s just; and the first principles of all sciences,
including the definitions of them, have consequently participated
hitherto in the vagueness and uncertainty which has pervaded that most
difficult and unsettled of all branches of knowledge. If we open any
book, even of mathematics or natural philosophy, it is impossible not to
be struck with the mistiness of what we find represented as preliminary
and fundamental notions, and the very insufficient manner in which the
propositions which are palmed upon us as first principles seem to be
made out, contrasted with the lucidity of the explanations and the
conclusiveness of the proofs as soon as the writer enters upon the
details of his subject. Whence comes this anomaly? Why is the admitted
certainty of the results of those sciences in no way prejudiced by the
want of solidity in their premises? How happens it that a firm
superstructure has been erected upon an unstable foundation? The
solution of the paradox _is_, that what are called first principles,
are, in truth, _last_ principles. Instead of being the fixed point from
whence the chain of proof which supports all the rest of the science
hangs suspended, they are themselves the remotest link of the chain.
Though presented as if all other truths were to be deduced from them,
they are the truths which are last arrived at; the result of the last
stage of generalization, or of the last and subtlest process of
analysis, to which the particular truths of the science can be
subjected; those particular truths having previously been ascertained
by the evidence proper to their own nature.

Like other sciences, Political Economy has remained destitute of a
definition framed on strictly logical principles, or even of, what is
more easily to be had, a definition exactly co-extensive with the thing
defined. This has not, perhaps, caused the real bounds of the science to
be, in this country at least, practically mistaken or overpassed; but
it has occasioned--perhaps we should rather say it is connected with
--indefinite, and often erroneous, conceptions of the mode in which the
science should be studied.

We proceed to verify these assertions by an examination of the most
generally received definitions of the science.

1. First, as to the vulgar notion of the nature and object of Political
Economy, we shall not be wide of the mark if we state it to be something
to this effect:--That Political Economy is a science which teaches, or
p