inference (and very possibly a crude and hasty one) from the economic
facts of which he is tolerably sure.

But the purpose of economic theory is not merely to describe the facts
of the economic world; it is to describe them in their proper sequence
and true perspective. It must begin with those facts which are most
general and which have the widest possible significance. Those are not
likely to be the facts which our practical experience forces most
insistently upon our notice. For it is the particular and not the
general, the differences between things rather than their
resemblances, that concern us most in daily life. Nor are we likely to
find the universal facts which we require in the sphere of public
controversy. We must rather look for them in the dark recesses of our
consciousness, where are stored those truths which are so obvious that
we hardly notice them, which are so indisputable that we seldom
examine them, which seem so trite that we are apt to miss their full
significance.


§2. _The Division of Labor_. There is one such truth in the economic
sphere which it is essential to appreciate vividly and fully, with the
widest sweep of the imagination and the sharpest clarity of
thought. Man lives by cooperating with his fellow-men. In the modern
world, that cooperation is of a boundless range and an indescribable
complexity. Yet it is essentially undesigned and uncontrolled by
man. The humblest inhabitant of the United States or Great Britain
depends for the satisfaction of his simplest needs upon the activities
of innumerable people, in every walk of life and in every corner of
the globe. The ordinary commodities which appear upon his dinner table
represent the final product of the labors of a medley of merchants,