ABSTRACT
While John Locke and François Quesnay correlated Law, Economics, and Ethics on the principle of abundance, David Hume correlated them on the principle of Scarcity. By "utility" Hume meant public utility—equivalent to the modern "social utility"—or public welfare, or the good of society. Bentham afterwards meant private utility, or the pleasure and pain of the individual. Hume mentions the various virtues of honor, generosity, bravery, conscientiousness, good faith, and all that Adam Smith afterwards included under the name of Sympathy, and based his ethics and economics on the two principles of personality and scarcity. C. S. Peirce actually made Habit and Custom, instead of intellect and sensations, the foundation of all science. He gave to his system the name Pragmatism, but by this he meant merely the method of scientific investigation. For, Peirce's solution of the metaphysical problem of the ultimate and fundamental reality becomes, not an individual bias, but a social consensus of opinion.
