mechanism that
character of continuous self-development which transforms it into an
"organism," the synthesis of the changing phenomena is still more
difficult to comprehend. These difficulties can only be overcome by a
recognition that the scientific imagination must play a larger part
here than it does in those sciences whose subject-matter is more
amenable to direct observation. In the latter the chief function of
the imagination will be the increase of knowledge by means of
hypotheses which tentatively transcend the region of known facts.

In economic science, as Cairnes has ably shown, the use of hypothesis
is much wider, serving in large measure as a substitute for
experiment.[2] But the scientific imagination has another constant
service to perform. Its exercise is constantly required by the
economist, and in general by the sociologist, to gather into true
relations of time, space, and causality those intricately connected
phenomena which, though individually amenable to sensuous
presentation, are not able to be thus presented as an aggregate in
their right organic order.

The attempts to construct a deductive economic science upon a
piece-meal basis by framing special and separate theories of wages,
rent, value, the functions of money, and so forth, are now recognised
to be in large measure failures precisely because they involve the
fundamental scientific fallacy of supposing that the several parts of
an organic whole can be separately studied, and that from this study
of the parts we can construct a correct idea of the whole. As in
economic theory so in the comprehension of industrial history, no
detailed investigation of a number of different heaps of facts
laboriously collected by intellectual moles will suffice for our
purpose. To understand the evolution of the system of modern industry
we must apply to the heaps of bare unordered facts those principles of
order which are now recognised as the widest generalisations or the
most valid assumptions derivable from other sciences, and endeavour
without slavish conformity to the formulae of these other sciences to
trace in the growth of industrial organisms those general laws of
development which seem common to all bodies of closely-related
phenomena.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Professor Marshall regards this restricted use of capital as
"misleading," rightly urging that "there are many other things which
truly perform the services commonly attributed to capital"
(