Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/749

Rh general principles, can best interpret the facts around him. To follow through a course of political economy without this attempt to think out the principles by use of the imagination, and by constant application to familiar facts, is like trying to climb a perpendicular slope of ice—the student will not catch hold.

In the next place, the disciplinary power of the study is very much that which is gained in the study and pursuit of the law. The beginner first gets an understanding of the principles, and he is then constantly engaged in turning with them to the economic phenomena around him as an exercise in their application. Or, struck by some new or interesting fact, he studies to find the law which explains the observed effects. In thus applying general principles to explain special facts, the economic student is doing almost exactly that which he does when, in the profession of the law, he applies legal principles to particular cases, or considers whether the interpretation of the law in one decision applies also to the special case he has in hand. The modern theory of legal teaching no longer recognizes the plan of simply filling the mind with statements of what the law now is, but aims to force the student, under oversight, constantly to apply principles to multitudes of cases, or to discover the principle running through the studied cases. It will, then, be seen that this process is much the same as in political economy. Consequently, quite apart from the "usefulness" of our study, its training is an excellent preparation for legal work, and strengthens the powers which are most called into play in that profession.

Moreover, this kind of mental exercise is continually calling upon one for the ability to see the pivotal part in any statement, whether of fact or principle. Not to see the essential bearing of an exposition is a species of mental blindness; but exercise will gradually give clearer vision. Nothing is more common in the replies of untrained students to questions than the happy-go-lucky kind of answers which bear upon the general subject, but are aside from the point. Persons may write or speak about the question, but do not answer it; what they may say may be quite true in itself, but it is irrelevant. The faculty of hitting a point is one, in my opinion, like concentration of mind (to which it is nearly allied), which is largely capable of cultivation and growth. And the discipline of rigorous study in political economy is one of the best means of acquiring it. In my experience, there have been some interesting illustrations of this analysis. Trained lawyers have, by heredity, transferred this faculty of directness of thought to their sons; and it has been possible, sometimes, without further data, to pick out the sons of lawyers from reading their examination-books in political economy. These sons "hit the nail on the head," and made clean work of their answers, without any mental shuffling, or avoidance of the essential point.

To make progress in such a study, the student must necessarily