But Professor Marshall, having thrown out Consumption as a definite factor altogether, that is to say, having cut away half of the wheel, can no more get a 'law' out of Production alone, by merely subdividing it into factors of production on the one hand, and the products of these factors on the other, than he could get a law out of his pair of scissors in his criticism of Jevons' theory of Value, where, although he began with two blades, he gave one of them nothing definite or positive to do. But if the reader is still unconvinced, and still feels that I must be doing the academical Economists some injustice, all I can do, - if I am not to drag him, already wearied, through more instances of the same fallacious method, - is to make them a direct challenge to produce a genuine law of Political Economy, in which the element of Consumption as a definite factor is left out. And I will go so far even as to defy them by their present statical method to get anything more out of their Science than either mere definitions of terms, catalogues of the accredited methods of doing business, or (in the way of professed 'laws'), such identical propositions (as in the case of differential rents, profits, and wages), that twice two are four, and that things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.

The truth is, the Science as it exists to-day is a pseudo-science in precisely the same sense as perpetual-motion is a pseudo-mechanics.

But before taking farewell of the academical economists, I wish to say a word or two on the Mathematics which have been so freely employed by their later representatives since their use by Jevons. Owing to the general contempt into which the academical Political Economy has fallen in these later days, - a contempt which I have in this volume attempted to prove is thoroughly justified, - the economists in their extremity have snatched at the high authority of Mathematics not only as a shield to protect them from the taunts of the vulgar, but as lending an air of greater scientific precision to the science itself. And it is this latter consideration which has been mainly instrumental in producing that curious assumption of special and exclusive authority which is becoming more and more noticeable in the younger economists who have been brought up under this mathematical regime. In the recent Fiscal Controversy, it may have been observed that such phrases as 'the consensus of experts,' 'expert economic opinion,' and the like, were freely waved over the heads of their antagonists by these younger men, to silence contradiction and to close discussion as by papal authority; and on looking more closely into the source of this arrogance, so foreign to the earlier exponents of the Science who never claimed more for their arguments than their natural weight in the ordinary exchanges of the world of thought, it soon begins to dawn on one that it is to the mathematics which have been imported into the Science that these lordly assumptions are due; - as when, in a particular instance which I remember, the reader was told that' the full proof of the argument in question involved much intricate mathematical calculation, but that he might take it for granted that this was how the matter stood,' etc., or words to that effect.

Now I might as well say at once that in my judgment this appeal to Mathematics as helping to establish any doctrine of Political Economy whatever which otherwise would be unable to stand on its own feet, is entirely gratuitous; and this for the reason I have already given, namely that whatever result a mathematical calculus may grind out at the end of an argument, is entirely conditioned by the presuppositions, axioms, postulates, and general relations put in at the beginning; and that if these do not represent the true organic relations of the different factors of the subject-matter dealt with, the mathematical manipulation of them by the calculus will only make them more definitely and irretrievably false. Given, for example, that the average length of life of human beings in a given community has been correctly estimated, the 'law of probabilities' will work you out a table of insurance rates on which an insurance company can rely to realise a dividend for its shareholders; but if the average length of human life on the one hand, or the dangers to which from outside circumstances the particular community is exposed on the other, were to alter, Mathematics would be obliged to construct an entirely new table of insurances to meet the altered relations with which the company had to deal.

In other words, the mathematics must follow the general laws and relations of the facts on which it has to operate when their complications get beyond the range of ordinary human foresight; but can never precede, anticipate, or prescribe to them. It is the same with Political Economy. When once you have ascertained the way in which Taxation, for example, is shifted from one class to another, mathematical diagrams and formulae will enable you to calculate its incidence in individual concrete cases with a degree of certainty impossible without their aid; but they cannot help you, unless you have made sure of the general laws of taxation beforehand. It is the same, too, with the mathematical curves for determining Rent and Value, which are only of use after you have discovered the true laws which determine Rent or Value in general; otherwise, they are not merely useless but positively mischievous, inasmuch as they lend the high authority of Mathematics to what lies quite beyond its sphere. And hence it is that if I am right in my contention that a dynamical wheel is the true symbol from which have to be deduced the laws of the production, exchange, and distribution of wealth, and not the academical symbol of the infinitely divided stick, the whole set of mathematical formulae used by the Science to work out the quantitative aspects of its laws must be entirely changed.