ABSTRACT
If we take the words ‘science’ and ‘scientific’ in their old-fashioned restricted sense, we may perhaps say that astronomy is a field of study which is ‘scientific’ more than any other of the fields of study having as their object the exploration of the exterior world. The reason for this, it seems, is that in astronomy the fusion between theory and observation has been realized more perfectly than in the other fields of study. When astronomy is a science, it is not because it has an abstract theoretical structure, nor is it because it is built on minute prolonged observations, but it is because the astronomical observations are filled into the theoretical structure. It is this unification that raises astronomy to the dignity and significance of a true science. Also in economics we have had theoretical speculations, but most of the time it has not been that kind of theory which is built with a view to being verified by observations. Economic theory has not as yet reached the stage where its fundamental notions are derived from the technique of observations. On the other hand, we also have had observations in economics, plenty of them. In the last century there has been accumulated an overwhelming statistical and historical material on economic facts. But these observations have not been guided and animated by constructive theoretical thinking in the same way as the astronomical observations. Theory and observations in economics have gone along in a more or less disconnected way. There have been cycles of empiricism and rationalism. At times when it became too obvious that economics did not progress so rapidly as, for instance, astronomy, physics and biology, even though theoretical thinking had been applied to it, some economists would lose confidence altogether in theoretical thinking in this field and plunge themselves into a pure empirical fact collection in the hope that such a blind grappling with facts should reveal something of the nature of the complicated phenomena with which the economist is faced. Then again when it became obvious that such a pure empiricism did not lead anywhere, theoretical speculations in economics had a revival and the abstract-minded type of people ruled the ground for a while. The latest phase of such a cycle is the reaction which is now little by little coming forth against the superficiality of the extreme institutionalists.
