The Character and Logical Method of Political Economy. By J. E. Cairnes, LL.D., Emeritus Professor of Political Economy in University College, London. Second and enlarged edition. Macmillan and Co., 1875.

The late Professor Cairnes spent the last remnant of his strength in revision the lectures on the Logic of Political Economy, by which he laid the foundation of his fame. They were originally delivered by him as Whately Professor of Political Economy in Dublin in 1857, and announced the rise of a new and vigorous thinker. By what labours he passed to the rank of a master, not only in economics, but in political science generally, is well-known, and now since his death in June the world has learnt what only his friends knew before, that all the work of his later years--the years of his intellectual prime--was done under overwhelming physical helplessness and in the face of inexorable doom. It was a revelation of the possibilities of human nature to see him as he struggled on.(9 § 5 ¶ 1)

Besides a number of minor changes, the present edition of his early work includes a new chapter on the subject of Definition in political economy. That definitions in such a science as political economy are expressions of results rather than principles to be reasoned from; that they are thus only provisional and subject to constant revision; that they may be good, though the attributes involved are found to exhibit degrees in the concrete; that, in a subject so nearly allied to the intreests of life, the terms employed must be borrowed from popular speech, and should be used as nearly in their common meaning as consists with the exigencies of the science--such are his main conclusions, and they bear the stamp of the sagacity so distinctive of his mind. The exposition of the logical method to be followed in the science generally--conceived in the sense of Mill's doctrine of deduction as resorted to in matter to complex for direct observation and not amenable to decisive experiment, while at the same time the general character of the causes or conditions involved is not doubtful--remains the best that has yet been attempted. In his new preface the author declines to follow Professor Jevons in his endeavour to make the deduction strictly quantitative, unless it can be shown either that mental feelings admit of being expressed in precise quantitative forms or that economic phenomena do not depend upon mental feelings. It is interesting, on the other hand, at the present time when the statistical treatment of economic questions has come so much into vogue, to note how forcibly Cairnes argued beforehand against its scientific character. Not for a moment denying the importance and necessity of statistical inquiries, whether for determining the real economic problems that have yet to be solved, or as furnishing the indispensable means of verifying the reasoned conclusions, he yet maintains that in the divinitory selection of appropriate premises and in the conduct of the reasoning process lies the true function of the scientific economist.(9 § 5 ¶ 2)

Editor.