Chapter II: The Degree of Permanence of Economic Laws

If we compare the historic developments of various branches of quantitative sciences, 12 we notice a striking similarity in the paths they have followed. Their origin is Man's craving for ‘explanations’ of ‘curious happenings’, the observations of such happenings being more or less accidental or, at any rate, of a very passive character. On the basis of such – perhaps very vague – recognition of facts, people build up some primitive explanations, usually of a metaphysical type. Then, some more ‘cold-blooded’ empiricists come along. They want to ‘know the facts’. They observe, measure, and classify, and, while doing so, they cannot fail to recognize the possibility of establishing a certain order, a certain system in the behaviour of real phenomena. And so they try to construct systems of relationships to copy reality as they see it from the point of view of a careful, but still passive, observer. As they go on collecting better and better observations, they see that their ‘copy’ of reality needs ‘repair’. And, successively, their schemes grow into labyrinths of ‘extra assumptions’ and ‘special cases’, the whole apparatus becoming more and more difficult to manage. Some clearing work is needed, and the key to such clearing is found in a priori reasoning, leading to the introduction of some very general – and often very simple – principles and relationships, from which whole classes of apparently very different things may be deduced.