the prudent calculation of selfishness. It is apt therefore to be attacked by the sentimentalist as untrue to human nature, by the moralist as unworthy of human nature. Both these critics may be largely in the right, but they are not fair to the economic man. Or, rather, the description of economic motives was incomplete. Men act economically when they exchange goods or services with their neighbours on the best possible terms to themselves. But this actual keenness in bargaining need not be prompted by pure selfishness. Public spirit or even philanthropic zeal may also on occasion issue in the same determination to sell in the dearest market and buy in the cheapest. In fact, a devoted father, a perfectly disinterested secretary of some institution, might bargain for his children or for his society even more keenly than a personally selfish merchant. Such conduct would seem to be economic and yet unselfish. The central fact for the economist is not the inmost spring of the will, but its resolution in this situation to exchange service for service on the most favourable terms. For this reason it seems to be wrong to identify the economic man with the egoist, unnecessary even to hold that the economic will is the non-moral' will devoted to a prudent search for enjoyment, which might or might not be ethically justified. It is true that the economist has no need to inquire whether a man's motives are ethically justifiable or not. But we need not therefore say that he discusses non-moral facts;1 it is merely that their ethical bearings

1 For this reason it is hard to agree with Croce's treatment of the two forms he finds in practical life-the ethical and the economic. If I understand it aright he confines 'l'activité économique' to 'les fins dites individuelles', which from the rest of the discussion seem to be merely personal egoistic pleasures. But it is very difficult to understand even on this distinction the function of the science called economics: for it is not,

do not interest him. So long as the will to exchange favourably is present, the economist may set to work: what the final cause of the will's economic activity may be he can leave on one side.

Yet even this is not quite satisfactory. For what is meant by a 'favourable exchange'? In the plainest sense, that a man gives up little for a great gain. But what sort of gains are contemplated? Primarily no doubt actual commodities or services that can be controlled, but also in the widest sense any advantages that can be measured in money. Social prestige, for example, is a thing that may be purchased: the inconvenience of any ugly house may be outbalanced by its fashionable situation: the small return from landed estates compensated by the stake they give in the country. There are, however, certain other considerations that may perhaps be called non-economic, and yet modify a man's action even in the market-place. Take for example the employer who refuses to discharge an old servant who has lost some of his competence. Inasmuch as he is then failing to secure the highest return for the wages he pays, he is acting philanthropically and not as a 'business man'. Yet he is personally satisfied by the exchange he is making. Are we to say that he is then purchasing philanthropic pleasure, and that the ordinary laws of exchange cover his conduct? But the moralist may point out the familiar difficulty that philanthropy could not bring pleasure unless the will to be philanthropic were already there: so that the attempt to explain such conduct on the lines of prudential calculation does not succeed. In any case so unpleasant a view would also properly speaking, engaged even on the study of 'l'activité économique' (see p. 227 of the French translation of Croce's Filosofia della Pratica).

seem likely to be very largely futile. Charity cannot well be measured in this way, any more than we can reasonably expect anything as precise as Gresham's Law, or the principles of the foreign exchange, to account for the operation of filial devotion. Yet the wide cultivation of charitable conduct might change the course of business till the economist could not recognize his way in it. The point is important enough to deserve some further illustration. It was noticed above that the economic man need by no means be entirely selfish. On the other hand he may be entirely devoted to his family or friends. Yet so far as this devotion makes him sell his labour dear in the interests of his daughters, or buy in the most favourable markets presents to distribute among his friends, then his altruistic motives express themselves in just as direct a seeking for economic advantages as the selfishness of a confirmed epicurean or the grasping covetousness of a miser. But, now suppose that a man could place his labour to greater advantage at a place far removed from his present home, his friends, and his relatives: suppose he refuses even the most tempting offers in order that his presence at home may add to the comfort of an invalid mother. Then, though he is no more altruistic in his motive than the father discussed above, his altruism seems, as the father's did not, to lead to conduct that might be called uneconomic. It might be suggested that all the economists need do in this situation is to measure the devotion of the son by the amount of salary he sacrifices to express it, and then represent the whole transaction as an exchange in which so many opportunities for devotion are set against a better house or more books. But this artificial representation of the facts fails to do justice to them: the things that he is supposed to

balance are not commensurable, and he could not even try to balance one against the other, as a man admittedly might weigh the pleasure of a good cigar against the pleasures of a picture palace. Yet such devotion as this might seriously disturb the economist's calculation. If men will not spend their labour where it gets the highest monetary reward the conditions of competition are suspended. Mobility of labour, like mobility of capital, is one of the assumptions on which the ordinary theory of the market rests. Yet 'non-economic' motives are continually disturbing or checking such mobility. National sentiment, for example, can go so far in preventing mobility, that it might well be asked whether in most trades there is an international market for labour at all. But where the economist might tell you more confidently that a market exists, these too similar disturbing influences prevent its working out as worldly prudence would recommend.

Similarly the joy men find in certain kinds of work is a factor that the economist could not deny, but must always find it hard to consider in detail. So far as it makes men willing to work for a smaller reward than would otherwise be necessary, it is a factor entering into exchange and therefore demands the economist's attention. But if it grew sufficiently keen, it might make men altogether indifferent to terms of exchange, and then the man so prompted must cease to interest the economist. For he is not a psychologist or a historian in general. It is not every branch of human activity, every variety of human motive that demands his attention. He is interested with all that affects exchange: and the real perplexity of his position is that certain things affect exchange which in the long run raise men above the

level of exchange altogether. In this sense they could be called non-economic and yet the economic system is profoundly disturbed by them. So far as men are really careless of their own advantage, whether it be in things material or in things spiritual-when debts are not collected, bargains not enforced, poverty willingly accepted ---then the economist is baffled. Motives like these do not explain the 'higgling of the market': and the starting-point of the economist's inquiries, the raison d'être of his existence is that the market does higgle.

Or, to put the same theme in rather a different way, economics studies men as they exchange service for service, possession for possession: its main topic is how the quid pro quo is fixed. But there are other forms of association in which men do not demand service for service in this way, forms of activity for which men require no payment at all. Now these other activities and associations may stand at a higher level than merely economic groupings and economic activities. But so far as their spirit is taken over into the market-place, the market ceases to retain its peculiar nature: it becomes the scene of men's direct unselfish co-operation, not the place where bargains are driven. Man's life cannot be divided into completely isolated departments, and the market-place is, as a matter of fact, continually feeling the uprush of a spirit that is not commercial. Consequently economics has to admit the existence of forces from which it has nevertheless to abstract. For it cannot really be developed into a science which measures every kind of motive, and gives account of all man's choices and preferences. So expanded it turns into psychology, and finally, as psychology must, into biography. The values it deals with are those that may be measured in