give this motive play are essentially
exceptional also, and could never be reproduced in social life at large,
except at the cost of making all human life intolerable.

I have called special attention to this particular socialistic argument,
partly because socialists, and other sentimental thinkers, like Ruskin,
attach such extreme importance to it; but mainly because it affords us
an exceptionally striking illustration of the manner in which they are
accustomed to reason about matters with regard to which they
ostentatiously profess themselves to be the pioneers of accurate
science. One of the principal grounds--to repeat what has been said
already--on which they attack what they call the Economics of
Capitalism, is that it deals exclusively with the actions of "the
economic man," or the man whose one motive is the appropriation of
wealth. Such a man, they say, is an abstraction. He does not exist in
reality; and if economics is to have any scientific value it must deal
with man as a whole, in all his living complexity. As applied to the
orthodox economists this criticism has an element of truth in it; but
when the socialists attempt to act on their own loudly boasted
principles, and deal with human nature as a whole instead of only one of
its elements, they do nothing but travesty the error which they set out
with denouncing. The one-motived economic man who cares only for
personal gain is, no doubt, an abstraction, like the lines and points of
Euclid. Still the motive ascribed to him is one which has a real
existence and produces real effects. It has been defined with accuracy;
and by studying its effects in isolation we reach many true conclusions.
But the other motives, with which socialists declare that we must
supplement this, are treated by them in a manner so crude, so childish,
so incomplete, so deficient in the mere rudiments of scientific
analysis, that they do not correspond to anything. Instead of forming
any true addition to the data of economic science, they are like images
belonging to the dream of a maudlin school-girl. They have only the
effect of obscuring, not completing, the facts to which the orthodox
economists too closely confined themselves, but which, though
incomplete, are so far as they go actual.

Now, however, without getting out of touch with the socialists, let us
return to firmer ground, and having seen the futility of their attempts
to indicate any motive calculated to operate on the