§3.The truth, of course, is that a scientific valuation of anything can only proceed by way of quantitative analysis.A standard of valuation which should regard qualitative differences as ultimate would not be scientific at all.It might be aesthetic or hygienic or ethical, according to the nature of the qualitative differences involved.A strictly scientific valuation of wealth, or of cost or of utility, or of life itself, must apply a single standard of measurement to all the various objects it seeks to value, i.e., it must reduce all the different objects to terms of this common denominator.
It can measure and value all forms of purchasable goods or services, however various in nature, through the market processes which reduce them to a single monetary equivalent.It can measure and value labour-costs of different sorts, either by a monetary standard or by some measure of fatigue or vital expenditure.It can measure the utility of various sorts of food or of fuel, by comparing the quantities of working-power or output which upon an average they yield.It can ascertain the vital values of different towns and occupations, incomes, races, in terms of longevity, fertility, susceptibility to diseases, etc.
This method, essential to scientific analysis, rests on an assumption that £1 worth of bad books is of the same value as £1 worth of good books.This assumption is true for the purpose to which it is applied, that of a market valuation.It assumes that a year's life of an imbecile or a loafer is worth the same as a year's life of a saint or a genius, and so it is for the purpose of vital statistics.
This is of course universally admitted.Science proceeds by abstraction:
it does not pretend to describe or explain the individuality or particular qualities of individual cases, but to discover common attributes of structure or composition or behaviour among numbers of cases, and to explain them in terms of these common characters.
So far, then, as the so-called value of anything, or any happening, consists in its uniqueness or idiosyncrasy, this value necessarily evades scientific analysis.It is only the common properties, the regularities, the conformities, that count for scientific valuation.Nay, more.So far as science takes account of individual qualities, it is in the capacity of eccentricities, i.e., it measures the amount of their variation from the average or normal.It cannot entertain the notion that there is any sort of difference which is inherently immeasurable, i.e., that there is difference in kind as well as in degree.1§4.A scientific analysis treats all differences as differences of degree.So-called difference of quality or kind it either ignores, or it seeks to reduce them to and express them in differences of quantity.
This endeavour to reduce qualitative to quantitative difference is the great stumbling-block in all organic science, but particularly in the departments of psychology and sociology.The difficulty is best illustrated in the recent extension of quantitative analysis into economics by the method of marginal preferences.Not content with the assumption that the particular costs, consumable qualities, etc., of any two articles selling for £1each may be disregarded, and the single property of their market value abstracted for consideration, the mathematical economists now insist that the study of marginal preferences discloses important laws of the psychology of individuals and societies.
The whole process of expenditure of income appears to be replete with instances of the capacity of the human mind to measure and apply a quantitative comparison to things which seem to be different in kind.It might seem as if my desire to help the starving population of India in a famine, and my desire to attend a Queen's Hall concert this evening were feelings, not merely of different intensity, but of such widely different nature that they could not be accurately measured against each other.And yet this miracle is said to be actually performed, when I decide upon due consideration to divide the 7s 6d in my purse so as to give 5s to the Famine Fund and to buy a 2s 6d ticket for the concert, instead of the more expensive ticket I should have bought had I not been lured to the Famine meeting.I might have given the whole 7s 6d to the Famine Fund, and missed the concert.
Why did I not? I must have performed the very delicate spiritual operation of reducing my humanitarian feeling to common terms with my love of music, and to have struck a balance which can only mean that I consider the additional satisfaction I would have got from giving another 2s 6d to the Famine Fund to be a little less than the satisfaction I would get from the concert.
But this, of course, is a single crude instance of a far more elaborate process of comparison which underlies the whole expenditure of my income.
After the routine expenditure upon necessaries and comforts, which may be said to represent my habitual standard of consumption, has been defrayed, there are various attractive uses to which every other sovereign and shilling may be put.All sorts of different appeals of pleasure, duty, pride, press their claims through a thousand different channels.In order to apportion my expenditure as I do, I must be conceived as reducing all these claims to some common standard of desirability, and deciding how much to lay out on this, how much on that.That physical satisfactions can be compared with one another, by the application of some standard of pleasure may appear intelligible enough.But that a sense of moral duty can be brought into direct comparison with a physical pleasure, or that various duties can be compared in size or strength with one another, would seem almost impossible.
