ABSTRACT
The special and separate studies of these various problems must then, in order to be socially serviceable, be subject to the guidance and direction of some general conception which shall have regard to all sorts of economic factors and operations, assessing them by reference to some single standard of the humanly desirable. This general survey and the application of this single standard of valuation are necessary alike to a scientific interpretation of the economic or industrial world and to a conscious art of social-economic progress. They must exert a control over the division of intellectual labour on the one hand, and over the utilisation of such labour for social policy upon the other. The notion that, by setting groups of students to work at gathering, testing, measuring and tabulating crude facts, relating, say, to infant mortality, expenditure on drink, or wages in women’s industries, valuable truths of wide application will somehow be spontaneously generated, and that by a purely inductive process there will come to light general laws authoritative for social policy, is entirely destitute of foundation. The humblest grubber among ‘facts’ must approach them with some equipment of questions, hypotheses, and methods of classification, all of which imply the acceptance of principles derived from a wider field of thought. The same holds again of the next higher grade of students, the intellectual middlemen who utilise the ‘facts’ got by the detailed workers ‘at the face.’ They too must bring wider principles to correlate and to interpret the results got by the humbler workers. So at each stage of the inductive process, laws and standards derived from a higher intellectual stage are brought to bear.
