there are three broad distinct classes of them: Unhired Labourers, who cultivate the ground which they occupy, and live on self-produced wages; Paid Dependants, who are paid out of the revenue or income of their employers, as the military retainers and domestic artizans of feudal times in Europe, and the greater part of the people of Asia at the present day; and Hired Labourers, who are paid wages from capital.

This last class, though taken as belonging to the normal condition of society by many political economists, is really the exceptional case, taking the world at large; and no propositions concerning the structure and relations of ranks in society can have any wide generality which are founded on a consideration of this case alone.

(Population.)-7. And again: with regard to the proposition that the progress of population depends merely on the rate of wages, a very little observation of different communities, and of the same communities at different times, will show that this is a very rash and hasty generalization. When wages rise, whether or not population shall undergo a corresponding increase depends upon many other circumstances besides this single fact of the increase of wages. The effect of a rise of wages upon population is affected by the form of the wages, the time occupied by the change, the institutions of the society under consideration, and other causes and a due classification of the conditions of the society according to these circumstances, is requisite in order to obtain any general proposition concerning the effect of a rise or fall of wages upon the progress of the population.

And thus those precepts of the philosophy of discovery which we have repeated so often, which are so simple, and which seem so obvious, have been neglected or violated in the outset of Political Economy as in so many other sciences:-namely, the precepts. that we must classify our facts before we generalize, and seek for narrower generalizations and inductions before we aim at the widest. If these maxims had been obeyed, they would have saved the earlier specu

lators on this subject from some splendid errors; but, on the other hand, it may be said, that if these earlier speculators had not been thus bold, the science could not so soon have assumed that large and striking form which made it so attractive, and to which it probably owes a large part of its progress.

CHAPTER XXIV.

MODERN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY'.

I. Science is the Idealization of Facts.

I. I HAVE spoken, a few chapters back, of the Reaction against the doctrines of the Sensational School in England and France. In Germany also there was a Reaction against these doctrines;-but there, this movement took a direction different from its direction in other countries. Omitting many other names, Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel may be regarded as the writers who mark, in a prominent manner, this Germanic line of speculation. The problem of philosophy, in the way in which they conceived it, may best be explained by reference to that Fundamental Antithesis of which I had occasion to speak in the History of Scientific Ideas. And in order to characterize the steps taken by these modern German philosophers, I must return to what I have said concerning the Fundamental Antithesis.

This Antithesis, as I have there remarked, is stated in various ways:-as the Antithesis of Thoughts and Things; of Ideas and Sensations; of Theory and Facts; of Necessary Truth and Experience; of the Subjective and Objective elements of our knowledge; and in other phrases. I have further remarked that the elements thus spoken of, though opposed, are inseparable. We cannot have the one without the other. We cannot have thoughts without thinking of Things: we cannot have things before us without thinking of them.

1 The substance of this and the next chapter was printed as a communication to the Cambridge Phil

Soc. in 1840.

2 Or in the earlier editions, in the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences.

Further, it has been shown, I conceive, that our knowledge derives from the former of these two elements, namely our Ideas, its form and character of knowledge; our ideas being the necessary Forms of knowledge, while the Matter of our knowledge in each case is supplied by the appropriate perception or outward experience.

Thus our Ideas of Space and Time are the necessary Forms of our geometrical and arithmetical knowledge; and no sensations or experience are needed as the matter of such knowledge, except in so far as sensation and experience are needed to evoke our Ideas in any degree. And hence these sciences are sometimes called Formal sciences. All other Sciences involve, along with the experience and observation appropriate to each, a development of the ideal conditions of knowledge existing in our minds; and I have given the history, both of this development of ideas and of the matter derived from experience, in two former works, the History of Scientific Ideas, and the History of the Inductive Sciences. I have there traced this history through the whole body of the physical sciences.

But though Ideas and Perceptions are thus separate elements in our philosophy, they cannot in fact be distinguished and separated, but are different aspects of the same thing. And the only way in which we can approach to truth is by gradually and successively, in one instance after another, advancing from the perception to the idea; from the fact to the theory.

2. I would now further observe, that in this progression from fact to theory, we advance (when the theory is complete and completely possessed by the mind) from the apprehension of truths as actual to the apprehension of them as necessary; and thus Facts which were originally observed merely as Facts become the consequences of theory, and are thus brought within the domain of Ideas. That which was a part of the objective world becomes also a part of the subjective world; a necessary part of the thoughts of the theorist. And in this way the progress of true theory is the Idealization of Facts.

Thus the Progress of Science consists in a perpetual reduction of Facts to Ideas. Portions are perpetually transferred from one side to another of the Fundamental Antithesis: namely, from the Objective to the Subjective side. The Centre or Fulcrum of the Antithesis is shifted by every movement which is made in the advance of science, and is shifted so that the ideal side gains something from the real side.

3. I will proceed to illustrate this Proposition a little further. Necessary Truths belong to the Subjective, Observed Facts to the Objective side of our knowledge. Now in the progress of that exact speculative knowledge which we call Science, Facts which were at a previous period merely Observed Facts, come to be known as Necessary Truths; and the attempts at new advances in science generally introduce the representation of known truths of fact, as included in higher and wider truths, and therefore, so far, necessary.

We may exemplify this progress in the history of the science of Mechanics. Thus the property of the lever, the inverse proportion of the weights and arms, was known as a fact before the time of Aristotle, and known as no more; for he gives many fantastical and inapplicable reasons for the fact. But in the writings of Archimedes we find this fact brought within the domain of necessary truth. It was there transferred from the empirical to the ideal side of the Fundamental Antithesis; and thus a progressive step was made in science. In like manner, it was at first taken by Galileo as a mere fact of experience, that in a falling body, the velocity increases in proportion to the time; but his followers have seen in this the necessary effect of the uniform force of gravity. In like manner, Kepler's empirical Laws were shown by Newton to be necessary results of a central force attracting inversely as the square of the distance. And if it be still, even at present, doubtful whether this is the necessary law of a central force, as some philosophers have maintained that it is, we cannot doubt that if now or hereafter, those philosophers