Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/60

 many promising literary projects — one aspect of an economic determinism sharpened by a secret recognition that our sense of “progress” involved peril to the purse, power, and prestige of the ruling classes in business, politics, society.

For myself, I think the many contacts which my work on the Review brought with more mature minds than my own, and in particular the experience of the intricate interactions in the worlds of thought and action, were of immense value in widening and deepening my outlook. It became impossible for me to devote myself to an arid economic science which boasted its growing exactitude and took “the measuring rod of money” as its final criterion of value.

Other associations belonging to this period of the nineties ministered to the same tendency, the close relations between economics and politics and the search after a social ethics which should harmonize the two and bring them both under a broader concept of the art of human welfare.

Here it behoves me to say something about the Ethical Movement which began its enlarged activities in the nineties. Soon after I came to London in the late eighties I found that my work in University Extension brought me into touch with the London Ethical Society, of which J. H. Muirhead and Bernard Bosanquet were active leaders. In substance it was an attempt of a few Oxford philosophers, not content with the seclusion of an academic life, to furnish