CHAPTER XXII 
SOCIAL SCIENCE AND SOCIAL ART 
§ 1. The task of a human valuation of industry involved at the 
outset the arbitrary assumption of a standard of value. That 
standard consisted in a conception of human well-being appli- 
cable to the various forms of human life, man as individual, as 
group or nation, as humanity. Starting from that conception of 
the health, physical and spiritual, of the individual human or- 
ganism, which is of widest acceptance, we proceeded to apply the 
organic metaphor to the larger groupings, so as to build up an in- 
telligible standard of social well-being. This standard, at once 
physical and spiritual, static and progressive, was assumed to be 
of such a kind as to provide a harmony of individual welfares 
when the growing social nature of man was taken into due 
account. 
With the standard of human well-being we then proceeded to 
assign values to the productive and the consumptive processes of 
which industry consists, examining them in their bearing upon 
the welfare of the individuals and the societies engaging in them. 
Now this mode of procedure, the only possible, of course in- 
volved an immense petitio principii. The assumption of any close 
agreement as to the nature of individual well-being, still more 
of social well-being, was logically quite unwarranted. 
Economic values have, indeed, an agreed, exact and measur- 
able meaning, derived from the nature of the monetary standard 
in which they are expressed. Now, no such standard of the hu- 
man value of economic goods or processes can be established. 
Yet we pretended to set up a standard of social value and to apply 
a calculus based upon it, claiming to assess the human worth 
which underlies the economic costs and utilities that enter into 
economic values. 
Has this procedure proved utterly illicit? I venture to think 
not. Though at the outset our standard was only a general phrase 
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