¹ “The association of economics with science jars harshly on the modern ear” (Hogben, Lancelot, Prolegomena to Political Arithmetic, Toronto, 1938).Google Scholar

² Lippmann, Walter, The Good Society (Boston, 1937), pp. 13–17.Google Scholar

³ “Spice high with Latin and a cum or two of Greek,” one was admonished when conversing with James; of Hebrew he was less exigent. The Marquis of Worcester's list of one hundred new inventions (all his own) appeared in 1663; Hero of Alexandria's about 75 A.D.,—from a fire engine to a penny-in-the-slot machine.

⁴ And you are not weak because your chin recedes or brave because your jaw sticks out ( Hrdlička, A., “The Forehead” in Smithsonian Institute, Annual Report, 1933, Washington, 1935, pp. 407–14).Google Scholar Karl Pearson's controversy with the craniologists may be recalled (“The law of ancestral heredity,” Biometrika, Feb., 1903). Statistics is giving meaning to the new science of biotypology.

⁵ The stirrup enabled cavalry to thrust as well as deliver chopping blows. But the fire-bomb has the “edge,” especially on non-combatants, as Bruno Mussolini's Volli Sulle Ambe (recommended to Italian schools) elucidates: “I got only mediocre effects because I was expecting enormous explosions whereas the little Abyssinian homes give no satisfaction to anyone bombing them. The incendiary bombs give satisfaction, at any rate one sees the fire. We set fire to the wooded hills and the little villages; it was all most diverting; I began throwing bombs by hand. It was most amusing. A big ‘zariba’ was not easy to hit, I had to aim carefully. The wretches inside, seeing their roof burning, jumped out and ran like mad.”

⁶ Or, as W. F. Ogburn would say less tragically, the tin can, marvel though it be, must not be tied to Society, even in the form of women's suffrage. “The invention of the tin can led to canning factories; it reduced the time in preparing meals; it thus gave women more time for activities outside the home” ( Ogburn, W. F., “The Influence of Invention and Discovery” in Recent Social Trends, New York, vol. I, chap. iiiGoogle Scholar).

⁷ “All those who are any ways afflicted or distressed in mind, body or estate.”

⁸ For a striking image see Wallas, Graham, Social Judgment (London, 1934), p. 122.Google Scholar

⁹ Dublin, L. I. and Lotka, A. J. (Population, Feb., 1934)Google Scholar; also Twenty-five Years of Health Progress (New York, 1937), chap. iii.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Recalling the classic speech by one Thornhill in the British House of Commons in 1753 when a census was proposed over the head of King David's experience: “I did not believe that there was any set of men or indeed any individual of the human species so presumptuous or so abandoned as to make the proposal which we have just heard” (Dictionary of Political Economy, art. Census).

¹¹ Hill, A. Bradford, Principles of Medical Statistics (London, 1937).Google Scholar

¹² Jones, R. H., “Physical indices and clinical assessments of the nutrition of school children” (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, vol. CI, part 1, 1938).Google Scholar

¹³ Spearman, C., Psychology down the Ages (Toronto, 1937)Google Scholar, part E, wherein certain mental unities are derived by a statistical technique from (a) three knowledge-originating principles of a qualitative kind, stated as tendential, and (b) five quantitative principles, which determine their occurrence and amount. Contrast C. E.M. Joad's “psychology only becomes scientific at the cost of turning into physiology. … Psycho-analysis substitutes the stirring of the bowels for the process of reason” ( Return to Philosophy, London, 1935 Google Scholar).

¹⁴ As a measure of the importance of the statistical use of applied psychology, R. B. Cattell finds that “the birthrate is inversely related to the intelligence level, throughout the whole of intelligence.” If matters continue as at present “in 300 years half the population [of England] will be mentally defective” ( The Fight for our National Intelligence, London, 1937 Google Scholar). In Sweden, however, the outlook is not so bad ( Edin, K. A. and Hutchinson, E. P., Studies of Differential Fertility in Sweden, London, 1935 Google Scholar).

¹⁵ Rhine, J. B., New Frontiers of the Mind (Oxford, 1937).Google Scholar

¹⁶ SirEddington, Arthur, The Nature of the Physical World (Cambridge University Press, 1928), chap. xiv.Google Scholar

¹⁷ In the meantime, however, the future here is as “existent” as the past, though there is no “now” in space.

¹⁸ “A definition which no statesman would be unwilling to admit to lie completely outside his purview” ( Yule, G. Udny, An Introduction to the Theory of Statistics, London, rev., 1936).Google Scholar

¹⁹ But see Watson, W. H., On Understanding Physics (Toronto, 1938), particularly chap, iiiGoogle Scholar; also Schrödinger, Erwin, Science and the Human Temperament (London, 1935).Google Scholar

²⁰ von Hayek, F. A., Collectivist Economie Planning (London, 1935)Google Scholar; “Economics and Knowledge” (Economica, Feb., 1937); Snow, E. C., “Is the Trade Cycle a Myth?” (Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, vol. CI, part II, 1938).Google Scholar Lippmann's The Good Society consistently understates quantitative possibilities. Incidentally Fleur, H. J. (“Racial Evolution and Archaeology,” Huxley Memorial Lecture, delivered before Royal Anthropological Institute, Nov. 9, 1937)Google Scholar says Society is the Creator of Man, not vice versa.

²¹ Robbins, Lionel, Nature and Significance of Economic Science (London, rev., 1935)Google Scholar; Bonar, James, Philosophy and Political Economy (London, 1927)Google Scholar; Wallas, Graham, Social Judgment, pp. 120–7Google Scholar; Kuznets, Simon, National Income and Capital Formation, 1919-1935 (Toronto, 1937).Google Scholar

²² Russell, Bertrand, Mysticism and Logic (London, 1919).Google Scholar Douglas, Paul H., “Professor Cassel on the Statistical Determination of Marginal Productivity” (C.J.E.P.S., Feb., 1938).Google Scholar Theories, says W. H. Watson (On Understanding Physics) “must in the first place do what a crude map does for a surveyor … the equation is the perfectly clear as opposed to the muddled statement … but a clear statement may still be incorrect.” The year's monumental essay in verification is the lamented Schultz's, Henry Theory and Measurement of Demand (Chicago, 1938).Google Scholar

²³ Professor Knight, e.g., is scandalized at discrepancies of 40 per cent in cotton estimates, but not at theories which are diametrically or 100 per cent opposed to each other (“The Limitations of Scientific Methods in Economics” in The Trend of Economics ed. by Tugwell, R. G., New York, 1924).Google Scholar The particular Burns incident is in Death and Doctor Hornbook:

²⁴ Aristotle similarly said that air had no weight, and man went seventeen centuries without the common pump. Aristotle made few observations himself, and had a very limited range of facts from which to generalize. “His was a philosophical age. But he clearly understood the objectives of scientific method and research. His followers listen to him saying ‘Let us first understand the facts and then we may seek their causes.’ Again, ‘We must not accept a general principle from logic only, but must prove its application to each fact, for it is in facts that we must seek general principles, and these must always accord with the facts’” (R. E. Chaddock, Review of Scientific Method by Kelly, T. L. in American Statistical Journal, 06, 1930 Google Scholar). The elimination of the observer is only technique. Quantity is defined by W. R. Thompson (no enemy of philosophy) as “that property by which not only the substance but all the qualitative attributes of the substance are made manifest to the senses” ( Science and Common Sense, London, 1937 Google Scholar).

²⁵ “In the live branches of physics formal logic is not called for; what is needed is a very different kind of thinking, a review of a system of interrelated facts and a perception of conjectured analogies” ( Darwin, C. G., Logic and Probability in Physics, Presidential Address, Section A, B.A.A.S., 1938 Google ScholarPubMed).

²⁶ Milne “by metaphysics out of mathematics” can breed universes at will, whilst Eddington is equally fertile with our own. Over against, Dingle cares no more for Milne's universes than for Alice's; Jeans's mysterious universe, says Dingle, isn't mysterious: Jeans and Eddington but emotionalize the new mathematics from a tool and fifth sense into a science self-contained. Eddington, however, can derive N, which now replaces infinity as the number of particles in the universe, by sheer knowledge of relativistic quantum analysis: by looking at the articles in a house, says Eddington, we reach the generalization that none cost more than sixpence, but we can reach it equally well by knowing that they were bought at Woolworth's (Nature, May 8 and July 12, 1937, for the apotheosis of the Dingle-Eddington controversy). The Aristotelians are attracting endowments, which is bitter. On probability as having an independent metaphysical existence see review of Mises, Von' Wahrscheinlichkeit, Statistik und Wahrheit in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, vol. CH, part I.Google Scholar

²⁷ “The biology of tomorrow will be statistical. … One solitary isolated phenomenon is of no more interest to the biologist than the man in the moon … it is not until we begin to deal with whole populations of facts that regularities begin to appear” ( Needham, J. H. in Science Today and Tomorrow, compiled from a series of lectures delivered at Morley College, London, 1937 Google Scholar). And again: “Living things differ from dead things in degree and not in kind, and are as it were extrapolations from the inorganic” (Needham, J. H., The Sceptical Biologist, New York, 1930).Google Scholar Cf. also Langdon-Davies, J., Science and Common Sense (London, 1931), chap. vii.Google Scholar Most daring as analogy is Reiser's suggestion from relativistic kinematics that the structure of thought may be inferred from the structure of light, based on the Morley-Michelson isotrophy of light (on which, however, see W. R. Thompson's Science and Common Sense, chap. vi).

²⁸ Roos, C. F., NRA Economic Planning (Bloomington, Ind., 1937).Google Scholar

²⁹ Pigou, A. C., Economics in Practice (London, 1936).Google Scholar

³⁰ Though “problems” suggest pathology: doctors are for indigestion, not just digestion.

³¹ Cohen, J. B., “The Misuse of Statistics” (American Statistical Journal, Dec., 1938).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³² “This Dionysius, whom I took for my pattern, the rather that he was a great linguist and grammarian and taught a school with good applause after his abdication (either he or his successor of the same name, it matters not whilk)”—Nigel (James loquitur).

³³ Keynes makes the assumption that the more income people receive, the larger proportion they save, whereas the classical economists assume that savings will be much less flexible, as human wants are unlimited. Both of these statements, of opposite bearing, on policy, are without verification, though a family budget study over the gamut of incomes would clarify the point. MissGilboy, E. W., “Propensity to Consume” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, Nov., 1938)CrossRefGoogle Scholar seems to say that for large classes of the population Keynes's postulates are not so.

³⁴ “Business forecasting,” it has been said, “must be by observation not by theory, and in observation we must not be hypnotized by our tools, but must get the feel of the phenomena themselves. The business trend is full of all sorts of whirls and eddies that change as the stream strikes new channels, often working in diverse directions.”

³⁵ Graham, Frank D., “Economic Theory and Unemployment” (Economic Essays in Honour of Gustav Cassel, London, 1933).Google Scholar In the same volume Snyder's, Carl “Measurement vs. Theory in Economics,” and his Business Cycles and Business Measurements (New York, 1927).Google Scholar The mocker is abroad as ever, as for example “Critic” in the New Statesman, June 18, 1938: “News from the economic front. According to one school of thought we are now experiencing a major intermediate recession in a major cyclical recovery, but this view is opposed by those who argue that it is a minor intermediate recession in a major cyclical recovery. More pessimistic are the people who dispute whether it is a major or a minor intermediate recession in a minor cyclical recovery, and those who plump for a minor intermediate recession in a minor cyclical depression are outbid by those who insist that it is a major intermediate recession in a minor cyclical depression. The realists ask us to face the fact that it is a minor intermediate recession in a major cyclical depression and the Cassandras go all out for a major intermediate recession in a major cyclical depression. The truth can probably be summed up in Calvin Coolidge's dictum that when a large number of people are out of work a state of unemployment can be said to exist.”

³⁶ von Haberler, G., Prosperity and Depression (League of Nations, 1937).Google Scholar Of course it does not satisfy all economists: e.g., Kahn, R. F., “The League of Nations Enquiry into the Trade Cycle” (Economic Journal, Dec., 1937).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁷ Seventh Census of Canada, vol. VII; also Census Monograph on Unemployment.

³⁸ The Canadian Census, it will be noted, breaks up the total “gainfully occupied” population into (a) “wage-earners,” and (b) “workers on own account.”

³⁹ The differentiation varies with industry; it is much greater in an industry in which a small proportion lose time than in one in which a high proportion report some loss of time—the degree of difference appears to be a function of time lost, a fact of direct bearing on relief policy.

⁴⁰ The 1936 Census from which these figures are taken covered only the three Prairie Provinces. The complete figures are as follows: While the total number of “gainfully occupied” increased from 895,786 in 1931 to 915,436 in 1936, or by 19,650, the number of “workers on own account” increased by 32,891, so that the number of “wage-earners” decreased by 13,241. Meanwhile the number of unemployed wage-earners decreased by 18,739.

⁴¹ A propos, W. H. Beveridge commenting on the common view that men become too old at 55 or 60 years to be retained in employment, points out that old union records run directly counter to this view. “In them at least men seem able to work on to a later age than they could a generation ago.” Commenting, however, on the special Report on Unemployment by the United Kingdom Ministry of Labour in 1927, he arrives at the same conclusion as above.

⁴² Incidentally it is not to be assumed that spreading jobs on the part-time principle does nothing to increase aggregate purchasing power and thus up-turn the cycle; it probably does ( Staehle, Hans, “Short Period Variation in the Distribution of Incomes” in Review of Economic Statistics, Aug., 1937, and Aug., 1938).Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Beveridge, W. H., “An Analysis of Unemployment” (Economica, Nov., 1936, and May, 1937).Google Scholar Also his Unemployment a Problem of Industry (London, New York, ed. 3, 1912).Google Scholar The Archbishop of York's Committee points the same moral, under Mr. Hawtrey's nose ( Men Without Work: A Report made to the Pilgrim Trust, Cambridge University, 1938 Google Scholar) as does the course of recent empirical economics in Germany. Certain of Beveridge's a priori statements require qualification for Canada, e.g., an increased demand for labour will not produce insufficiency of supply and a rise in wages as readily as in Great Britain, owing to our larger reserve of potential wage-earners.

⁴⁴ The law of gravitation is not that bodies attract each other, but that the attraction is proportional to the product of their mass divided by the square of their distance. But the distribution factor in employment has been overlooked and is certainly of first importance.

⁴⁵ Expenditures of 60 nations on armaments have increased from $3.8 billions in 1932 to S17.6 billions in 1938.

⁴⁶ Of dwellings by class, tenure, and number of rooms, collected on the population schedule.

⁴⁷ Cf. Lionel Robbins's “melancholy reflection” (“The Optimum Theory of Population” in London Essays in Economics ed. Gregory, T. E. and Dalton, H., London, 1927).Google Scholar “To-day we are as ignorant of the causes which govern the birth rate as we were ignorant a century ago of the causes which govern the death rate” ( Haldane, J. B. S., “Society as a Biological Experiment” in Human Affairs ed. by Cottell, R. B., Cohen, J., and Travers, R. M. W., London, 1937).Google Scholar

⁴⁸ As items: The Maritime Provinces of Canada are in contrast with many other sections of the continent; no new natural resources have been developed, no territory has been added, nor have they experienced much stimulus of industrialization. For Nova Scotia the trend of population from the earliest times until the present forms a logistic, with a slowing up above the point of inflection concurrently with movements into Western Canada and the United States. These episodes over, the curve is returning to form, pending a new cycle. From Jacob to the Census of Moses, and from the earliest settlement of the French until the present is about the same time lapse: the growth of the two populations is the same.

⁴⁹ Supplemented by Needed Population Research, prepared by Whelpton, P. K. under the auspices of the Population Association of America (New York, 1938).Google Scholar

⁵⁰ Of course, there must be more censuses, and some quaint methods of the past must disappear (see Kuczynski, R. R., Colonial Population, Toronto, 1937)Google Scholar; and of course vital and migration statistics must keep pace.

⁵¹ Udny Yule calls it nonsense, but not Wright, Harold (Population, New York, 1923, p. 102).Google Scholar

⁵² The International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (35 adhering nations) supplies another.

⁵³ James's son Charles lost his head and his grandson the throne over it (or so the Whigs have always made out, soft-pedalling bourgeois objection to taxes during an upswing of the trade cycle), but not James. It was Cromwell, Ruler (self-elected) of the Saints (self-styled), who called democracy “the Creed of all Bad men and Poor men.”

⁵⁴ The Dominion Bureau of Statistics, a brochure issued on the occasion of the Conference of British Commonwealth Statisticians (Ottawa, 1935).Google Scholar

⁵⁵ SirSalter, Arthur, The Framework of an Ordered Society (New York, 1933).Google Scholar Edge-worth considers that if the investigation of the conditions which determine value (the job par excellence of abstract economics) were abolished, “there would survive only the empirical school flourishing in the chaos congenial to their mentality.” But Hayek, who quotes this against planning, comments, “we are as far from capitalism in its pure form as we are from any system of central planning. The world of today is just interventionist chaos.”

⁵⁶ “In deductive reasoning all knowledge obtainable is already latent in the postulates … the successive inferences growing less and less accurate as we proceed. In inductive reasoning we are performing part of the process by which new knowledge is created. The conclusions normally grow more and more accurate as more data are included. That errors in the knowledge postulated a priori will produce less and less effect on the conclusions drawn as the observations are made more and more abundant seems to be a reason not for thinking that the postulate is true but rather that it must be possible to draw valid conclusions without its aid” ( Fisher, R. A., “The Logic of Inductive Inference” in Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, vol. XCVIII, part I, 1935).Google Scholar “It cannot be,” says Bacon, “that axioms established by argumentation can suffice for the discovery of new works.”

⁵⁷ Neyman, J., “‘La Critique est la vie de la science’” (Nature, Aug. 6, 1938).Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Walker, Helen M., Studies in the History of Statistical Method (Baltimore, 1929).Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Pearson, Karl, Life, Labours and Letters of Francis Galton (Cambridge University, 1914–1930), vol. II, p. 418.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Snyder, Carl, World Machine (London, New York, 1907).Google Scholar

⁶¹ Hensal, P. H., “The Statistical Control of Business Activities” (Canadian Chartered Accountant, 03, 1938).Google Scholar

⁶² The insurance companies have a set rule in the matter.

⁶³ Madge, Charles and Harrison, Tom (eds.), Mass-Observation (London, 1937).Google Scholar

⁶⁴ James was “Solomon” to his court—“save only in the matter of wives and concubines.”

⁶⁵ Archy and mehitabel (New York, 1935).Google Scholar Archy could not reach the capitals on his typewriter.

⁶⁶ Gallup, George, “Government and the Sampling Referendum” (American Statistical Journal, vol. XXXIII).Google Scholar

⁶⁷ Our obsession by economic interest is, in Tawney's, R. H. excoriation (The Acquisitive Society, New York, 1920)Google Scholar, “as local and transitory as it is repulsive and disturbing … as pitiful as the obsession of the seventeenth century by religious quarrels.”

⁶⁸ Rice, Stuart, Quantitative Methods in Politics (New York, 1928).Google Scholar Cf. also Florence, P. Sargant, The Statistical Method in Economics and Political Science (New York, 1929).Google Scholar

⁶⁹ Whitehead, A. N., Science and the Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 1930).Google Scholar

⁷⁰ “Hygiene has transformed resignation in face of epidemic disease from a religious virtue to a punishable offence. … Institutions based on short lives have almost wholly collapsed.”—Daedalus.

⁷¹ “We must accommodate our eschatology to a view of the Universe which leaves no room for a geographical heaven and hell” ( Inge, Dean, Scientific Ethics, London, 1927).Google Scholar

⁷² As to international law, still wallowing in make-believe ingeminating peace in terms of war, SirZimmern, Alfred (“The Decline of International Standards,” International Affairs, Jan.-Feb., 1938 Google Scholar) describes the League of Nations' Japanese policy as a “double bluff,” first because the jus gentium based on the Christian ethic has disappeared among European nations, and secondly because Japan is not Christian. Or as Señor Ortega y Gasset puts it, “the League was a gigantic juridical machinery created for the administration of a non-existent law” (“Concerning Pacificism,” Nineteenth Century, July, 1938). Yet radio has brought the world within sound of a herald's voice—which was Aristotle's limit to the size of a state; we are not a plurality of nations but a world society; and in general as someone says it should be easier to love your neighbour when you do not have to see him and live with him. If war is psychologic as well as economic, statistics will let Norman Angell distinguish the two faces. “The people who do most completely what is in fact to their interest are those who, on moral grounds, do what they believe to be against their interest” (Icarus). Or, as P. G. Wodehouse says, we must be kind and not leave it all to the Boy Scouts.

⁷³ Eastman, Max, The Literary Mind (New York, London, 1931).Google Scholar Contemporaneously, Señor Fassi is making a statistical analysis of the perforations on player piano rolls (Appunti di statistica musicale, Rome, 1936). Plato's preference for the Dorian and Phrygian modes over the Ionian and Lydian had a mathematical explanation.

⁷⁴ Haldane, Viscount, The Pathway to Reality (London, 1926).Google Scholar Lord Haldane lived in the age of the bustle (et ego in Arcadia vixi), and no doubt found it beautiful, though the later Haldane calls it a revolution when man's ideal woman ceased to be steatopygous.

⁷⁵ Of any event “to which the whole creation moves,” says Bertrand Russell, a more correct description would be “to which some parts of creation move while others move away from it,” adding that “an emotion which can be destroyed by a little mathematics is neither very genuine nor very valuable.” And Dingle says that the lady of the line “the stars she whispered btindly move” might have been comforted by reflecting that she was not a star. Moore, George (An Anthology of Pure Poetry, New York, 1924)Google Scholar calls “pure poetry” only poetry which is objective, born of admiration of the world of things.

⁷⁶ Meredith, George, “The Lark Ascending” (Poems, vol. I, London, 1898).Google Scholar

⁷⁷ Ruskin “largely failed in his life's endeavours for the simple reason that he could not write … he was incapable of using language as a precise means of communicating ordered thought … again and again a paragraph begins as precise writing and ends as emotive rhetoric” ( Willenski, R. H. in The Great Victorians, London, 1934 Google Scholar). But Professor Knight wants economics to be “literature” (The Trend of Economics).

⁷⁸ Huxley, Aldous, Ends and Means (London, 1937).Google Scholar

⁷⁹ Darwin delivered the nineteenth century from anthropomorphism, and we have likewise survived the succeeding mechanicomorphism, books like Drummond's, Henry Natural Law in the Spiritual World (London, 1902)Google Scholar marking the transition. Cf. also Bradleys “approximation of knowledge and aspiration … so that religion may satisfy the soul of the saint and not disgust the intellect of the scholar.” Hogben has disinterred the bishop who calculated from Numbers that man was created by the Trinity on October 23, B.C. 4004, at nine o'clock in the morning, but it is idle sport: within the year the Anglican Commission on Doctrine has rejected both the infallibility of the Scriptures and the resurrection of the physical body—a far cry from the tocsin over Vestiges of Creation, the Origin of Species, or even Essays and Reviews.

⁸⁰ Of a non-sensible reality: Jung would admit the mystic to the laboratory; but Eddington's truths of science are not truths but truisms: “non-metrical” laws, the statistical and the transcendental, lie beyond. So likewise Jacques Maritain, the twentieth-century Aquinas (“vae mihi si non thomatizavero”) divides science from metaphysics, and both from the mystical union with God, of which Emily Brontë's “Last Lines” remain surely the supreme expression ( Maritain, Jacques, The Degrees of Knowledge, London, 1937 Google Scholar). But Santayana would not call the mystical experience (including Hindu Yoga, Buddhist Dhyana, Mohammedan Sufism, Jewish Cabalism) “truth.”

⁸¹ Curtis, H. D., “Receding Horizons” (Scientific Monthly, Sept., 1938).Google Scholar

⁸² Even in a “pessimist” like Thomas Hardy: Consciousness the Will informing till It fashion all things fair (concluding line of The Dynasts). Bernard Shaw wears his hope with a difference: “Man is on trial. If we are a mistake, God will use other creatures a trifle less stupid to carry on His purpose.”

⁸³ Karl Pearson, Life, Labours and Letters of Francis Galton.

⁸⁴ As he said of himself in the Basilkon Doron.

⁸⁵ As in the Religio Medici and in New England a hundred years later. Coke, Bacon, fourteen English bishops, and the Scottish clergy to a man applauded James ( Lecky, W. E. H., History of Rationalism in Europe, London, 1865, chap. iGoogle Scholar).