in the nature of things, but in human arrangements. And in looking for this
ultimate cause, he, like his great predecessors, comes extremely near to
the truth, but, after all, glides past without seeing it.

On this road, which leads to truth past so many errors, the last stage is
the hypothesis set up by the so-called Historical School of political
economy--the hypothesis, namely, that there exists in the nature of things
a gulf between economic theory and practice, which makes it quite
conceivable that the principles that are correct _in thesi_ do not coincide
with the real course of industrial life. The existence of the problem is
thereby more fully established than ever, but its solution is placed
outside of the domain of theoretical cognisance. For the Historical School
is perfectly correct in maintaining that the abstractions of the current
economic doctrine are practically useless, and that this is true not only
of some of them, but of all. The real human economy does _not_ obey those
laws which the theorists have abstractedly deduced from economic phenomena.
Hence it is only possible either that the human economy is by its very
nature unfitted to become the object of scientific abstraction and
cognisance, or that the abstractions hitherto made have been
erroneous--erroneous, that is, not in the sense of being actually out of
harmony with phenomena from which they are correctly and logically deduced,
but in the sense of being theoretically erroneous, deduced according to
wrong principles, and therefore useless both _in abstracto_ and _in
concreto_.

Of these alternatives only the second can, in reality, be correct. There is
absolutely no reasonable ground for supposing that the laws which regulate
the economic activity of men should be beyond human cognisance; and still
less ground is there for assuming that such laws do not exist at all. We
must therefore suppose that the science which seeks to discover these laws