Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy
John Stuart Mill · en
3. If we contemplate the whole field of human knowledge, attained or
attainable, we find that it separates itself obviously, and as it were
spontaneously, into two divisions, which stand so strikingly in
opposition and contradistinction to one another, that in all
classifications of our knowledge they have been kept apart. These are,
_physical_ science, and _moral_ or psychological science. The difference
between these two departments of our knowledge does not reside in the
subject-matter with which they are conversant: for although, of the
simplest and most elementary parts of each, it may be said, with an
approach to truth, that they are concerned with different subject-
matters--namely, the one with the human mind, the other with all things
whatever except the mind; this distinction does not hold between the
higher regions of the two. Take the science of politics, for instance,
or that of law: who will say that these are physical sciences? and yet
is it not obvious that they are conversant fully as much with matter as
with mind? Take, again, the theory of music, of painting, of any other
of the fine arts, and who will venture to pronounce that the facts they
are conversant with belong either wholly to the class of matter, or
wholly to that of mind?
The following seems to be the _rationale_ of the distinction between
physical and moral science.
In all the intercourse of man with nature, whether we consider him as
acting upon it, or as receiving impressions from it, the effect or
phenomenon depends upon causes of two kinds: the properties of the
object acting, and those of the object acted upon. Everything which can
possibly happen in which man and external things, are jointly concerned,
results from the joint operation of a law or laws of matter, and a law
or laws of the human mind. Thus the production of corn by human labour
is the result of a law of mind, and many laws of matter. The laws of
matter are those properties of the soil and of vegetable life which
cause the seed to germinate in the ground, and those properties of the
human body which render food necessary to its support. The law of mind
is, that man desires to possess subsistence, and consequently wills the
necessary means of procuring it.
Laws of mind and laws of matter are so dissimilar in their nature, that
it would be contrary to all principles of rational arrangement to mix
them up as part of the same study. In all scientific methods, therefore,
they are placed apart. Any compound effect or phenomenon which depends
both on the properties of matter and on those of mind, may thus become
the subject of two completely distinct sciences, or branches of science;
one, treating of the phenomenon in so far as it depends upon the laws of
matter only; the other treating of it in so far as it depends upon the
laws of mind.