ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THE STUDY

OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE.

A LECTURE DELIVERED AT THE ROYAL INSTITUTION OF GREAT BRITAIN.

BY

W. B. HODGSON, LL.D.

"Ignorance does not simply deprive us of advantages; it leads us to work our own misery; it is not merely a vacuum, void of knowledge, but a plenum of positive errors, continually productive of unhappiness. This remark was never more apposite than in the case of Political Economy."— Samuel Bailey's Discourses, &c. p. 121. 1852.

"If a man begins to forget that he is a social being, a member of a body, and that the only truths which can avail him anything, the only truths which are worthy objects of his philosophical search, are those which are equally true for every man, which will equally avail every man, which he must proclaim, as far as he can, to every man, from the proudest sage to the meanest outcast, he enters, I believe, into a lie, and helps forward the dissolution of that society of which he is a member."—Rev. C. Kingsley's Alexandria and her Schools. L. ii. p. 66. 1854.

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"A man will never be just to others who is not just to himself, and the first requisite of that justice is, that he should look every obligation, every engagement, every duty in the face. This applies as much to money as to more serious affairs, and as much to nations as to men.”—Times, June 6, 1854.

ON THE

STUDY OF ECONOMIC SCIENCE.

IT was truly said in this room, some weeks ago, by one whose departure from London we must all regret -Professor Edward Forbes-that "It is the nature of the human mind to desire and seek a law." The higher desires of man have not been left, any more than his lower, without their object and their fulfilment; and just as the bodily appetite desires food, while the earth yields stores of nourishment, as the imagination craves for beauty, and beauty is on every side,-so, responding to man's desire for law, does all Nature bear the impress of law. Not to the ignorant or careless eye, however, does LAW anywhere reveal itself. The discovery of its traces is the student's rich and ever fresh reward. men in general, the outward sense reports only a number of detached phenomena; their relations become gradually apparent to him only whose mental vision is acute. enough, and whose gaze is steady enough, to behold them. SCIENCE, therefore, consists not in the accumulation of heterogeneous facts, any more than the random up-piling of stones is architecture, but in the detection of the principles which co-relate facts even the most dissimilar and anomalous, and of the order which binds the parts into a whole. SCIENCE is, in brief, the pursuit of LAW; and the history of science is the record

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of the steps by which man in this pursuit rises through classifications, of which the last is ever more comprehensive than its predecessors, from the complexity of countless individuals to the simplicity of the group, and from the diversity of the many, at least towards the oneness of the universal.

The discoveries, however, which it needed a Newton or a Cuvier to make, may be rendered intelligible in their results, if not always in their processes, to ordinary understandings; and whether our knowledge be superficial or profound, the belief in the omnipresence of law, in at least the physical world, has long ago taken its place in the convictions of the least instructed man. Let any one, then, who can realize mentally the dif ference between the aspect which the starry heavens bear to the quite ignorant beholder, and that which those same heavens present to the man most slightly acquainted with the discoveries of astronomy, or between the appearances of the vegetable world before. and after some acquaintance with Vegetable Physiology, but who has never thoughtfully considered the phenomena of industrial life,—let such a one station himself, say on London Bridge, at high tide, and in the busy hour of day; let him watch the ever-flowing streams of human beings, each bound on his several errand,— the seemingly endless succession of vehicles, with their freight, animate and inanimate; let him look down the river, and observe the number and variety of shipping, coming and departing from and to all parts of the world, remote or near; let him observe, as he strolls onwards, the shops, and warehouses, and wharfs, and arsenals, and docks, with their overflowing stores; the almost interminable lines of streets with houses of every