the latter
in ourselves or others. "Moral sense" then refers to our spontaneous
and disinterested approval of unselfish acts whenever we see them,
even when performed by people we dislike or toward whom we other-
wise are indifferent. It is thus a reflexive sense, directed not toward
external things but toward inner sentiments and motives.
To show that the moral sense is a fact it is necessary to establish
two things: first, that people really do have benevolent desires as well
as selfish ones; second, that whenever we observe someone (ourselves
or others) acting from altruistic motives, we spontaneously approve,
entirely apart from any benefits to us. The method that Shaftesbury
and Hutcheson adopt to prove these facts is very simpleâthat of
direct observation. Perhaps if they had lived today their observations
would have been different. We are in a debunking ageâa guy is a
"sap" who does anything to help another, and a sentimentalist if he
approves such acts. Yet perhaps this toughness is partly a camou-
flage: we are afraid of showing our real feelings.
One can of course object that a person cannot directly observe the
motives of another but only his overt acts, and that a person's own
"real," that is, subconscious, impulses may be quite different from
his consciously recognized desires. Such objections, however, are
based on an awareness of problems in psychological observation that
historically had not yet arisen. Here again our age differs greatly
from Shaftesbury's. Unless we can find the most sordid motives be-
hind an act, we are sure we have not got down to the real drives.
But Shaftesbury and Hutcheson assumed that a straightforward ob-
servation of motives is possible and open to everyone. The result
of such observation is the discrediting of Hobbes. It is simply false
that people are devoid of generous motives and of disinterested ap-
proval thereof. If we only commended an act because we thought
we would personally gain from it, our moral approval would be
equally directed upon our fruitful field as upon our generous friend,
and equally withheld from a generous act that benefited another
only and an utterly ungenerous one. This plainly is not so.
It might be objected that this moral sense is nothing but a refined
pleasure, say the anticipated pleasure of God's reward of benevolent
acts or a pleasure that has come to accompany our idea of virtue
through the fact that society regularly honors and praises virtuous
acts. In answer, Hutcheson says that the objector assumes the very
thing denied. If we had no moral sense, why would we suppose that
God will reward virtue, or why would society honor and approve it?
Moreover, the objector supposes that we can recognize a virtuous
act as something different from the accompanying approval or re-
warding pleasure. This very recognition presupposes a moral sense.
I think it must be admitted that the advocates of a moral sense did
in some sense get at real facts not properly recognized by Hobbes.
People often are spontaneously generous and public spirited, and
usually the observers of such actions approve, in a genuinely disin-

terested way. It may be misleading to speak of these facts as a "moral
sense" or as proving the existence of a special "faculty." It may be
that all we need to admit are the ordinary emotions of men plus
some modicum of reason (a key criticism offered by the school
against the Cambridge platonists was that our intellectual natures,
however clearly they may grasp truths, never motivate us to act nor
even, by themselves, to approve or disapprove men's conduct). How-
ever, the way we explain the facts may for the moment be put to one
side; the facts are there. The trouble, so far as ethics is concerned,
is that Shaftesbury and Hutcheson made the same mistake as Hobbes.
Although differing in their account of the facts, they thought that
factual statements (about human motives) could answer normative
questions.
Suppose I have a moral sense. Suppose it approves, on a given
occasion, a benevolent act. The normative question is not as to the
occurrence of this approval but as to its correctness or propriety.
Should I approve? Is the act really praiseworthy? There would seem
to be many exceptions to the generalization that all benevolent acts
are morally good. Parents frequently spoil their children by acting
too unselfishly toward them. Teachers weaken the moral fiber of
their students by offering, I am sure from entirely benevolent mo-
tives, "pipe" courses. Such unselfishness may call forth our emo-
tional approval, but intellectually, with an eye on consequences, we
judge it to be bad. Moreover, let us suppose that in approving an
act our moral sense is right. Must we not, following Cudworth, dis-
tinguish between the essence of good as displayed by the act and the
fact of approval by our moral sense? Is the act made good by its
being approved? In short, is there a moral-sense ethics or only a
moral-sense psychology?
John Balguy (a disciple of Clarke), in his Foundation of Moral
Goodness, and Richard Price came very close to stating this objec-
tion. Balguy argued that if our morals rest upon mere sense, they
might have been different or might change in the future, since they
would have no more security than an arbitrary factâGod's good
pleasure in constituting us as he has. This, of course, is not quite
the point of the preceding paragraph; rather it amounts to the ac-
cusation (to use the terminology we have adopted) that, appearances
to the contrary notwithstanding, the moral-sense school is volun-
taristic at heart. Price attacked the matter a little differently. He
thought that all sensory experience is merely subjective (the moral

sense being assimilated to sight, hearing, and so on) and that true
realities are only grasped by reason as it understands necessary con-
nections. Thus, if moral qualities are apprehended by sense, they
are merely a kind of vast delusion in us. (This whole argument, of
course, rests on a sort of neo-platonic mysticism we saw to be the
warp in the cloth constituting the new physical science.)
I think that Shaftesbury and Hutcheson were confused, that they
did not clearly see the problem. There is a strong tendency on their
part to assume, uncritically, that a psychological description of our
experience or sense of right and wrong is sufficient to establish right-
ness and wrongness themselves. But we cannot simply say that they
were satisfied to give a factual answer to a normative question.
There are indications that they did make a distinction between the
normative and the factual and that they meant to hold a definitely
ethical position.
In the first place, it seems quite clear that in what we have called
the rationalist-voluntarist controversy, they meant to choose the
former alternative. The faculty involved is not the real point of
controversy here, but rather the issue: Do we apprehend a good or
evil already and independently there, or do we create good by will-
ing it (or evil by opposing it)? The moral sense apparently does not
create the goodness of the acts it approves; it simply recognizes a
goodness obtaining independently.
In the second place, our authors admit that occasionally benevo-
lence may be so strong as to be evil, and that a certain amount of self-
love is good. Now, since they never say that benevolence is con-
demned by the moral sense nor that self-love is approved, this at
least suggests that the moral sense may be mistaken. Such a view,
in turn, clearly implies some other standard or mark of good and
evil than approval or disapproval by the moral sense. Such an impli-
cation seems definitely to have been seen or at least felt by both
Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, as our next point indicates.
In the third place, both men do attempt on occasion to character-
ize goodness apart from its being an object of approval by the moral
sense. Shaftesbury supposes that the true foundation and criterion of
good lies in a well-ordered system of the whole universe, where, as
respects man, public and private good, the good of the race and the
individual, coincide. Here both benevolent and selfish motives will
occur, but will reinforce one another. Hutcheson follows Shaftes-
bury in this last emphasis. In fact, he would like to determine

quantitatively the degree to which various motives, whether selfish
or altruistic, tend to promote the good of all. In attempting to state
the principles upon which such quantitative judgments are to be
made, he frankly turns to the consequences of the acts, and in these
he selects degrees or amounts of happiness as his measure. Thus an
act motivated by selfishness may be morally better than one spring-
ing from benevolence if the consequences of the former, considering
all the persons affected, include a greater amount of happiness, after
subtraction of misery, than do those of the latter. Hutcheson pretty
definitely anticipated the hedonic calculus of Bentham. Our present
point, however, is simply that we have in this development of
Hutcheson's thought a rather clear recognition that the facts of
moral sense must be supplemented by a criterion of good before an
ethics is possible.
The historical importance of the moral-sense school was great,
much greater than is often recognized. In four ways in particular
these writers stimulated later ethical thought. By their insistence
upon the fact of benevolent motivation they stirred up the selfish-
ness controversy. Although this was largely psychologicalâand its
importance in developing the first approximation to a scientific
psychology in the associationistic school can hardly be overestimated
âit had ethical implications of some significance. By their insist-
ence upon the disinterestedness of the moral sense they stimulated
the impartial-spectator point of view. By the attempt, on the part
of Hutcheson, to rate the amounts of happiness on the whole due to
selfish and altruistic motives, they furnished a starting point for a
calculational moral philosophy. By their tendency (in which as the
previous point indicates, they were not wholly consistent) to say
that only the motive is relevant to the goodness of an act, they were
influential in the rise of an ethics of duty-for-duty's-sake. We shall,
roughly, follow this sequence in our further tracing of naturalistic
ethics in the Enlightenment.
The Selfishness Controversy
In England, especially among the more serious and religiously
inclined students of human nature, Hobbes' theory of the selfishness
of all human motives did not find acceptance. If we turn to the
continent, however, and especially to those literary writers with an
iconoclastic and satirical bent, we discover that his viewpoint was
not without effect.

Baron La Rochefoucauld was an early example. He must of
course be put in the context of the brilliant but superficial court of
Louis XIV, where he was active in the intrigues so characteristic of
that circle. He was himself a nobleman, with a weakness for the
weaker sex's admiration: a French gallant who cherished style above
substance. His Reflections and Moral Maxims was an affected and
stilted product of the French literary salon, where the bon mot, the
verbal quip, the striking phrase took precedence over any care for
honest and exact expression of one's ideas. The gold mine that La
Rochefoucauld stumbled upon was the shock to ordinary feelings
furnished by the Hobbesian account of human nature. Man's high
moral pretensions placed over against the low realities of his actual
motives offered a never failing base for verbal thrust.
All men's desires are selfish, are but varying aspects of self-love.
Every propensity toward friendship, love between the sexes, fellow-
feeling, gratitude, is founded more or less subtly upon it. We do
not readily recognize this because love of self takes such myriad dis-
guises. It particularly likes to hide behind noble moral phrases. But
in the last analysis "men blame vice and praise virtue only through
self-interest." We insist on keeping up the moral appearances, even
in our own eyes, not because of any disinterested love of virtue but
because we seek the flattery and high esteem of being morally re-
spectable.
Another native of the continent, Bernard de Mandeville, wrote
an even more scathing satire upon moral hypocrisy. Although born
and educated in Holland he came to England to live while still a
young man. His chief works were in English and show his reactions
to English thought. His fame derived from his Fable of the Bees or
Private Vices Public Benefits. This literary parody was aimed
primarily to sweep aside the smug moralistic veil covering the grow-
ing imperialism and commercialism of England. Mandeville in-
sisted on calling a spade a spade: England's prosperity was largely
based on practices in affairs of business and state that were uni-
versally condemned by the English when occurring in the sphere of
individual morals. (It is perhaps not irrelevant in this connection
to point out that during the seventeenth century England had defi-
nitely achieved supremacy over Holland in world trade, thanks to
her mercantilist policies, and de Mandeville was Dutch.)
Also present in the Fable is a more serious theoretical purposeâ
to answer Shaftesbury's challenge to Hobbes. Mandeville wished to

retain Hobbes' doctrine that all human motivation is fundamentally
selfish. Yet he did not want to follow Hobbes in explaining all
socially beneficent action as due to rational calculation of selfish ad-
vantage, for Shaftesbury had shown that this explicit self-considera-
tion is, as a matter of fact, not always present.
First, then, Mandeville's Fable is a travesty on English commercial
imperialism. This is stated clearly in the Preface, where there is
pointed out the impossibility of a nation's becoming industrious,
wealthy and powerful while yet retaining the virtue and innocence
of a golden age. In the story itself, Mandeville portrays English
society under the metaphor of a hive of bees that has grown great as
a hive by individual viceâfraud, deceit, laziness, prodigality, distrust
in all its varietiesâwhich parades as virtue and devotion to the com-
mon good. To accentuate by contrast the picture here painted,
Mandeville has Jove suddenly, through irritation, take the bees,
who constantly cry, "Would that all were honest and sought the
public good only," at their word. The hive is suddenly cleared of
vice. The result is disastrous. Its prosperity is immediately de-
stroyed. "In half an Hour, the Nation round, Meat fell a Peny in
the Pound."
If one insists on drawing a moral from this part of the Fable, there
seems to be a choice. One can accept the moral Mandeville himself
offers: "Fools only strive to make a Great an Honest Hive"âthat
is, keep the vices of commercialism but be honest in admitting
them. Or one can accept a suggestion arising from the general tone
of the poem: return to the simple life, give up the dubious benefits
of large-scale trade and industry, and experience again the content-
ment of a more natural existence.
In the second place, and of more importance for us, the Fable,
especially in the appendix added to the second edition and entitled
An Enquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue, attempts to defend and
develop the Hobbesian doctrine of the universal selfishness of men.
Man, like other animals, is originally and by nature only concerned
to satisfy his own appetites, not to do anything for the good of others.
Mandeville, however, is aware of the force of Shaftesbury's attack.
Hence, he does not go on with Hobbes to say that men can be made
to serve the good of others only through superior force backed up by
a rational calculation of benefits to themselves. Thus, of course,
Mandeville is forced to give up the whole Hobbesian apparatus of a
social compact that sets up an absolute political and moral authority.

In its place he simply supposes an already constituted political so-
ciety and asks how those in authority can sufficiently control the
selfish propensities of the masses so as to motivate them to serve the
public good (that is, of course, to serve the private good of those in
authority). He found the answer in reward. Since, however, indi-
vidual reward for each act of public benefit was too costly, a cheap
general reward of an automatic variety was necessary. This was
found in flattery. But even flattery could not be parceled out to
each appropriate individual act. So a wholesale device was hit upon.
The acts desired by those in authority were dubbed "virtuous," and
the men who performed them, "human" (rather than "brutish") as
a class.
It is clear that for Mandeville, as for Hobbes, acts conducive to
the good of others are due to a calculation of selfish advantage, but
for Mandeville this calculation was confined to the few in political
power. The masses do not compute their advantage. They have
been so "conditioned," as we would say today, that they quite spon-
taneously seek the good of their overlords. Thus, Shaftesbury is
right: the masses act generously and compassionately without con-
sidering future benefits to themselves. But their motivation is never-
theless fundamentally selfish. They are moved by the pleasure de-
rived from praise, from social esteem. What they seek is not really
the good of others but their own pleasure in being flattered by men,
often the pleasure of mere imagination of such commendation.
If Hobbes' Leviathan was a Hiroshima bursting in the face of
English complacency and moral decency, Mandeville's Fable was a
Nagasaki, less shattering only because the first shock to public opin-
ion had already occurred. Hutcheson, as a matter of fact, wrote
largely with Mandeville rather than Hobbes as his avowed enemy.
He did not, however, develop any new weapon of defense. But in
Joseph Butler, a contemporary, living largely in the first half of the
eighteenth century, we find a more ingenious fighter.
Even though of Presbyterian parentage and having been sent to a
dissenting academy, Butler joined the established church and de-
voted his life to its service. He attained high position in it, becom-
ing Bishop of Bristol, Dean of St. Paul's and Bishop of Durham. He
is perhaps best known for his attempt, in his A nalogy of Religion to
the Constitution and Course of Nature, to refute the deistic religion
of reason without revelation.
For Butler's contribution to the selfishness controversy, the main

source is his Sermons, particularly his Preface and sermons xi and
xii, "Upon the Love of our Neighbour." Butler carries on the battle
of Shaftesbury and Hutcheson against the selfishness theory, but he
uses quite a different strategy. Whereas Shaftesbury and Hutcheson
had simply insisted that honest observation must report many cases
of genuine, spontaneous benevolence, Butler turns to a more careful
general analysis of the nature of our motives. He is aware that the
Hobbes-La Rochefoucauld-Mandeville account of human motives
gets its plausibility not as a direct, commonsensical description of
the obvious facts, but as a subtle insinuation as to the unobserved
constituents and originals of these facts. His argument is that, as an
analysis, this account contains a serious blunder.
These men seem to have supposed that, since all my desires are
mine, and consequently all the gratifications of them are mine, their
objects are simply my satisfactions. There is, in this, a failure to dis-
tinguish between the object desired and the satisfaction of attaining
that object. It is supposed that, since all satisfactions are satisfactions
of the person having the desire, all desire is directed toward self-
satisfaction and is therefore selfish. Butler grants that people only
act from desire; that the pleasure coming from the fulfillment of a
desire is always the pleasure of the person having the desire. But
he contends that this admission does not force one to deny the obvi-
ous fact that we desire many different things, not merely our own
individual pleasure. That it is a confusion to identify the pleasure of
gratification of desire and the object desired becomes clear as soon
as we note the fact that we get such pleasure upon attaining the
object desired. The pleasure, so far from itself being the object de-
sired, presupposes that there are such objects already desired ante-
cedent to the experience of gratification. Take away desire for food,
for company, for intellectual insight, for any and every particular
sort of thing toward which humans are motivated, and no pleasure
of getting what is desired could arise. Butler does not mean to deny
that we are sometimes motivated by self-love, that is, by a general
desire for our own happiness. He simply wishes to insist that this is
a derived or secondary desire. Without desires for particular things,
this generalized desire would be empty; it is essentially the desire to
get as many of one's desires fulfilled as possible.
Among the particular desires for particular external things is
benevolence, the desire to do good to someone else. Just as my
desire for food is my desire and its gratification is my gratification,

so is my benevolence mine and its gratification also. But it does not
follow that what I desire in the case of benevolence is my pleasureâ
I desire the good of someone else.
From this analysis of desire, it follows that benevolence is in no
fundamental way opposed to self-love. Self-love is the seeking of
one's own greatest happiness. This can be in conflict with any par-
ticular desiresâwhenever, that is, the gratification of the latter forces
a diminution in the total of one's possible satisfactions: as when I
overeat or overindulge in philosophic questioning. The conflict here
really lies between various particular desires. Just as I cannot spend
the same evening eating and drinking in company and also reading
a book in solitude, so I cannot spend all my time in philosophic pro-
fundities and also spend a sufficient amount of it in practical activi-
ties to be a normal human being. To do good to someone else does
sometimes conflict with some other particular desire, but this is in
no way peculiar to benevolence.
Mandeville's attempt to rehabilitate the selfishness theory of
Hobbes, by dropping out rational calculation and politically con-
trolled force as explanations of how a wholly selfish mankind could
ever be made to recognize justice and the public good, and putting
in place thereof flattery, or as we would say, the control of public
opinion, was yet defective in that its mechanism was an artificial de-
vice on the part of a few. It would seem that spontaneous, uncalcu-
lated generosity is too widespread, too little confined to those rare
countries where flattery is effectively used by those in authority, to
allow us to explain it in this fashion. Subsequent advocates of the
selfishness theory were aware of this, and tried to explain benevolent
acts not by some political device but by human nature itself, by a
natural mechanism at work everywhere. The mechanism chosen
was one, appropriately enough, furnished by Hobbes himselfâthe
association of ideas.
Hobbes revived in the modern age the doctrine stated fully and
explicitly by Aristotle in the ancient that our present imaginings
and rememberings are determined by their relations to earlier per-
ceptual experiences. For Aristotle there were two laws of association.
Present perception tends to revive in imagination earlier experiences
similar to or contiguous in time with such similar perceptions.
In general, advocates of the selfishness theory after Mandeville
claimed that men seek to promote the public good and the welfare
of others because these objectives have come to be associated in their

experience with pleasure (and activity that conflicts with them, with
pain). The assumption is that fundamentally and originally we seek
only our own pleasure, but that through association of our pleasure
with the good of others, the latter comes to be sought naturally,
without specific reckoning of selfish advantage and without benefit
of artificial political mechanisms. With Hume, chief reliance was
placed on association by similarity; with later advocates of the selfish-
ness doctrine, such as Gay and Hartley, appeal was largely to associa-
tion by contiguity.
David Hume was a Scotchman living in the eighteenth century.
He was not a churchman nor a university professor (he sought un-
successfully to obtain a chair in the university of his native Edin-
burgh). He was in fact a writerâan historian and essayist. But he
was not a literary satirist, as certain of his predecessors in defense
of the Hobbesian view had been. Rather he was an extremely seri-
ous and honest, although disillusioned, philosopher. His greatest
work, A Treatise of Human Nature, "fell dead-born from the press,"
which led Hume to rewrite it in sections in a more popular style.
Our topic will take us into books ii and iii of this work, concerned
respectively with the passions and with morals.
Hume agreed, as Hutcheson had before him, that our moral ap-
probations and disapprobations cannot spring from reason, for ex-
ample, from an intellectual faculty apprehending the fitness of
things, to use Cudworth's phrase. If such were the case, apprehen-
sion of goodness would be like apprehension of triangularity or any
other property of things. It would be simply a beholding. It actu-
ally is quite different. It leads to action. It thus must touch our
feelings, particularly our pleasures. In fact, moral approbation
simply is a certain pleasure.
This seems pretty Hobbesian. But Hume would disagree with
Hobbes' simple identification of moral approval with pleasure or of
the morally good object with the object of appetite. The moral-
sense school is right in insisting that virtue and vice are apprehended
as having a specific moral character not reducible to pleasures and
pains in the person experiencing them, and thus not determined by
calculation of selfish advantage. Hume attempts to combine these
two views by saying that moral approbation, through which an act
is taken to be good, is a feeling of pleasure of a certain sortânamely,
the pleasure when one considers that sort of act in general and with-
out reference to one's own benefit. Thus, Hume tacitly extends the
range of Hobbes' appetites to include desire for and pleasure in cer-
tain things, such as benevolent actions, quite apart from their effects
upon the desirer.
This might seem to suggest that Hume accepts an innate moral
sense, an impartial aspiration to see justice done and good deeds
performed. Such is not the case. Our moral approbation of, say, a
generous act is due simply to the fact that we tend to enter sym-
pathetically into the feelings of the recipient of the generosity.
There is in all of us a sympathetic mechanism whereby we feel
pleasure when we observe others pleased, and pain when we see them
pained. This is acquired during the course of our experience
through the natural functioning of the associative processes, specifi-
cally through association by similarity. We perceive others pleased
and pained. Their resemblance to us and the resemblance of their
behavior to ours when so pleased and pained is so striking that by
association the feelings of pleasure and pain are called up in us.
Thus benevolence arises from no selfish estimation of personal
benefits accruing from the act but from sympathy with the object of
the benevolence. Yet in the last analysis it is selfish; it is a desire to
increase our own pleasures and decrease our own pains. And so for
all the "artificial virtues," as Hume quaintly designates them, that
make primarily for the general good of society. They spring from
sympathy, and thus from selfishness broadened by association to em-
brace the feelings of others.
We are carried a step further in the theoretical defense of the
doctrine of universal selfishness, and incidentally in the founding of
associationistic psychology, by the eighteenth-century Englishman,
the Reverend John Gay. John Gay may be considered representa-
tive of that odd class of English theologians who had sufficiently over-
come their first reaction of horror to Hobbism to use the Hobbesian
dogma of selfishness as an argument for orthodox Christianity.
Their position naturally tended toward ethical voluntarism in its
theistic form. The good is what God wills. As a matter of fact, God
wills the happiness of the human race. Good acts then are those
which promote the general happiness. To get us to perform them
God appeals to our motives. Since our impulses are all basically sel-
fish, God must attach inducements in the way of rewards to the per-
formance of good acts. So we get the theory (to use a colloquialism)
of "pie in the sky by and by."
One tendency on the part of these theologians was to emphasize

the mechanism of rational calculation, particularly of pleasures and
pains to be experienced in the next life as meted out by a divine
bookkeeper. We may call this "the double-entry" or "red-and-
black-ink theory." Such a specifk and arbitrary mechanism for ac-
counting for our benevolent acts on a universal-selfishness basis did
not appeal to Gay. Benevolence occurs too generally and too spon-
taneously to be accredited to a continuous computation of distant,
possible, future events: the whole explanation is a little too musty,
too confined to the psychology of banks and loan companies to be
universally applicable.
As a matter of fact, Gay, in the little essay furnishing the source
of our description, "Concerning the Fundamental Principle of Vir-
tue or Morality," explicitly sides with Hutcheson in admitting a
moral sense. This, however, is only a verbal concession meant to
indicate that many of our acts are not consciously selfish. In such
cases, however, a careful analysis of them, by way of the genesis of
the sort of motives leading to them, will reveal their originally and,
hence, fundamentally selfish character. The mechanism again is that
universal one of association appealed to by Hume, but Gay does not
bring in sympathy nor stress association by similarity; it is contiguity
that now does the trick.
Originally our motivation is very simple: to increase our own
personal pleasure and decrease our pain. We call that "good" which
promotes the one, and that "evil" which causes the other, just as
Hobbes said. But experience and association complicate matters.
From earliest childhood we are rewarded for acting in a way that
yields pleasure to others, and punished for producing pain in them.
The pleasure of frequent rewards is thus firmly associated with
other-regarding behavior, and the pain of punishments with thought-
lessness. Thus, on new occasions the mere idea of benevolent action
fills us with satisfaction, whereas inconsiderate selfishness promptly
elicits a sense of discomfort. This then accounts for the moral sense.
It is not clear whether Gay was aware of Butler's analysis of the
relation of the object of desire to its gratification, but he strongly
insisted on a point which may be considered an attempt to answer
it. He carefully distinguishes the immediate objects of particular
desires from the ultimate object of all desireânamely, private happi-
ness. Whereas Butler insisted that the latter (the object of self-love)
would be empty without the former, and that therefore not all de-
sires are selfish, Gay treats the former as simply so many means to
the latter: the particular things we want are desired only as ways of
gaining happiness. Gay admits we frequently do not see that this
is the case since our own pleasure is so intimately associated with
the particular things as to "coalesce" with them, to use a term made
popular by later associationists. That is, the association of our ulti-
mate end, our own happiness, with particular things, such as food,
good company, social kindliness, and so on, has become so intimate
that we seem to seek the latter as ends themselves, whereas they
really are only means to the former. Unfortunately there is a glaring
fault in this account (one which later associationists were to try to
remedy): sometimes men desire things which by no stretch of the
imagination can be considered causes of future pleasure to the agent.
Suppose a man has seen great honors paid to heroes slain in battle.
He might, through associated pleasure, come to desire a hero's death,
but hardly as a means to his future pleasure, especially if he does
not believe in personal immortality. Pleasure may induce him to
seek this heroic death; it is not the end for which his death is a
means.
David Hartley, in his Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty,
and His Expectations, whose publication in the middle of the
eighteenth century is often taken to mark the founding of associa-
tionistic psychology, tells us that he was immediately stimulated to
develop his associationism by reading John Gay's Dissertation. He
unites this psychology with a somewhat bizarre physiology of nervous
conduction whose chief concept, that of "vibratiuncles," he de-
veloped from hints at the end of Newton's Principia. As he himself
points out, however, his physiological theory is not essential to his
associationistic psychology.
In dealing with motives and the moral feelings, Hartley in general
follows Gay. Other-regarding behavior arises through association
by contiguity with selfish pleasures. "A person who has had a suffi-
cient experience of the pleasures of friendship, generosity, devotion
and self-approbation, cannot but desire to have a return of them
. . . not at all from any particular vivid love of his neighbour, or of
God, or from a sense of duty to him, but entirely from the view of
private happiness."
In dealing with the pleasures and pains of sympathy, Hartley dis-
tinguishes four classes: pleasure over the pleasure of others, pain
over their pain, pleasure over the pain of others and pain over their
pleasure. It will be noted that Hume would ascribe only the first
two to the mechanism of sympathy, the last two requiring a different
one (that of malice). This is something more than a verbal differ-
ence, since Hartley can account for all these types of reaction by a
single principle of association, that of contiguity in earlier experi-
ence. We are pleased when we see others pleased because people
experiencing pleasure are usually in a kindly and generous mood
and so afford us pleasure. We are pained with others' pains so far
as people in pain have tended to mete out pain to us. The other two
reactions are not so common. But suppose we have been subjected
to sadistic cruelties by our elders when we were young. Then their
pleasure has become associated with our pain and we are apt to feel
pain when we observe them pleased. Likewise, if our elders were
pained whenever they observed us having pleasure, then we are
likely to feel pleased upon seeing them pained. Call these last two
reactions "abnormal," they yet occur, and association by contiguity
can account for them on the assumption that originally all our de-
sires are selfish.
In the early nineteenth century, James Mill, acclaimed by his son
as the "reviver and second founder of the Association Psychology"
saved Hartley's work from the neglect into which it had fallen.
Mill's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind carries on the
Gay-Hartley type of defense of the selfishness theory, but makes a
significant advanceâthe last one, indeed, to be made in this type of
analysis. Mill's further step is to define desire in terms of pleasure
(as the idea of pleasure or of something as associated with pleasure).
This is more extreme than the position of his predecessors who
held, apparently, that the connection between pleasure and desire
was a factual or observational one. Indeed, Mill's view does not re-
quire that we always desire pleasure, but rather that whatever we
desire we view, as it were, pleasantly or with pleasure. This would
seem to meet the objection raised earlier as to the variety of the ob-
jects of our wants and the fact that we sometimes want something
that by no stretch of the imagination can be conceived as producing
a later pleasure in us, as in the death of a hero, who does not seek
a pleasure produced by his heroism, but is pleased with the anticipa-
tion of his glorious end. However, it seems that this turn has left
behind the selfishness doctrine in its ordinary form. Although the
pleasure of my desire is mine, its objects can be as diverse as Butler
insisted: many of them are not my gratifications.
In concluding this discussion of the controversy I would like to

say two things about the associationistic pattern (especially in the
form it took in the Enlightenment) by way of clarification. In the
first place, as a defense of the theory of universal selfishness it com-
mits the genetic fallacy. That fallacy occurs whenever one argues that
something at an advanced stage of development cannot have a cer-
tain property because at some earlier stage it did not have it. Grant
that in early infancy all human motives are selfish. It does not fol-
low that there are no unselfish motives later in life. In fact, associa-
tion may be the very mechanism by which they arise. It may be that
I seek another's good only if I have in earlier experience found it
accompanied by my pleasure. It does not follow that what I seek is
my pleasure. It follows at most that I would not seek what I do had
there not been this association.
These remarks are directed to the psychological concepts involved.
Of more direct import in the present context is a clarification for
ethics. Suppose it be a fact that originally all motives are selfish.
What implication does this have for ethics? Directly, none whatever!
Suppose at all stages of human development all motives are selfish.
What implication does this have for ethics? Directly, none whatever!
This is just another way of saying that factual statements do not an-
swer normative questions. It might be morally better to seek the
good of others than one's own, even though no one as a matter of
fact does so, or even though people can be convinced to do so only
through the establishment of appropriate associations.
Why then, I may well be asked, discuss this selfishness controversy
in an account of the history of ethical ideas? Precisely because this
clear distinction between ethical, or normative, and psychological, or
factual, concepts and statements was not made and consistently held
to until the present century. Not that the confusion was complete.
Certainly the parties in the controversy frequently did, on both sides,
try to make some such distinction, but they never succeeded in hold-
ing firmly to it. It was felt that somehow the question whether men
have irreducibly generous motives was of ethical significance; its an-
swer had some bearing on the question of how we ought to act and
what motives we ought to have.
The Ethics and Psychology of Impartiality
There was another issue in the eighteenth century almost equal
in historical importance to the selfishness controversy. Is there a
unique and irreducible faculty or tendency in man to be impartial

in his moral judgments? We say that Hutcheson, at times at least,
made a distinction between benevolence and moral sense. Although
moral sense, it would seem, regularly approves benevolence, it is not
itself benevolence. Moral sense is not one kind of motive; it is a re-
flection upon motivesâwhether one's own or others. One may use
the analogy of a mirror. It reflects back, and thus shows as an out-
sider might see them, the facial expressions one has before it. So
the moral sense reflects impartially and objectively the motives of
our acts and passes judgment on them.
There was nothing analogous to this in Hobbes. For Hobbes, the
object of any appetite is good; he did not have another "endeavor"
or act of mind reflecting upon a desire and taking it to be good.
Hutcheson, however, in claiming that everyone distinguishes be-
tween good and bad desires, approving the former and disapproving
the latter, needed some further psychological mechanism besides the
desires or motives themselves. He claimed that the moral sense per-
forms this task and does so impartially. If the motive is benevolent,
the moral sense approves it, whether it is mine or yours, my friend's
or my enemy's, my contemporary's or the motive of someone living
many centuries ago. This notion, that our moral judgments arise
from an impartial, reflexive act, was to play an important role in
subsequent ethical thought.
Bishop Butler used a very similar principle. He called it "con-
science." Conscience reflects upon our acts and their motives and
approves or disapproves them. Like the moral sense, it is com-
pletely impartial. Its judgment is given only in a cool moment
when, putting aside our immediate passions, we can evaluate ration-
ally. It differs in certain respects, however, from Hutcheson's moral
sense. In the first place, it apparently reflects only upon its posses-
sor's own motives; conscience does not judge the desires of another.
Closely connected with this and basic to it is a further difference.
Conscience is not merely an appraiser; it is itself active, controlling
various desires, keeping one's appetitive nature in balance. Ideally,
human nature is not a mere chaos of conflicting impulses; it is an
ordered whole with conscience in the seat of power. Like Shaftes-
bury, Butler would describe the good for man as inner health or as
accord with human nature, so that each type of appetite is given its
dueâbeing neither wholly repressed nor overindulged. In this, both
self-love and other-regarding motives have their proper and harmoni-
ous places.
Eighteenth-century thought subsequent to Butler was not favor-
able to the idea of a special faculty of moral judgment, yet it refused
to discard the conviction that men can be impartial in their moral
appraisals. In explaining how this was possible, a conflict arose be-
tween people who may be described as intellectualists on the one
hand, and emotivists on the other. The former simply presumed
that reason is, by its very nature, impartial; just as it is no respecter
of persons in formulating mathematical truths, so it is completely
fair and objective in passing moral judgment.
With the emotivists the case was different. Their argument was,
in the first place, negative. As David Hume expressed it, moral
evaluation has an effect upon conduct; although perhaps men do
not always act in conformity with their approvals, their moral ap-
praisals are not completely otiose. Now reason (on Hume's account,
though his opponents in the Cambridge platonist camp would never
agree) has absolutely no effect upon our choice of ends; its only role
in conduct is in the determination of means for the attainment of
ends elected by our emotions. Insofar then as our moral evaluations
affect the ends we seek, they must arise from emotions. The ma-
chinery of this is sympathy, which we have already briefly sketched
out in our review of Hume's position in the selfishness controversy.
The great problem, of course, for the emotivists was how emotions,
which are notoriously prejudicial and fickle, could ever come out
with settled and socially impartial moral appraisals.
A tremendous advance toward the solution of this difficulty was
made by Adam Smith, and coincidently a great contribution to the
social psychology of emotions, unfortunately largely ignored at
present, perhaps because eclipsed in the public mind by its author's
influence in the sphere of economic theory. In a work published
nearly twenty years before The Wealth of Nations, namely, The
Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith carried on the emphasis upon
the impartiality of moral judgments. In fact, in his "impartial
spectator" he laid down a foundation for a whole ethical system.
Moreover, he attempted to give a psychological account of the im-
partial attitude in the making of moral judgments which is worthy
of serious consideration even today.
Smith's impartial spectator is essentially Hume's principle of
sympathy, differing from the latter, however, in two important re-
spects. It is a source and judge of all our virtues, not merely of the
"artificial" ones, and it is not reducible to self-love. What Hume

failed to see when he reduced sympathy to self-love via the mech-
anism of association by similarity was that my sympathy with you is
not due to my assimilation of you to me, of my recognition of how
like mine are your behavior and experience, but the opposite. I
sympathize with you only as I read myself into your position, dis-
regarding the ways in which I and my situation differ from you and
yours. In sympathy we take "the role of the other," as a recent
American writer (George Herbert Mead) has put it. A bachelor
may sympathize with a father who has lost an only son, not because
the father's situation is so similar to his own that a resembling grief
is induced in the bachelor, but because the bachelor actively assumes
something of the situation and feeling of the father.
Sympathy then extends our pleasures and pains through fellow-
feeling to the pleasures and pains of others. More than this, it
develops by this extension and aloofness an objectivity that is the
true mark of the reflexive principle which is the basis of all our
moral judgments. Hume is quite correct in denying that moral
judgments spring from reason. They come from, in fact are, certain
feelings of approval and disapprovalâthe sort felt by the impartial
spectator. The attitude of the latter is developed in two ways, or,
we had better say, in two steps. On the one hand, a man approves or
disapproves another's motives by experiencing them sympathetically
and thus reacting in terms of his own emotional propensities. If
under like circumstances he would have the same feelings and
desires as the other, he approves; if unlike, he disapproves. Even
here a certain aloofness is gained. We do not, through sympathy,
experience in their full force the feelings of another. On the other
hand, whenever one has spectators of one's emotional experiences,
one tends to sympathize with them. They are not ordinarily in the
same ecstatic or grievous situation as oneself. This likewise then
tends to cool down one's emotions and develop some degree of dis-
interestedness. If these are put together a genuinely objective and
impartial attitude arises. We tend to evaluate the motives and feel-
ings of others and ourselves in terms of a generalized spectator.
Without this role of the other, we would never judge ourselves,
and only in terms of it can we come to some agreement as to good
and bad behavior. One may think in this connection of Freud's ego,
but Smith's impartial spectator has the advantage of not suggesting
a mythological entity; it is just a name for the massive impact of a
certain strand in all our earlier social experience. The sense of

being watched (whether by Jesus, Mother or an impersonal society)
is present in the moral experience of most of us, and it is the emo-
tional genesis of this that Adam Smith tried to work out in his ac-
count of the impartial spectator.
The two main kinds of moral virtue are explained by Smith in
terms of the two spectator roles. The gentle, kindly, amiable virtues
are due to our ability as spectators to sympathize with the sorrows
and other passions of our fellows. The austere, heroic virtues come
from our power, even in the throes of a strong emotion, to sym-
pathize with our spectators. Benevolent motives are much more
generally approved than selfish because in the former our sympathies
with the benefactor and the recipient reinforce one another, whereas
in the latter our feeling for anyone that may be harmed by the
selfish behavior conflicts with our sympathy with the agent. Widely
accepted moral rules arise because of the general similarity of our
sympathetic reactions; they are, in fact, constituted by agreement in
our moral approvals and disapprovals.
Clearly Adam Smith's concern with moral objectivity is largely
psychological rather than ethical. He describes how we come to be
impartial in our appraisals. If he means to hold that such judgments
are better or more correct than those pronounced in the heat of
emotion, he has done nothing to substantiate his view. His whole
account of the various virtues is not an ethical establishment of
them but a psychological account of how we come to exhibit them.
As we shall see, Bentham and the utilitarians will make im-
partiality a cornerstone of their ethical system ("everyone to count
for one and no one for more than one"), combining it with a calcula-
tional ethics coming from Hutcheson. But they will have no psy-
chology of impartiality comparable to Smith's. On the other hand,
Kant will elevate the psychological attitude of impartiality into his
chief ethical principle, claiming that only acts arising from this
attitude, acts performed for the sake of duty, are truly good.
Although the moral-sense school had held that we approve and
disapprove acts morally in terms of their motives only, and this
spontaneously, by direct experience, yet in Hutcheson there was an-
other and an incompatible tendency. He became interested in trying
to reckon the goodness and badness of acts in terms of their con-
sequences. He attempted to develop a series of mathematical formu-
lae by which the relative probable goodness of acts, that is, their
probable effect upon the sum total of human happiness, could be

determined by ascertaining their motive (benevolent or malicious),
the capacity of their agent to carry out his motive, the number of
people affected and so forth.
In this day of moral uncertainty (aggravated by the sort of thing
undertaken in the present book), there may be some of my readers
who would be grateful for a definite, quantitative basis for the cal-
culation of morals. For their peace of mind and in the hope that
they will find it practically useful, I present one of Hutcheson's
formulas:
M = (B + Se)A;
u = (H + Sa)A;
therefore M â u = (BA + SeA) â (HA + SUA),
where M = moment of good,
u â moment of evil,
M â u = balance of good,
B = benevolence,
Se = enlightened self-love,
H = hatred or social malevolence,
Su = unenlightened self-love,
A = agent's ability.
This whole approach was taken over by Jeremy Bentham, who could
use it more consistently since not a member of the moral-sense school
âhe was in fact a follower of Gay and Hartley.
Bentham lived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth cen-
turies. His thought, however, characteristically places him in the
Enlightenment. Besides the early portion of Introduction to the
Principles of Morals and Legislation, The Deontology is an impor-
tant expression of his ethical ideas. The full title of this latter work
is "deontology; or, the science of morality: in which the harmony and
coincidence of duty and self-interest, virtue and felicity, prudence
and benevolence, are explained and exemplified." Bentham's main
concern in it is to establish the validity and proper limits of benev-
olence, or our other-regarding virtues generally, on the assumption
of a purely selfish motivation. This he does by weighing the pleas-
ures the individual receives from acting benevolently (uniting the
immediate gratification from so acting with the pleasures produced
by the good will of the party benefited) against the self-sacrifice
required by the benevolence.
Bentham's terminology shows the great influence upon him of
political economy in its classical form. He describes his Deontology

as "a budget of receipt and disbursement, out of every operation-ef-
which he [the moral agent] is to draw a balance of good." "Over
and above any present pleasure with which an act of beneficence may
be accompanied to the actor, the inducement which a man has for
its exercise" is "that which the husbandman has for the sowing of
his seed: as that which the frugal man has for laying up his money."
This whole account presupposes that pleasures and pains are sus-
ceptible to quite exact quantitative determinationâa view which is
definitely stated and developed in his earlier work, the Principles of
Morals and Legislation. In this Bentham attempts to show that the
total amount or "value" of pleasure and pain arising from an act is
a complex quantity, composed of several factors; or, phrased mathe-
matically, it is a function of several variables. These component
factors are the pleasure's (or the pain's) intensity, duration, certainty,
propinquity or nearness in time, fecundity or probability of being
followed by pleasure (in the case of pleasure, by pain in the case of
pain), purity or probability of not being followed by pain (in the
case of pleasure, by pleasure in the case of pain) and extent or the
number of persons experiencing it.
As a quantitative concept, this leaves much to be desired. The
probability of a pleasure's occurrence is hardly a quantity of pleas-
ure, although it is relevant to the "value" of the pleasure in our
everyday judgments. The probability of a pleasure's being followed
by pleasure is hardly another variable over and above that of the
total probable pleasure arising from the act. But the chief trouble
is revealed by my speaking of the concept as a "function." The value
of a function is determined whenever the values of its independent
variables are determined. This is not the case here. Bentham does
not show how intensity is to be weighted against duration, and so
on (as to extent, he does say that each person is to count for one,
which apparently means that each person's happiness is to be cal-
culated independently, in terms of the other variables, and then
these amounts added).
If the pseudo-precision of Bentham's concept is at first irritating,
we should not be blinded to the fact that pleasures can be roughly
calculated and balanced against pains. More important, the working
out of an acceptable quantitative concept and method of application
thereof waits upon psychology. The ethicist can construct a view on
the supposition of such a concept, leaving it actually for psychology
to furnish.
This reference to the distinction between ethics and psychology
leads us to note that Bentham in the Principles is not concerned
merely with the psychology of motives. Bringing in the extent of
pleasure does not mean he has given up the selfishness theory. He
is trying to state a method by which the goodness of an act may be
determinedâwhatever its motives. This can be done by summing
up the probable pleasures and pains it will produce and subtracting
the latter from the former. This clearly presupposes an ethical
criterion. It is that an act is good to the extent to which it promotes
pleasure in those affected by it. This he calls the principle of utility,
"which states the greatest happiness of all those whose interest is in
question, as being the right and proper, and only right and proper
and universally desirable, end of human action."
Thus, Bentham has a socially objective or impartial ethics. To
determine the goodness of an act I must consider its effects upon
others with the same care that I gauge its consequences upon myself.
In determining the total probable happiness effects, "everyone is to
count for one and no one for more than one." Yet as we have seen
Bentham is a disciple of the selfishness school. This does not directly
involve a contradiction. It may be that no one actually seeks to
promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number and yet that
may be the proper standard of the goodness of acts. It would follow
from these two assumptions that no one performs an act because it
is good. This, of course, may be a fact. However, it is not the sort of
fact that Bentham would care to admit, as we shall see very pres-
ently.
The problem now immediately arises, what is the proof of the
principle of utility? Bentham answers that it cannot be directly
proved. Proofs as to what is good must start from some basic assump-
tion, and this is it. Indirectly, however, it can be established or at
least made highly plausible. When any opponent attempts to deny
it, says Bentham, he tacitly assumes it; and whenever he attempts to
prove any other ethical standard he does so by silently using it as his
first premise. Furthermore, no other ethical standard can appeal to
the actual motives of men. Finally, the principle of utility alone fur-
nishes an objective standard that evaluates acts by properties (of
their consequences) observable to all, upon which all can agree, and
which are not matters of the subjective feelings of the one perform-
ing the moral evaluation.
Of these "proofs" it is clear that the basic one in Bentham's mind

is the second. Let us name it the proof from "psychological realism."
It holds that an ethical standard is unacceptable if it sets up as
good, and therefore as the goal for man, that for which there is no
actual motivation, as, for example, if one were to say, the good for
man is to colonize the moon or to breed asymmetrical ants. The
principle of utility alone is left after a rigorous use of this test. It
alone squares with actual motivesâall men seek pleasure and shun
pain.
There are two serious objections to this proof via the requirement
of psychological realism. In the first place, some ethicists have not
admitted that it is a valid requirement, and Bentham hardly has
anything convincing to say to them. The most striking case is Kant.
As we shall see, Kant held that even if no act has ever been per-
formed merely from a sense of duty, yet only an act so performed is
or could be morally good; and the theological doctrine of total
depravity agrees with Kant. In the second place, the requirement
eliminates Bentham's principle of utility. This result can arise on
either of two bases. First, it can be assumed with Hume that actions
are never due to reason, thus to calculation, and certainly never to a
computation of total possible pleasures and pains arising from them.
Second, it can be assumed with Bentham that calculative reason can
control action, but only for the agent's own anticipated pleasure. No
one, then, would seek the greatest happiness of the greatest number.
The difficulty may be put in another way. Bentham's ethical
standard was impartial; each person's pleasure was to count the
same (supposing it the same in amount) as every other person's. But
his psychology of motivation had no place for such impartiality; he
had nothing similar to Adam Smith's impartial spectatorâeach man
is interested only in his own pleasures. Kant was to remedy this
by a drastic change. He was to set up the motivation of the impartial
spectator as itself the ethical criterionâan act is good only if its mo-
tivation is wholly disinterested.
When we turn to Immanuel Kant we move from England to
Germany. Yet in him we sense much that was typical of the English
Enlightenment, although also something, by way of foretaste, of
German romanticism. He was of Scotch ancestry, his grandfather
having come to Germany from Scotland. He was greatly influenced
by British, particularly Scotch, philosophers. His Critique o/ Pure
Reason, one of the most important works of all time in theory of
knowledge, was written to meet the challenge of Hume's Treatise.

In ethics he was equally indebted to Scotch writersâto Hutcheson's
moral sense and Adam Smith's impartial spectator.
To this philosophic influence from across the North Sea should be
added a religious cause originating nearer home. As a child and
through his parents, Kant felt strongly the impact of the movement
in German Lutheranism known as "pietism." Pietism insisted on
the inner realities of religion as against outer ceremonies and in-
stitutionsâinner rebirth, the good will, the right motives. This
Kant conserved and united with a rationalistic emphasis running
through his whole philosophy. The result is found in an inner yet
rationalistic religion, expounded in Religion within the Limits of
Reason Alone, that essentially redefined all the leading Lutheran
doctrines in terms of a purely rational morality. That morality had
been formulated earlier in his Fundamental Principles of the Meta-
physic of Morals and The Critique of Practical Reason.
As we have seen, Bentham developed a calculational ethics from
some suggestions in Hutcheson. By it, the moral status of an act
can be determined wholly by reference to the effects, in pleasures
and pains, of the act. This calculation disregards motives, or rather
evaluates them by their probable consequences. By themselves, apart
from pleasurable and painful effects, motives are neither good nor
bad. We are fooled here, says Bentham, because we give pejorative
names to them and thereby tacitly evaluate them. When we call
the sexual desire "lust" we have thereby already damned it; when
we speak of it as "love" we have ennobled it by our language. As
such, however, it is neither good nor bad.
Kant developed the opposite emphasis in Hutchesonâthe moral
sense approves and disapproves acts wholly in terms of their motives.
An act done from benevolence is good, from malice, evil. As Kant
puts it, our abilities, our wealth, our social station are certainly
relevant to our happiness, but they do not have anything to do with
the morality of our acts. What is good about a good act is simply
the good will from which it arose. Even if the good will is impotent,
is unable to put its intention into effect, it remains goodâas good
as though it did achieve its purpose.
When is the will good? Not when it wills the right thing, merely.
We must distinguish carefully between acts which accord with duty
and those done from duty. Our duty may be to perform an act, say
of benevolence. The mere doing of the act, however, is not good. It
must be done out of good will, from a sense of duty. If it is done

from an inclination or desire, however altruistic, it is not morally
good. Suppose a philanthropist performs an act of public utility
because he enjoys helping others. Then the act has no moral worth.
But suppose he is absorbed in deep personal sorrow, that he "tears
himself out of this dead insensibility, and performs the action with-
out any inclination to it, but simply from duty, then first has his
action its genuine moral worth."
What is it to act from duty? To act out of respect for law, not
legal law, but moral law. This seems circularâto be moral is to act
out of respect for moral law. But Kant has in mind not some con-
crete set of moral rules, such as the Ten Commandments of the Old
Testament. When he speaks of the moral law he is thinking ab-
stractly of the nature or form of law. Moral law is that which deter-
mines right and wrong universally, for everyone. Hence, to act out
of respect for law means to act on a principle or maxim which could
be formulated as moral legislation. "I am never to act otherwise
than so that I could also will that my maxim should become a uni-
versal law."
What does this mean? Perhaps to a certain extent we can under-
stand it by remembering that Kant was greatly influenced by New-
tonian science and the concept of an unexceptional uniform1ty in
occurrences. But it should also be pointed out that he was one of the
first to make and adhere consistently to the distinction between
factual and normative questions. He saw clearly that a scientific law
is a factual matter; a moral law, a normative one. Moreover, Kant
felt strongly that a moral law is binding in the sense of expressing
an obligation quite independently of matters of fact; it formulates
a duty that holds whether we like it or not, and whether we actually
adhere to it or not. This he stated as a kind of necessity: "Thou
shalt not lie" is binding upon everyone, whatever his circumstances,
and entirely apart from the describable facts of his conduct (whether,
for example, he does or does not lie).
To find such fact-independent necessity, Kant turned to logic. He
thought that some maxims could not be universalized without run-
ning into contradiction. Thus, he said that a lying promise if uni-
versalized leads to contradiction because then no one would believe
the promisor and hence the latter could not lie. This self-contradic-
tory character of its opposite confers necessity upon the universal
maxim: "Thou shalt not lie." But, at least at times, Kant seemed to
realize that sheer logic would leave ethics empty of content.

I think it is appropriate, although not of itself adequate in under-
standing Kant, to point out that one aspect of his "categorical im-
perative," as he sometimes calls his duty-for-duty's-sake principle, is
an emphasis upon absolute impartiality. One is to make no excep-
tions for, nor grant special privileges to, oneself. In this respect the
categorical imperative is like the moral sense and the impartial spec-
tator. But whereas the moral sense was simply reflexive, Kant's good
will is a source of action. For Hutcheson an act is good if done
from benevolence; the moral sense simply adds its approval. For
Kant an act is good only if done from duty; the approval of the good
will must be the sole motivation or the act is not praiseworthy.
Thus, only as one acts from impartiality is one truly righteous.

CHAPTER 9
Romanticism and Values
Romanticism in Ethics
In following the vicissitudes of the history of modern science, we
had occasion, in the first part of the present study, to note some-
thing of the complex nature and origin of the romantic movement
in the nineteenth century. This development never became strong
enough to be properly designated a "counterrevolution" against
science, although it did have great influence in the area of social and
economic thought. Its most forceful impact came in the spheres of
religion, literature, music and fine art. Only of slightly less sub-
stantiality was its effect upon ethics and jurisprudence. This dif-
ferential can be readily understood if we think of the movement, as
I believe we may, as an attempt to reassert human values in the face
of what it conceived to be their repudiation by the new science. It
was, of course, unable to arrest, to modify in any fundamental way
or even to slow the pace, significantly, of the forward march of this
all-transforming human enterprise. But in the value-creating and
value-investigating activities of the human mind it was profoundly
influential. Here it collided head-on with the spirit of the Age of
Reason, which was the spirit of victorious science.
We found several good reasons for this new development, a few of
which might be mentioned again. Fundamentally, perhaps, there
was just the reassertion by the human mind of its belief in values.
Unfortunately, the tendency of science to become value free was
confused with the proneness of certain hangers-on of science to deny
all value. Moreover, the application of science in industryâand for
that matter in human life generallyânot only failed to produce all
the improvements dreamed of by the leaders in the Enlightenment:
it seemed to bring in its own special evils, as instanced in the factory
towns in England. And many people (not without reason) traced
the French Revolution, in its ideology, back to "les philosophes."

[9] Romanticism and Values 395
Now so far as this revolution came to be feared and decriedâas was
the case rather widely in England, particularly on the part of those
in powerâthe thinking of these "ideologues" was similarly feared.
In Germany, after Napoleon's successes, it was hated, as something
French, against which was to be put the spirit and the language of
the German people.
In art itself the revolt came in the form of opposition to the
regular and rationalistic rules of classicism and academicism: crea-
tive genius was not to be so fettered. The language of rigid form was
replaced by that of feelingâfeeling for the commonplace, for Nature,
for one's native land, its customs and its folk.
Ethics felt this change of atmosphere. In the Enlightenment, as
we have seen, it was closely attached to science; indeed it was often
confused therewithâbeing a phase of physiology for Hobbes, of
geometry for Cudworth, Clarke and Price, of psychology for Hutche-
son and Adam Smith. It was only at the very end of the eighteenth
century that men saw clearly that "ought" and "is" are two: Ben-
tham found them both in pleasure, but very definitely in two differ-
ent roles, as standard of what men ought to seek, and as object of
what they do; and Kant, at the opposite pole, was willing to consider
that no one ever has been motivated as he should. This distinction
itself, although in implication cutting ethics off from science, clearly
was the handiwork of reason. Indeed, both Kant and Bentham
showed throughout their ethics the intellectualism of the Enlighten-
ment, where analysis, classification, deductionânot right feelingâ
form the bases. All this of course was to be rejected by romanticism.
It was to return to an amalgam of fact and value, where whatever is,
is right, and reality is seen not through abstract and factual eyes
but through the colored glasses of what ought to be. The universe
must not be cut in two.
This refusal of romanticism to make an intellectual distinction
was quite in character. It insisted on concreteness, wholeness, every-
thing in context. In ethics this had vast effects. The romantic saw
the individual in society: he would not take him by himself, as
having separate motives or a moral sense; and morals were no gen-
eralized reactions of the single person's mind. To grasp the in-
dividual as he is (which curiously also showed him as he ought to
be), one must take him in his family, town and state, in his culture
and his epoch. All history must be brought to bear to give an un-
derstanding, and the spirit of his time and of the world be expressed
in him if we would be fair. Ethics thus became a glorified cosmology
and cosmology an ethics.
The shift in point of view, in total mental climate, can hardly
be more strikingly portrayed than by the contrast when we go to
Hegel from a Bentham or a Kant. We have, we may recall, already
made acquaintance with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel when we
briefly traced the antecedents of Karl Marx's dialectical materialism.
For this romantic's views on ethics, our most important sources are
his Philosophy of Right, Philosophy of History and the third part
of his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, entitled "Philoso-
phy of Mind."
Hegel specifically criticized any morality of motives: Kant's con-
cept of a duty for the duty's sake is viciously abstract; it cannot form
the basis for a deduction of any particular duty, for "it lacks all
organic filling." In fact, the whole morality of motives is abstractâ
just as on the other hand is Bentham's morality of consequencesâ
and should be replaced by an ethics of the total, concrete act. It is
perhaps permissible in times of social decay to withdraw into one's
conscience to find the content of the "good" and a valid authority
for duty. But this is so far from a complete morality that it is even
perverted: in its tendency to make the individual will the final au-
thority, it is apt to enthrone caprice and subjective opinion, to jus-
tify any act (whatever its consequences) on the basis that the agent
had good intentions. A proper definition of duty must have "ethical
objectivity," that is, it must define duty in terms of the individual's
proper place in, and the subordination of his will to, the social insti-
tutions of his time and country.
Let us follow Hegel's own advice and be "concrete," using his
example of the family. First, we must note the characteristically
Hegelian trick of considering this institution under three aspects.
These are: marriage, the family budget and children. Throughout,
the emphasis is upon the unity of the members. Consider marriage.
Hegel opposed any views basing marriage on mere sex, on civil con-
tract or on subjective feelings. Although the starting point of any
marriage may be due to chance association, every individual enter-
ing this relation must (to attain "ethical objectivity"âI share the
reader's bewilderment as to what this is, but it apparently is some-
thing awfully proper and eminently respectable) give up his private
personality and identify himself and his good with the unity of the
family which the marriage sets up. Marriages controlled wholly by
previous arrangements of the parents are more ethical than those
resultant from the inclinations of the individuals involved, and in
general, marriage is to be based as little as possible on the feelings
of the parties to it, since these are subjective and transitory. The
ceremonial aspects of the rite are important, not because it is one of
the sacraments of the church, but because it is a public recognition
and acceptance of the institution, completing the wills of the in-
dividuals involved and elevating them to social and ethical objec-
tivity. Marriage must be monogamous, since it demands a complete
identification of personalities with each other (and who could com-
pletely identify himself with several different women?). It must be
exogamous, since all members of a given family are really one and
marriage requires renunciation of differences and identification of
personalities. The culmination of this bonding is in the children
coming from it, where the ethical (institutional) union is reflected
in the physical.
No one illustration, however, can do justice to Hegel's ethical
position, which is essentially a total system. Its plan is triadicâ
threefold divisions proliferating everywhere. For ethics, the basic
triad is: (1) the individual as independent and capricious, deter-
mined only by his own subjective will, (2) society as external to the
individual, as an abstract legal framework that disregards differences
between individuals, (3) the concrete social institution, where the
individual and society are one, the individual's will conforming to
social needs, the social factor becoming intimately bound up with
actual individuals. In general, the goal here is "true" freedom; not
the license of capricious choice, but the liberty arising from the
individual's loyal devotion to his society and acceptance of its restric-
tions upon him.
Now the question arises, what does Hegel mean by this triad,
and by the innumerable sub-triads he includes within it? There are
two interpretations, each having some grounds in what our philoso-
pher himself says. On the one hand, it can be considered a method
of gaining the truth, whereby we in our thinking pass from one
abstraction to another that approximates more nearly the total con-
crete reality, until at last we attain the latter. This interpretation fits
best the probable actual source of the dialectic historicallyânamely,
the disputation in the medieval university. As was mentioned
earlier, this was a teaching device whereby one candidate was given
a thesis to defend, another, or the audience, the job of refuting it by
establishing its antithesis. The master concluded matters by syn-
thesizing the truth to be found on both sides. Of course, Hegel gave
much more profound significance to his dialectic than is compatible
with viewing it as such a pedagogical device. In fact, he talks as
though it were right out there in the world, like the swing of a pen-
dulum or the passing of the seasons. This fact is the basis of the
other interpretation. It is that the dialectic is a description of a
mechanism in the real world, a statement of actual social changes, a
profound history of man's concept of freedom (in our illustration)
not as consciously held, but as unconsciously embodied in the in-
stitutions and cultural attitudes of different periods and peoples.
A portion of the dialectic that seems most readily interpreted in
the first fashion is found in Hegel's Philosophy of Right. The main
triad here is: (1) abstract right, (2) morality, (3) the ethical system.
Abstract right is law, in the legal sense, leaving out the individual's
inner life and purposes. It is subdivided into the sub-triad: private
property, contract and tort. In morality the individual is viewed
wholly from within, in terms of his intention or will. The ethical
system is really the union of the first two in social institutions. It
includes the sub-triad: family, civil community and state. It is in the
last of these that we grasp objective, concrete, ethical truth. It is
through identifying himself with his state that the individual finds
freedom, for it is as a loyal citizen that his true character is attained.
"Let man be aware of it or not, his essence realizes itself as an in-
dependent power, in which particular persons are only phases. The
state is the march of God in the world." The state should allow its
citizens to live so that they think they have brought about their
condition by their own free choice; actually, however, they should be
determined by their objective relations within the framework of the
state.
The state itself, however, has its place in a world movement and
this takes us from the interpretation that views the dialectic as an
intellectual approximation of the total truth by surmounting ab-
stractions to one that treats it as an actual historical change.
In the Philosophy of History Hegel portrays human history as a
spiritual development. It is the story of man's achievement of free-
dom. Hegel outlines three great stages. "The Orientals have not
attained the knowledge that SpiritâMan as suchâis free; and be-
cause they do not know this, they are not free. They only know that
one is free. . . . The consciousness of Freedom first arose among the
Greeks, and therefore they were free; but they, and the Romans like-
wise, knew only that some are freeânot man as such. . . . The
German nations, under the influence of Christianity, were the first
to attain the consciousness, that man, as man, is free: that it is the
freedom of Spirit which constitutes his essence." In this last stage
the state includes all individuals as its citizens and recipients of its
benefits; but they in turn must identify themselves completely with
it and its welfare.
In all this there is a strange parading of the normative in descrip-
tive clothes. The unwary reader may suppose he is getting history
and an objective analysis of social institutions: actually he is being
given ethics, an ethics claiming that the subordination of the in-
dividual to the state in Hegel's Germany defines the highest good.
There is in fact a very vicious double confusion here. From the es-
sentially factual (and in some sense no doubt true) contention that
all actual individuals are in social contexts and are to a great degree
molded and determined thereby, there is, first, supposed that norma-
tively this is good, and hence, second, that each one should embrace
it. This approach turns our attention away from the obvious fact
that even a revolting and anti-social person is in a social context,
and that whatever attitude one takes toward one's historical and cul-
tural environment there is still the value question whether this is the
proper or the best one to adopt. It is difficult to avoid the convic-
tion that, after the clear distinction of what is and what ought to be
arising at the close of the Enlightenment, the romantic's selling of a
conformist program as to the latter on the supposed mere statement
of the former is a shabby kind of trick.
The romantic movement, so important in the early nineteenth
century in Germany, moved across the North Sea to England where
it became very influential in the second half of that century. We
have explored briefly in Part I some of the reasons for this shift.
They tie in, in part, with the sense of resentment and shame over
the lot of the industrial worker, and the use of this feeling by the
representatives of the older aristocracy to help in their struggle with
capitalist manufacturers. There are of course other causes as well,
notably a sense of a threat to religion from the scientific spirit of the
Enlightenment. These interests are revealed quite clearly in the
lives of several of the leaders in the romantic movementâfor ex-
ample, in those of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, John

and Edward Caird, Thomas Hill Green, Bernard Bosanquet and
F. H. Bradley, all forward-looking in their social views but reaction-
ary in ethical theory.
For purposes of illustration, we might glance briefly at the ethical
ideas of Green, particularly as expressed in his Prolegomena to
Ethics. Although Green was primarily an Hegelian in outlook, we
find that Kant's idea of the good will and Butler's analysis of desire
were important in determining his thought. The utilitarians are
wrong, argues Green, in supposing that pleasure is the object of all
desire. As soon as we translate "pleasure" into "satisfaction" we
recognize that pleasure arises from getting what is desired. It is then
possible to define what is morally good in terms of satisfaction, but
since some desires are bad and all desires have their own concrete
objects, such a definition must be made more specific. The morally
good is not simply the satisfactory, but that which satisfies certain
desires, namely, the desires of a morally good man. We cannot deter-
mine exactly what the objects of these desires are, but we can say
they must lie in the direction of the progress of humanity toward
an ideal society. This implies that the central ideal of the morally
good man is the self-development of himself and others, the realiza-
tion of human personality.
This can be shown from an analysis of will. If I have an impulse
to act in a certain way, it is not necessary that I yield to it, that I will
to act in that way. Hobbes was wrong when he made decision simply
the last appetite before action. Will involves a further step. Besides
the impulse I must actively identify myself with it and with the type
of act toward which it moves me. Thus, the real object willed is not
just an act, but myself as so acting; I will my own expansion and
development, my own self-realization. This is clearly seen in all the
major decisions of life: choice of a vocation, of an education, of a
mate. The object willed is not some external thing nor some tran-
sient pleasure, but myself as changed and developed in some respect.
However, such self-realization cannot be merely private and in-
dividual. Society enters not merely as a necessary means to the
attainment of one's capacities but as giving content to the end itself.
My goal is the development of myself as a personality, but personal-
ity is a social concept. I can be a person only in a society of persons,
mutually influencing one another. Such a society is not a mere sum
of individuals; there is a common good binding them together. This
common good is the ideal of the perfection of human personality as

the true objective for all; it is this that unifies and transcends the
individuals involved.
This last idea introduces us to the most characteristic yet most
abstruse of Green's ideas. The human spirit, whether in a given
individual, a community, humanity, or in that divine archetype in
Nature of which man is but an imitation, involves a unifying prin-
ciple that is the mark of spirit and reveals wherein man transcends
whatever science can discover about the world. It is only in con-
sciousness that an aggregate of separate items can be unified into a
totality. Consider your pleasures of last year, last month, yesterday.
They appeared, then ceased. To make a whole they must be thought
of together, although they cannot be heaped up in a single time and
place. Consciousness, which is not one of the pleasures so united, is
the principle that apprehends them in one totality; any goodness
must reside in it. Similarly, human society is composed of individ-
uals in diverse places doing many things. Its unity can only be
found in a conscious act that unifies. Nature itself, the whole uni-
verse of actual fact, must likewise be made one by such a spiritual
principleâin traditional terminology, by God. It is the realization
of God in us which is the true aim in all self-development. We want,
that is, not a series of satisfactions of separate desires, but a realiza-
tion of a single, permanent self (or rather, Self).
Whatever may be one's reaction to this strange compound of
metaphysics and psychology, from our standpoint there is one very
crucial objection to it. Like Hegel and the romanticists generally,
Green confuses the normative and the factual. He attempts to an-
swer the question as to what men ought to desire by showing what
they do and what this supposedly involves. Grant that there is a
spiritual principle in nature which is imitated in man, particularly
in man's endeavor to develop his personality, this at best would
simply be a fact; it would not establish how man ought to act.
I regret it very deeply if I have given the impression of some
slight lack of sympathy with romanticism in ethics, for I am at heart
one with it in one respect: a scientific ethics is quite impossible, for
ethics studies values, science facts. But the way out, if we would
escape complete skepticism as to values, is not by confusion, by
somehow rolling fact and value into one, and thereby opposing all
the progress made by science. Rather we must pursue further the
separation (in the intellect not in fact) of "ought" and "is," and just
as science has successfully hit upon a method of establishing the

latter, so must ethics resolutely seek, however dim the hope, a way
of ascertaining the former in whatever degree of reliability this may
prove accessible to the human mind.
The Historico-Romantic Theory of Law and the State
It is the custom on the part of historians to call Jean Jacques
Rousseau "the ideological father of the French Revolution." In his
time, Rousseau fathered a good many children, not all of whom he
was willing to own. Whether he would have accepted the French
Revolution as his offspring is a problem (he died about a decade
before its birth). Unquestionably the leaders of this movement,
particularly the Jacobins, derived most of their ideas from his writ-
ings, just as they lifted their slogan, "Liberty, equality, fraternity"
bodily from him, and similarly their epigram, "Man is born free;
and everywhere he is in chains." The basic ideas of the Revolution
are incorporated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of
Citizens as adopted by the National Assembly in 1789 and made a
preamble to the first constitution of the Republic of France. In the
main, they are the same as those Locke adopted to justify the Glori-
ous Revolution of 1688, and Paine and Jefferson utilized to instigate
and shape the American Revolution of 1776. They are the concepts
of natural rights, the original equality of men and the social con-
tract, with which we are thoroughly familiar. They were embraced
by the leaders in the French Enlightenment, by Voltaire and the
Encyclopedists. For example, Diderot in an article in the Encyclope-
dia on natural law espoused the notions of the rationality of man,
the law of nature, the equality of all men in their natural rights
and so on.
In the light of these facts, the reader may wonder why Rousseau
is discussed in the present chapter and taken indeed (as will be
seen) as one of the progenitors of the romantic movement in legal
and political thought. One could of course point out that he con-
demned Diderot's article on natural law in almost every particular.
This in itself, however, is not too significant, for it could be attri-
buted to Rousseau's psychopathic personality that forced him to
oppose whatever anyone else said and even to turn viciously against
his best friends. But there are grounds for denying that Rousseau
was a natural-rights man, that he represented the kind of liberal
individualism to be found in the Age of Reason: or better, there
is evidence that his was a divided mind, in part adhering to this

rationalistic individualism, in part embracing an organic view of
society based on feeling and expressed by the phrase "general will"
or "the will of the community," also adopted by the framers of the
Declaration of Rights.
Certainly there is plausibility in describing Rousseau as an ex-
treme individualist who saw all social conventions and restrictions
upon the individual as wholly evil and hence to be thrown off in
order to allow him to "return to nature." Rousseau would seem to
go Tom Paine one better. The latter condemned all governments
as bad, advising our choosing the least evil among them; Rousseau
would have even the customs and ornaments of civilization evil,
advising us to leave them all and go back to the state of nature. In
his Discourse on the Moral Effects of the Arts and Sciences, he con-
demns the vast inequalities of power and wealth in civilization by
contrasting them with conditions in a state of nature, "since it is
plainly contrary to the law of nature . . . that the privileged few
should gorge themselves with superfluities, while all the starving
multitude are in want of the bare necessities of life."
Despite all this, it is about equally correct, in fact, slightly more
than equally correct, to describe Rousseau as an advocate of a most
extreme doctrine of the organic nature of society and of the need
of subordinating the individual to the social whole. He saw clearly
that the state of nature is a fiction; he also found the ideal situation
not in such a condition but in the state set up by social contract. He
discerned that not only political power but moral achievement and
even individual liberty can be discovered nowhere but in organized
society.
Such a paradoxical thinker is hard to classify. It is, I admit, some-
what arbitrary to use him as one of the earliest representatives of
the romantic school of thought rather than as one of the last propo-
nents of the doctrine of natural law. I am, however, at least half-
convinced that "the state of nature," "the social contract," "the nat-
ural individual," and similar phrases are but literary devices for
Rousseau. I do not mean to say that in this matter he was just dis-
honestâas he certainly was in his personal affairs, preaching parental
love but depositing his own illegitimate offspring in foundling
homesârather, he was striving for effect.
It must be remembered that Rousseau was living in a France of
Louis XV. All the literary and artistic genius of the nation was
fostered by and dependent upon a highly artificial court life. In

the Parisian salon, the world of the French peasant or worker was
a closed book, save in some idealized Arcadian picture. Rousseau
wished to condemn not society, in favor of some anarchic life of
separate individuals, but the sort of artificial society he saw in the
most "civilized" section of France, yet his condemnation had per-
force to appeal to exactly this section as the only group with sufficient
literary cultivation to appreciate it. (I am reminded of a certain
school of contemporary philosophy, now centered at Oxford, that
wishes to condemn all philosophers as psychopathic, but whose argu-
ments are so subtle and require so much knowledge of philosophy
that only philosophers can understand them.)
It should also be noted, moreover, that Rousseau's thought seems
to have undergone some development. He perhaps became increas-
ingly convinced that individuality and freedom can be attained only
in organized society and only as the individual subordinates his
private will to the general will.
Rousseau's Social Contract, our main source of his political and
legal ideas, shows quite clearly the influence of Hobbes, leading me
to remark that as the romantic movement was the illegitimate child
of Rousseau and Rousseau was the natural son of Hobbes, the ro-
mantic school was the doubly bastard grandchild of the Engl1sh
philosopher. Perhaps it would not be too misleading to think of
The Social Contract as the answer of a liberal whose chief device is
to develop Hobbes' idea that the contract in some mystical fashion
melts the plurality of individual wills into a single social and politi-
cal one. Rousseau starts with an account of the state of nature which
makes it as individualistic and egoistic as it was for Hobbes. Each
man is only concerned with his own preservation. There is here no
social authority or organization. Man leaves this condition by enter-
ing a social contract. He thereby alienates some of his original
liberty. Obviously he will do this only if he secures some advantage
thereby. The advantage is a greater security in his liberty. But this
introduces Rousseau's basic problem (obviously a value problem,
not a factual one): How may an individual protect his liberty, by
entering the social contract, without subtracting from that liberty, as
Hobbes had contended was necessary?
Rousseau believed this question could be answered. His solution
amounts to a development of what I have called the mystical element
in his predecessor's account of the genesis of the sovereign will. The
contracting individual, argued Rousseau, does not alienate or trans-

fer some only of his liberty or individual rights that he may be the
better protected in the remainder. The contract is a total alienation
of them. But this transference is not to other individuals, and it
does not set up or authorize as sovereign a will that is outside the
contract. It is a transference to the whole community. Thus, since
the community is his, he does not really lose any rights. (This re-
minds one of the Soviet worker, who, bemoaning his loss of the
right to strike for better wages and living conditions, is told: You
can only strike when the tools of production are not yours, as in
bourgeois countries; but here you own everythingâto strike would
be to strike against yourself!) The individual's liberty is saved by
being transformed. No longer self-centered and selfish, it has be-
come socially centered upon the common good.
This new whole created by the social contract Rousseau calls "the
general will." "At once, in place of the individual personality of
each contracting party, this act of association creates a moral and
collective body . . . receiving from this act its unity, its common
identity, its life and its will." The general will is both a new, public
person, distinguishable from the individuals entering the contract,
and yet is the very will of these latter conserving their rights and
liberties. (The Germans had a word for itâ"aufgehoben," meaning
both canceled or destroyed, and lifted up, thus retained.) It is only
as men find their liberty in the general will that they are truly free;
only hereânot in the state of natureâare they equal in their rights
and privileges.
However, despite the fact that under the contract the individual
becomes so transformed that he finds his own liberty in the general
will, the latter must be clearly distinguished from the individual's
will. It is an agreement of individual wills, but it is more than this.
It is an essential agreement coming from a singleness of objectiveâ
the common good. Even under the social contract there are individ-
ual wills each seeking what is of particular benefit to that individual.
Thus, the general will is not just the totality of individual wills. It
is not a majority of individual choices. It is not even the unanimous
concurrence of individual wills, where each is bent on what is of
individual benefit. It is the will of all when all will rationallyâwith
information, after deliberation and for the common good. (The
reader may construct an ideogram of this by eliminating in Fig.
33, P- 344, tne external potentate, changing the name of the beast
from 'The Great Leviathan' to 'The General Will,' and transform-

ing Its act from one of giving sovereignty to another to one of
crowning Itself.)
Unlike the wills of individuals, the general will is infallible; "the
general will is always right and tends to the public advantage. . . ."
Rousseau does not say, as Hobbes had said for his sovereign, that
what is socially right is simply defined as that which the general will
decrees. This may be obscurely present in his thought, for he gives
no reasons why the general will can make no mistake as to what the
state ought to do. And he follows the absolutists in claiming that
the general will, once constituted by the social contract, is indestruc-
tible. He admits that a state may become corrupt. "Does it follow
from this that the general will is exterminated or corrupted? Not
at all: it is always constant, unalterable and pure; but it is subordi-
nated to other wills which encroach upon its sphere." Its absolute-
ness is likewise revealed in the fact that wherever individual wills
conflict with it, it is justified in compelling conformity with itself:
"whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do
so by the whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be
forced to be free. ..."
In this last sentence Rousseau seems to be adding insult to injury,
but this is not quite the case. Although the general will is as absolute
as Bodin's or Hobbes' sovereign in being indestructible, always right,
always justified in compelling conformity, yet there is a difference.
The general will is, after all, the will of the people. Never does
Rousseau give the impression, as Bodin and Hobbes frequently do
with their sovereign, that he has confused the general will with the
will of some individual, whether prince or elected public official. No
matter how much force, tradition and prestige it may command, the
will of a monarch, a council, a government is not the general will.
It is only an instrument of the latter. As soon as it fails to accord
with and serve the general will, it has lost all its authority and the
people have the right to disobey and, if necessary, to revolt.
Actually, Rousseau favored as the ideal form of government the
direct democracy only possible in a small state such as the cantons of
his native Switzerland or the city-state of Greek antiquity. This of
course was an anachronism in the eighteenth century with its large
national states. There is no basis in Rousseau's general theory for
this preference. In fact, even the allegiance he gives to the principle
of democracy, to the idea of the sovereignty of the people and the

right of revolt against a government that does not carry out the
general will, seems to be accidental. The doctrine of the general will
could be used to justify the most extreme monarchy or even an
arbitrary tyranny rather than popular government. Let us set up a
hypothetical line of reasoning. The general will is absolutely sover-
eign. It is not the same as the majority of individual wills nor is it
even identical with the unanimous will of all. Where then can we
find it? Only in him who bears or epitomizes the life of the state as
an organic wholeâthe absolute prince, dictator or whom you will.
That this line of reasoning is not perhaps entirely hypothetical is
indicated by Robespierre's statement, referring to the Jacobins, "Our
will is the general will."
I hope I have made out a case for the thesis that Rousseau was one
of the parents of the romantic-historical school of legal and political
thought. His contribution was in the direction of a voluntaristic
organicism. Other genes were necessary for the formation of the
species we are to consider. One in particular was the emphasis upon
the uniqueness of each nation's culture, character and laws. For
this we turn to another eighteenth-century Frenchman, Charles de
Montesquieu. He, like Rousseau, was in great part a child of the
Enlightenment. In particular, unlike most of the later members of
the school, he was a liberal in his political allegiance. Though a
baron, a minor official in the government and a writer of racy tales
(Personal Letters) appealing to aristocratic frequenters of French
salons, he was at heart on the side of popular government. Appar-
ently his chief practical aim was to soften the tyrannical rule of the
Bourbons in France into something resembling the limited mon-
archy in England after the Glorious Revolution. The autocratic
excesses of Louis XIV had called forth reactions toward a more
restricted or at least enlightened monarchy. Montesquieu had trav-
eled in England and been greatly impressed with their civil liberties
under monarchy.
As the title of his chief work, The Spirit of Laws, suggests,
Montesquieu is concerned with the spirit or ethos of the laws of a
given country, not in the mystical sense of the nineteenth-century
romantics but in a significance more appropriate to the eighteenth
centuryânamely that of the whole complex of customs, attitudes,
economic relations, political mechanisms, education, religion of a
people and even the climate and topography of their habitat as those
favor a given system of law and form of government. His basic con-
tention is that laws and governments cannot arbitrarily rule a people,
but must be appropriate to them and their way of life.
The main forms of government and associated systems of law, are
republican, aristocratic, monarchical and despotic. Each variety re-
quires a peculiar set of virtues for its maintenance. The preserva-
tion of democratic government enjoins the political virtues, on the
part of the people, of patriotism, a sense of equality and frugality;
aristocracy demands moderation or self-restraint; monarchy is based
on class distinction maintained by the sense of honor; despotism is
founded on fear sufficient to extinguish all ambition. The purpose
of education, in these several governments, is to develop the general
spirit requisite to their continuance.
Likewise, the laws of a country should aim to strengthen the
attitudes necessary to the maintenance of the type of government
involved. Liberty is not something absolute, but is relative to the
laws. In order for the citizen to have this liberty under law, it is
necessary that the different branches of government serve as checks
upon one another and therefore that they be not constituted by the
same people. "When the legislative and executive powers are united
in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be
no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch
or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyranni-
cal manner. Again, there is no liberty, if the judiciary power be not
separated from the legislative and executive." This idea was taken
up by our founding fathers, particularly the Federalists, who were
afraid both of monarchs and people, and was used to form the keel-
son of our constitution. Only in times of crises have we witnessed
how unworkable it really can beâwith Congress ranged against the
administration and the whole government frustrated.
To return to Montesquieu: the spirit of a people, and therefore its
laws and institutions, are relative to its physical environment. It
seems clear that Montesquieu got this idea from Bodinâwho how-
ever had not been able to integrate it into his system, whereas it
plays an important role in Montesquieu's. Climate is especially im-
portant. Cold climates produce strong, active nations, more war-like
and liberty loving; warm ones more emotional, less energetic peoples,
who are more willing to submit even to absolute despots. Topog-
raphy is also important. Broken, mountainous country, by dividing
the inhabitants, produces small nations, jealous of independence, re-

publican; large open plains, larger units, less concerned with free-
dom.
In like manner, Montesquieu tries to trace the connections of the
spirit of a people with its natural resources and commercial relations.
Religion and the various historical legal systems are considered in
conjunction with these basic determinants of the life and institutions
of a nation.
It should thus be clear that Montesquieu is developing no abstract
theory of natural rights so dominant at his time and with those of his
political persuasion. On the other hand, he is not concerned to
overthrow such a theory. His attempt is to understand the laws of
a people as an expression of all the factors determining their life.
Although Montesquieu is not a romantic conservative, it is not diffi-
cult to see how an advocate of the status quo could use his ideas,
could argue that since the laws and political institutions of a nation
are determined by its environment and history, they should not be
tampered with; there is more appropriateness in them than in any
supposed inprovement some meddler might try to devise. It is pre-
cisely this line of thought, combined with derision for the abstrac-
tions of the theory of natural rights, which we find in the writings
of the next man for our consideration.
Edmund Burke was an English politician and pamphleteer, an
orator and rhetorician of the grand style of the nineteenth century
(whose last living representative we have in our own day in the per-
son of Winston Churchill). He was more concerned with influencing
the course of political events than with any statement of political
theory until the French Revolution stirred him to political philoso-
phizing, especially in his Reflections on the Revolution in France.
Although a Whigâand thus a political descendent of the Glorious
Revolution of 1688âand an advocate of leniency toward the colo-
nists in the American Revolution, nevertheless when revolution hit
just across the channel in France, even before it turned into the
excesses of the reign of terror, the horror of it and of the fact that
there were English sympathizers with it, turned his thoughts toward
anti-revolutionary theory. Not that he involved himself in any
theoretical contradiction, for he had not accepted the ideology of the
American revolutionistsânatural rights, popular consent and all
that. His grounds for championing the American cause were practi-
cal (and Burke was an eminently practical man): English measures
against the colonists were inexpedient, they would not attain their
aim, they would simply increase ill will. But I cannot avoid the
conviction that there is a contradiction in fundamental attitudes, in
basic political loyalties, although perhaps that should not be held
against a rhetorician of such eminence as Burke.
In a letter in answer to Philip Francis, who after seeing the proof
sheets had tried to persuade him not to publish the Reflections, and
had criticized a foppish passage in praise of Marie Antoinette, Burke
wrote: "Are not high rank, great splendour of descent, great personal
elegance and outward accomplishments ingredients of moment in
forming the interest we take in the misfortunes of men? ... I tell
you again that the recollection of the manner in which I saw the
queen of France in 1774, and the contrast between that brilliancy,
splendour and beauty, with the prostrate homage of a nation to her,
and the abominable scene of 1789 [the meeting of the National
Assembly when the Declaration of the Rights of Man was adopted]
which I was describing, did draw tears from me and wetted my
paper. These tears came again into my eyes almost as often as I
looked at the description,âthey may again. . . . My friend, I tell
you it is truth; and that it is true when you and I are no more; and
will exist as long as men with their natural feelings shall exist."
The French Revolution, Burke contends, makes clear the evils of
such abstract theorizing about government and law as is to be found
in the doctrine of natural rights. We cannot determine whether laws
and governments are good or bad, should be defended or over-
thrown, by looking to some naked metaphysical abstraction. "Cir-
cumstances (which for some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in
reality to every political principle its distinguishing color and dis-
criminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil
and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind." So France
is not to be congratulated on a revolution that has enshrined an
abstract principle of liberty and equality. The important thing is
what this principle will come to mean in the concrete life of France.
Will it bulwark peace and order, morality, social manners, religion,
and property? If not, it is no benefit to France and should be a
cause of commiseration, not of congratulation.
Burke is particularly concerned, however, not for the French but
for the English. There were those in England sympathetic with the
aims of the French revolutionists (indeed, Reflections was explicitly
written as a reply to a sermon by Richard Priceâone of the Cam-
bridge Platonists with whose ethical views we have gained some

acquaintanceâexpressing sympathy toward the French revolution-
ists). Burke denounces those who claim for the people the right "to
choose our own governors, to cashier them for misconduct, and to
frame a government for ourselves." And worse, there is the conten-
tion that these claims are in accord with the Glorious Revolution.
That revolution, Burke hastens to point out, did not set up an
elective monarchy, nor give the people any right to overthrow a
monarch. It was in fact in line with the traditional English emphasis
upon hereditary prerogatives. "We have an inheritable crown, an
inheritable peerage, and a House of Commons and a people inherit-
ing privileges, franchises, and liberties from a long line of ancestors.
This policy appears to me to be the result of profound reflection.
... A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper
and confined views." The English have stood for freedom, but no
abstract, unrestrained freedom. The freedom they espouse has been
one which acts always "as if in the presence of canonized fore-
fathers."
The English Parliament, recognizing the importance of this em-
phasis upon conservation, continuity and the dignity and restraining
power of age, is based on class distinctions which insure that it will
always be worthy, that it will be composed of the most illustrious
personages in rank and descent to be found in England. But the
National Assembly of France put into power the riffraff of small
lawyers, country curates and petty tradesmen. It is unaware of that
foundation stone of solid government: great property must have
proportionately great representation in the government; if it did
not, it would be liable to fall before the invasions of great ability.
The perpetuation of property is a circumstance more favorable than
any other to the preservation of society; and the accumulation of
great property, though frequently due to the vice of avarice, quickly
turns into the virtue of benevolence once it is accomplished. It is
thus property above all that must be represented in stable govern-
ment. On this point we must grant that Burke really tried to square
his actions with his sentimentsâfor he had purchased (for 22,000
pounds, perhaps half a million dollars in today's values) a large
estate and kept it in the grand manner (a fact which led some rumor
mongers, who did not discern the true foundations of political sub-
stance, to speculate a bit on how a penniless political writer was able
to accomplish such a feat). To return to exposition: if it be said that
the will of the many should prevail over the will of the few, the
answer is "True; if the constitution of a kingdom be a problem in
arithmetic. This sort of discourse does well enough with the lamp-
post for its second; to men who may reason calmly it is ridiculous."
The many are not as able to see what is to their own interest as are
the few.
So much for the English sympathizers with the French Revolution
who would turn from the dignity of the English principle of
hereditary aristocracy to that spirit of innovation which puts small
men at the top. Burke next turns his eloquence directly against the
theory behind the French Revolutionâthat of natural rights. It is
a doctrine the belief in which destroys the security of any govern-
ment whatever. When men are bitten by it they lose all rationality.
Under such circumstances "it is vain to talk to them of the practice
of their ancestors, the fundamental laws of their country, the fixed
form of a Constitution whose merits are confirmed by the solid test
of long experience and an increasing public strength and national
prosperity. . . . They have the 'rights of men.' Against these there
can be no prescription; against these no argument is binding: these
admit no temperament and no compromising: anything withheld
from their full demand is so much fraud and injustice."
Burke is willing to admit that men have natural rightsâeven
equal natural rights (though not to equal thingsâonly in being
rights are they equal!). But political rights are not natural. They
are wholly due to convention and tradition. Government therefore
does not depend upon any natural rights of the governed. It de-
pends upon tradition and that skill and finesse in dealing with
complicated matters of convention and precedent that only men of
long experience in the art of government can acquire. It is thus
with something approaching vertigo that Burke reacts to the thought
of pulling down any political or legal edifice and building some-
thing new in its place. Surely no bare rough boards of a social con-
tract and natural rights can possibly make a habitable building.
Burke is willing to admit that society is a contract. But it is an
inviolable one and one which, in some mystic fashion, binds all
functions in society and all states into union with the divine. "Each
contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primeval
contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures,
connecting the visible with the invisible world, according to the
fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all
physical and all moral natures each in their appointed place."

Such a contract, I would suggest, appears to offer no great threat
to any government, however remote it may be from possessing the
consent of its people. Whether due to its rhetoric, its tapping the
roots of fear or its anticipation of the spirit of romanticism already
arising, in any case in a few years it passed through eleven editions.
Its spirit was to increase before it diminished.
As I have said, the romantic-historical movement proper was char-
acteristically German. It arose in the early nineteenth century. It
may be said, so far as any broad movement may be ascribed a begin-
ning in the influence of one man, to have had its inception in the
writings of the philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte.
It should be borne in mind that Germany at the end of the
eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries was dis-
united. The old German Empire was completely disrupted. The
two strongest states, Prussia and Austria, were at each other's throats.
Frederick the Great did set up a German League of Princes, but it
was only a temporary confederation to help keep Austria in check.
Napoleon was able to use this disunity to conquer the German states
one by one. His victory at Austerlitz in 1805 won him the war with
Austria. His successes at Jena and Auerstadt in 1806 spelled the
defeat of Prussia. Napoleon entered Berlin in triumph; the king of
Prussia, Frederick William III, was forced to flee to Konigsberg
(Fichte, incidentally, accompanying him). Russia's intervention
saved the complete destruction of Prussia, but the latter country was
greatly humiliated by the Peace of Tilsit in 1807: she lost territories,
was forced to pay a large indemnity and had to consent to the occu-
pation of her fortresses by the French, her own army being greatly
reduced. This humiliation gave rise to a hatred of the French, a
growing German patriotism and a receptive attitude toward a
doctrine, such as Fichte's, teaching nationalism, action, spiritual
unity, the willingness to sacrifice the comfort and benefit of the indi-
vidual for the strengthening of the state.
It was in this setting that Fichte delivered his electrifying Ad-
dresses to the German Nation. Defeat by Napoleon, begins Fichte,
was really a good thing for the Germans. Before that, they were in
a corrupt state of materialistic self-seeking, not only on the part of
the average individual but even in the case of the rulers. The whole
state had thereby become weak and soft. There is a foreign doctrine
âFichte probably had Adam Smith (of The Wealth of Nations) in
mindâto the effect that all men's motives are selfish, that the well-
being of society automatically follows upon each individual's seeking
what is in his own best interest. This foreign doctrine is alien to
the genius of the German people and must be completely uprooted.
The German spirit, which it is Fichte's task to make self-conscious
after having been hidden under a foreign attitude, is the disposition
of life itself, of activity, of freedom.
The method of developing this truly German attitude is by edu-
cation. Education for this purpose cannot be merely formal and
academic. It must involve an active experiment in living together
so that the sense of a community spirit is made real. This will re-
quire that all economic goods consumed in the community be made
there, so far as possible, in order that dependence upon foreign
peoples be eliminated. It will demand that every type of activity,
from the humblest day labor to the work of the scholar, be under-
taken for the good of the state, not for individual advancement. The
vital thing in this corporate, social body will be not the organization,
not the government or the state, but the human, unifying, vitalizing
spirit that makes it a nation, a "folk." You can, I hope, see here
Hobbes "Great Leviathan" and Rousseau's "General Will" created
not by a social contract but by great forces in national history.
Very important in developing this corporate sense is the German
language. It not only unites the various politically disunited Ger-
man states, giving them one literature and one culture; more im-
portant for the future of the German spirit, it must be seen to be
the only primitive and thus the only living language. French, being
Romanic in origin, is essentially dead, a mere survival of an earlier
civilization. (Let me comment on this device: the historical school
can and does play it either wayâthe new is alive, the old is dead;
hurrah for the new! Or, the new is innovative, immature, the old
has the sanctity of age, having passed the test of experience; hurrah
for the old! Specifically, this break of the Germanic from the Ro-
manic was to be reversed in von Savigny on law.)
It might be thought that the excessively nationalistic emphasis
in Fichte's Addresses make them of no lasting and general signifi-
cance. This is not the case. In the first place, as we have seen, the
romantic-historical school of thought is characteristically nationalis-
tic, even in the area of economics. In the second place, this is not
without connection with other elements in their thought. If legal
and political ideas must be concrete, must always relate to particular
peoples at particular times, nationalism, the extolling of one's own

people in one's own time, is a natural, although not a logically con-
sequent, step. Then there are other aspects of Fichte's emphasis,
closely intertwined with his nationalism and yet distinguishable
therefrom. For example, there is his praise of the spiritual unity of
a people that mystically unites all individuals into one, living, or-
ganic whole. Also, the state is authorized to compel the individual
to behave in a way that will promote his own welfare. The indi-
vidual may mistakenly suppose that his welfare lies in the direction
of his selfish interests. It does not. It is to be found in the common
good of his people, and the state on occasion must force him to act
for this, which is really his own good (a doctrine we have met in
one whom Fichte should have considered a decadent Frenchmanâ
Rousseau).
Then there is Fichte's glorification of action. Mere knowledge,
mere theory are to be disparaged. Science itself is simply an expres-
sion of life, a form of activity. This living activity Fichte portrays
as "free." It is free in somehow being creative, not determined by
any natural necessity. But it is not free in the sense of being a mat-
ter of individual choice. It must be disciplined in each individual
to seek the good of the nation, so that every decision of every indi-
vidual may be relied on with certainty to conform to the will of the
people.
It is clear that in all of this there is more of moral education and
what we would call propaganda than of description of government
and law, even ideal or just government and law. But this again is
characteristic of the romantic-historical school. The political and
legal aspects of the life of a people are not to be separated from
their total life pattern. In the latter, custom, moral ideals, ways of
thinking, literature and culture are extremely importantâfar more
important than some legal or political minutiae of interest only to
the antiquarian.
Just as Fichte was the stimulus that set the historical school of
economic thought in motion (in the person of Adam Miiller), so
likewise it was he that gave the impetus to the rise of the historical
school in jurisprudence, particularly in the work of Friedrich Karl
von Savigny. For Savigny, law is the expression of the inner spirit
of a people; it thus gives us insight into a living, developing organic
whole. As Savigny puts it, in Of the Vocation of our Age for
Legislation and Jurisprudence: "In the earliest times to which au-
thentic history extends, the law will be found to have already at-
tained a fixed character, peculiar to the people, like their language,
manners and constitution. Nay, these phenomena have no separate
existence, they are but the particular faculties and tendencies of an
individual people, inseparably united in nature, and only wearing
the semblance of distinct attributes to our view."
There would seem to be three rather obvious characteristics of law
as so approached: it is always nationalistic; the idea of a law of
reason common to all men would be quite foreign and unacceptable.
It is intimately united with other aspects of a people's life; thus the
study of law cannot be separated from sociology, economics, linguis-
tics and general history. Finally, jurisprudence must be itself his-
torical, not an abstract systematic discipline; it must be a study of
the development of law.
Savigny wholeheartedly and consistently accepted this last impli-
cation of his position. "For law, as for language, there is no moment
of absolute cessation; it is subject to the same movement and de-
velopment as every other popular tendency. . . . Law grows with
the growth, and strengthens with the strength of the people, and
finally dies away as the nation loses its nationality." Savigny devoted
most of his life to the study of the history of law, particularly Roman
law: witness his monumental works on Obligations in Roman Law,
History of Roman Law in the Middle Ages, System of Modern
Roman Law.
It is quite understandable why Savigny's interest in historical
jurisprudence should have turned his attention to Roman law: it
had the longest history and had attained the most complete develop-
ment and explicit formulation of any body of law in the western
world. Its leading principles had been clearly stated by Roman
jurisconsults, and these formulations had been used as the basis for
later decisions and even for imperial edicts. Here was the ideal field
for the historian of law, particularly for one wishing to prove the
inner continuity of spirit in its development. There was one draw-
back however. Since all law is national, an expression of the "Volks-
geist," Roman law must be the expression of the Roman genius, not
the German.
The historical school in Germany was nationalisticâit had to be
by the very nature of the conditions giving rise to it. It was opposed
to a purely objective, impartial history, the sort of history that one
man could write of an utterly foreign people and simply for the
purpose of determining past facts. Savigny himself, quite in the

spirit of Fichte, finds the object of the historical method to be to
"discover an organic principle, whereby that which still has life
may be separated from that which is lifeless and only belongs to
history." And he praises the study of Roman law in particular in
that it can serve as a pattern for the modern German jurist. But
should he not have called it "dead"?
This issue which I now raise is not simply a question of internal
consistency. It was a challenge that was to develop into a split in
the historical school itself. Such men as Karl Friedrich Eichhorn
and Otto Gierke opposed the Romanism of Savigny and his followers
in favor of a Germanism: they espoused not merely an historical
study of the growth of German law (as in Eichhorn's History of
German Laws and Institutions), but a reform of current law. They
advocated a civil code that would reduce the Roman element and
increase the purely German influence in the law.
It is interesting and not wholly irrelevant to note that German
law, in its medieval origins, was significantly different from Roman
in its most developed form, that is, at the beginning of the Middle
Ages. For Roman law there was a clear distinction between the state
and state officials, on the one hand, and the private citizen. This was
not true for German law or custom (and German law was essentially
unwritten custom); the individual was not clearly distinguished
from the group, nor his rights from the powers of the government.
Furthermore, in Roman law, individuals had rights as individuals,
but in German law their rights were only those accruing to them as
members of the group. There had to be close adhesion within a bar-
baric German tribe simply for self-preservation. Roman civilization,
on the other hand, had gone a long way in the direction of peaceful,
cosmopolitan individualism. Roman law explicitly protected the
private person against other individuals and against the state. Ger-
manic custom did not; it gave the individual status and protection
only as a part of a well-knit, small group always alert in its communal
life to the threat presented by similar groups.
Thus, actually the Germanists were right. The concept of the
folk, of the organic life of a people with law as simply one of its
expressions, the subordination of the individual to this common
"Volksgeist," the denial of any rights to individuals as individuals
(from an impersonal law of nature the same for all men)âall these
romantic concepts in the historical school of jurisprudence go back
to German law, not to Roman.

On the other hand, there can be no question that Savigny was
correct in saying that actual German law in the nineteenth century
was to a very large extent based on Roman law. Moreover, he had
a plausible argument for the assimilation and appropriation of Ro-
man law by the German people, as especially expressive of the latter's
peculiar genius. It was that Roman law was largely due, in its gen-
eral features, to the shaping it was given by the opinions and analyses
of jurisconsults. It was not a set of arbitrary enactmentsâwhether
senatorial decrees or imperial edictsâso much as a continuous de-
velopment and reapplication of legal principles as formulated by the
great Roman jurists (who were licensed by the emperor to give
legal opinionsâcomparable to our professors of law save that their
opinions had legal status and thus were comparable to opinions of
the justices of the Supreme Court). This emphasis upon precedent,
upon reapplication of recognized principles, upon a jurist's sense of
the total meaning and spirit of the laws as bearing upon new cases
and problems, is far more in harmony with, and expressive of, the
organic life of a people than arbitrary enactments and the setting up
of codesâeven if those codes attempt to reinstitute older Germanic
practices. Legislative reform breaks the continuous growth of law;
judicial reapplication of precedent fosters it.
Savigny's opposition to codification and legislation was very vehe-
mently expressed in his "the Vocation of Our Age for Legislation
and Jurisprudence. Let us recall the situation in 1814. It was just
prior to the final defeat of Napoleon. Austria and Germany still
rankled from the defeats of Austerlitz and Jena. Their patriotic
fervor was still intense against France and anything French. Thus
it was both natural and effective for Savigny to oppose the Civil
Code which Napoleon attempted to impose upon Europe, a code
which "served him as a bond the more to fetter nations: and for that
reason it would be an object of terror and abomination to us, even
had it possessed all the intrinsic excellence which it wants."
However, the danger from this foreign code was already past when
Savigny wrote. Why then flog such a dead ass? Because he wanted
to damn all codes, all code making, all legislated law. Such law is
new, an innovation. He was for the past.
Von Savigny, as his name indicates, was a nobleman. (His family
came from Lorraine, deriving its French name from the castle of
Savigny.) Thus, like Prince Metternich, and in general the leaders
in the Restoration era, he feared the forces of parliamentarianism

and of middle-class control of government which the French Revolu-
tion had let loose on the continent. National assemblies and civil
codes could take away the powers and break up the holdings of the
old aristocracy and the church. They were to be feared and opposed.
What better way to oppose their threat in Germany than to associate
them in people's minds with a foreign conqueror, and to indicate
their basic contradiction with the truly German spirit: legislation,
codification are mechanical, arbitrary acts. They can thus be super-
imposed from without. Juridical review of custom and precedent
taps the well-springs of a people's life.
Thus, Savigny effectively turns historicism and romanticism to the
purpose of blocking liberal reform in nineteenth-century Germany.
Of the three characteristics of jurisprudence implied by Savigny's
genera] view of law, two were prominent in his own work (although,
as we have seen, there was some difficulty in harmonizing them): it
is historical and it is nationalistic. The third was not so well repre-
sented in him as in an English follower, Sir Henry Maine. I refer
to the close union of jurisprudence with sociology.
Sir Henry was probably the outstanding English proponent of the
historical method in jurisprudence. If there was less jingoistic na-
tionalism in him than in Savigny, it must be remembered that Eng-
land had reached nationhood long before Germany and had not
suffered conquest by foreigners since the time of William the Con-
queror. Like Savigny, Sir Henry was a conservative in political
allegiance. Whereas the former fought the codification of German
law and the framing of a constitution (lest it favor representative
government), the latter opposed the widening of the franchise, re-
distribution of Parliamentary representation to bring it more in line
with relative populations, and the growing powers of Commons as
against the House of Lords.
For purposes of exposition, his thought, especially as found in his
famous Ancient Law, may be presented in two phases. First, there
is the negative or critical element.
The most formidable foe in England of the historical method in
jurisprudence and political philosophy was still the doctrine of
natural rights (a theory that had never gained significant foothold in
Germany and thus did not need to be combatted by Savigny). Like
Burke, Sir Henry saw the French Revolution, with its almost com-
plete break with earlier political institutions and law, as evil, and
he attributed it to the abstract emphasis upon the natural rights of

man (as contrasted with an appreciation of the concrete historical
development of law and governmentâan appreciation which would
never tolerate any sudden breaks with the past nor any extreme
individualism). The doctrine of natural rights "helped most power-
fully to bring about the grosser disappointments of which the French
revolution was fertile. It gave birth, or intense stimulus, to the vices
of mental habit all but universal at the time, disdain of positive law,
impatience of experience, and the preference of a priori to all other
reasoning. In proportion too as this philosophy fixes its grasp on
minds which have thought less than others and fortified themselves
with smaller observation, its tendency is to become distinctly an-
archical." However, Maine's real argument against the doctrine is to
be found in his positive and somewhat invidious historical account
of how it arose.
Maine also opposed Jeremy Bentham and the utilitarians. He
specifically opposed the approach to law that evaluated it by its
tendency to promote happiness (or, more accurately, by its tendency
to restrict pain). It suggests that laws can and should be modified
consciously and explicitly with a view to expediency. This fails to
recognize that they are natural growths, reflecting the habits and
spirit of a people; and though it may be well to have an ideal in
mind as to some perfect law, yet the attempt directly to enact it, or
to try to push normal change too rapidly, will only result in that
constant variation of laws, to suit the particular occasion character-
istic of the Greek city-state (as contrasted with the slow maturation
of Roman law), which by eliminating all settled and fixed rules, pro-
hibits the development of any legal or juridical principles. Maine
recognizes in Montesquieu a predecessor in the historical method,
but even in Montesquieu there is too much tolerance of change in
law and political institutions, too little insistence upon conservation.
Let us turn from the negative to the positive aspect of Sir Henry's
thought. Here, as is so frequently true with writers of this school,
the argument must be found between the lines. It is really quite a
thin little argument capable of existing forever between the lines,
without being seen there, so I presume there will be no objection
to my furnishing a reading glass occasionally. It is the total impact
of an actual historical interpretation that presents the author's real
affiliations and purposes.
Roughly, Maine's historical account falls into two chief divisions:
a period of unwritten, customary law and an era of written law

(usually in the form of codes, as in the twelve tables of Rome but
sometimes in the shape of case law, as in the written court precedents
of English common law).
In its first appearance, law is not (as it would have to be for Ben-
tham) something specifically enacted or commanded; it is simply so-
cial custom or habit. At this stage (before writing), the social struc-
ture was patriarchal, the family was the basic unit and the father
was in absolute control (the family being much larger than ours, in-
cluding the families of male children). Blood kinship was the basic
political and legal realityâone had no individual rights; only as a
member of a family did one have any protection. Maine interprets
this early social condition which he conceived to be the same for all
peoplesâa view now repudiatedâas one of absolute authority in
the hands of the patriarchal chieftain. The earliest written laws (for
example, early Roman law) show that the father has the power of
life and death over his children and of controlling their marriage;
he can sell them; they have no rights to property.
The need for continuity in this early form of law is revealed by
the fiction of adoptionâthrough certain rites, an outsider can have
blood kinship conferred upon him. As the use of this fiction grew
âdue to the gradual, real (but unadmitted) change from blood rela-
tionship to territorial proximity as the basis of lawâan aristocracy,
composed of the true-line descendants, became the custodian and
interpreter of law. The earliest codes we have were formulated by
it. So the early state was an overgrown family; its laws were the
commands of a patriarchal sovereign. Thus, written law arose
through no democratic movement to insure the rights of everyman
âas the social contract theory might suggestâbut as an attempt to
conserve the old kinship order, as far as possible, in the face of its
disintegration through inroads by the geographical principle furnish-
ing the basis of the modern state.
It may not be amiss to stop at this point to look between Sir
Henry's lines. Since written laws were first formulated in order to
conserve, it is now improper to use them to overturn, one seems to
hear our lord sayâan argument that was best left unstated.
The history of written law even of the most progressive peoples,
Maine shows, gives striking evidence throughout of the conservative
tendency of manâhis desire to retain old custom as long as possible
and when it is changed to cover up the fact as much as one can.
This tendency exhibits man's basic good sense, for primitive law is
generally sound, even when no one understands its purpose. Here
one finds Maine's argument in the lines themselves: "The usages
which a particular community is found to have adopted in its in-
fancy and in its primitive seats are generally those which are on the
whole best suited to promote its physical and moral well-being; and,
if they are retained in their integrity until new social wants have
taught new practices, the upward march of society is almost certain."
However, man's reverence for the old in law may be too great,
causing beneficial law to be generalized too far, to be applied by
unreliable analogy to new or different situations. In general, social
necessities are in advance of law. Law is modified to bring it more
into line with social realities in three ways: by specific legislative
enactment, by the overruling of law by equity and by legal fictions.
Specific remedial legislation is a very recent invention (and thus,
we are led to suppose, is to be viewed with suspicion). Legal fiction
is one of the oldest devices, and fortunately allows law to be changed
actually but without verbal alteration. A striking case from Ameri-
can history illustrates Maine's point. The fourteenth amendment,
adopted in 1868 to protect the Negro in southern states, provides
that "no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdictions the
equal protection of the laws" nor can it take his property without
due process. States were prohibited (so the U. S. Supreme Court
ruled) by this amendment to fix maximum railroad rates, maximum
hours of labor, minimum wages and so on, on the fiction that
corporations were persons, and their property could not be taken
without due process, nor were they being protected equally (with
real persons, in the form of shipper and passengers or laborers) if
they were not allowed complete freedom of contract.
Equity differs from fiction in that in its application "interference
with the law is open and avowed." It differs from legislation in that
its authority lies in a set of principles, not in a governmental body.
The principles of equity are essentially simply those known by the
title, "the law of nature." This had two sources, the Roman law of
nations and the Greek concept of nature. The law of nations was
essentially a device for dealing with litigation involving foreigners,
which became frequent as Rome extended its economic and political
boundaries. Yet the conservatism of Roman lawyers, their unwill-
ingness to treat foreigners as really within the social circle, pro-
hibited their applying to them the Roman Civil Law. On the other
hand, it would have been a degradation of that law had it been

superseded by the law of the foreigner. So a law of nations, that is,
a set of practices common to the laws of all nations then known, was
recognized. It arose from disdain of the foreigner and hence (to
read between the lines again) can hardly claim today any nobility of
lineage. To this Roman ius gentium was united the Greek idea of a
ius naturale. When these two united (after the Roman conquest of
Greece) the result was the notion of an ideal law, holding for man
as man, a rule to which the laws of various nations (including
Rome) should conform.
However, Maine continues, the law of nature as revived in mod-
ern times differs in one profound respect from its ancestor in the
ancient world. Instead of being simply an ideal which would serve
to remedy the defects and injustices of positive law, it is now viewed
(by its proponents) as the only legitimate basis of positive lawâit
thus furnishes a justification of revolution and anarchy. This is par-
ticularly the case in its insistence upon the equality of men. For the
Roman lawyer, applying the ius gentium, this simply meant equality
before the law; under this law the distinction between Roman citi-
zen and foreigner was not of legal signif1cance. But to the modern
believer in natural law, the dictum that men are by nature equal
means they ought to be equal, that injustice has been done if they
are not equal, thus that class distinctions and institutions founded
on them are wrong. What was a mere legal procedure is elevated to
a moral goal and formulated as a literary slogan. It follows (so Sir
Henry implies) that the true meaning and significance of the law of
nature have been lost.
Our lord has an even more skillful play to use against his adver-
sary, in this case, against the doctrine that civil society is based on a
mutual compact. As we have seen, the social basis of primitive, cus-
tomary law was the kinship tie, the family, not the individual. This
reveals itself in the type of law involvedâit was imperial or status
law, not contractual. But progressive societies have moved in the
direction of the geographical state, thereby breaking the kinship
relation as fundamental and increasing the emphasis upon the indi-
vidual and his rights. This has been accompanied by a decrease in
the legal control of individual behavior. Law has more and more
become viewed as simply a protection of individuals (laissez. faire).
This change has been gradual (therefore apparently for our lord
unobjectionable). At first, ordinary promises had no binding forceâ
they must be accompanied by special rites. Gradually they came to

be recognized as binding if in due legal form (with seal), and then
even without. Now Sir Henry can show his hand: the whole doc-
trine of the social contract as the basis of government and law is
thus an historical anomalyâit puts as the basis of all law, at the
very foundation of society, the most recent legal development.
We thus see how with Maine, as with Savigny, the historical study
of law was used for conservative practical ends. There was however
a difference in emphasis. Maine was more concerned with the his-
tory of law in its sociological bases; he thus stressed the character of
law before it was in writing. Savigny, on the other hand, devoted
himself to the history of law in its written form as shaped by court
decisions and juristic opinions. Thus, Maine looked with more favor
upon common law, Savigny upon law as interpreted by judge and
jurist, both, however, being suspicious of specific enactments by
legislatures (statute law)âfor the latter brings change about too sud-
denly, it can be used for reform, for radical departures and therefore
for overturning of old class relations.

CHAPTER 10
Values in the Present Age
Formal and Scientific Approaches to Law
The reader of this volume must by now have become resigned to
the author's willingness to sacrifice historical accuracy on the altar
of ideational insight. In any case, the last chapter is hardly the ap-
propriate place for any compunction, and so I do not hesitate to add
to my sins: for in all historical conscience, it is a sin to put the
utilitarians in "the present." They properly belong in the nine-
teenth century, but to place them there destroys the simple picture,
so neatly sketched previously, of that period's being one of romantic
reaction against science. Actually their ideas should assign them to
the Age of Reason, and they might have been discussed there had it
not been that one of the chief developments of the present century
in the philosophy of law grew almost directly out of their position.
It appears that to make sense out of intellectual history it is necessary
to tear apart its seamless cloth; but, when the end is worthy, what
matters that the life that once inhabited it hangs dying as we tear?
Adherents of both the natural-rights and the historical schools of
jurisprudence had used the device of looking to the past for justifica-
tion of some present system of law or government or, conversely, for
revolt therefrom. The utilitarians reversed this, however, and
turned attention to the future. They insisted that laws and govern-
ments be vindicated or condemned not by appeal to hypothetical
antecedents but by reference to probable consequences.
This orientation perhaps explains why the utilitarians did not
bother to challenge seriously the historical accuracy of the natural
rights theory. In fact, not even the historical school, violently op-
posed as it was to that doctrine, was interested in using what might
seem to us a most damaging assaultâthat all historical evidence is
against the theory that there once was a condition without positive
law or organized government, terminated by a general contract. But
a more sympathetic understanding reveals why this would not have

been an effective maneuver. The proponents of natural rights did
not themselves take their theory seriously as an historical account of
what had actually happened. As history, it was pretty patently fic-
tion, even in the seventeenth century. The utilitarians did point out
this fact; they also pointed out that the "history" of the historical
school was likewise pretty much fictionâand patently so in all those
ideas (such as "Volksgeist," "inner, living development of law" and
so on) which were vital to the school's practical purposes.
Moreover, the romantic view of history was itself involved here.
History to be alive and real cannot be a mere report of past, dead,
unchangeable fact. It must reflect the spirit of the historian as well
as the character of his subject matter. Thus, to say flatly that no
general social contract ever occurred in the establishment of govern-
ments would be to take an unhistorical, a merely reportorial point
of view. For the historian believing in such a contract, shaping his
material from such a point of view, there must be truth in it. So it
was necessary that such men as Sir Henry Maine and Otto von
Gierke undertake, not the easy job of ridiculing the history in the
natural rights theory, but the much more laborious and subtle task
of undermining that theory by giving a history (of course from their
point of view) of the doctrine itself.
Before this occurred in the late nineteenth century, however,
David Hume, a precursor of the utilitarians, had already, in the
middle eighteenth, given the theory a mortal wound, but by the use
of an entirely different weapon. He had attempted to offer a realistic
account of how governments arise which would yet allow a justif1ca-
tion and a critical evaluation of them.
I am referring here to two of his essays: "Of the Original Con-
tract" and "Of Passive Obedience," published in 1742. It is true,
as Professor Sabine has emphasized, that Hume in his Treatise of
Human Nature had previously (in 1739) analyzed reason in such a
way as to undermine effectively any notion of a law of reason that
could determine how men ought to act in relation to one another. It
cannot be denied that Hume's skepticism as to reason's ability to
establish either what is or what ought to be was soon to create a
climate at least in England that was generally unfavorable to the
rationalism at the basis of any doctrine of natural lawâit made a
voluntaristic account of law almost inevitable. However, Hume did
not draw these conclusions himself. I shall follow him simply in

[10] Values in the Present Age 427
what he said directly about natural law and the social contract in the
essays mentioned.
First, he points out clearly that the doctrine of an original con-
tract, like the dogma of a divine right to rule, is constructed, as we
would say, for propagandistic purposes. Thus, it is not to be taken
seriously as theory.
Next, he gives his description of how political power probably
arose as a fact. "No compact or agreement, it is evident, was ex-
pressly found for general submission; an idea far beyond the compre-
hension of savages: Each exertion of authority in the chieftain must
have been particular, and called forth by the present exigencies of
the case: the sensible utility, resulting from this interposition, made
these exertions become daily more frequent; and their frequency
gradually produced an habitual, and, if you please to call it so, a
voluntary, and therefore precarious, acquiescence in the people."
This type of account is borne out by observing that governments
that now exist gained power not by compact, but by conquest or
usurpation, which they consolidated by successfully obtaining obedi-
ence of the people in particular cases until it became a general habit.
They were thus based at first upon violence and fear but eventually
upon custom.
If it be argued that consent to the government is given at least
tacitly whenever one accepts the protection it offers, Hume replies:
"Can we seriously say, that a poor peasant or artizan has a free choice
to leave his country, when he knows no foreign language or manners,
and lives from day to day, by the small wages he acquires? We may
as well assert, that a man, by remaining in a vessel, freely consents
to the dominion of the master; though he was carried on board
while asleep, and must leap into the ocean, and perish, the moment
he leaves her."
But how can political rule ever be justified, how can Hume show
that laws ought to be obeyed, consonantly with his realistic account
of how they actually arose? How can he go from his supposed his-
torical facts to present evaluations? Not, of course, by looking to the
past, by appeal to the legitimacy of an historical source of power, but
by turning to consequences, to social utility. Men are by nature
selfish and for the most part unable to restrain their desires in proper
bounds. The government acts to restrain them by force. Gradually
they come to learn by experience that this restraint is good, that

without obedience to law and allegiance to one's political superiors
society would be impossible.
Here is where the social-contract people have made their worst
mistake. They have argued that the subject is obligated to obey the
government and laws because he has contracted so to doâthat is,
because he must abide by his promise already given. But why should
he keep his word? Why should contracts be considered binding?
Only because the general interests of society demand it. It is socially
useful that individuals be bound by their promises. But, argues
Hume, it is just as advantageous to society that subjects obey the law
and give allegiance to their government. There is no need to go
through an extra step here by way of the bindingness of promises,
for the latter has no other basis than that which can be used to estab-
lish the conclusion directly.
As we have seen, however, the doctrine of natural rights and a
social contract had been repeatedly used to justify revolt, when gov-
ernments no longer acted for the common good. But, says Hume,
the principle of social utility can also be used for this purpose: when
a regime serves public utility so poorly that a revolution pays off in
terms of public welfare, then a revolution is justified. It must be
admitted, though, that Hume is himself no revolutionist. In bal-
ancing the disutility of a bad government against that of civil war,
his emphasis is all upon the latter. "... I shall always incline to
their side, who draw the bond of allegiance [to established govern-
ment] very close, and consider an infringement of it, as the last
refuge in desperate cases, when the public is in the highest danger,
from violence and tyranny."
When we turn to Jeremy Bentham, we find a very different manâ
an ardent reformer repelled by the manifold devices adopted by
those in power to deceive and ill-use the public. Yet his ideas on law
and the status of government are, to a large extent, tacitly present
in Hume (although I do not wish to underrate the great significance
of Bentham's passionate elaboration and application of them).
Bentham was trained as a lawyer. But he was shocked into a life
of criticism and speculation by the abuses he saw, the first that struck
him being that a client was forced to pay for three attendances in the
office of a Master of Chancery when only one was given.
The vehemence of his condemnation of legal abuses bespeaks the
true reformer: "Such is the matter of a record: everything is sham
that finds its way into that receptacle, as everything is foul that finds
its way out of Fleet-ditch into the Thames." "Thief to catch thief,
fraud to combat fraud, lie to answer lie. Every criminal uses the
weapon he is most practised in the use of; the bull uses his horns,
the tiger his claws, the rattle-snake his fangs, the technical lawyer his
lies. Unlicensed thieves use pick-lock keys; licensed thieves use fic-
tions."
This invective was directed against a set of laws which, however
appropriate and rational in their first form (as a feudal system where
conquerors placed the conquered under complete subjection), had,
through the process of simple addition or accumulation of new laws
to meet new needs, without dropping any of the old, become a
hodgepodge, whose very terminology was meaningless save to an
antiquarian in the law. That lawyers knew how to turn this to their
advantage, even after the scathing criticisms of Bentham, is evi-
denced in Dicken's Bleak House where litigation in Chancery over
a large estate is only brought to a close when it is found that lawyers'
fees have eaten up the whole estate.
Bentham's A Fragment on Government constitutes a most biting
condemnation of Blackstone's pontifical attempt, in his Commen-
taries, to eulogize the system of English law. One can write about
the laws, says Bentham, either as an expositor or as a censor (that is,
one who evaluates). Ostensibly, Blackstone wrote as an expositor,
but by not distinguishing the two, he was able to use exposition as
a cloak for censure, for unrestricted eulogy and a denial of the right
to question: ". . . he [Blackstone] pronounces with equal peremp-
toriness and complacency, that every thing, yes, 'everything is as it
should be,' ... he commands us to believe, and that on pain of for-
feiting all pretensions to either 'sense of probity,' that the system of
our jurisprudence is, in the whole and every part of it, the very
quintessence of perfection."
As to the form of government, Blackstone's satisfaction with the
status quo is expressed by claiming that England has all the ad-
vantages of all the main types of rule (monarchy, aristocracy, de-
mocracy), since it combines all three ". . . without any of the disad-
vantages; the disadvantages vanishing at the word of command, or
even without it, as not being suitable to the purpose."
Bentham attacks Blackstone's somewhat hesitating acceptance of
the concepts of a state of nature and a social contract. "The in-
destructible prerogatives of mankind have no need to be supported
upon the sandy foundation of a fiction." The notion of a contract

430 Modern Sc1ence and Human Values [10]
had been used, as furnishing the basis of political obligation, because
of the universal tendency to observe promises, to look upon con-
tracts as binding. "Suppose the constant and universal effect of an
observance of promises were to produce mischief, would it then be
men's duty to observe them?"
Bentham seeks to replace Blackstone's "toilette of classic erudition
enlivened with metaphors and allusions" by scientific precision
attained through the use of carefully defined terms. Already in this
Fragment Bentham formulates definitions of many key terms in
jurisprudence in a way that strikingly anticipates later developments
in the utilitarian-positivistic school. We shall return to this pres-
ently. Besides lashing out against Blackstone, Bentham turns his
attack directly upon his real object: unclearness, technicality and
fiction in English law. After commending the change from Latin to
English as the linguistic vehicle, Bentham writes: "Fiction, tautology,
technicality, circularity, irregularity, inconsistency remain. But
above all the pestilential breath of Fiction poisons the sense of every
instrument it comes near."
In his Book of Fallacies (from his unfinished papers, first printed
in 1824) Bentham hits out with a most scathing denunciation of the
tricks of argument in politics. By "fallacy" he means a conscious
attempt to produce deception through the use of various devices of
persuasion. His classification and nomenclature are sufficient indica-
tion of the scorn he feels for all those who attempt to fend off legal
and political reform with tricks of speech aimed at avoiding, delay-
ing or confusing the discussion of current evils. For example, under
the heading "fallacies of authority" he lists such devices as "the
wisdom of our ancestors or the Chinese argument," "the no precedent
argument" and "the self-trumpeter's fallacy." Under the heading
"fallacies of danger" we find "the hobgoblin argument or no in-
novation," "the official malefactor's screenâ'attack us, you attack
government' " and "the accusation-scarer's deviceâ'infamy must
attach somewhere.' " Then there are "vague generalities" that cover
bad circumstances by using terms of good connotation, such as
"matchless constitution" and "glorious revolution," and there are
"allegorical idols" among the professions: "the Government" to
members of the governing body, "the Law" to lawyers, "Holy Mother
Church" to churchmen.
All of this "debunking" seems old and obvious to us today, but it
came as a breath of fresh air in Bentham's time. The reform move-

ment in law and politics headed by Bentham and his "philosophical
radicals" was very real and very effective in nineteenth-century
England. But if Bentham had made only this negative and practical
contribution we would hardly be justified in considering him here.
In terms of the history of ideas, Bentham's importance lies in the
impetus he gave to a positive ethical and legal theory. We may now
look back and clearly distinguish these two aspects of his theory,
calling the ethical, "utilitarianism," and the legal, "the positive
theory of law." But in Bentham they were very closely intertwined.
Although the Fragment on Government attempts the definition
of a few key terms, such as "political society," "political obedience,"
"statute law," "common law" and "political right," this work is,
as we have seen, largely destructive. Bentham's positive attempt to
make jurisprudence a science is to be found in An Introduction to
the Principles of Morals and Legislation (printed in 1780 but not
published until 1789).
A book of jurisprudence, says Bentham, may be expository, at-
tempting to ascertain what the law is, or censorial, attempting to
state what it ought to be. Bentham identifies the latter with a book
on the art of legislation, that is, a handbook for legislators and courts
of law. His Introduction is essentially the latter sort of book. But
clearly any censorial book must make assumptions as to the general
character and purpose of law, and to this extent it embraces an
expository element.
As we have seen, Bentham casts aside the fiction of any law of
nature. The only kind of law there is is positive. And we should
use the plural, for there is no law in general, only various individ-
ual laws. A law is simply "whatever is given for law by the person
or persons recognized as possessing the power of making laws. . . ."
Laws are commands (or revocations of earlier commands) on the
part of persons having the power of making them and acting in that
capacity.
Thus, Bentham frankly revives and unequivocally states a volun-
taristic philosophy of lawâHobbes without the fiction of a contract
or the mysticism of a Great Leviathan. The alert reader will recall
that Bentham's utilitarian ethics is rationalistic. There is, of course,
no logical contradiction in this, but it does raise the question of the
final relation between the two.
There are two very different sorts of law, Bentham points out.
One is an imperative that is addressed to everyone to whom the law

applies, prohibiting a specified type of behavior. The other is an
order to an officer of the law, usually a judge, to carry out or cause
to be carried out some punishment upon anyone convicted of dis-
obeying the first mentioned command. In general, constitutional
law, as contrasted with civil and criminal, embraces those commands
that confer legal power upon various persons and bodies to make
and to enforce law.
Bentham's chief interest, however, is censorial, not expository.
He wants to present a set of rules constituting an art of good legisla-
tion. This requires that some standard be accepted by which laws
can be evaluated as good or bad, that some objective for all law be
agreed upon as proper. This introduces his utilitarianism. It seems
beyond question that Bentham not only makes ethics more funda-
mental than jurisprudence but also treats the ethical evaluation of
law not merely as a phase of ethics but as an integral part of juris-
prudence itself (falling, of course, in the censorial, not the exposi-
tory, subdivision).
Bentham's art of legislation is based on the ethical assumption
that all laws ought to promote happiness and discourage behavior
productive of unhappiness. But laws are commands with sanctions,
with threats of punishment for infraction. Punishment, the inflic-
tion of pain, is evil. Revenge as such is never right. Therefore, laws
are justifiable only as they promise to exclude evils greater than
those they themselves create, that is, only as they function as effective
deterrents to pain-producing behavior. In the first place, then, there
are certain sorts of laws that can never be ethically defended. This
is the case if the threatened punishment is groundless, inefficacious,
too expensive or needless.
Supposing that a law is justifiable, that it will tend to promote
happiness by punishing those who disobey the command it formu-
lates, the next question is the amount of punishment that is war-
ranted. Here Bentham formulates certain rules quite ridiculously
precise, such as, "Where two offences come in competition, the
punishment for the greater offence must be sufficient to induce a
man to prefer the less." Bentham apparently thought his book
could serve as a sort of table of legal logarithms whereby courts
could actually compute the propriety of various penalties. I hastily
cover up this indiscretion, for I greatly admire Bentham and hate
to have him make a fool of himself.
The next representative of the utilitarian-positivistic theory is

John Austin. His Lectures on Jurisprudence or the Philosophy of
Positive Law (published in 1861 from lectures given at the Uni-
versity of London in 1828-32) are largely a development of certain
ideas in Bentham, although the influence of Hobbes and perhaps
through him of Bodin can be seen. But the characteristically re-
formist element in Bentham is absent. Austin is no reformer
denouncing the verbal subterfuges of the law enabling those in
power to remain there. So far as he reveals his practical inclinations
Austin is, in fact, anti-reformist. He intimates that parliamentary
reforms are impossible or, where possible, mischievous. Political
power is safest in the hands of those with large property; intelligence
and knowledge give no presumption of political capacity. But such
excursions into practice are rare. Austin is essentially the theoreti-
cian attempting to make the study of law a science. If there is a
trace of cynicism throughout the Lectures, it is not that of an em-
bittered critic so much as of a somewhat disillusioned observer.
Perhaps the most characteristic feature of Austin's philosophy of
law is his insistence upon the distinction between positive law (that
is, law that actually obtains in any country) and positive morality
(the moral customs actually prevailing), and the separation of both
of these from ethics (which considers what ought to obtainâboth
as regards law and custom). In a prospectus for a book, The Prin-
ciples and Relations of Jurisprudence and Ethics^ which was never
published nor even, apparently, written, Austin says, "He [author]
had thought of entitling the intended essay, the principles and rela-
tions of law, morals, and ethics: meaning by law, positive law, by
morals, positive morals; and by ethics, the principles which are the
test of both."
The ethical standard Austin accepts in the Lectures is Bentham's
principle of utility (although occasionally he pays lip service to
God's commands; but the latter cannot be known directly, utility is
therefore the standard actually applied). "The proper purpose or
end of a sovereign political government, or the purpose or end for
which it ought to exist, is the greatest possible advancement of
human happiness. . . ."
Ethical evaluation of law, however, must be strictly distinguished
from law itself. "The existence of law is one thing; its merit or
demerit is another. Whether it be or be not is one enquiry; whether
it be or be not conformable to an assumed standard, is a different
enquiry." In justifying Hobbes' decried statement: "no law can be

unjust" Austin says: "For positive law is the measure or test of
legal justice and injustice: and, consequently, if positive law might
be legally unjust, positive law might be unjust as measured or tried
by itself."
Positive morality or customary laws (moral customs) are to be
distinguished from positive law in that they are not properly speak-
ing imperative: they are not enacted by determinate bodies having
power to punish their infraction. "Now a merely moral, or merely
customary rule, may take the quality of a legal rule in two ways:âit
may be adopted by a sovereign or subordinate legislature, and turned
into a law in the direct mode; or it may be taken as a ground of a
judicial decision, which afterwards obtains as a precedent." But
when this happens the customary rule is not law because it is cus-
tomary, but only in that it is legislated or functions as a judicial
precedent.
This leads us to Austin's characterization of positive law as law.
It is, for Austin as for Bentham, tied up with command and punish-
ment. "Every law or rule ... is a command. Or rather, laws or
rules, properly so called, are a species of commands." The further
qualification necessary is that the command must emanate from a
sovereign in an independent political society. An independent polit-
ical society Austin defines (as did Bentham) in terms of the habit of
obedience. "If a determinate human superior, not in a habit of
obedience to a like superior, receive habitual obedience from the
bulk of a given society, that determinate superior is sovereign in that
society, and the society (including the superior) is a society political
and independent." Finally, a law must be general in characterâa
command concerning a type of conduct, not an individual act.
This view of the nature of law clearly debars certain rules of con-
duct often spoken of as law. We have seen how it excludes moral
customsâas not emanating from an authoritative body. The same
can be said of rules of honor and of fashion. Equally, so-called in-
ternational law is to be denied that status of law in the strict sense,
for it is not a command of a sovereign in an independent political
society, but a sentiment toward a kind of conduct on the part of an
uncertain aggregate of persons.
Again there are declaratory lawsâacts on the part of legislatures
explanatory of positive laws, but not themselves commands. These,
although called laws, are not strictly so (in Austin's definition).
There are likewise the so-called permissive laws designed to repeal

laws or to release from existing duties. These are not commands
but revocations thereof.
Similarly there are imperfect laws, which apparently command
but, through the want of a sanction, are not strictly imperatives (al-
though they are expressions of desire).
However, there is a type of law which, although not ostensibly
falling under Austin's definition, our author wishes to retain as
law in the strict sense. This is what may be called subordinate or
delegated law (where the command does not emanate from the
sovereign as above defined, but from someone authorized by him).
Thus, a private person may be delegated the right to issue certain
ordersâas a guardian may have the right to command his ward, or
a master his slave. Such laws, Austin argues, are circuitously set by
the sovereign, who backs them up by sanctions.
Again there is judicial law as contrasted with statute. It might be
objected that judicial law is not general, it is composed of decisions
on particular cases, hence is not law. To this Austin replies: "Inas-
much as the grounds of the decision may serve as grounds of decision
in future and similar cases, its author legislates substantially or in
effect: . . . He knows that similar cases may be decided in a similar
manner; and that the principles or grounds of his decision may
therefore be a law by which the members of the community may be
bound to guide their conduct." (It should be borne in mind that in
England there was a vast body of judicial law constituted by the
decisions of the King's Courts which were not interpretations of
statutes but recognitions of immemorial practices.)
Perhaps we should now call a brief halt to get our bearings. We
have trudged across many pages in the present chapter and are still
bogged down in the middle of the nineteenth century. Let the weary
reader rejoice, however, for I propose to lift him bodily into the
contemporary scene and introduce him to one of the most contro-
versial figures in present-day jurisprudence. I refer to Hans Kelsen,
an Austrian by birth but now a naturalized citizen of the United
States and a professor at the University of California.
Although perhaps the best justification for this sudden jump is
the reader's fatigue, I do have some rational grounds. Kelsen's
formalistic system, although showing other influences (notably that
of Kant), can be, without impropriety, treated as simply the logical
outcome of the Austinian approach, requiring only a tightening up
and a single (and entirely natural) change in principle. Since Austin

himself did little more than organize and apply more rigorously a
number of Bentham's ideas, we might well ask at this point what the
utilitarian-positivistic school of legal philosophy contributed in the
development we are tracing.
Negatively, they rejected the whole notion of natural law and
natural rights. Now in part, at least, this was based on a clear realiza-
tion that one should distinguish value from fact. It solves no
normative question of how men now ought to behave to appeal to
a past act (of social agreement and mutual contract), particularly
if there is no good evidence of its occurrence; and the notion of an
original condition of men (of equal rights on the part of all), hardly
itself determines what ideal should be set up as our goal. One must,
in all honesty, lay one's cards on the table, and the utilitarians un-
equivocally stated that they had a basic, valuational principle that
was no factual description nor any logical consequence derivable
from factual assertionsâthe principle of utility.
This was insufficient, however; for many actual laws, especially in
the eyes of such a reformer as Bentham, are bad when judged on
this ethical basis, yet must be admitted to be legal. The "ought," the
obligatoriness in law must be different from that in ethics. A rule
which does not promise the greatest happiness of the greatest num-
ber is not ethically binding, but it may be legally so.
In this situation our school turned from their ethical rationalism
to a legal voluntarism which they found ready at hand in Hobbes.
Law involves a "thou shall" or "thou shalt not," but its basis is not
a rationally justifiable outcome but an arbitrary command backed up
by power to enforce. This utilization of Hobbes, however, involved
a transformation. For Hobbes, there is no further question of ethical
evaluation; ethics becomes a part of law and is itself absorbed in
legal imperatives. This the utilitarian could not admit. Law is
something positive, something to be observed, a kind of fact; but it
is also something to be ethically evaluated.
When we turn to Kelsen we find a thinker who refuses to perform
this function (who, in Bentham's terms, remains an expositor and
declines to act as censor), although not denying the possibility of its
performance. He confines himself to jurisprudence and rejects the
idea that this study can ever go beyond an analysis of what law is
to a statement of what it ought to be. But right here we strike a
fundamental paradox. Laws, for Kelsen, are "norms." Norms are
propositions as to what ought to be, not what is. Yet, as I have said,
Kelsen is simply pursuing Austin's ideal of a study of positive law,
law that is, never law that ought to be.
Verbally we can meet the difficulty by saying that law is a legal
ought, which must be distinguished from an ethical one. But this,
I fear, does not give much insight. We must turn to a more careful
comparison of Kelsen's norm with Austin's command.
For Austin a law is a command by a sovereign or a delegated au-
thority to which is attached a sanction. In his concept of law as
norm, Kelsen wishes to retain certain features of this view. He wants
to keep what may be called the arbitrary element, that is, its volun-
tarism. What the law is in a given state cannot be determined by
studying the content of some basic law, such as that which the law
of nature pretended to furnish. Just as the commands of a sovereign
are arbitrary in the sense that they can be known only by hearing or
seeing them, so norms (in Kelsen's sense) are simply facts given to
the jurist.
A command has a further feature that Kelsen wishes to save. Al-
though a fact, it is peculiarly independent of facts. Suppose I com-
mand my students to stop making disturbances during my lectures.
If that command is valid or legitimate it is so before it is obeyed and
even if it is disobeyed. Kelsen wanted a view that would square with
the fact that legal laws are frequently violated without thereby
ceasing to be laws. Quite unlike scientific laws, which are plain
statements of fact and are shown false by any exceptions, legal rules
are not abrogated by cases of disobedience. Thus, although there
are laws against murder, murders occur and many murderers are un-
apprehended, but a body that refused to "obey" Newton's laws of
motion is unheard of. Laws for the jurist, then, are clearly not gen-
eralized descriptions, but are much more akin to imperatives which
may be conceived to retain their imperativity even when not fol-
lowed.
In these respects, then, Kelsen's norm is like Austin's command.
But it is different in a very important aspect. It is a depersonalized
command, one which once instituted, has some sort of impersonal
reality of its ownâindependent of the volition of the person institut-
ing it. Suppose I draw up my last will and testament in due legal
form. This bequest then becomes law and is binding upon the
executor of my estate after I have ceased (presumably) to have any
interest in the matter.
Take an even more striking case: Kelsen argues that law can be
created without any definite command on the part of those creating
it. A parliament may enact a statute law where some members op-
pose it, and the vast majority do not have any idea what it is (and
probably couldn't be expected to, legislators being what they are).
Such legislators can hardly be said to will or command it. And surely
no one will attempt to test its legality by a psychological investiga-
tion of the states of mind of those who voted for it (thank goodness
our courts, even though they have to investigate pretty sordid stuff,
are spared this indignity).
Furthermore, one can hardly be said to issue commands to one-
self. Yet laws are enacted that bind those enacting themâfor ex-
ample, tax laws that apply to legislators themselves. Thus, a law
is a peculiarly impersonal command, one that has reality when no
one is willing it. So it is more properly called a "norm" than a
"command."
Kelsen agrees with Austin that law must always include a sanc-
tion. He has some difficulty with civil law. Criminal law, of course,
does attempt to punish, whether on the theory of retribution or on
that of the possible reform of the criminal or deterrence of crime
on the part of others. But in civil law, as in the nonfulfillment of a
contract, action obtains not punishment but reparation for damage
done. Kelsen claims that such reparation is still a sanction, that legal
norms are all characterized by their attaching a sanction to the
breaking of the law (to the "delict," to use legal terminology).
Thus, the legal norm has the following form: If A (a delict) occurs,
then B (a sanction) ought to occur.
Now a serious problem arises. Wherein lies the authority of these
depersonalized commands? Austin had said that only certain com-
mands were lawsânamely, those of a sovereign or his authorized
delegates. Kelsen seeks a similar restriction and for the same reason.
Many imperatives are not legal. A law is a law only as created by the
proper authority. But Kelsen cannot accept Austin's sovereign here.
He needs a depersonalized source of authority. Laws are not personal
orders on the part of some absolute monarch and his officers. Where
then does their authority lie? Kelsen's real answer is that it lies in
the whole legal system. To see this, let us follow him step by step.
First, and at the lowest rung of this ladder is a norm that says: If
a committed delict x, b should punish him by sanction y. For ex-
ample, if a murdered someone, b (the executioner) should hang him
by the neck until he was dead. But wherein is this legal? Its legality
resides in the fact that it was properly created by a criminal court.
This, in turn, needs authorization. So we have a higher norm,
'stating that if a jury finds a guilty of murder, the court is to sentence
him to execution. Thus, we must have a whole hierarchy of norms,
each higher one stipulating that the law-applying organ next lower
in the system under certain circumstances ought to carry out a sanc-
tion. Since each of these obtains its authority from the one above it,
the whole system depends upon a highest norm corresponding to
Austin's sovereign, otherwise Kelsen's view would lead him to a pic-
ture like that of the cartoonist after a particularly juicy scandal
involving Tammany Hall: each politician points to the next one as
having authorized and instituted the bad businessâbut the whole
group is arranged in a circle! Kelsen calls his final authority a
"basic norm" and finds it in the constitution (whether written or
just customary) of the state in question.
It should be noted that this relation between the basic norm
and others depending on it is very similar to Austin's delegation of
authority, being simply a depersonalized form thereof. That this is
so can be shown in the following way. That the lower norm is
valid is made clear not by understanding its content, what it says
ought to be, but by noting that it is created by a person or body of
people properly authorized by a higher norm to issue such laws.
The legitimacy of the norm is thus established by the procedure
giving rise to it. To use our earlier analogy, Susan should go to
school not because learning is good and going to school may promote
learning, but because papa says so and God has authorized papa to
command Susan. The whole thing is thus an emasculated volun-
taristic theory of law.
Contrast it with the rationalism of a natural-rights doctrine. Here
again in a sense is a basic normâthe law of nature itself. From this
all other legitimate law is derived. But note how it is derived (at
least in the mainâthe social contract itself brings in a voluntaristic
element, as we have noted). The law of habeas corpus requires that
no one be imprisoned without charges and a trial. This is deducible
from the law of nature, which says that everyone has a right to
liberty. It follows logically, in terms of its content, not by virtue of
what organ of the state has created it. It is a rational consequence:
all the lawgiver does is to recognize itâhe does not create it by an
act of will (or, a la Kelsen, by proper legal procedures).
This brings us to the most crucial problem of all for Kelsen. If

each lower norm gains its authority through fact, the fact that it has
been authorized by a higher norm, what about the highest, the
"basic" norm? It obviously cannot gain its legitimacy the same way.
Yet if it has no legitimacy the whole system collapses. Kelsen really
has two answers which, unfortunately, are not consistent with each
other.
One is a bold move peculiar to Kelsen. It is to say that the basic
norm has only hypothetical validity. Without it no other could have
any standing. We thus must postulate its validity or law vanishes
out of our hands. This is something like Bodin's sovereign whose
authority is established, so to speak, by definition: without him there
would be no state and no law. (It was perhaps actually suggested by
Kant's proof of freedom: without it there could be no moral respon-
sibility.)
Kelsen's other answer reminds us of Austin. Austin had defined
the sovereign as one to whom the bulk of a given society are in the
habit of giving obedience. This means that the authority of a sover-
eign lies in a sense precisely in the fact of its general acceptance. So
Kelsen frequently claims that the validity of a basic norm requires
the "effectiveness" of, that is general obedience to, the system of laws
it validates. Laws "cease to be valid, not only when they are an-
nulled in a constitutional way, but also when the total order ceases
to be efficacious."
It seems to me that Kelsen has got himself into a serious dilemma:
either laws have only hypothetical validity, on the basis of a con-
stitution whose validity itself is just an hypothesis; or they have
validity only so far as they are actually accepted by society. On the
first alternative, laws simply form closed hypothetical systems with-
out any binding force upon any one not accepting their bases. On
the second, they are binding only in those societies where they are
accepted. In either case we have lost what Kelsen has striven so
hard to maintain: a bindingness of laws in themselves, quite apart
from whether they are as a fact acknowledged and obeyed. For all
his ingenuity, Kelsen is unable to avoid recourse to "Susan!" And
this, it seems to me, is the outcome of any serious and consistent
voluntarism.
Faced with this dilemna it is natural to turn to a schoolâthe
legal realistsâwho deny that laws have any bindingness save on
those who obey them, who in fact refuse to admit that law is any-
thing but the actual effectiveness of certain governmental controls of

people's behavior. They give up seeking any obligatoriness in law
at all. Legal law not only does not embrace any moral duty: there
is in it no legal ought. It simply states facts. It is always sociological
law, the statement of some uniformity in men's social behavior. It
thus allows (or in one formulation is) prediction of how men will
act. It is, in short, a form of scientific law, and jurisprudence is a
science.
Put thus succinctly, legal realism is clearly a form of value skep-
ticism. It is hardly fair to its proponents, however, to make it so
unequivocal. In its original form, at least (and I think it retains
this feature of its immaturity), it was an offshoot of American prag-
matism. Pragmatism, arising from romanticism and sharing the
latter's distrust of abstract distinctions (such as that between "ought"
and "is"), is confident that a "science of values" is possible. Some-
how by studying how men do act we discover in the process how
they ought to. The philosophical pragmatists (above all, John
Dewey) have played the changes on this theme in ethics; the legal
realists have transposed it for jurisprudence.
An excellent example of this point of view is the man who may
be rightly considered its founder, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes
taught law at Harvard, where, in "the Metaphysical Club" he made
acquaintance with pragmatism in the persons of Charles Peirce and
William James. He became Chief Justice of the Massachusetts
Supreme Court and was later appointed to the bench of the Supreme
Court of the United States, where he became famous for his liberal
interpretations of the constitution. He was the editor of, and a
frequent contributor to, The American Law Review, and he wrote
the very influential book, The Common Law.
Holmes' "realistic" attitude, in contrast with Austin's attempt at
clear, formal definitions, is manifest in his contention that an in-
definite body (society generally or public opinion) can be a source
of law. Custom attaches sanctions to its rules, as anyone who has
come in conflict with it knows. The only advantage of a definite
political superior and a specific court of enforcement is the greater
likelihood that laws based thereon will have a specific penalty at-
tached to their infraction and therefore will be more unexceptionally
obeyed.
We may, if we will, define law in terms of the legal apparatus
(rather than simply as social custom). But if so, we must be realistic.
It is not the ideal functioning of this apparatus (that is, the way the
law reads, the constitutional provisions) that defines law, but the
way it actually works. Law is what the courts enforce as law, or,
more accurately, what it may be expected they will enforce (since
no one cares about what they have done save as that throws some
light on their future probable decisions). As Holmes succinctly puts
it: "The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing
more pretentious, are what I mean by law." To put this strikingly,
Holmes says that we can understand the nature of law only by view-
ing it as a bad but intelligent man does. "But what does it mean
to a bad man? Mainly, and in the first place, a prophecy that if he
does certain things he will be subjected to disagreeable consequences
by way of imprisonment or compulsory payment of money." Now
the bad man is interested in predicting particular eventsâcourt
decisions that might affect him. How then can we account for the
generalized form of law? "It is to make the prophecies easier to be
remembered and to be understood [by the bad man?] that the teach-
ings of the decisions of the past are put into general propositions and
gathered into text-books, or that statutes are passed in a general
form."
This approach seems to destroy entirely the moral element in law.
Holmes admits that law does show the effects of moral beliefs and
practices. Yet in understanding law we should distinguish it from
morality. Otherwise it would be nonsense to say that any law ac-
tually in force in any society is ever condemned by the best moral
opinion in that society.
This raises the question as to what should be one's purpose in the
study of law. Holmes' answer is that it should be scientific. But this
is ambiguous. On the one hand, it means that law should be studied
without further purpose than to understand it as a social phenom-
enon; but, on the other, an ulterior motive is covertly involved,
namely an "objective" evaluation, criticism and modification of law
to keep it abreast of the times. This shows, I claim, a fundamental
confusion of thought, shared by all pragmatists, and specifically re-
vealed by such a statement as, ". . . it is finally for science to deter-
mine, so far as it can, the relative worth of our different social ends
. . ."âa view the present study should show to be untenable.
To bring this approach down to contemporary discussions, let
me refer briefly to the ideas of Karl N. Llewellyn, Professor oÂ£ Law
at Columbia University, who essentially simply develops and clarifies
Holmes' views.
The contention that law is prediction (of how courts will act)
becomes, with Llewellyn, the view that rules of law are what they
socially and effectively do. He writes, "until we know how a rule
works, we do not know what a rule is. A rule of law conceived
merely as a formula of words is emptiness. A rule of law acquires
content and meaning only in terms of behavior." As this change in
formulation suggests, Llewellyn has a broader conception of the
social effects of law which constitute its nature. Besides the future
decisions of courts, the law finds its meaning in the activity of law-
yers who appeal to it and the behavior of laymen who are affected
by it.
Applying this point of view to the American Constitution, Llewel-
lyn emphasizes the working institution in contrast with the written
document. The former includes many things not in the latterâin-
stance the party system, judicial review, senatorial filibuster; and it
has dropped out many things still contained in the latterâwitness
the effective functioning of the electoral college. It may be said that
"the working constitution is amended whenever the basic ways of
government are changed." In this "working constitution" there is
included the behavior of three groups: the specialists (that is, public
officials), the general public and interest groups (such as those main-
taining lobbies at Washington). So far as the behavior of the public
is concerned, the working constitution is almost empty of specific
content. This leaves the specialists free to reshape it almost as they
see fit. They must (in the eyes of the public) keep sacrosanct the
name, "The Constitution of the United States" but can change its
actual character at will. "Indeed, amendment occurs typically by
action of the relevant specialists alone, and without alteration of
the language of the Document. Of their own motion they can, and
of their own motion or under pressure from interested groups they
do, change the manner of government in vital aspects, widen it
startlingly, ring out old pieces of the constitution as bells ring out
an Old Year. It is they who have remade the pattern of government
as we have passed from a dominantly agricultural into a dominantly
industrial and on into a dominantly financial economy." There is
one limit to this, howeverâthe activities of organized or pressure-
interest groups, such as the N.A.M., A.F. of L., C.I.O. and U.S.C.C.
As this analysis of the American Constitution indicates, Llewellyn,
even more than Holmes, stresses the negative view: law is not to be
found in words, in written documents. We may use written law

(both statute and court decision) to try to gain a knowledge of actual
law, but in doing so we must be very careful; it is a very distorted
reflection of the social patterns of behavior; only abnormal situations
are brought into court, the story presented in court is twisted to
make a good case in terms of traditions as to legal procedures and so
on. And we must not assume that the judge always does as the law
states he ought to do, nor that the general public behaves conforma-
bly with enacted laws.
This criticism of reliance upon the language of law in any attempt
to understand its meaning seems to imply two things to Llewellyn.
First, it involves a shift in emphasis from the "ought" to the "is."
The language of law is normative: linguistically law is a set of rules.
The legal realist thus would have us turn from rules as to how peo-
ple ought to behave to an observation of how they do. Thus, the
study of law should no longer be primarily formalâan investigation
of how rules imply other rules (how higher norms create lower ones,
in Kelsen's terminology)âbut scientific. In the second place, it ap-
parently implies for Llewellyn a criticism of the tradition in law.
And since written law is essentially dead, something fixed, this
criticism is directed against the attitude of allowing the dead hand
of the past to determine our interpretation and evaluation of present-
day law. For all his emphasis upon studying law as it actually is in
practice, Llewellyn does not mean that we are never to evaluate it.
But when we do, our ideal should be determined not by the past,
not by our knowledge of law as already formulated, but by the social
needs of our own time as revealed to us by a scientific study of society
and of the way legal institutions function. Thus Llewellyn's criti-
cism of the linguistic or formal study of law is also a criticism of
conservatism in the evaluation of law.
It is unfortunate that this confusion still persists. If it were elimi-
nated, the legal realist could be interpreted as a juridical skeptic,
comparable to contemporary ethical skeptics (whose views we shall
consider in the next section). He would, thus "clarified," contend
that laws are simply facts (of social behavior), and jurisprudence is
a subdivision of the science of sociology. There is no value dimen-
sion to legal laws: they involve no norms, no obligation, no ought.
Such a position would, it seems to me, be somewhat embarrassing
to maintain with clarity and credibility. We would want to know
exactly what marks out the subdivision of social science forming the
province of the jurist, and although at first this might seem easily
specifiable (in terms of legal institutions and professions), the sys-
tematic substitution of completely behavioral for legalistic termin-
ology would soon (as it strikes me) lead to something like the fol-
lowing: the jurist studies behavior connected with people's beliefs
about how one ought legally to act (or how society should politically
be controlled). Now a belief about an ought is not an ought; it is a
factâthis is of course conceded. But just what is it "about" if there
are no legal oughts? Nothing at all? Then, is it a belief? False be-
liefs can occur, but this one, on the realist's account, would be mean-
ingless. It seems then, on his program, that the jurist would have no
subject matter at all. (And it would not help if we substituted
"words" for "beliefs," since words must also be about somethingâ
surely the jurist does not study mere sounds and ink marks.) The
only escape, as far as I can see, is for the legal realist to say that he
will not characterize the behavior the jurist is to study, but only
point it out in particular cases. This perhaps would be a logical
possibility: it would hardly be practicable and surely not plausible.
A far more sensible proposal (and one which parallels the decision
of the ethical skeptics) would be to deny that there is any such sub-
ject as jurisprudence at all.
If I seem here somewhat unsympathetic with the legal realist (and
with him when "clarified" into a legal skeptic), I do wish to assert
my appreciation of the basic difficulty leading him into his uncom-
fortable situation. It is that all dogmatic positions in legal philoso-
phy have to date broken down at crucial points. No credible method
of establishing legal obligations, comparable to the scientific method
of verifying factual laws, has been developed. The legal realist is a
manifestation of the value skepticism of our age.
Recent Controversy in Ethics
Evolutionism
A whole section in the first part of the present volume is devoted
to a summary of Darwin's theory of evolution and its tremendous
effect upon the thinking of the late nineteenth century. It is thus
unnecessary in the present context to undertake another resume".
To anyone who has been following the present study it is of course
obvious that the idea of biological evolution, in its Darwinian or in

any other specific form, has absolutely no implications for ethics.
The obvious, however, is not always seen; it frequently requires the
help of a good guide.
The publication of The Origin of Species called forth works
praising the law of tooth and claw, and others condemning it as
opposed to the true ethics of evolution, which was revealed in gre-
garious behavior. Thomas Huxley, the founder of physical anthro-
pology and one of the early popularizers of the theory of evolution,
was not so swept off his feet. In his essay, "Evolution and Ethics," he
maintained that the doctrine of evolution could not properly de-
termine our ethical standards. How life and behavior have actually
evolved is one question, how we ought to act and what we should
consider to be morally good is another.
That engineer-philosopher, Herbert Spencer, who became inebri-
ated by the idea of evolution, was not so clear-sighted as Huxley.
Just as all the rest of his philosophical system was little more than an
assemblage of scientific odds and ends, so with his ethics. His Data
of Ethics, published early in the last quarter of the nineteenth cen-
tury, contains an attempt to construct an evolutionary ethics com-
bined rather incongruously with a defense of utilitarianism.
Spencer's evolutionary ethics amounts essentially to the assertion
that the ethical ideal, the summum bonum, is the state toward which
conduct has been evolving, and will constitute the last stage in that
evolution. He gives several criteria by which we may distinguish
more from less evolved conduct, which for Spencer means better
from worse behavior.
First, that conduct is more evolved which serves better to main-
tain or preserve the individual. This test includes several factors.
It refers to behavior which is more suitably adjusted to ends, more
clearly purposive and less random; it embraces the behavior of that
organism which reveals a greater variety of adjustments, a larger
number of activities achieving different ends; it comprehends the
longer life of the individual and the greater quantity of vital activi-
ties within his life. Thus, my dog's behavior ("dumb" as it is) is
more evolved than that of the fleas he harbors. They apparently
spend their time biting him: he, although spending most of his time
trying to bite them, occasionally does something elseâchases a
rabbit, tries to run on the water to catch a seagull, gets into a dog
fight; surely a great advantage over the flea.
The second general criterion is the preservation of the species.

Conduct is more evolved in the degree to which it tends to protect
and nurture the young.
A third mark is the extent to which the conflict between the ac-
tivities of different individuals is replaced by cooperation. As a
corollary to this when applied to man, we have the progressive elim-
ination of war and the development of positive cooperation in a
peaceful, industrial societyâan amazing optimism that we in the
twentieth century have had knocked out of us by cruel events: in-
dustrialism provides sinews for more terrible wars and competition
for natural resources and the markets furnishing motivation to -un-
dertake them.
In general, according to Spencer the state toward which conduct
evolves, and which, hence, is the ethical ideal, is that in which there
is most lifeâthe largest amount of purposive activity freely and
cooperatively pursued by the largest number of individuals. That is,
the more life the better.
But is life itself good, is evolution really moral progress? This
question leads Spencer to a discussion of optimism and pessimism,
the conclusion of which is that the two agree in judging life's good-
ness and badness in terms of its pleasurableness and painfulness.
Spencer concludes that the good is universally the pleasurable, and
that everyone, even those advocating other ethical views, admits this
to be the case.
This would seem to force our author to admit a double summum
bonumâthat it is the last stage in human development and that it
is the most pleasant lifeâunited only by his arbitrary assertion.
There is one element in his system that might seem to offer a ra-
tional basis of unification. In discussing the biological view, Spencer
claims that pleasure and pain are indicative of what is, respectively,
biologically beneficial and harmful. Thus, pleasure is attached to
that behavior that makes for survival. Contrariwise, painful behavior
is gradually sloughed off in the process of evolution. On this account
it is possible for Spencer to claim that that type of behavior which is
selected by the evolutionary mechanism and toward which evolution
is making is accompanied by pleasure and not by pain. Similarly, in
a chapter on the relativity of pains and pleasures, Spencer urges that
pleasure is the accompaniment of behavior that is properly adapted
to the conditions under which it occurs and to the ends that it sub-
serves. Hence, as life evolves, since it thereby becomes better
adapted, it tends to become more pleasurable. Spencer thus feels

justified in the claim that the last stage in man's evolution will be
the most pleasant.
Spencer concludes with a statement of "absolute ethics"âa de-
scription of the absolutely perfect moral state in which evolution is
to end. This will be one of pure pleasure. There will be no conflict
between altruism and egoism, for self-sacrifice will not be needed.
Whatever altruistic acts will be called for will give pleasure to the
doer. All sense of duty and of guilt will be eliminated, since these
are based on a conflict of higher with lower impulses.
It is clear that Spencer attempted a pretty direct application of
biological evolution to the ethical problem. If the result is somewhat
juvenile, it at least brings out rather forcefully the basic difficulty of
any such attempt. How can a scientific theory hope to answer a
normative question? At most, the theory of evolution can tell us
how conduct probably has evolved in the past and how it may do so
in the future; it does not tell us how it ought to. It cannot distin-
guish for us better from worse. To do this, Spencer had to call in
utilitarianism, for which he could offer, essentially, no new argu-
ments.
It must, however, be admitted that, when evolution took on a
cultural garb and invaded the fields of anthropology and sociology,
it seemed to be much more relevant to problems of value. The
reason for. this is that it became involved in questions as to why men
approve the things and actions they do. Social scientists became in-
terested in the development of moral customs, the evolution of
moral ideas and ideals. For example, already in the nineteenth cen-
tury the American anthropologist, Lewis Henry Morgan, on the
basis of a study of American Indians, claimed that kinship ties are
survivals of earlier marital forms and that marriage evolves from
promiscuity to monogamy. In the early twentieth century the Eng-
lish anthropologist, W. H. R. Rivers, on the basis of a study of
Melanesians, claimed that cultural and social evolution is always due
to diffusion. A small number of immigrants bringing a different set
of customs may cause great cultural transformations. The American
sociologist, William G. Sumner, attempted to apply the Darwinian
concept of survival value to folkways and morals. Those moral cus-
toms which are retained by any people prove, by their very success,
that they must help the group in some way to survive in the sort of
environment it finds itself.
As illustrative of the attempt to apply this sort of cultural evolu-

tionism to ethics we shall consider briefly the ideas of the Finnish
sociologist and ethicist, Edward Westermarck, as formulated in his
Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas and Ethical Relativity,
both published in the present century.
On all moral issues there has been found a great variety and a
fundamental incompatibility of custom and opinion between people
in different cultures, accompanied by impressive similarities among
people in a common one. A striking example is the contrast of the
cannibalism of some aborigines, which is no mere dietary idiosyn-
crasy but a social and moral duty, with the Hindu's elaborate pre-
cautions to avoid the taking of life even in the lowly forms of insects
or worms. We do not appreciate this variation because Christian
culture since the Middle Ages has been largely the same, but it is
notable if one turns to a study of primitive peoples.
This variability proves, according to Westermarck, that there is no
common, rational, universal ethical standard functioning to deter-
mine men's moral judgments. It shows that moral judgments are
not, as is ordinarily supposed, "objective." That is, there are no
moral values, no moral distinctions, existing outside human beliefs
and feelings to which moral judgments refer. Most ethicists have
assumed that moral judgments are objective, but they have not been
able to prove it; they simply carry over this view from common
sense. Common sense does believe that our moral judgments refer
to something outside us. This is due to the general psychological
propensity to objectify our emotions. We speak of "horrible acci-
dents," "fearful sounds," "gay scenes," "ludicrous situations," though
the horror, fear, gaiety and humor are wholly in us.
Westermarck thus holds that all moral judgments are subjective.
They are ultimately based on human emotions and are neither true
nor false in the sense of agreeing or disagreeing with objective fact.
They arise from one or the other of two emotionsâmoral approval
or moral disapproval. The disparity they exhibit simply reflects the
variation in the occurrence of these feelings. The moral emotions
are forms of two more extensive onesânamely, the kindly retribu-
tive emotion directed toward a source of pleasure, and the feeling of
resentment directed toward a source of pain. Their special charac-
ter, as moral, lies in their impartiality. One experiences them as
being uninfluenced by one's own relation to the act and the parties
affected by it. (It is not, perhaps, irrelevant to point out that Wester-
marck was trained in philosophy in Scotland, where he came under

the influence of such thinkers as Hutcheson, Hume and Adam
Smith.)
Simply to say, however, that moral judgments are caused by cer-
tain emotions is not sufficient to establish their subjectivity if one
means by this, as Westermarck frequently indicates that he does,
that they are neither true nor false. Jealousy may cause me to be-
lieve in the dishonesty of a rival; yet this belief is not subjective in
the sense of being neither true nor false. Indeed, its truth or falsity
is entirely independent of whether it is held by me in the heat of
emotion, or by you, a casual outsider. If this is so for factual beliefs,
it would seem it ought to be the case for moral judgments as well.
Westermarck is not entirely clear on this. He denies flatly the ob-
jectivity of moral judgments, but often seems to think that this can
be established by a merely psychological and anthropological discus-
sion showing that moral judgments are caused by emotions.
There is, however, a further tendency in Westermarck's thought.
He sometimes suggests that our moral ideas are simply generaliza-
tions and projections of moral emotions, and thus that they have no
meaning or reference beyond the latter. This is not to say that when
I make a moral judgment I am merely asserting a feeling I now
have. Rather, what I really do is to classify the subject about which
I am judging in a general group to which I tend to react by the emo-
tion in question. To put it more clearly than Westermarck ever
does: when I make a moral statement, what I really assert is my
tendency to react emotionally in a given way (say by moral ap-
proval), even though, because of the psychological mechanism of the
projection of emotions, I think I am asserting an objective quality
or value. When I condemn Cesare Borgia I may think I am censur-
ing that evil man, but I am, on this interpretation, really only
classifying him as an instance of a type that tends to elicit moral dis-
approval in me.
On this account Westermarck is not merely a social scientist dis-
cussing the causes of our moral judgments; he is also an ethicist dis-
cussing their content and their truth and falsity. In one sense, on
this view, all moral judgments are false. They are false in their
surface meaning, which is an ascription of objective moral qualities
to acts and agents. But in their deeper meaning of asserting a pro-
pensity on the part of the one uttering them to feel a certain sort of
emotion in the presence of an act of the sort of which their subject
is an instance, they are true or falseâusually true, since falsity

would involve a sort of lying about one's own emotions. In this
latter interpretation, moral judgments become relative to the person
formulating them. I can truly believe an act to be bad which you
just as truly judge to be good, since I am really asserting a tendency
in my emotions and you a tendency in yours.
It may be objected that this relativity of moral judgments is
dangerous: it threatens to undermine the foundations of morality.
If believed in it will tend to destroy the morality of the believer. To
this Westermarck answers that its being dangerous would not dis-
prove it. There are many dangerous things in the world. Moreover,
it is not really dangerous, since we cannot change our emotional
tendencies at will. Furthermore, instead of being dangerous it is
actually advantageous to morality; it will make believers more toler-
ant of others' moral opinions and more critical of their own.
It is not quite clear how these answers are consistent with one an-
other. In any case, this is not where the real difficulty lies. An
ethical view is not to be discarded because of effects upon those hold-
ing it. The central question is as to its validity. And it is precisely
here that Westermarck has involved himself in serious trouble. He
has confused the normative with the factual. He has transformed
normative statements (as to the goodness and badness of acts) into
descriptive statements (as to tendencies of the speaker to have certain
emotions). When I condemn Cesare Borgia as a bad man, I am
evaluating his kind of life; when I say that people like him tend to
elicit a certain emotion in me, I am making a psychological gen-
eralization about myself. The two are quite different and would
require, it would seem, quite different methods for their establish-
ment. The confusion is not quite so obvious as it was with Spencer
simply because the facts described are intimately connected, causally,
with the occurrence of value judgments.
In a somewhat oblique way, G. E. Moore (to whose ethical views
we shall turn immediately) raises this same objection. If Wester-
marck's relativity is a correct rendition of our moral judgments, then
we must face an amazing, a perfectly fabulous consequence: no hus-
band and wife ever disagree on moral matters; neither do any busi-
ness partners nor political rivals; no two people ever do. One says:
"It's perfectly all right," the other, "It's definitely wrong and bad."
But Westermarck interprets these statements so that the one really
says: "It's the sort of thing that generally arouses approval in me,"
and the other, "It's the kind of business that usually elicits disap-
proval in me," each, of course, speaking only about himself and so
in no sense contradicting what the other asserts.
This consequence being absurd, the view giving rise to it, says
Moore, is quite untenable. I would like to amplify this in perhaps a
somewhat non-British way by adding that the consequence being
dreary, the view giving rise to it is deplorably drab. Just think what
a Westermarckian clarification would effect: it would be seen that
people not only do not, they cannot, quarrel over any moral issues
whatever! One is reminded of the Fable of the Beesâthe lucrative
business of psychiatrists would disappear, lawyers would be reduced
to filing clerks, preachers would have no objects of their righteous
denunciations and life generally (including the stock exchange)
would slow down to a snail's pace. Now, of course, we must distin-
guish the validity of a view from the effects of its adoption, so that
my amplification hardly adds theoretical weight to Moore's criticism,
but it may have some persuasive effectiveness especially upon those
of my readers whom I have convinced of the necessity of clearly dis-
tinguishing value from fact.
Intuitionism
Like most truisms, the adage, "History never repeats itself," is
banal to the degree of being actually false. In the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, Spencer and Westermarck acted upon
their rationalistic opponents in much the same fashion as Hobbes
and Mandeville did in the seventeenth. Indeed, a good case can
(and in Professor Prior's The Logical Basis of Ethics has, I think)
been made out that the latter-day saint of the rationalists, G. E.
Moore, simply carries on the seventeenth-century Cambridge tradi-
tion. It will be recalled that the Cambridge Platonists (Ralph Cud-
worth, Samuel Clarke, Richard Price) insisted upon the irreducibil-
ity of value essences to matters of fact. If an act is morally right, it is
so because it displays the character of moral r1ghtness. No mere
event, such as the fact of its being commanded (even if by the chief
Chief of Staffs) can create this moral property. The tradition of
Cambridge Platonism had a long and deep influence upon English
thought, despite the fact that the more generally successful view was
that expressed in associationistic psychology.
An important example is Henry Sidgwick, especially his Methods
of Ethics, published toward the end of the nineteenth century. Al-
though Sidgwick was a utilitarian he clearly sided with the Platonists

or "intuitionists," as he called them, on two key points in the
utilitarian system. In the first place, the utilitarian says that pleasure
is good, and that a maximum of pleasure ought to be sought in pref-
erence to any lesser amount. Such an assertion, says Sidgwick, is
normative. Thus it cannot be validated by establishing some factual
statement, such as that everybody seeks a maximum of pleasure.
Some experiences are pleasant, some painful. To say that the former
are good and the latter bad is to say something more than that the
former are pleasant and the latter painful. Our knowledge that
what is pleasant is good cannot be in the form of observation. It is
not a knowledge of fact, but of value. It must be intuitive.
Sidgwick uses the same argument for the principle of justice (by
which he means what we have called "impartiality"). For the utili-
tarian, this takes the form: everyone is to count for one and no one
for more than one. I ought to seek the largest total of pleasure for
everyone, not just for myself. I ought to prefer a larger sum of
pleasure for mankind even if that implies a smaller sum for me.
These are normative, not factual, statements and therefore rest not
upon observation but intuition, intuition of the inherent rightness
of impartiality or justice.
In the present century G. E. Moore, another Cambridge philoso-
pher, has developed this intuitionism further. His two most impor-
tant contributions are Principia Ethica and Ethics. His position is
based on the distinction just stressed between the normative and the
factual. All normative claims imply or themselves state that some-
thing is good. What do we do when we say something is good? We
ascribe goodness to it. How is goodness to be denned? It cannot be.
It is simple, like yellowness or sweetness. How can you tell if some-
thing is yellow?âjust by looking, not by its effects or causes (for
example, by rigging up a photoelectrical cell to ring a bell). How
can we tell when a value statement is true? How can we determine
that something is good? It is self-evident. We tell by considering the
thing by itself. We intuit that the thing is good.
So we must be careful to avoid the "naturalistic fallacy." This
fallacy is the confusion of goodness, which is a unique, simple qual-
ity, with something else. For example, many people believe that
everything pleasant is good and everything good is pleasant. Moore
does not accept this, but it is not an absurd position. Suppose we
hold it. We are not to go on, upon pain of committing the natural-
istic fallacy, to hold that goodness is simply pleasantness. The two

qualities, although they may always be found together, are still two;
otherwise it would be silly to assert that pleasant things are goodâ
it would amount to the contention that pleasant things are pleasant,
which is hardly a bone of contention. To borrow an analogy from
the nursery book: I have a shadow that goes in and out with me: I
would be somewhat startled to discover it had left me, I would sup-
pose something drastic had happened to me, that I had lost this all
too solid flesh. Yet I am not for a moment in danger of confusing
myself with my shadow. So with goodness and pleasure (or any other
factual property).
To speak of goodness as a quality, and especially to say that it is
like yellowness, is, however, very misleading. If it were a sensibly
observable quality, then value statements would be just a form of
factual ones. To say something is good would be exactly comparable
to saying something is yellow. Moore attempts to avoid this conclu-
sion by a peculiar device. He says that though goodness is a quality
it is a "non-natural" one. In fact, it is precisely this usage that is the
source of the expression, "naturalistic fallacy," which names, as we
have seen, the confusion of goodness, a nonnatural quality, with
some observable property. But when we ask what a nonnatural
quality is we get only a negative answer: it is a quality which we
need not mention to give a complete description of anything possess-
ing it. I can fully describe my experience of a beautiful sunsetâ
here red, there violet shading into deep blue, patches of white,
streaks of orange against pale over-arching blue, without mention-
ing beauty. Its beauty is not a color, a shape, a sound, an odor; it is
(like goodness) a nonnatural property. This is particularly discon-
certing in view of the fact that the value of some good things is, for
Moore, intrinsic to them, not a matter of their relations to other
things. It is my opinion that Moore has not seen how radically dif-
ferent value statements are from factual ones, and thus has fallen
into the error of supposing that values are similar in character to
sensory qualities, such as colors, although never seen with mortal eye.
Moreover, it is an unfortunate fact that the intuitive power required
for their apprehension seems not to be very widely distributed: not
many ethicists appear to possess it. This does not deny its presence
in G. E. Moore (although recently he has grown somewhat dubious
of it himself), but it does make one somewhat skeptical of its being
a general requisite for moral perceptivity.
Moral judgments, at least those involving such notions as "right,"

"duty," "ought," and their opposites, are different from ordinary
value statements asserting that something is good. Here Moore fol-
lows the utilitarian. For the utilitarian to say that an act is my duty
does not mean that the act is pleasant. It means that of all the al-
ternatives open, this one will probably produce the most pleasure.
So Moore defines duty as that act which, in the circumstances, will
yield the most intrinsic value. Thus, assertions of duty involve both
value statements and causal (that is, a certain sort of factual) ones.
It is interesting to note that W. D. Ross, another English intuition-
ist, in the Right and the Good opposes this last view. He says that
"rightness" or "oughtness" like "goodness" is a simple, unanalyzable
value quality.
Skepticism
In technical ethical discussions evolutionary naturalism of the
quasi-biological species as found in Spencer is no longer a live al-
ternative, nor is even the cultural-anthropological variety, as repre-
sented in Westermarck. Today, the outstanding form of ethical
naturalism is the linguistic. This most recent type owes its promi-
nence to several factors. No doubt one of these is its iconoclastic
character. It purports to overthrow every previous ethical position
and, in fact, to destroy the whole ethical enterprise. The brashness
of this claim has, quite naturally, put this extreme school of thought
in the spotlight. There is, however, a more substantial basis for its
success. For the first time a naturalism has arisen which takes seri-
ously and works out consistently the difference between the norma-
tive and the factual. The shocking feature of this position is that,
after sharply making this distinction, it denies the former element
entirely. There is no normative aspect of things; normative ques-
tions and their normative answers are meaningless.
The historical sources of linguistic naturalism are quite different
from those of its evolutionary predecessor, although this fact is some-
what obscured by a tendency to join forces with one particular form
of the latter, namely, with instrumentalism, as expounded by John
Dewey.
It is not farfetched to find a real ancestor of the movement in Wil-
liam of Ockham, whose voluntarism, radically developed, furnishes
the foundation of the new naturalism. Another emphasis of Ock-
ham's is also relevant particularly to the skeptical element in the
contemporary school. In logic, Ockham was something of an innova-

tor. His studies on the nature and functions of signs are acute. He
headed a reform movement seeking to simplify the language of
philosophy, not in the popular sense of eliminating technical terms,
but in the logical sense of admitting only a minimal number of
terms as essential. He insisted that hypothetical entities should not
be multiplied beyond necessity. We must not suppose that all words
refer to real things. We may assume our sweetheart lovely, but must
not be taken in by our rhapsodies on her loveliness to suppose that,
besides the lovely lady, there is her loveliness. In particular, Ockham
said we should not imagine that abstract, general terms refer to real
entities, called forms or essences by the Platonists. Yet Ockham did
not deny the usefulness of such expressions in logic and mathematics.
What would we do without "classes," "propositions," "equations,"
"functions"? This usefulness can be retained, however, by saying
that such abstract, general terms refer to other terms, to language
and linguistic elements, not to real entities.
The logical positivists of the twenties and thirties of the present
century embraced essentially the same point of view. For our pur-
poses, the best examples are Rudolph Carnap, Philosophy and Logi-
cal Syntax and The Logical Syntax of Language; Moritz Schlick, The
Problems of Ethics; and Alfred J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic.
The more popular general semanticists, Count Alfred Korzybski,
Science and Sanity, Stuart Chase, The Tyranny of Words, and
Wendell Johnson, People in Quandaries, show some affinities with
this group. They should be distinguished from them, however, in
that their purpose is primarily practicalâto help people out of emo-
tional difficulties. Also, they do not avoid the pitfall of older forms
of naturalism: the giving of factual answers to normative questions,
as when they say that science can settle moral issues.
Of course, many things have happened between the fourteenth
and the twentieth centuries having at least some bearing on the
character of the revival of Ockhamism, if it may be so designated (it
is not a conscious attempt to return to Ockham in any sense compar-
able to the return to Aquinas advocated by the neo-Thomists). One
of course was the whole development of modern science. Another
was the rise of modern mathematical logic. This development, due
to the genius of such thinkers as Gottfried Leibniz, George Boole,
G. Peano and Bertrand Russell, was important in two respects for
logical positivism. It showed the possibility of treating mathematics
as an extension of logic and both as being fundamentally simply

linguistic in character, not sciences, however abstract, of matters of
fact. Also, it offered a tool for the analysis of science such that the
rational or deductive elements (usually expressed in mathematical
calculations, that is, what is done on paper or in one's head and
might be taken over by the new calculating machines) could be
separated from the observational or descriptive (which must be done
in the laboratory or field by the use of sense organs).
Language is composed of sentences. Sentences, say the logical
positivists, are of two sorts. Some are factual. They assert things
about the world that can be observed. Such sentences can be verified
or disverified by sensory observations. "This book has brown covers,"
"The temperature in my room at the present time is 68Â°F," are
examples. Their truth can be determined only (in the last analysis)
by direct perception. All other sentences are linguistic. They assert
something about language, or, more correctly speaking, they formu-
late rules as to the structure of language or they state consequences
of such rules. "Subject and verb must agree in number," "Things
equal to the same thing are equal to each other," are cases in point.
It may be supposed that the last says something about the world, but
it does not; it is simply a consequence of a rule as to how we are to
use "equal." We must not use "equal" of a, b, c, such that a equals
b and b, c, but a does not equal c. To do so would be to make a
grammatical mistake, like saying, "The reader are confused at this
point."
Logic and mathematics, all cogent reasoning, in fact, are simply
linguistic, being composed of linguistic sentences. All sentences
which are neither factual nor linguistic are pseudo-sentences. They
appear to say something but actually are completely meaningless
sounds or marks. The way to identify a linguistic sentence is to see
whether it must be true simply by the conventions of the language
used. A factual sentence may be false and it may be one not yet
verified or disverified. But for it to be a factual sentence we must
be able to verify or disverify it by observationsâa relevant method
of verification must be known. For example, "People live on after
death but have no way of communicating with us," looks like a
factual sentence but is not.
It will be noted that so far no mention has been made of norma-
tive sentences. It might be thought that rules of language are of this
character. For our present purposes this need not be discussed.
Clearly the normative sentences with which ethics is concerned are

not linguistic. They concern, for the most part, nonlinguistic be-
havior.
The implication should be clear. For the logical positivist, ethical
questions and answers are meaningless. There are no ethical sen-
tences. To say that benevolent kindliness is morally better than
selfish cruelty is to say nothing whatever, unless it be to reveal cer-
tain tacitly accepted rules of language, for such sentences cannot be
verified nor disverified. They assert nothing that is observable. The
clear-cut distinction we now have between what is and what ought
to be, between fact and value, carries with it the implication that the
second in each of these pairs stands outside observation. We can
see and touch only that which is, not that which ought to be. As
Ayer strikingly puts it: "The presence of an ethical symbol in a
proposition adds nothing to its factual content. Thus if I say to
someone, 'You acted wrongly in stealing that money,' I am not
stating anything more than if I had simply said, 'You stole that
money,' ... If now I generalise my previous statement and say,
'Stealing money is wrong,' I produce a sentence which has no factual
meaning."
This does not mean that our moral sentences are meaningless in
every sense. They do have a social and psychological function.
Carnap says they are all disguised commands. Commands are not
sentences; they are stimuli to action, like a love-call or a groan.
"Killing is wrong" really is "Do not kill" in a misleading form. It
is misleading since it suggests there is some property of wrongness
that killing does or might have. Rut clearly_jynu cannot $eer taste
or smell wrongness: there is no_such property. Ayer says that moral
statement^Terve lo express the feelings of the person making them
and also to arouse the feelings of those who hear them. And by "ex-
pressing a feeling" Ayer does not mean "asserting a feeling." A
sentence that describes or asserts the speaker's emotions is obviously
factual and can be observationally verified, at least by the speaker
himself. When you tell me you feel sad that this challenging and
informative book is drawing to a close, you clearly mean to describe
a fact. This is likewise true when you tell me you approve my hav-
ing written itâif this is meant just to state your feelings. But when
you say that publishing this kind of book is morally good, you do
not mean to describe or assert your own reaction; or, to use Ayer's
example, "Thrift is a virtue" is misleading. Its sole function is to
express or stimulate emotion. It seems however to be asserting that

thrift has a property of virtuousness. But no way of observing any
such property can be pointed out. Therefore, the sentence is really
making no such affirmation; it is then in a basic way meaningless, a
pseudo-sentence.
All this sounds much like Westermarck's contention that moral
concepts are wholly subjective but appear to be objective because
of our tendency to project them into the acts causing their occur-
rence. There is an important difference, however. Westermarck
held that moral judgments are true or false, since really asserting
certain emotional tendencies on the part of the judge. The logical
positivist denies this. Moral sentences affirm nothing whatever, are
never true, never false. Ayer uses a similar argument to show the
impropriety of Westermarck's position: I can deny that I tend to
disapprove of acts of a certain sort and also say that acts of that kind
are wrong without thereby contradicting myself. We frequently do
just this when we condemn ourselves for not disapproving emo-
tionally an act we know to be improper. Contrariwise, we can,
without inconsistency, say that something is morally good but that
we don't have a feeling of approval of it. You do not contradict
yourself if you say: "This is a good book, people ought to read it,
but I can't say I personally have enjoyed it or have any feeling of
approval of it." This could not be, if judging an act to be wrong is
simply asserting that the speaker feels disapproval of it and vice
versa. So where Westermarck says that such sentences as, "Human
sacrifice is wrong" are relative, that is, true if spoken by certain
people, false if spoken by others, the logical positivist contends that
they are meaningless; they are never true and never false.
This point of view is clearly not open to the kind of criticism
I directed against Westermarck: it does not confuse value judgments
with any kind of factual statements, for example, with statements
about the speaker's emotions or tendencies to emote. Indeed, the
skepticism of this position, that is, its denial that moral judgments
have any meaning, that they assert anything at all, presupposes that
they have been clearly distinguished from all factual assertions, for
the latter are meaningful. But it would seem that such a skepticism
is wide open to Moore's sort of attack, namely, that it must deny
that there are any disagreements on moral matters. People may
think they are gainsaying one another on value issues, but they never
are; they cannot do so, for if value-judgments are meaningless and
assert nothing, they cannot state contradictory or incompatible

things. If two of you debate whether this is a good book and ought
to be given a wide reading, and if you clearly distinguish this from
any disagreement about what feelings you have, then (on this skep-
tical view) you are not arguing anything at all! This would seem
to the author most unfortunate.
Carnap doesn't bother to try to meet this objection. He would,
I suppose, say that any controversy over value issues is just a "pre-
tended" one, a total mistake. Ayer recognizes the objection. He
admits there can be, on his view, no opposition between people con-
cerning moral issues as such. But there are conflicts when people
discuss moral matters; they are, however, wholly factual. Suppose
we argue whether Jones is doing the right thing in taking some drug.
Our conflict then may be as to the facts: you may suppose he is
doing it under doctor's orders and supervision; I, that he is doing it
as an addict. This difference is genuine and may be resolved. But
if we suppose ourselves to disagree over the morality of drug addic-
tion, then we are just mistaken.
A recent moral skeptic has gone further in trying to meet Moore's
type of objection. Charles Stevenson, in Ethics and Language, dis-
tinguishes two kinds of disagreement: those in beliefs and those in
attitudes or emotions. We disagree in beliefs if we say inconsistent
things, as when father asserts that Johnny marked the walls with
crayon and mother denies it. We disagree in attitudes if we have
opposing feelings, that is, feelings about the same thing which lead
into incompatible actions, as when father is disposed to spank
Johnny and mother is strongly indisposed. This latter sort of dis-
agreement may be present even when the former is not. This, thinks
Stevenson, answers Moore. Whenever there is an appearance of
disagreement on moral issues there is present a real oppositionânot
necessarily in anything believed or asserted but in attitudes.
To this it can, I think, be cogently retorted that there are a large
number of cases where people in moral conflict are quite aware that
their attitudes are opposed yet genuinely consider themselves to be
in conflict over the objective matter itself, as when father and mother
are aware of their difference in feelings and may even agree as to
its explanation but continue to suppose a moral conflict as well,
namely, as to whether Johnny ought to be spanked. I suspect that
Professor Stevenson believes he has assuaged common sense by in-
troducing a third disagreement, which may be called "persuasive"
(he does not himself name it because he tends to confuse it with dis-
agreement in attitude as already defined). Two people are in persua-
sive disagreement when at least one is trying to modify the other's
attitude toward something and the other resists.
I cannot personally discern, however, in what way this added twist
affects the basic issue. Moral skepticism remains and is, in the last
analysis, based simply on the recognition that value judgments are
inherently different from factual assertions and that the methods
of perceptual verification relevant to the establishment of the latter
are not valid, by themselves, for the justification of the former.
Nor do I find anything essentially added by a contemporary group
of analytic ethicists represented by S. E. Toulmin in his The Place
of Reason in Ethics. These philosophers try to do better by every-
day moral thought than their more iconoclastic fellow skeptics.
They say that there often are good reasons for acting as we do, that
these can help us decide how we ought to behave and that they are
not to be confused with merely prudential considerations. But we
find that reasons are treated here as just an extension of emotions
as those functioned in the thought of the logical positivists. That is,
we find simply a more faithful account of how people persuade
others to act and help themselves to decide moral issues; the whole
approach, that is, is finally itself descriptive of everyday choices with
the aim of helping people make up their minds when in quandaries;
it is quite compatible with a complete denial of the reality of values.
In one way, then, contemporary skepticism in this area is super-
ficial: it rests its case on a profound distinction which the whole
movement of modern thought has served to establishâthat between
fact and value. However, instead of carrying out the implication of
this by recognizing that the methods of ascertaining the one must
basically differ from those used in making out the other, it virtually
contends that, since the methods used in establishing the one are not
relevant to the other, any supposition that the other is in the world
is just nonsense. In another way, however, it is not so superficial: it
tacitly appeals to the amazing success of modern science in develop-
ing a method of establishing factual statements, and to the almost
complete failure in the value disciplines to accomplish anything
analogous in their realm. We have here something basic, and as
long as we remain in this predicament, value skepticism, in one form
or another, will remain. The existentialists would deny this, would
say we can decide ourselves (if the reader will forgive the solecism)
into values. The present author, however, is of the opinion that

existentialism offers no viable alternative to skepticism, that it is,
in fact, nothing but skepticism attempting to lift itself by its own
bootstraps into dogmatism.
Existentialism
Any patient reader that has plodded as far as this need not sud-
denly desist his efforts from fear of being subjected to the unintel-
ligible jargon of "being" and "nothing," to say nothing of "the
being of nothing." The author has neither the inclination nor the
comprehension to attempt any survey of this most baffling recent
school of thought, and in any case (so he rationalizes) an adequate
and judicious summary is not what is demanded in the present con-
text. What is wanted is a view that, starting from the skepticism of
today, or rather, from the situation that has given rise to it, promises
some kind of escape. This can be found, some think, in the existen-
tialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. I have in mind not so much his literary
works as the last few pages of his Being and Nothing and his lecture,
Existentialism is a Humanism.
If logical positivism may be considered, and I believe it can, as a
kind of voluntarism pushed to its skeptical outcome, existentialism
(of the Sartrean variety) can be envisaged as a similar voluntarism
that has called a halt just before reaching this final extreme. We
may think of the former position as moving from the standpoint of
an Ockham or a Hobbes, namely, from the view that some command
constitutes the moral righteousness of the act commanded, to a
skeptical outlook to the effect that there is only the command (or
the emotion or attitude, as the proponent may be inclined to put
it), that there is no further "righteousness" constituted by it. Simi-
larly we may conceive the latter as saying that there really is some-
thing further, something, indeed, of profound moral significance
(call it "righteousness" or what you will), but that this is created
ex nihilo by the appropriate command or decision.
In the atheistical form with which we are here concerned, existen-
tialism denies that there is any independent standard to which the
values we create by our decision must conform if they are to be
valid, to define our moral obligations: ". . . if God does not exist,
we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our
conduct. So, in the bright realm of values, we have no excuse behind
us, nor justification before us. We are alone, with no excuses." We
are condemned to freedom, not just the freedom of being able to

act as we choose, and certainly not to the freedom of choice between
good and evil. We are condemned to the profound and awful free-
dom of creating what is good and evil by our unfounded choice;
morality itself, and the particular morality of the particular situa-
tion, is created by our decision. Each and every one of us, in each
and every concrete situation is an Ockhamite God, with unrestricted
moral omnipotence.
It is a little difficult for a rationalist, such as the present author,
to see just how this omnipotence differs from complete impotence;
how, for example, if you and I differ in our decisions in a given
situation and set up rival moralities we can both be successful, but
Sartre feels that relativism has been transcended, since what is really
created is not a number of competing value systems but human
freedom.
With so much at stake (morality itself), and with nothing to fall
back upon as an authority or criterion, it would seem that as we are
faced with such decisions we must of necessity feel forlorn, be over-
whelmed with anxiety, for we and we alone are responsible for what
shall be right and what wrong. And this responsibility is not simply
our own commitment; we legislate morals not for ourselves alone
but for everyone. As Kant would say, we are moral legislators for
everyman in similar circumstances (though quite unlike Kant,
Sartre would admit no objective form of reason to which we can turn
for a criterionâthe criterion he says, agreeing with the ancient skep-
tics, is itself created by the decision that forms the moral legislation).
"The existentialists say . . . that man is anguish. What that means
is this: the man who involves himself and who realizes that he is
not only the person he chooses to be, but also a lawmaker who is, at
the same time, choosing for all mankind as well as himself, can not
help escape the feeling of his total and deep responsibility." Those
who try to shun this awful accountability by claiming to be neces-
sitated, Sartre calls "stinkers"; those who honestly face the fact of
their complete and arbitrary freedom and accept the serious obliga-
tion it entails are "authentic."
There is no use trying to hide the fact that the present author is
not too impressed with these heroics. Insofar as they simply express
contemporary man's bewilderment and insecurity upon the loss of
ancient authorities, they are no doubt quite sincere and are cer-
tainly revealingly symptomatic. But considered in this aspect they
are of psychological and historical import only. If they are meant

to show the proper reaction of an intelligent person to the advent of
a real insight into the status of moral value in the world and the
only appropriate method of ascertaining what is right in any con-
crete situation, they are patently absurd. Why should anyone suffer
anguish in creating a morality if he cannot make a mistake? If one's
arbitrary decision produces not only something actually good but
the very criterion and character of its goodness, then it becomes
difficult to see why his responsibility for the result should worry him
in the least. Everyone wants to be accountable for creating good,
and if one cannot go wrong the very basis of anxiety is removed.
It must be admitted that Sartre tries to face up to this objection.
One thing he does is to stress that our value-creating decisions al-
ways occur in concrete situations and that somehow the latter can be
taken as furnishing a test. But it certainly appears that what he has
given us here with his right hand he has already taken away with his
left. For a "situation" is not something definable in itself; it is in a
sense external and given, but only to and through a consciousness
that interprets it and makes it definite by application of its own
categories and standards which, in the last analysis, are based on its
own free choice. Again, he asserts that the resultant act itself func-
tions as a test of the decision giving rise to it; but he immediately
recognizes that to do this the act must itself be established as the
right one, and this can be done only by assuming a standard fur-
nished by the decision itself. Apparently man's freedom itself is
something ultimate for Sartre. But how it can, unaided, be a ground
of that evaluation which is assumed in the concept of "responsibil-
ity" is hardly transparent. Moreover, it is a little difficult, at least
for minds of ordinary apprehension, to grasp how the power of free
choice can have for its end and the touchstone of its acts the power
of free choice, and should this be seen or in any case allowed, it
would appear (and Sartre himself raises this possibility) that such a
standard has left the concrete situation and its demands entirely out
of the picture.
One thing is clear: Sartre means to avoid escape from his predica-
ment via the concept of the nature of man as something prior to his
free and value-creating choices and furnishing some kind of standard
for them. Sartre here comes violently into collision with rationalism.
Man has no nature apart from his free choice which can serve as a
criterion of the appropriateness of the latter. It is only through his
acts, springing from his arbitrary decisions, that he has any nature
at all. This is the significance of the famous doctrine that existence
precedes essence (which is a revival of the position of the medieval
voluntarists in the debate as to whether reason or will is the prior).
Despite my promise to the reader to avoid the unintelligible I can-
not refrain from quoting a characteristic passage to suggest the flavor
of Sartre's mode of thinking: "What is meant here by saying that
existence precedes essence? It means that, first of all, man exists,
turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself.
... At first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something,
and he himself will have made what he will be. Thus there is no
human nature, since there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man
what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills
himself to be after his thrust toward existence."

CONCLUSION
Where Do We Stand?
I hope that the subtitle of the present work has not been fraud-
ulently misleading. I think there can be no doubt that we have been
engaged in a very genuine study of ideas, but there may well be
serious question as to the appropriateness of the designation, "his-
tory." If history is essentially a story, as Croce would have it, and,
more specifically, a story revealing the spiritual adventure of the
historian, then I would have no hesitancy whatever about describing
the present book as a "study in the history of ideas." I would like to
claim a bit more than this, however, namely, that the story told is
roughly true to the facts of the formation of our western mind.
In particular, I think the picture that has been sketched is fair to
our present state of thought and perhaps even gives some insight
into it. Those of us who are concerned with values, moral, aesthetic
and legal (perhaps in some degree this includes everyone), are in a
serious predicament. We have a feeling of very deep insecurity, for
we sense that, with the clear distinction of value from fact, we have
lost the comfortable assurance that the nature of our universe or of
ourselves, if properly grasped, will show us the right goals to seek
and rules to obey. The successes of a value-free scientific mode of
thought have, not merely by contrast with, but even more by the
destruction of, the medieval approach, left us high and dry. Frantic
returns to authoritarianism, foolish attempts to lift oneself by one's
own bootstraps through arbitrary, individual decision, self-assured
whistling-in-the-dark to show that there really are no values and that
all moral judgments are meaninglessâall these are symptomatic
reactions that are essentially neurotic, for they do not face and solve
the dilemma.
It would be nice if your author could end on a note of hope, could
suggest that we shall pull out of our malease by attaining some
ground (new or old) of confidence about values. As an historian he

must refrain; his task is done in presenting the sources and develop-
ment of our present outlook. As a philosopher he refuses to indulge
in empty optimism; he wants to know, at least in outline, the "how"
of it. To be completely honest, he does have some very tentative
opinions of his own on this matter, but they must be presented else-
where and undergo the trial by fire of unrestricted criticism by his
colleagues.
Yet something perhaps has been accomplished not merely in tell-
ing a story with an unhappy ending but in laying the ground for
happier developments to come. Before a problem can be solved,
one must be clear what the problem is and what data are available
for its solution. Something, perhaps, has been accomplished along
these lines.
In the first place, the clear distinction we have now attained be-
tween questions of fact and of value prohibits a return to medieval
confusions of the two. It is quite unrealistic to suppose that we can
go back to a medieval outlook that will inform us how we ought to
behave, personally, politically, or economically, by appeal to the
"natural" or to what is "in accord with nature." "Nature," so far
as the term refers to what can be observationally or scientifically
deciphered of our world, tells us nothing about what ought to be.
Of course, it does not follow (at least on any logic I am willing to
accept) that, since value is not fact, it is not anything at all or is only
one kind of fact (namely, a cobweb in the mind).
In the second place, in conformance with this it should by now
be clear that a reliable method of determining value must differ
quite radically from any appropriate procedure for ascertaining
fact. People who advocate the use of scientific method in ethics,
aesthetics or jurisprudence are simply trying to modernize medieval-
ism. On the other hand, those who would establish value skepticism
on the grounds that scientific method is not appropriate to the value
disciplines seem to have been hoodwinked by a perverted logic of
their own. Of course, if one asks, "Just what method is appropriate
to the establishment of values, and how does it differ from the scien-
tific?" no very generally acceptable answer is forthcoming. But to
face this squarely is already to have made great progress, for it means
a grappling with the central and inescapable issue of our time.
We have achieved even a little more than this, I like to believe.
The major alternatives seem clear. The methods of justifying value
judgments developed in the past can be grouped in two main divi-

Where Do We Stand? 471
sionsâthose which in the last analysis are voluntaristic, which appeal
to some value-creating event or act, as against the ones that at
heart are rationalistic, which justify an evaluation in terms of the
nature of what is evaluated. It is doubtful whether any third general
approach is likely to arise or is even possible.
This at first seems not too encouraging, for each of these orienta-
tions appears beset with its own inherent malignity. On the one
hand, the arbitrary character of every voluntaristic basis tends ever
toward value skepticism. The church, no doubt, felt this even in
the case of Ockham, who made God's will the free determiner of
morals. It becomes increasingly obvious when one turns to the civil
magistrate's decrees with Hobbes, the actual customs and institu-
tional organization of the state with Hegel and the human individ-
ual's arbitrary decision with Sartre. When one seriously asks how
any event can create, not the valuable thing but that thing's value,
the only sensible reply seems to be that it cannot. The Cambridge
Platonists formulated an almost unanswerable challenge, so it seems
to me. If the value of something is really different from its being
willed (and if one does not admit this, one is operating in the skep-
tical framework), then mere willing (or any other arbitrary event)
is impotent to create it. I do not urge this as strict logic; our world
is a strange place and perhaps this can occur. But how it can occurâ
that moral goodness, for example, and not merely what possesses it,
is formed, is literally made, by some commandâescapes a mind as
unsubtle as my own. It seems far more plausible to suppose that
there is only the command and whatever events it produces as a
matter of fact.
On the other hand, rationalism is hard pressed not to fall back
into the medieval confusion of value with fact. If how man ought to
act is determined by the sort of creature he is, or by the nature of
the act or of its probable consequences on mankind, we seem in-
volved in the fallacy of answering a value question by an assertion
about what is the case. If man's essence or the nature of his act or of
its consequences contain some value component, the fallacy is
avoided but at the cost of losing any ultimate value test, for we
would want to know just how we ascertain this vah1e element itself.
The intuit ionists (I am thinking of the whole tradition of Cam-
bridge Platonism) seem to have an answer. They say that the connec-
tion between a certain kind of man or act or consequence and its
value (between promise-keeping and its rightness, for example) is

something self-evident: it is, to use the jargon, "a priori." Some
necessity in the world binds the nature of the thing to its unmodifi-
able value. This raises serious doubts in the minds of those who
lack the appropriate intuitive power. It has the added difficulty of
needing to account for exceptions (and almost everyone would want
some exceptions to moral rules) and for genuine conflicts of intuited
value connections in concrete situations (as, for example, when
promise-keeping might require the taking of a human life).
Putting these aside, the very nature of this necessary connection
between fact and value is difficult to make out. It cannot be identity
or the whole distinction of the terms would be denied. We can dub
it "a priori"; we can claim it is self-evident or completely clear in
itself. But actually it is most elusive. Frankly, it escapes my grasp
entirely and judging by the radically empirical tendency of philoso-
phy in England and America today, it apparently is not too obvious
to my colleagues.
There is, however, another form of what I have (perhaps some-
what infelicitously) called "rationalism" which is not so out of con-
formity with the temper of our culture and which has not been at
all seriously investigated. This is not the place to explore it even in
outline, but it may not be amiss to mention it as a possibility for
the future.
What I have in mind is the development of a strictly empirical
procedure of ascertaining values which nevertheless avoids confusing
them with facts. The point of view is rationalistic in that it assumes
that the value of anything is determined by the nature of that thing.
It is not intuitionistic or "a prioristic," however, because it does
not presuppose any universal, necessary connections between facts
and their values; it only posits that in individual cases there are
associations between the kind of fact involved and the value thereof,
that any generalizations about such associations must be based on
induction, and must run the risk of all inductive generalizations.
Value, on this approach, is to be known, basically and in the last
analysis, in the individual case. As with scientific method, logical and
mathematical processes may be properly used in the discovery of
values, and particularly of value laws, but on no assumption that
nature is perfect or operates geometrically: rather, they are intel-
lectual tools that aid us but reveal no necessities "out there."
This may look as though I were simply taking scientific method
and substituting value terms for factual. This would of course be

witless and would save the distinction of value from fact only ver-
bally. A wholly different basis must be found as regards knowledge
in the individual case. It is precisely here that the really radical
character of the alternative I have in mind appears. In the estab-
lishment of facts this knowledge takes the form of sense observation
or perception. The proposal now before us is that, analogously, at-
titudes or emotions furnish our knowledge of value in concrete
instances.
Many and serious qualifications must be added to make this a
plausible suggestion, but perhaps none is fatal to it. It must be
granted that value knowledge, on such a foundation, can never be
as reliable as factual. This amounts to a truism as soon as one thinks
of the lesser degree of agreement in people's emotional attitudes
than in their perceptual observations. Yet there are disagreements
in the latter, as everyday arguments over observed facts and con-
tradictions of eyewitnesses in legal disputes testify. Science has to
some degree obviated these discrepancies by improving the condi-
tions of observation and relying only on reports of perceptually dis-
criminating observers.
Something similar can be done and in a way is done in ascertain-
ing values through attitudinal reactions. In some rough sense, every-
one admits that the feelings one has toward a painting or a musical
composition are more reliable if they occur under better conditions,
and, though it may sound invidious, the whole procedure (which
within proper bounds is quite legitimate) of literary and artistic
criticism presupposes that some men are aesthetically more sensitive
than others. Much the same thing can be said in the sphere of moral
and social values.
The difficulty about agreement is one of degree and can, I think,
be met if candidly faced. A more basic objection is one of kind. It
would say that emotional reactions are toto caelo disparate from
perceptual observations in that they are not cognitive at all. This
perhaps is the nub of the whole matter, and I would not, even if I
could hope to succeed, argue the issue here. There has been a thin
trickle of recognition, from Plato down, that emotions are cognitive,
that they have objects (not merely causes), that they are about or
directed toward (not simply aroused by) something. So it perhaps
is within the realm of possible hypothesis that they do furnish some
sort of knowledge.
It would seem apparent, however, that emotions show us no new

qualities or relations of things in any sense comparable to the colors
or shapes observed, for example, in visual perception. If they reveal
anything, it is quite different from any property the senses discernâ
so different that even the designation "non-natural property" is in-
appropriate to it. Now it has been long recognized that emotions
group themselves in pairs, according as they involve favorable or
unfavorable attitudes toward their objects (love-hate, joy-sorrow,
hope-anxiety). Likewise there is nothing novel to the realization
that values are also polar, being positive and negative in character
(good-bad, beautiful-ugly, legal-illegal). Putting these together we
may speculate that favorable emotions (with some degree of reliabil-
ity) grasp positive values in their objects, unfavorable, negative.
But what is the value thus emotively grasped? Not a quality or
relation, not a property, but an it-were-good (or bad), an it-were-
fitting (or unfitting), that the object exist or have the properties it is
perceived or pictured as having. This is awkward to put in everyday
phraseology except in the extreme cases, where we do have common
expressions for it in the form of such auxiliary verbs as "ought"; for
example, "The walls should be a deeper green," "You ought to tell
your wife the truth," "You must leave the park by midnight." Un-
fortunately, this view requires a comparatively novel and uncustom-
ary treatment of values. They are not just a subclass of facts; they
are a wholly separate yet analogous realm. For every actual or pos-
sible fact of anything's exemplifying some property or set of proper-
ties, there is a positive or negative valueâit's being good (fitting,
right, beautiful) or bad (unfitting, wrong, ugly)âthat it exemplify
this property or set of properties. Such a view must not merely
clear the hurdle of unfamiliarity; it must also overcome the obstacle
of requiring a new logic. I shall not even intimate why this is so,
but simply set it down as a technical necessity.
Frankly, I am not very sanguine about the prospects for the de-
velopment of an empirical method in the value disciplines along the
lines just outlined. But it does furnish some small hope in an other-
wise dark outlook. And the difficulties in it and the work required
for its specification may, perhaps, be attributed to the novelty of the
proposition that values really are different from facts, and that truly
arduous labor must go into the perfection of any procedures which
can do for our ascertainment of them what modern scientific method
has done for our knowledge of facts.
But whatever happens to this little ray of hope, our study has, it
seems to me, thrown a floodlight on the truth: Western man today
has achieved an exceedingly powerful tool for discovering facts and
factual laws. He has done this by ridding himself, in this procedure,
of value thinking. He has attained nothing comparable in the area
of value, although he has made some progress here in clearing his
mind of factual thinking. If he can cling to the conviction that there
are values in the world until he can work out a reliable technique
for discovering them concretely, he may survive. Otherwise he will
be forced down the path to complete value skepticism. Such skep-
ticism involves no logical inconsistency, but it stands in contradic-
tion to man's whole nature and outlook. I doubt whether he can
remake himself sufficiently to live with it, and I certainly would hate
to see him try.

Index
Absolute motion (see Relative motion)
Academie des Sciences, 95, 173
Accademia del Cimento, 94-95, 134
Addison, 143-144
"Agreement of the People," 339
Agricola, 70
Agricultural revolution, 161-164
Agriculture, 157, 159-160
Alexander, Samuel, 234
Althusius, 333-335
American Revolution, 351-352, 409
Anxiety, 463-464
Apian, Peter, 72
Aquinas, Thomas (see Aristotle; Aris-
totle, concepts of)
ethics of, 277-278, 279-285
physics of, 19, 37
political theory of, 292-294, 297-299,
323
Archimedes, 68, 91
Aristotle
concepts and type of concepts of,
20-23, 100-102, 104, 108-109, 117,
122, 126-129, 131, 149, 170-171,
198, 224-225, 280-283
and medieval economics, 39, 41-45
and medieval ethics, 276-278, 279-
280, 282-283
and medieval physics, 18-20, 37
and Renaissance physics, 49, 99-100
influence on Marx, 217, 218
influence on Quesnay, 158
on causes, 23-24
on motion, 20-37
on the elements, 26-30
Asceticism, 276-277, 279
Association, laws of, 139, 376-382
Astronomy (see Celestial; Copernican
system; Homocentric system; Ptol-
emaic system; Saving the appear-
ances)
Atheism, 145, 462-463, 465
Augustine, Saint, 285
Austin, John, 433-435
Authoritarianism
in ethics, 277, 289
in science, 11-12, 14, 18-19, 93~94
Bacon, Francis, 95, 97-99
Bakewell, Robert, 163
Balguy, John, 369
Barometer, 112-114, 132-133
Bayle, Pierre, 141
Benevolence, 367-371, 375-376, 387
(see Hutcheson; Moral Sense;
Selfishness; Shaftesbury)
Bentham, 257, 387-390, 420, 428-432
Bergson, 223
Bismarck, 202, 240-241
Black, Joseph, 134-135
Blackstone, 429-430
Blanc, Louis, 208-209
Blount, Charles, 144
Boccaccio, 311-312
Bodin, 324-328
Bohm-Bawerk, 256-260
Books, 17-18, 96-97, 147-148
Boyle, Robert, 114-115, 129
Brahe, Tycho, 60, 75
Breeding, 163, 227

478
Index
Celestial
mechanics, of Aristotle, 34-35, 55-57
mechanics, of Copernicus, 52-57
mechanics, of Newton, 122-124
motions, as observed, 32-33
Change
kinds of, for Aristotle, 20-21, 128
definition of, for Aristotle, 22
Church (see Councils, church; Papacy;
Protestant Reformation)
and control of ideas, 16-17, 93-94,
142-143, 146-147, 148, 297
and humanism, 65
Circular motion, 120-122 (see Per-
fection of motion)
Circulation, monetary, 155
Clarke, Samuel, 363-366
Classical economists, 150, 161-173, 175-
184
Classification, 224-225
Code Napoledn, 193, 418
Codes of law, 193, 418, 420-421, 432
Colbert, 95, 151-152
Coleridge, 188, 192
Colonies, 81-82, 85
Combination acts, 210
Commercial revolution, 65-67, 69-78,
84-87, 146, 162, 332
"Commonwealth," 338, 345
Communism (see Dialectical materi-
alism; Engels; Marx)
Competition (see Laissez faire; Mo-
nopolies; Price, regulation of)
Conscience, 383
Consent, 300-301, 302-303, 305-307,
323-324. 331-33*. 346. 349. 352
Conservation of energy, 132-137
Conservation of matter, 128-132
Constitutional law, 432, 439, 440, 443
Contract (see Social compact)
Cooperative societies, 210, 211
Copernican revolution, 46-57, 68
Copernican system, 52-57, 91, 119-120
Copernicus, 46-57, 68
Corn laws, 176, 182, 191
Cosimo de'Medici, 63, 67
Councils, church, 303, 305, 306, 332
Cowper, William, 187-188, 189, 190
Cudworth, Ralph, 363, 364-365
Cusa, Nicholas of, 305-306, 332
Customary law, 417, 421, 423-424, 434,
435
Dalton, 185
Darwin, 186, 221-223, 227-229, 231, 233
Darwinism, 232-235, 445-451
"Declaration of Rights," 192, 402, 410
Deism, 109, 143-146, 362
Delegated law, 435, 438
Demand (see Supply and demand)
Density, 111-116
Descartes, 138
De Vries, Hugo, 228
Dewey, John, 3, 234, 441, 455
Dialectic, Hegelian, 212-217; 397-399
Dialectical materialism, 214-215
Diderot, 140, 141, 145, 149
Disraeli, 191
Distribution of income, 155-156, 265-

Index
479
Factory system, 174-175, 190, sn
Feudalism, 12-18, 39-41, 163, 197
Feiierbach, Ludwig, 213-214
Fichte, 194, 196, 413-415
Fiction, legal, 422, 428-430
Filmer, Sir Robert, 346
Flattery, 374
Folk, 194, 196, 198, 414, 416-417
Force, 116, 124
Fortrey, Samuel, 80
Fourier, Charles, 205-206
Freedom, 398-399, 405-406, 408, 411,
414-415, 462-465
French Revolution, 140, 161, 192, 202-
203, 402, 409-410, 419-420
Galileo, 90-92, 112
concepts & type of concept of, 100-
102, 104, 108-109, ''", 112-113,
123, 132, 137, 149, 155, 156, 164,
186, 230, 237, 247, 254, 259-260,
273
History, 195, 201, 221-222, 416, 426,
469
Hobbes, 138, 139, 152-153, 289, 300,
321, 339-345. 356-36*. 404-405. 436
Holmes, Justice, 441-442
Homocentric system, 34-35
Hooke, Robert, 95
Hooker, Richard, 322-324, 347
Humanism, 63-65, 67, 68, 69, 308-314,
316 (see Boccaccio; Erasmus;
Petrarch; Rabelais)
Hume, 142-143, 145-146, 377-378, 384,
426-428
Hutcheson, Francis, 367-371, 386-387
Hutton, James, 226
Huxley, Thomas, 232, 446
Huygens, 95, 242
Impetus, physics of, 99-100
Industrial revolution, 173-175, 190-
191, 203, 240
Inertia, 99, 102-104, 116-122, 250
Inheritance, 225-226, 228-230
Institutional ethics, 396-399
International law, 335, 434
Intuitionism, moral, 452-455
James I, 338
Jeans, Sir James, 274
Jefferson, Thomas, 353-354
Joule, James, 136-137
Jurists, Roman, 296, 418, 422-423
Just price, 41, 43, 159
Kant, 390-393
Kapital, Das, 215-216
Kelsen, Hans, 292, 435-440
Kepler, 58-62
Kepler's laws, 58-60, 122
Knies, Karl, 201
Labor, 181, 182, 190, 202-211, 216, 218,
219
on motion, 22, 99, 100-109, 1Z2
Gauss, 253
Gay, John, 378-380
General Will, 405-407
Geographical explorations, 64, 84
Gilbert, William, 77-78
Glorious Revolution, 140, 146, 345, 411
Goethe, 194
480
Index
Latent heat, 134-135
Lavoisier, 130-132
'Law,' ambiguity of, 329-330, 340, 392,
437
Law, legal (see Codes of law; Consti-
tutional law; Customary law;
Delegated law; Fiction, legal; In-
ternational law; Jurist, Roman;
'Law,' ambiguity of; Law of na-
tions; Law of nature; Legal real-
ism; Positive law; Positive theory
of law; Social compact)
Law of nations, 296, 336, 423
Law of nature, 139, 152-153, 170-171,
296-298, 304, 327, 329-331, 337,
343, 347-349. 351. 402-4Â°4. 409-
410, 412, 419-423, 4*6-428, 431,
436
Legal realism, 441-445
Leonardo da Vinci, 75-77
Les philosoph1es, 141-142, 144-145, 147,
148, 149, 192
Levellers, 339
Light, 242-246
Linnaeus, 225
List, Friedrich, 198-200
Literati, 146-148, 186, 372 (see Books)
Llewellyn, Karl, 442-445
Locke, 138, 141, 144, 160, 171, 345-
351
Lorentz, H. A., 245-246
Louis XIV, 151, 372
Luxembourg Commission, 209
Lyell, Charles, 226
Machiavelli, 317-321
Machines, industrial, 174-175
Magnetism, 77-78
Maine, Sir Henry, 419-424
Malthus, 179-180, 182, 228
Mandeville, Bernard de, 372-374
Maps, 72-73
Marginal prices, 266-270
Marginal utility, 182, 255-261
Marie Antoinette, 410
Marriage, 396-397
Marsiglio, 301-305
Marx, 209, 212-221
Mass, 111, 115, 116, 250-254 (see Con-
servation of matter; Density; Im-
petus, physics of; Inertia; Gravita-
tion)
Mechanical equivalent of heat, 136-137
Mendel, Gregor, 228-230
Menger, Karl, 202, 256-261
Mercantilism, 79-84, 149, 151, 176, 351-
352 (see Colonies; American Rev-
olution; Money)
Mercator, 73
Methodenstreit, 202, 256
Michelson and Morley, 241-242, 244
Mill, James, 257, 381
Milliken, R. A., 274
Miracles, 142-143, 144
Momentum, 115-119, 132
Monarchical power, 317, 338, 353
Money, 41-44, 80, 82-83, 86. 88, 155,
158, 165, 196, 207, 211, 216-217,
263-264, 352
Index
481
Newton, 96, 108-110, 137-140, 145, 242
concepts of, 110-117, 123, 126-127
laws of motion of, 116-119
Nothing, 462
Numbers (see Elements for Pytha-
goreans)
Ockham, William of, 287-289, 356, 455-
456
Origin of Species, tit, 446
Otherworldliness, 276, 279, 283, 315
Owen, Robert, 210-212
Oxygen (see Calcination; Lavoisier;
Phlogiston)
Paine, Tom, 353
Papacy, 301, 305, 306, 318
Paracelsus, 129
Parallelogram principle, 106-108, 118,
121, 122, 244-249
Pascal, 113-114
Paternalism, 293-294, 297-298, 307, 325
Paul, Saint, 284-285
Pavlov, 233
Pendula, 118-119
Perfection
moral, 283, 284, 287
of motion, 33-34, 47, 49, 54-57, 58-
62, 104, 106, 108-109, 122
Petrarch, 63-64, 311
Philosophical radicals, 141
Phlogiston, 129-131
Physiocrats, 149-161
Pietism, 391
Plato, 50-51, 63, 224
Platonic Academy, 63
Pleasure, 300-301, 374, 375, 376-382,
388-389, 447
Pletho, 63
Politiques, les, 324
Pomponazzi, 315
Poor-relief, 163, 175, 180
Pope, Alexander, 138
Population, 179-180
Positive law, 299, 304, 329, 330, 349,
43â¢. 433. 434
Positive theory of law, 431-440
Positivists, 4-5, 289, 456-460
Pragmatism, 441
Price, 164-168, 181, 220, 257, 259, 260-
261, 263-270 (see Just price;
Marginal prices; Natural price;
Supply and demand)
Price, regulation of, 40-41, 153
Price, Richard, 365-366, 369-370, 410
Priestly, Joseph, 131
Principia Mathematica (Newton), 137-
â¢38
Production, economic, 156, 265-266
Profits, 157, 163, 164, 169-170, 183-184,
204-205, 211-212, 266-267, 268
Progress, 8, 126, 142, 205
Property, private, 160, 205-207, 348,
411
Protestant Reformation, 86-87, 142'
148, 322, 330-331
Proudhon, 206-208
Psychology, 138-139, 233-234, 357, 368-
369, 37". 376-38*. 384-386 (*Â«Â«
Association, laws of; Hartley,

482
Index
Research, scientific, 240-241
Respiration, 129-130
Restoration era, 193, 418
Revelation, 143-144, 299, 302
Revival of learning, 64-65, 67
Revolution of 1848, 202-204, 208-209,
215
Revolutions, political, 330, 333, 402,
409-410, 423, 428 (see American
Revolution; French Revolution;
Glorious Revolution; Revolution
of 1848)
Revolutions, social and economic (see
Agricultural revolution; Com-
mercial revolution; Industrial
revolution)
Ricardo, 173, 175-179, 180-183, 218,
258
Rivers, W. H. R., 448
Romanticism, 148, 186-202, 212, 215,
222-223, 344, 394-396, 399-400,
401, 402, 407, 413, 415, 417, 424
Ross, W. D., 455
Rousseau, 203, 344, 402-407
Royal Society of London, 95-96, 137,
174, 242
Rumford, Count, 135-136
Saint (see Aquinas; Augustine; Paul)
Saint-Simon, 204-205
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 462-465
Saving the appearances, 34, 36, 37, 52-
54. 61
Schelling, 222
Schmoller, Gustav, 201-202, 256
Scientific societies, 94-96 (see Acade'mie
des Sciences; Accademia del
Cimento, Royal Society of Lon-
don)
Scott, Sir Walter, 188
Secondary qualities, 127, 150
Selfishness, 361, 367-382, 387
Self-realization, 400-401
Semantics, 456-460
Senior, Nassau William, 183-184, 218
Shaftesbury, third Earl of, 367-370
Sidgwick, Henry, 452-453
Simplification in science, 126-128, 132,
150, 185
Simultaneity, 247-249
Skepticism (see Value, skepticism
about)
Smith, Adam, 80, 139, 149, 150, 161-
173, 182, 384-386
Social compact, 301, 332-335, 336, 339,
343, 346, 348, 349-351. 35*. 403-
407, 412, 423-424, 426-428, 430, 436
(see "Agreement of the People";
Althusius; Consent; Egalitarian-
ism; Hobbes; Jefferson; Rousseau)
Sociology of law (see Legal realism)
Sovereignty, 325-328, 334, 336, 338,
342-345, 346, 349-350, 354, 359,
360-361, 364, 405-406, 434, 438,
44Â°
Special creation, 226, 227
Species, fixity of, 224, 226, 227
Spencer, Herbert, 446-447
Stahl, G. E., 129

Index
483
Utility, principle of, 389-390, 432, 433,
436, 447-448, 453
Vacuum, 112-114, 128
Value
distinguished from fact, 5-6, 38-39,
45, 46-47, 62, 82, 89, 108, 123, 127-
128, 146, 154, 156-157, 170-172,
175, 190, 195-196, 197-198, 224,
232, 236, 255, 261, 273-275, 290,
3*9-330, 340, 355-356, 359, 369,
370-371, 382, 392, 394-396. 399,
401-402, 431, 436, 441, 451, 452,
455. 459. 461. 469. 470, 475
skepticism about, 4-5, 274-275, 316,
359, 441, 442, 444-445, 458-461,
470, 475
study of, by social science, 3-4, 441,
442, 444-445
Virgil, 55
Virtues, 282, 386, 408
Voltaire, 138, 140, 145, 147
Voluntarism
in ethics, 284-292, 356, 362, 364,
369, 37Â°, 378, 455, 462, 464, 471
in legal and political theory, 299,
304-305. 3*1. 3*3, 3*6, 331-33*.
337. 351, 431. 434. 436. 437, 439,
440
Von Guericke, Otto, 112
Von Mises, Ludwig, 262
Von Savigny, Friedrich, 415-419
Wages, 164, 175, 180-181
Wealth, 43-45, 79-83, 150, 158, 171-172,
"99
Weber, Max, 87
Welfare economics, 262
Wesley, John, 187, 190
Westermarck, Edward, 233, 449-452,
459
Wordsworth, 188, 189
World state, 294-296, 297
Young, Thomas, 136, 242
Zabarella, 91
Zeitgeist, 195
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Modern Science and Human Values A Study in The History of Ideas - Everett W Hall

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Modern Science and Human Values A Study in The History of Ideas - Everett W Hall

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MODERN SCIENCE

A STUDY IN THE HISTORY OF IDEAS

Kenan Professor of Philosophy

The University of North Carolina

D. VAN NOSTRAND COMPANY, INC.

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

120 Alexander St., Princeton, New Jersey

257 Fourth Avenue, New York 10, New York

25 Hollinger Rd., Toronto 16, Canada

All correspondence should be addressed to the

principal office of the company at Princeton, N. J.

Copyright, Â©, 1956 by

D. VAN NOSTRAND COMPANY, INC.

Published simultaneously in Canada by

D. VAN NOSTRAND COMPANY (Canada), LTD.

All Rights Reserved

This book, or any parts thereof, may not be

reproduced in any form without written per-

mission from the author and the publisher.

Library of Congress Catalogue Card No.: 56-11755

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

C., R., D., D. and S.

The ensuing study is addressed primarily neither to scientists nor

to historians. In writing it the author had in mind two groups of

laymen in these fields, who, bewildered by the cross-currents of con-

temporary thought, wish to get some perspective by means of an

historical approach. On the other, there are students, some looking

ahead to careers in science, medicine or engineering, who desire a

broader cultural framework for their subjects than their technical

training promises; others in philosophy and the humanities who

wanted an outlook on modern scientific method and its relations to

path of some actual scientific pursuit. The author has no special

qualifications in the way of scholarship in the areas involved, and

certainly puts forth no claim to having established any new theories.

If he has made any contribution it is in the tracing out of certain

clusters of ideas and their association with certain attitudes that

have profoundly affected the modern mind. He hopes and believes

in gaining that kind of objectivity concerning itself which the pres-

ent age so greatly needs.

parts in it; in any case, the author is deeply indebted to them.

stages, and encouraged its publication. They are Professor Ralph

Ellsworth, Director of Libraries at the State University of Iowa,

Professor Lewis Zerby of the Department of Philosophy at Michigan

State College, Professor George Mosse of the Department of History

at the University of Wisconsin, Doctor Nathan Womack, Head of

the Department of Surgery in the School of Medicine at the Uni-

versity of North Carolina, Mr. Lambert Davis, Director of the Uni-

versity of North Carolina Press, and Professor Henry Margenau of

the Sloane Physics Laboratory, Yale University, who, it should be

added, expressed some disagreement with the author's general ac-

Then there is Professor James King of the Department of History

also offered numerous criticisms both of a general and a detailed

character. That he must not be held responsible for historical errors

and misinterpretations that remain may best be indicated by my stat-

ing that I still hold to an account of the development of science and

of economics in particular from which he differs, as I understand

him, almost toto caelo.

Above all, I owe a debt of gratitude to people connected with a

course of lectures in the history of ideas which I gave at the State

University of Iowa at the close of World War II and from which

ants who shared with me its many problems and discouragements

with relatively few rewards, Doctors Leonard Pinsky, Thomas

Thompson and Romane Clark. On the other, there is the mass of

IntroductionâOn the Difference Between the

Part IâAttainment of the Method of Modern Science 9

Part IIâToward an Independent Investigation of Values 271

ConclusionâWhere Do We Stand? 467