I do not know whether I have answered all your objections, but I have endeavoured to answer all those which seem to me fundamental. A dispute, in which questions of method and of principle are at stake need not be carried on pedantically into minute details; we must depend to some extent on the assistance of the readers, who, putting themselves mentally in the position of the two disputants, work out for themselves the final application. I wish merely to add that it is my strongest conviction that the reaction against metaphysics (a far-sighted reaction in that it has freed scientific procedure from admixture with the arbitrary judgments of feeling and belief) has been pushed forward by many so far as to destroy science itself. The mathematicians who have a quick feeling for scientific procedure, have done much for economic science by reviving in it the dignity of abstract analysis, darkened and overwhelmed by the mass of anecdotes of the historical school. But, as it happens, they have also introduced into it the prejudice of their profession, and, being themselves students of the general conditions of the physical world, the particular prejudice that mathematics can take up in relation to economics--which is the science of _man_, of a form of the conscious activity of man--the same attitude which it rightly takes up in relation to the empirical natural sciences. From what I have now stated you will easily discover exactly how far we are in agreement in the establishment of the principles of _Economics_ and how far we disagree. If my new observations should assist in further reducing the extent of the disagreement, I shall indeed be glad. Perugia, _20th October, 1900_.[100] FOOTNOTES: [93] _Comment se pose le problème de l'economie pure._ Paper read in December 1898 to the _Societé Stella_. [94] _Giornale degli economisti_, March 1900, pp. 216-235. [95] _Rivista di sociologia_, III. no. vi., pp. 746-8, see _Materialismo Storico_, pp. 193-208. [96] DR CHRISTIAN V. EHRENFELS (Professor at Prague University): _System der Werttheorie_, vol. I, _Allgemeine Werttheorie, Psychologie des Begehrens_, Leipzig, Reisland, 1897; vol. II, _Grundzüge einer Ethik_, the same, 1898. [97] PARETO answered this letter in the same journal, _Giornale degli economisti_, August, 1900, pp. 139-162.