§ 2. _Economic_.

It must be clearly understood that the political economy of the
mediævals was not a science, like modern political economy, but an
art. 'It is a branch of the virtue of prudence; it is half-way between
morality, which regulates the conduct of the individual, and politics,
which regulates the conduct of the sovereign. It is the morality of
the family or of the head of the family, from the point of view of the
good administration of the patrimony, just as politics is the morality
of the sovereign, from the point of view of the good government of the
State. There is as yet no question of economic laws in the sense
of historical and descriptive laws; and political economy, not yet
existing in the form of a science, is not more than a branch of that
great tree which is called ethics, or the art of living well.'[1] 'The
doctrine of the canon law,' says Sir William Ashley, 'differed from
modern economics in being an art rather than a science. It was a body
of rules and prescriptions as to conduct, rather than of conclusions
as to fact. All art indeed in this sense rests on science; but the
science on which the canonist doctrine rested was theology. Theology,
or rather that branch of it which we may call Christian ethics, laid
down certain principles of right and wrong in the economic sphere;
and it was the work of the canonists to apply them to specific
transactions and to pronounce judgment as to their permissibility.'[2]
The conception of economic laws, in the modern sense, was quite
foreign to the mediæval treatment of the subject. It was only in
the middle of the fourteenth century that anything approaching a
scientific examination of the phenomena of economic life appeared,
and that was only in relation to a particular subject, namely, the
doctrine of money.[3]