744 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
country, is as hopeless a task as to abolish poverty, and no statesman
attempts it It is here that the complexity of all sociological
problems comes in to baffle the politician, and compels him, in the vast majority of cases, to legislate simply for the Economic Man, with whose needs and tendencies he is, as a rule, far more familiar than he is with the needs of the ethical man."
An unintended confession, and an excellent illustration of demand for a definite and adequate social criterion! The epithet "obsoles- cent" applies not particularly to the foregoing but to the whole thought of which it forms a part. Thus (p. 162): "Ethics and reli- gion in fact constitute the disturbing forces which make possible the organization and prosperous existence of civilized states." It should be conceded in passing that "disturbing forces" is truly a happy fin de siecle conceit ! The "constant tendency" which these forces dis- turb is economic self-interest. Mr. Godkin continues : " If the Eco- nomic Man were blotted out of existence, nearly all the discussions of the economists would be as empty logomachy as the attempts to rec- oncile fixed fate and free will."
Again (pp. 165-6): "Science means the law which regulates the
succession of phenomena In all economic investigation the
first inquiry is, and, so far as it is economical, must forever remain : what will the Economic Man do when brought in contact with certain selected phenomena of the physical or social world]? And the more complicated the facts of the industrial and social world are, the more necessary to the economist the Economic Man is, in order to enable him to steer his way through this maze."
The naive assumption of the old economic conception which Mr. Godkin represents is that this abstraction, the Economic Man, that everybody now concedes to be an element of the actual man, is the whole of actual man ; and, further, that having selected certain "circum- stances" or "phenomena," it is possible to discover what the actual man will do in contact with them by discovering simply what the Eco- nomic Man would do. The Economic Man is a perfectly legitimate abstraction, but reasoners of Mr. Godkin's kind implicitly claim the privilege first of abstracting him, and then of recreating him as a sub- stitute for the whole from which he was abstracted. Mr. Godkin fur- ther remarks (p. 167): "The test of science is that it enables one to predict consequences. Until our researches have enabled us to foresee exactly what will happen if something else happens, although we may
