far as it is a method of investigation at all, is simply that of other economists applied under a more dominating sense of the complexity and diversity of the phenomena which are subjected to it. There is consequently with the historical school more rigour of observation and less rigour of theory, and this peculiarity leads to practical results of considerable importance, but it has no just pretensions to assume the dignity of a new economic method, and it is made to appear much bigger than it is by looming through the scholastic distinctions in which it is usually set forth. The historical school sometimes call their method the _realistic_ and _ethical_ method, to distinguish it from what they are pleased to term the _idealistic_, and _selfish_ or _materialistic_ method of the earlier economists. They are _realists_ because they cannot agree with the majority of economists who have gone before them in believing there is one, and only one, ideal of the best economic system. There are, says Roscher, as many different ideals as there are different types of peoples, and he completely casts aside the notion, which had generally prevailed before him, that there is a single normal system of economic arrangements, which is built on the natural laws of economic life, and to which all nations may at all times with advantage conform. It is against this notion that the historical school has revolted with so much energy that they wish to make their opposition to it the flag and symbol of a schism. They deny that there are any natural laws in political economy; they deny that there is any economic solution absolutely valid, or capable of answering in one economic situation because it has answered in another. Roscher, Knies, and the older members of the school make most of the latter point; but Hildebrand, Schönberg, Schmoller, Brentano, and the younger spirits among them, direct against the former some of their keenest attacks. They declare it to be a survival from the exploded metaphysics of the much-abused _Aufklärung_ of last century. They argue that just as the economists of that period took self-interest to be the only economic motive, because the then dominant psychology--that of the selfish or sensual school--represented it as the only real motive of human action, of which the other motives were merely modifications; so did they come to count the reciprocal action and reaction of the self-interest of different individuals to be a system of natural forces, working according to natural laws, because they found the whole intellectual air they breathed at the time filled with the idea that all error in poetry, art, ethics, and therefore also economics, had come through departing from nature, and that the true course in everything lay in giving the supremacy to the nature of things. We need not stop to discuss this historical question as to the origin of the idea; it is enough here to say that the Socialists of the Chair maintain that in economic affairs