4 
ECONOMIC ESSAYS IN HONOR OF JOHN BATES CLARK 
and literally to think his way through mass and detail to what 
seemed to him absolute verities. 
In the inveterate quality of his reasoning, in the resistless force 
of his penetration, in the logical symmetry of his conclusions there 
is something reminiscent of Ricardo. Coming at a time when 
spadework threatened to dispossess architecture, this reassertion 
of the scope and calibre of the economist’s task infused life into 
automatism. If, thereafter, the mantle proved too ample for 
narrower shoulders, if thought yielded to commentation, text- 
writing and hypercriticism—such is the price of rebound. Clark 
drew aside the curtain and American economists from his day 
have been stirred—and lashed—by the vista beyond. 
The positive contributions of Clark to American economic 
thinking will reflect, in estimate, the personal reactions of the 
reviewer. Not enough time has passed for a final precipitate, 
and gradation is bound to vary with interest and response. 
At least one student has found chief aid in Clark’s underlying 
distinction between “static” and “dynamic” in economic abstrac- 
tions. Tracing back, subconsciously, to Adam Smith’s “station- 
ary” in contrast to “declining” or “progressive” state of society— 
Clark’s alignment, sharply defined and amply expounded, cleared 
the ground at the very outset for orderly analysis. More than 
any single concept it has rid the area of American economic 
philosophy of the twin “idols” of social speculation—varying 
assumption and unexpressed implication. 
As an intellectual achievement Clark’s construct of “the 
ultimate standard of value”’—expounded to a small company of 
students at the Johns Hopkins University in 1892, set forth in 
a classic paper in the Yale Review in the same year, and 
incorporated in The Distribution of Wealth in 1899—is likely 
to be given first place. A tour de force in pure reasoning, its 
scientific place is distinguished. Eighty years before, Ricardo had 
reluctantly admitted “the non-existence of any measure of abso- 
lute value,” adding “there is not and can not be an accurate 
measure of value, and [that] the most that any man can do 
is to find out a measure of value applicable in a great many cases, 
and not very far deviating from accuracy in many others.” 
Ricardo’s frank agnosticism was succeded by a half century of 
thinly veiled empiricism. The post-classicists illumined the gap