METHODOLOGY OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM 1 27
tual, and ethical elements. Now I may properly set myself to study the economic sequences betrayed during the crusades. I may set myself to abstract these altogether from political, intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical developments. I will start with the fact of overcrowding, say, in France. Some of the incidents of overcrowding are sanitary, but I do not enter into these realities. I am tracing only economic causes and effects. Some of the , influences are on family relationships. They are material for me, though not as domestic matters, but as industrial matters. Some of the incidents are criminal, such as bodily violence, robbery, etc. I might turn away from my proposed abstraction to weigh the ethical quality of these, but that is none of my business now. Some of the incidents are those of mob violence under the guise of military conquest : murder, rapine, outrage. These again are stuff for the moralist, but in a quite different way stuff for me. Other incidents are those of superstition and sacrilege and profanation under the guise of religion. Whatever is of economic impulse and for economic interest in all this is my material. I am to trace, if possible, how the mind of man is acted upon, and how it reacts, so far as its economic interests are concerned, by all the circumstances in which economic interests are seen to be a factor in this period. If I ask how the same minds ought to have been affected by giving just weight to all the considerations involved, I am simply quitting my pro- posed task, and taking up another. My proposed object was to get together certain series of facts about the play of mind under given conditions with ref- erence to economic interest. Economic science has for its ideal this same thing, not for one period, but for all periods ; and the gathering of all these facts so abstracted into generalizations about the actual reactions of mind upon the economic motive. When we take up the question, "What ought to be our attitude toward certain economic relations," we enter upon a distinct inquiry, as different as diagnosis of a disease is from discovery of ways to treat the disease. We cannot call the two things by the same name, without creating hopeless confusion from the start. The former inquiry is what the economists mean by economics, when they say it has nothing to do with ethics. This is not to say that economics may, can, or must ignore actions that are ethical in quality. It is to say that economics may, can, and must ignore the ethical aspects of those actions, and calculate them simply as fac- tors of such and such force, to be determined by any available means of measurement. To say that economics has nothing to do with ethics is not to say that economics is simply a calculation of forces into which the intellectual and moral character of men does not enter. It is to say that economics is a calculation of all the forces, physical, mental, and moral, that enter into reac- tion with self-interest in the pursuit of wealth ; but solely, in the first instance, with a view to clear knowledge of their actual action ; not at all, in the first place, with reference to an estimate of the moral quality of the action. When
plating the activities directed to the production of wealth entirely apart from the other activities which compose the whole of human pursuits. '
