other legal conditions, the effects would be different; but none of the effects would occur were it not for the economic nature of man, which is a necessary postulate, and not to be identified with the postulate of technical knowledge, or with any other of the social rules. _To know_ is not to _will_; and _to will in accordance with objective rules_ is not _to will in accordance with ideals which are merely subjective and individual_ (economic). Stammler might say that if the science of economics thus interpreted is not properly a social science, he leaves it on one side, because his object is to construct a science which may be fully entitled to the name of _social economics_. But--let us, too, construct a dilemma!--this social economics, to which he aspires, will either be just economic science applied to definite social conditions, in the sense now indicated, or it will be a form of historical knowledge. No third thing exists. _Ein Drittes ist nicht da!_ And indeed, for Stammler an _economic phenomenon_ is not any single social fact whatever, but a group of homogeneous facts, which offer the marks of _necessity_. The number of economic facts required to form the group and give rise to an economic phenomenon cannot be determined in general; but can be seen in each case. By the formation of these groups, he says, social economics does not degenerate into a register of data concerning fact, nor does it become purely mechanical statistics of material already given which it has merely to enumerate. Social economics should not merely examine into the change in the actual working out of one and the same social order, but remains, now as formerly, the seat of all knowledge of actual social life. It must start from the knowledge of a given social existence, both in regard to its form and in regard to its content; and enlarge and deepen it up to the most minute peculiarity of its actual working out, with the accuracy of a technical science, the conditions and concrete objects of which are clearly indicated; and thus free the reality of social life from every obscurity. Hence it must make for itself a series of concepts, which will serve the purpose of such an explanation.