IN opening this section of our subject the first general position which I desire to establish is this, that it would have been almost a miracle for any man living in the time of Adam Smith to lay even the groundwork of a science dealing either with political, social, religious, or moral problems which should have a permanent and final validity and authority for men living at the present day; and above all a Science of Political Economy. In the first place the great conception of Evolution with its dynamic point of view had not yet, except perhaps in the mind of Goethe and a few French Sociological Thinkers, even dawned on the intellectual world, much less had any attempt been made to reconstruct the distinctly human sciences of Religion, Ethics,. Politics, or Economics, on the lines of its fundamental principle. And the consequence is that no system of thought having its origin and development in the Eighteenth or first half of the Nineteenth Century (always barring of course the Mathematical and Physical Sciences, for reasons which we have given in our first chapter), but has become hopelessly antiquated and superannuated for readers of the present age; and the antiquity which was once the consecration of all human thought and institutions has now become their tomb.

Except therefore as marking the stages through which the intellectual development of mankind has passed on its way, these old systems in themselves serve only to choke up libraries, to waste time, and to cumber the ground. Indeed there is no need for us to refute them, they have done that for us themselves; each system swallowing up the one that went before it like a succession of perpetual motion schemers, and with net result, as in the case of the fabled Kilkenny cats, - zero, or tails only! For where now are the political doctrines of 'natural rights,' the 'state of Nature,' of abstract 'liberty and equality,' which gave rise to as many new constitutions and forms of government in the Nineteenth Century as those they overturned at the time of the French Revolution, and which so permeated the minds of men in the days of Adam Smith? They are one and all more or less discredited, and are being gradually superseded by the doctrine of Evolution and the Science of Sociology which are now gathering Politics as well as the other Sciences into their ample folds.

Held in their decadence by Herbert Spencer alone among thinkers of the first rank, and being in their essence diametrically opposed to his own doctrine of Evolution, he went to his grave in despair because his adhesion to this Utopia of 'natural rights' which had been the creed of philosophical radicalism in his youth, had ruined his influence in the domain of those social, moral, and political sciences which lay nearest his heart, and which were regarded by himself as the crown of his labours. Where, again, is the natural theology of Paley and his successors, or the systems of Theism, Atheism, and Materialism to which Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists in their various ways gave their imprimatur! Or the individualist Psychology of that time, which culminated in the individualist Ethics of Bentham and the Mills that followed on it! Gone too, and swallowed up in the same maelstrom of Evolution. It is the same, too, with the systems of Metaphysics and Ontology of Kant and Hegel, profound and suggestive in many ways as they are, but which are at last passing away even in those academic haunts where they lingered so long, and for whose scholastic dialectics they were so well adapted; retreating before the rising tide of a philosophy founded on the new way of looking at things through the eyes of the Evolution Psychology. For in spite of all the labour they expended in trying to solve the Problem of Existence in the ultimate form into which they had cast it, - namely as to how a bridge could be built which would get them logically across from 'the Many' to 'the One,' - even they, were not able to span the gulf by the elaborate cantilevers which they threw across from the opposite banks (for they would never quite meet in the centre), any more than Herbert Spencer could by his more naive and unsophisticated subway of an Unknown Cause.

And now we have to see that to this death and oblivion of all distinctly Eighteenth Century thought no exception can be made in the case of Political Economy. For when Adam Smith wrote his 'Wealth of Nations' the type of Modern Industry to which every Applied Science of Political Economy must now be adapted - if it is to be of any use in Politics and Legislation - had not even been born, but was only just giving herald of its advent on the horizon. None of the great inventions had yet appeared, or if they had, they had scarcely yet been applied to manufactures. Hand looms, hand lathes, primitive furnaces, were still the order of the day and were typical of manufacturing industry generally; and it was only when a particular product happened to require several distinct operations, and the labour could be organised by bringing the workmen all closely together under one roof, and keeping each to a particular task where practice would make perfect - by the division of labour, in short, - that the amount of the product would exceed very much the mere physical power and skill of the labourer by himself; unlike the present day where the powers of Nature embodied in machinery will add gratuitously a thousand units of product for every unit added by the workman.