Page:Life of Sir William Petty 1623 – 1687.djvu/207

 acceptation of that term, may be seen just beginning to struggle into a bare existence as a separate branch of science in the pages of the writers of the earlier part of the seventeenth century. Economics, in the sense in which they were understood by the authors of antiquity, were concerned with those practical questions only which affected the finances of the State. In the Middle Ages even such limited inquiries could hardly find a natural place in a society which, outside the limits of the towns, was almost entirely based on the idea of personal service. Meanwhile political philosophy had chiefly busied itself with speculations whether man by nature was or was not a social being, but little or no connection was established between these speculations and the sphere of economics.

When at length, after the long political and religious struggles of the sixteenth century, States in their modern form had arisen, and the trading and commercial classes of society became a political factor in every country, the inquiries of the old economics as to what taxes a Government might properly raise naturally revived, and political philosophy lived again in the works of Bodin and Grotius. But the two sisters still stood apart, and political economy cannot be said to have existed till Hobbes proclaimed the doctrine that political philosophy was concerned with certain general questions, on which 'the nutrition and pro-creation of a commonwealth' depended in practice, as well as with the questions on the border-land of metaphysics and moral philosophy. Scattered up and down the pages of both the 'Leviathan' and the 'De Cive' are discussions which not only touch on a number of social questions, but contain occasional attempts to define terms, such as value and price, and to analyse the origin of wealth, as well as the usual practical considerations as to the taxes which ought to be imposed as a matter of immediate