18

POLITICAL  ECONOMY

able  too  narrowly  and  too  superficially,  was
the  characteristic  vice  of  the  age.  Even
the  opponents  of  the  political  economists
fell  victims  to  it  :  Godwin,  the  visionary,
attempted  (in  vain)  “  to  pass  the  Arctic
Circle  and  Frozen  Regions,  where  the  understanding ­
  is  no  longer  warmed  by  the  affections, ­
  nor  fanned  by  the  breeze  of  fancy.”
But  Bentham,  nevertheless,  by  his  abstractions, ­
  though  they  represented  human  nature
as  far  too  simple—indeed,  one  might  say,
because  they  did  so—gave  to  economic  science
an  impulse  which  has  endured  up  to  the
present  time.  The  data  of  the  science  were
rendered  manageable  ;  and  when  its  fundamental ­
  ideas  were  revised  it  was  happily  found
that  not  demolition  and  reconstruction  of
the  science,  but  rather  adaptation,  re-facing
and  extension  were  involved.  It  is  nothing
new  in  the  history  of  thought  that  a  study
founded  on  false  hypotheses  should  embody  a
framework  of  permanent  value.  Physics  so
frequently  alters  its  hypotheses  that  physicists ­
  themselves  may  be  left  behind.  But
on  each  occasion  the  science  of  physics  does
not  collapse  ;  on  the  contrary  little  has  to
be  sacrificed;  and  in  its  unchecked  building
up  "we  are  presented  with  the  spectacle  of
scholars  working  on  different  hypotheses,  but