Page:The Economic Journal Volume 1.djvu/445

 R.V.WS 423 on the methods of induction which occur earlier. A rich vein of logical reflection runs through the whole work; sometimes, as it were, visible on the surface, expressed legibly in the text, and sometimes requiring to be mined from abstruse footnotes. The principle of this variety of strata is not very evident. Why, for instance, should the valuable remark of Professor Cohn on the use of deduction, which we have already quoted, be placed in the text, while the strained eye must seek in a footnote for the following equally valuable remark, which we are glad to have an opportunity of quoting? ' The idea that mere col- lections of historical and statistical material can be made available for science without deductive aids, is just as much an extravagance as the opposite idea that out of deductions from elementary hypotheses the whole science can be constructed.' Of the numerous logical discussions to which we have referred may be specify noted those which relate to the method of difference, and the use of definition in political economy. In treating these and cognate topics the author has not aimed at producing surprise and entertainment by brilliant paradoxes, but rather at co-ordinating and occasionally supplementing the logical principles which Mill and the later economists who have treated of economic method have laid clown. The relation of Mr. Keynes; Scope and Method of Political Economy to the classical writings on that subject is much the same as the relation of his Formal Logic to the treatises of Aristotle and Boole--not equally original, but perhaps better adapted to the purposes of education. We trust that Mr. Keynes' later logical treatise may also resemble his earlier one in its popularity. We could wish for it indeed monopoly of fayour, and such finality as in political economy is attain- able. For we cannot conceal a certain impatience at the continual reopening of a question on which authorities appear to be substantially, if not in phrase, agreed. As it is forcibly said by one of Mr. Keynes' predecessors, Mr. Edward C. Lunt, in his brilliant study on The Present Conditio of Economic Science, ' sensible men long ago dropped the controversy and went about their business, careless as to whether their methods were called "historical" or "orthodox."' 1 . Y. EDGEWORTH. Untersuchungen ber das Kapital. Von OTTO WITTELSHFER. Tbingen, 1890. THOUGH published in Germany, this book is of Austrian author- ship; the writer is a well-known bank director in Vienna.. It is a sign of the real popularity of economic study in Austria that such books can be written outside the Universities. In the German-speaking nations, laymen rarely vent_re to write on learned topics; and some features of the present treatise will probably offend academic critics on the Continent, if not in our own country. The anxious pro- vision of references, chequering the pages of most German authors with long footnotes and encumbering their volumes before and