Saturday, March 31, 2012

Man's Wants - Frédéric Bastiat - 2





Many economic errors are due to the fact that human wants are considered as a fixed quantity; and for that reason I have felt obliged to enlarge on this subject. At the risk of anticipating what I shall say later I shall now describe briefly this mode of reasoning. All the chief satisfactions of the age in which one happens to live are taken into account, and it is presumed that humanity admits of no others. Then, if the bounty of Nature or the productivity of machinery or habits of temperance and moderation result for a time in rendering idle a certain part of human labor, this progress is viewed with alarm, it is considered a disaster, and the theorists take refuge behind absurd but plausible formulas, like: We are suffering from overproduction; we are dying of a surfeit; production has outstripped consumer buying power, etc.
It is impossible to find a good solution to the problem of the machine, foreign competition, and luxury, as long as wants are considered as an invariable quantity, or their capacity for indefinite multiplication is not taken into account.
But if man's wants are not fixed quantities, but progressive, capable of growth like the inexhaustible desires on which they constantly feed, we must conclude, granting that a balance between the means and the end is the first law of all harmony, that Nature has placed in man and about him unlimited and constantly increasing means of satisfaction. This is what we shall now examine.
I said, at the beginning of this work, that political economy has for its subject man, considered from the point of view of his wants and the means whereby he is able to satisfy them.
It is thus natural to have begun by studying man and his nature.
But we have also seen that he is not a solitary being. If his wants and his satisfactions—in virtue of the nature of his senses—are inseparable from his being, the same is not true of his efforts, which are part of his dynamic constitution. These are transferable. In a word, men work for one another.
Now a very strange thing happens.
When we consider man from a general and, so to speak, abstract point of view—his wants, his efforts, his satisfactions, his constitution, his inclinations, his tendencies—we arrive at a series of observations that seem clear beyond all doubt and strikingly self-evident, for each one of us finds their proof within himself. So obvious and commonplace are these truths that the writer fears the public's derision if he presents them. He feels, with some reason, that he can see the angry reader throwing away the book and crying out, “I will not waste my time learning anything so trivial.”
Nevertheless, these truths, held to be so incontestable—as long as they are presented in a general way—that we can hardly bear to be reminded of them, are no longer regarded as anything but ridiculous errors, absurd theories, as soon as we view man in his social surroundings. Who, contemplating man in his isolated state, would ever think of saying: We have overproduction; consumption cannot keep pace with production; luxury and artificial tastes are the source of wealth; mechanical inventions destroy labor; and other aphorisms of the same import, which, when applied to the mass of mankind, are nevertheless accepted as so axiomatic that they are made the foundation of our industrial and commercial laws? Exchange produces in this respect an illusion capable of beguiling even the best minds, and I affirm that political economy will have gained its objective and fulfilled its mission when it has conclusively proved this fact: What holds true for one man holds true for society. Man in a state of isolation is at once producer and consumer, inventor and entrepreneur, capitalist and worker; all the economic phenomena are performed in him, and he is, as it were, a society in miniature. In the same way, humanity, viewed in its totality, is like a single man, immense, composite, many-sided, to whom are applicable exactly the same truths observable in a single individual.
I felt the need to make this remark, which, I hope, will be better justified later, before continuing my studies on man. Had I not made it, I should have feared that the reader would reject as superfluous the deductions, the veritable truisms, that are to follow.
I have just spoken of man's wants, and, after an approximate enumeration of them, I have observed that they are not static, but progressive. This is true whether they are considered by themselves alone or included altogether in the physical, intellectual, or moral order. How could it be otherwise? There are certain wants of our bodies that must be satisfied, or we die; and, up to a certain point, we could maintain that these wants are fixed quantities, though this statement is not strictly accurate. For, however little we may desire to overlook an essential element—the force of habit—and to condescend to subject ourselves to honest self-examination, we are constrained to admit that our wants, even the most elemental, like eating, are unquestionably modified by habit. Anyone who would take exception to this remark, as smacking of materialism or epicureanism, would be most unhappy if we took him at his word and reduced him to the black broth of the Spartans or to the pittance of an anchorite. But, in any case, when these wants are satisfied once and for all, there are others that spring from the most elastic of all our faculties—desire. Can we imagine a moment in man's life when he is incapable of new desires, even reasonable desires? Let us not forget that a desire that is unreasonable at a certain point in civilization, when all human resources are absorbed in the satisfaction of lesser desires, ceases to be unreasonable when the improvement of these resources has cleared the way. Thus, a desire to go thirty miles an hour would have been unreasonable two centuries ago but is not so today. To assert that the wants and desires of man are fixed and static quantities is to misunderstand the nature of the soul, to deny the facts, to make civilization inexplicable.
It would be still more inexplicable if the unlimited formation of new wants were not accompanied by the potentially unlimited development of new means to satisfy them. As far as progress is concerned, what good would the indefinitely elastic nature of our wants do us if, at a certain definite point, our faculties could advance no further, if they encountered an immovable barrier? Therefore, unless Nature, Providence, or whatever may be the power that rules our fate, has fallen into the most cruel and shocking contradiction, we must presume, since our desires are without limit, that our means of satisfying them are likewise without limit.
I say “without limit,” and not “infinite,” for nothing that relates to man is infinite. Because our desires and our faculties go on developing endlessly, they have no assignable limits, although they do have absolute limits. We can mention countless points above and beyond humanity that humanity can never reach, yet we cannot for that reason determine an exact instant when progress toward them will come to a halt.1
I do not mean that desire and the means of satisfying it keep pace with one another. Desire runs ahead, while the means limps along behind. The nature of our desire, so quick and adventurous compared with the slowness of our faculties, reminds us that at every step of civilization, on every rung of the ladder of progress, a certain degree of suffering is and always will be man's lot. But it teaches us also that suffering has a mission, since it would be impossible to comprehend the role of desire as a goad to our faculties if it lagged behind them, instead of rushing along ahead, as it does. Yet let us not accuse Nature of cruelty for having built this mechanism, for it is to be noted that desire does not become a real want, that is, a painful desire, unless habit has turned it into a permanent satisfaction; in other words, unless the means of gratifying it has been discovered and placed permanently and irrevocably within our reach.2
We must now consider this question: What means are available to us to satisfy our wants?
It seems clear to me that there are two: Nature and labor, the gifts of God and the fruits of our efforts, or, if you will, the application of our faculties to the things that Nature has placed at our disposal.
No school of thought, as far as I know, has attributed to Nature alone the satisfaction of our wants. Such an assertion is obviously refuted by experience, and we do not have to study political economy to perceive that the intervention of our faculties is necessary.
But there are schools that have attributed this distinction to labor alone. Their axiom is: All wealth comes from labor; labor is wealth.
I cannot refrain from observing here that these formulas, taken literally, have led to gross errors of principle and, consequently, to deplorable legislative measures. I shall speak of this subject elsewhere.
I confine myself here to maintaining that, in point of fact, Nature and labor function together for the satisfaction of our wants and our desires.
Let us look at the facts.
The first want, which we have placed at the head of our list, is that of breathing. On this score we have already noted that, generally, Nature foots the whole bill, and that human labor intervenes only in certain exceptional cases as, for example, when it is necessary to purify the air.
The want of quenching our thirst is satisfied by Nature, to a greater or lesser degree, according to the availability and quality of the water provided; and the role of labor is to compensate by wells and cisterns for Nature's deficiencies.
Nature is no more uniformly liberal toward us in the matter of food; for who will say that the amount of labor we must perform is always the same whether the land is fertile or barren, the forest filled with game, the river with fish, or the contrary is the case?
As for lighting, there is certainly less for human labor to do in places where the night is short than where it has pleased the sun to run a briefer course.
I dare not state this as an absolute rule, but it seems to me that as we rise on the scale of our wants, Nature's co-operation diminishes, and more is left to our own faculties. The painter, the sculptor, even the writer, are forced to use materials and instruments that Nature alone furnishes; but we must admit that they must draw upon their own genius for the qualities that make for the charm, the merit, the usefulness, and the value of their works. Learning is a want that is satisfied almost entirely by the use of our intellectual faculties. Nevertheless, could we not say that here too Nature aids us by offering to us, in different degrees, objects for observation and comparison? For an equal amount of work can an equal amount of progress in botany, geology, or biology be made everywhere in the world?
It would be superfluous to cite other examples. We can already state as a fact that Nature gives us means of satisfaction that have greater or lesser degrees of utility. (This word is used in its etymological sense, i.e., the property of rendering a service.) In many cases, in almost every case, something remains for labor to do before this utility is complete; and we recognize that this contribution by labor will be greater or less, in each individual case, in accordance with the extent to which Nature herself has furthered the operation.
We can therefore lay down these two formulas:

  • 1.Utility is transmitted sometimes by Nature, sometimes by labor alone, almost always by the conjunction of Nature and labor.
  • 2.To bring a thing to its complete state of utility, the contribution of labor is in inverse ratio to the contribution of Nature.
From these two propositions, combined with what we have said about the indefinite elasticity of our wants, allow me to draw a conclusion whose importance will be demonstrated later. If we imagine two men without means of mutual communication placed in unequal situations, with Nature generous to one and parsimonious to the other, the first one will obviously have less work to do for each given satisfaction. Does it follow that that part of his energies thus left, so to speak, available, will necessarily be stricken with inertia, and that this man, because of Nature's liberality, will be reduced to enforced idleness? No, what happens is that he will be able, if he so desires, to employ his energies to enlarge the circle of his enjoyments; that for an equal amount of labor he will obtain two satisfactions instead of one; in a word, progress will be easier for him.
Perhaps I am deluding myself, but it does not seem to me that any science, not even geometry, presents, at its outset, truths more unassailable. If, nevertheless, someone were to prove to me that all these truths are so many errors, he would have destroyed in me not only the confidence that they inspire, but the bases of all certainty and all faith in evidence of any kind whatsoever, for what logic could be more convincing than the logic that he would thus have overturned? On the day when an axiom will be found to contradict the axiom that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points, the human mind will have no other refuge than absolute skepticism, if that can be called a refuge.
Therefore, I feel a real embarrassment in insisting on primary truths so clear that they seem childish. Nevertheless, I must say, in the midst of the complications of human transactions, these truths have been misunderstood; and, to justify myself in the eyes of the reader for delaying him so long on what the English call truisms, I shall point out the singular aberration that has misled some very excellent minds. Setting aside, neglecting entirely, the co-operation of Nature, in relation to the satisfaction of our wants, they have laid down this absolute principle: All wealth comes from labor. On this premise they have constructed the following syllogism:

  • “All wealth comes from labor.
  • “Hence, wealth is in proportion to labor.
  • ”But labor is in inverse ratio to the bounty of Nature.
  • “Hence, wealth is in inverse ratio to the bounty of Nature.”
And, whether we like it or not, many of our economic laws have been inspired by this singular logic. These laws can be only detrimental to the creation and distribution of wealth. For this reason I am justified in setting down these apparently very trivial truths as a preliminary step toward refuting the errors and deplorable misconceptions under which present-day society is laboring.
Let us now analyze this question of the contribution of Nature.
Nature puts two things at our disposal: materials and forces.
Most material objects that contribute to the satisfaction of our wants and our desires are brought to the state of utility, which adapts them to our use through the intervention of labor, by the application of human faculties. But, in any case, the elements, the atoms, if you wish, of which these objects are composed, are gifts, and I add, gratuitous gifts, of Nature. This observation is of the greatest importance, and, I am convinced, will shed a new light on the theory of wealth.
I beg the reader to be good enough to remember that I am studying here in a general way the physical and moral constitution of man, his wants, his faculties, and his relations with Nature, with the exception of exchange, which I shall take up in the next chapter; we shall then see in what areas and in what way social transactions modify the phenomena.
It is obvious that if man in the state of isolation must, so to speak, purchase most of his satisfactions by labor, by effort, it is strictly accurate to say that before any labor, any effort, of his has come into play, the materials he finds available are the gratuitous gifts of Nature. After the first effort, however slight, they cease to be gratuitous; and if the terminology of political economy had always been exact, the name raw materials would have been reserved for material objects in this state, prior to any human activity.
I say again at this point that the gratuitousness of these gifts of Nature, before the intervention of labor, is of the highest importance. In fact, I said in the second chapter that political economy was the theory of value. I add now, anticipating, that things begin to havevalue only when labor gives it to them. I propose to demonstrate, later, that all that is gratis to man in the state of isolation remains gratis to man in society, and that the gratuitous gifts of Nature, however great their utility, have no value. I say that a man receiving directly and without effort a benefit from Nature cannot be considered as having rendered himself an onerous service, and that, consequently, he cannot render any service to another in regard to things that are common to all. So, when there are no services rendered or received, there is no value.
All that I say of materials applies also to the forces supplied us by Nature. Gravitation, volatile gases, the power of the wind, the laws of equilibrium, plant and animal life—these are so many forces that we learn to turn to our advantage. The pains, the mental energy, we expend to accomplish this are subject to payment, for we cannot be required to devote our efforts gratis to another's advantage. But these natural forces, considered in themselves alone, and without reference to any intellectual or physical labor, are gratuitousgifts from Providence; and, as such, remain without value through all the complications of human transactions. Such is the central idea of this work.
This observation, I admit, would have little importance if the co-operation of Nature were entirely uniform, if every man, at all times, in all places, under all circumstances, invariably received exactly the same assistance from Nature. In that case science could be excused for not taking into account an element that, remaining always and everywhere the same, would affect the exchange of services to the same extent in all areas. Just as in geometry the segments of lines common to two figures under comparison are eliminated, so in political economy we could disregard this ever-present co-operation and be content to say, as has been said until now: Natural wealth does exist; political economy notes the fact once and for all and is no longer concerned with it.
But this is not the way things happen. The irresistible tendency of the human intellect, stimulated by self-interest and aided by previous discoveries, is to substitute the gratuitous contribution of Nature for the onerous contribution of man; so that any given utility, although remaining the same in its result, in the satisfaction it gives, represents a continually decreasing amount of labor. Certainly we cannot fail to see the tremendous influence of this marvelous phenomenon on our idea of value. For what is the result? In every product the tendency is for gratuitous utility to replace onerous utility. Since utility is the result of two contributions, one requiring payment in terms of effort, the other not, value that is determined only by the former decreases for an identical amount of utility from both sources in proportion as Nature's share is made more effective. Thus, we can say that humanity enjoys greatersatisfactions, or wealth, in proportion as value decreases. Now, since most authors have given a kind of synonymous meaning to the three expressions—“utility,” “wealth,” “value”—they have formulated a theory that is not only incorrect, but the exact opposite of the truth. I sincerely believe that a more exact description of this combination of natural and human forces in the work of production or, putting it another way, a more accurate definition of value, will put an end to inextricable theoretical confusions and will reconcile schools of thought now divergent; and if I anticipate here some of the findings of this inquiry, I do so to justify myself to the reader for dwelling on notions whose importance would otherwise be difficult to appreciate.
After this digression I resume my study of man considered solely from the economic point of view.
Another observation by Jean-Baptiste Say which is obvious enough, although too often neglected by other authors, is that man creates neither the materials nor the forces of Nature, if we understand the word “create” in its strict sense. These materials, these forces, exist independently of man. Man can only combine them, move them about for his own or others' advantage. If he does so for his own advantage, he renders a service to himself; if for the advantage of others, he renders a service to his fellow men, and it is his right to exact an equivalent service in return. Hence, it follows also that value is in proportion to the service rendered, and not at all in proportion to the absolute utility of the thing. For this utility can be, in large part, the result of a gratuitous act of Nature, in which case the human service, the service involving labor and remuneration, is of little value. This results from the axiom stated above: In bringing a thing to the highest degree of utility, man's share in the action is in inverse ratio to Nature's.
This observation overturns the doctrine that places value in the materiality of things. The contrary is true. Materiality is a quality that is given by Nature and is, therefore, gratuitous, possessing no value, although of incontestable utility. Human action, which can never succeed in creating matter, alone constitutes the service that man in a state of isolation renders to himself or that men in society render one another, and it is the free appraisal of these services that is the basis of value. Value cannot be thought of as residing only in matter, as Adam Smith would have put it; rather, between matter and value there is no possible connection.
From this erroneous doctrine, rigorously adhered to, came the conclusion that those classes alone are productive that work directly with matter. Smith thus prepared the way for the error of the modern socialists, who always represent as unproductive parasites those whom they call the middlemen between the producer and the consumer, such as the businessman, the merchant, etc. Do they render services? Do they spare us pains by taking pains for us? In that case, they create value, even though they do not create matter. And, indeed, since nobody creates matter, since we are all limited to rendering reciprocal services, it is altogether accurate to say that all of us, including farmers and artisans, are middlemen in our relations with one another.
For the moment, this is what I have to say about the contribution of Nature. Nature places at our disposal, in varying amounts according to climate, seasons, and our own degree of enlightenment, but always gratis, materials and forces. Therefore, these materials and these forces do not have value; it would be very strange if they did. In accordance with what criterion would we estimate it? How can we understand Nature being paid, recompensed, remunerated? We shall see later that exchange is necessary to determine value. We do not buy Nature's goods; we gather them in, and if, to gather them in, an effort of some sort has to be made, it is in this effort, not in the gift of Nature, that the value consists.
Let us pass, now, to man's action, designated in a general way under the name of labor.
The word “labor,” like nearly all those used in political economy, is very vague; the breadth of its connotations varies from author to author. Political economy has not had, like most sciences—chemistry for example—the advantage of being able to create its own vocabulary. Dealing with things with which men have been occupied since the beginning of the world, and which they have made the habitual subject of their conversation, political economists have found their terms ready-made and have been forced to use them. The sense of the word “labor” is frequently restricted to the muscular activity of men working with material things. Thus, we speak of the “working classes” when we mean those who carry out the mechanical part of production.
The reader will understand that I give this a broader sense. By labor I mean the use of our faculties for the satisfaction of our wants.Want, effort, satisfaction—this is the orbit of political economy. Effort can be physical, intellectual, or even moral, as we shall see.
It is unnecessary to demonstrate here that all our powers, all or nearly all our faculties, can and in fact do contribute to production. Concentration, sagacity, intelligence, imagination have their part to play in it.
M. Dunoyer, in his admirable book on The Freedom of Labor, has included, and with full scientific accuracy, our moral faculties among the factors to which we owe our wealth. This is a new idea and as stimulating as it is sound; it is destined to add scope and luster to the field of political economy.
I shall dwell on this idea here only in so far as it gives me the opportunity to shed a little light on the origin of a powerful agent of production about which I have not yet spoken: capital.
If we examine successively the material objects that serve to satisfy our wants, we shall recognize that all or nearly all of them require for their production more time, a greater part of our lives, than we can expend without renewing our strength, that is to say, without satisfying our wants. Hence, the men who produced such things were first required, presumably, to reserve, to set aside, to accumulate, their means of livelihood during the operation.
The same is true for satisfactions of a nonmaterial order. A priest could not devote himself to his preaching, a professor to his teaching, a magistrate to the maintenance of law and order, unless by their own devices or with the help of others they had at their disposal previously produced means of subsistence.
Let us go back and imagine a man in the state of isolation reduced to earning a living by hunting. It is easy to see that if, every evening, he ate all the game he had caught during the day, he would never be able to undertake any other type of work, such as building a hut or repairing his weapons; all progress would be out of the question for him.
This is not the place to define the nature and function of capital. My only purpose is to show how, even if we do not go beyond mere considerations of wealth, certain moral virtues such as orderliness, foresight, self-control, thrift, contribute directly to the improvement of our way of life.
Foresight is one of man's noblest privileges, and it is hardly necessary to say that, in almost all the circumstances of life, the odds are all in favor of the man who best knows the consequences of his decisions and his acts.
Restraint of one's appetites, control of one's passions, acceptance of present privation for the sake of future, though distant, gain—these are the essential conditions for the building up of capital; and capital, as we have seen, is itself the essential prerequisite for all undertakings that are at all complicated or extensive. All the evidence suggests that if two men were placed in completely identical situations, if we supposed them to possess the same degree of intelligence and initiative, the one making the greater progress would be he who, by storing up his resources, would be able to carry on long-range operations, improve his tools, and thus enlist the forces of Nature in accomplishing his ends.
I shall not dwell on this. We need only look about us to realize that all our strength, all our faculties, all our virtues, work together for the advancement of man and society.
By the same token there is not one of our vices that does not contribute directly or indirectly to poverty. Idleness paralyzes the very sinews of production. Ignorance and error give it false direction. Lack of foresight opens the way to miscalculations. Yielding to the appetites of the moment prevents the building up of capital. Vanity leads to dissipating our energies on illusory satisfactions, at the expense of real ones. Violence, fraud, provoking violence and fraud in return, force us to surround ourselves with burdensome protective measures, to the great depletion of our energies.
I shall end this preliminary study of man with an observation that I have already made concerning wants. The factors enumerated in this chapter that enter into the science of economics and constitute it are essentially variable and diverse. Wants, desires, materials and forces supplied by Nature, muscular strength, bodily organs, intellectual faculties, moral qualities—all vary according to the individual, the time, and the place. No two men are alike in any one of these respects and even less alike in all of them taken together. Furthermore, no man is exactly like himself for two hours running. What one man knows, another does not; what one man treasures, another despises; here Nature has been lavish, there miserly; a virtue that is difficult to practice at one degree of temperature becomes easy in a different climate. The science of economics, therefore, does not have the advantage, as do the so-called exact sciences, of possessing a measure, a yardstick, enabling it to determine the precise intensity of desires, efforts, and satisfactions. If we were called upon to work in solitude, like certain animals, our circumstances would differ to some degree, and even if these outside circumstances were similar, and our milieu identical, we should still differ in our desires, our wants, our ideas, our judgment, our energy, our values, our foresight, our activity; so that a great and inevitable inequality would be manifested among men. Certainly, absolute isolation, the absence of all contacts among men, is only a flight of fancy born in the imagination of Rousseau. But, supposing that this antisocial state, the so-called state of nature, ever existed, I wonder how Rousseau and his faithful followers ever managed to attribute equality to it. We shall see later that equality, like wealth, like liberty, like brotherhood, like unity, is an end, and not a point of departure. It arises from the natural and orderly development of society. Humanity does not move away from equality, but toward it. This thought is more reassuring than what Rousseau would have us believe, and far truer.
Having spoken of our wants and the means we possess to satisfy them, I have a word to say about our satisfactions. They are the result of the whole mechanism. According to the degree of physical, moral, and intellectual satisfactions enjoyed by humanity, we know whether the machine is functioning well or badly. Hence, the word consommation (taken over in French by the economists to mean consumption) would have profound meaning, if, keeping its etymological sense, it were used as a synonym of end, achievement. Unfortunately, in common usage and even in the scientific language, it suggests to the mind a coarse and material connotation, accurate undoubtedly for physical wants, but not for wants of a higher order. The raising of wheat, the spinning of wool are concluded by an act of consumption. Can the word consumption be also applied to the works of the artist, the songs of the poet, the deliberations of the jurist, the sermons of the priest? Here again we encounter the difficulties of the basic error that led Adam Smith to confine political economy to material values; and the reader will pardon me if I often use the word satisfaction to apply to all our wants and to all our desires, since I think it better corresponds to the wider scope that I feel justified in giving to political economy.
Economists have often been reproached for concerning themselves exclusively with the interests of the consumer. “You forget the producer,” people say. But satisfaction being the goal, the end of all efforts, and, as it were, the final consummation of economic phenomena, is it not evident that it is the touchstone of all progress? A man's well-being is not measured by his efforts, but by hissatisfactions. This observation also holds true for men taken collectively. This again is one of those truths accepted by everybody when it is applied to the individual, but disputed endlessly when applied to society as a whole. The expression so much attacked means only this: The value of every economic activity is determined, not by the labor it entails, but by the positive effect it produces, which in turn results in increasing or decreasing the general welfare.
We have said, apropos of wants and desires, that no two men are alike. The same is true of our satisfactions. They are not equally esteemed by all; which is tantamount to the trite observation: tastes differ. But it is the intensity of our desires and the variety of our tastes that determine the direction of our efforts. Here the influence of morality on habits of work becomes clear. We can imagine an individual man as a slave to idle, childish, immoral tastes. In that case, it is obvious that his strength, which is limited, will satisfy his depraved desires only at the expense of more intelligent and reasonable desires. But when society as a whole is considered, this obvious axiom appears erroneous. We tend to believe that idle tastes, illusory satisfactions, which we recognize as a cause of poverty for the individual, are nevertheless a source of national wealth because they create an outlet for a multitude of industries. If such were the case, we should arrive at a very distressing conclusion: Man in the social state has the choice of poverty or immorality. Once again, it is political economy that can resolve these seeming contradictions in the most satisfactory and conclusive way.






Friday, March 30, 2012

Man's Wants - Frédéric Bastiat - 1



Man's Wants

It is perhaps impossible and, in any case, not very useful to present a complete and methodical catalogue of all of man's wants. Almost all those of real importance are included in the following list:
Breathing (I keep this want here as marking the absolute limit where the transfer of labor or the exchange of services begins), food, clothing, housing, the preservation or recovery of health, transportation, security, education, amusement, enjoyment of the beautiful.
Wants exist. This is a fact. It would be childish to inquire whether it would be better if they did not exist and why God has made us subject to them.
It is certain that man suffers and even dies when he cannot satisfy the wants that it is his nature as a human being to feel. It is certain that he suffers and can die when he satisfies certain of them overmuch.
We can satisfy most of our wants only by taking pains, which can themselves be considered suffering. The same is true of the act by which, exercising a noble restraint over our appetites, we deprive ourselves of something.
Thus, suffering is unavoidable, and we have little more than a choice of evils. Furthermore, suffering is the most personal, intimate thing in the world; consequently, self-interest, the impulse that today is branded as selfish and individualistic, is indestructible. Nature has placed feeling at the ends of our nerves, at all the approaches to our hearts and our minds, like an outpost, to warn us where there is a lack or an excess of satisfaction. Pain, then, has a purpose, a mission. It has often been asked if the existence of evil can be reconciled with the infinite goodness of the Creator—an awesome problem that philosophy will always grapple with and will probably never solve. As far as political economy is concerned, man must be taken as he is, inasmuch as it has not been vouchsafed to the imagination to picture—and to reason even less to conceive of—an animate and mortal being exempt from pain. All our efforts to understand feeling without pain or man without feeling would be vain.
Today, some sentimentalist schools reject as false any social science that has not succeeded in devising a system by means of which pain will disappear from the world. They pass a harsh judgment on political economy because it recognizes what cannot be denied: the existence of suffering. They go further; they hold political economy responsible for it. This is like attributing the frailty of our organs to the physiologist who studies them.
Of course, a man can make himself momentarily popular, can attract to himself men who are suffering, and can arouse them against the natural order of society by telling them that he has in mind a plan for the artificial arrangement of society that will exclude pain in any form. He can even say that he has stolen God's secret and has interpreted His supposed will by banishing evil from the face of the earth. And yet the sentimentalist schools call irreverent the science that refuses to make such claims, accusing it of misunderstanding or denying the foresight or omnipotence of the Author of all things!
At the same time, these schools paint a frightening picture of present-day society, and they do not perceive that, if it is irreverent to predict suffering for the future, it is no less irreverent to note its existence in the past or in the present. For the Infinite admits of no limits; and if, since Creation, even one man has suffered in this world, that is reason enough to admit, without irreverence, that pain has entered into the plan of Providence.
It is certainly more scientific and more manly to recognize the existence of the great facts of Nature, which not only do exist, but without which mankind could not be imagined.
Thus, man is subject to suffering, and, consequently, society is also.
Suffering has a role to play in the life of the individual and, consequently, in that of society as well.
The study of the natural laws of society will reveal that the role of suffering is gradually to destroy its own causes, to restrict itself to narrower and narrower limits, and, finally, to guarantee us, by making us earn and deserve it, a preponderance of the good and the beautiful over the evil.
The catalogue presented above puts material needs first.
We live in times that force me to warn the reader once again against the sentimental affectation so very much in vogue.
There are people who hold very cheap what they disdainfully call material needs, material satisfactions. They will doubtless say to me, as Bélise says to Chrysale:
  • Is the body, this rag, of sufficient importance,
  • Of sufficient worth, that we should give it the slightest heed?
And these people, though generally well provided for in every respect (on which I sincerely congratulate them), will blame me for having listed food, for example, as coming first.
Certainly I recognize that moral improvement belongs to a higher order of things than the preservation of the body. But, after all, are we so beset by this mania for cant and affectation that we are no longer permitted to say that in order to attain moral improvement we must keep soul and body together? Let us avoid these childish attitudes, which stand in the way of science. By trying to pass ourselves off as philanthropic, we cease to be truthful; for it is contrary to logic and to the facts that moral progress, the concern for personal dignity, the cultivation of refined sentiments should have priority over the simple needs of preserving the body. This type of prudery is quite recent. Rousseau, that enthusiastic panegyrist of the state of nature, did not indulge in it; and a man endowed with exquisite delicacy, with appealing gentleness of heart, with a spirituality that led him to embrace quietism, and withal a stoic in his own mode of life, Fénelon, said, “In the final analysis, soundness of mind consists in seeking to learn how those things are done that are the basis of human life. All the matters of great importance turn upon them.”
Without professing, then, to classify human wants in a rigorously methodical order, we may say that man cannot direct his efforts toward the satisfaction of his highest and noblest moral wants until he has provided for those that concern the preservation of his life. Hence, we can already conclude that any legislative measure that makes material life difficult is harmful to the moral life of nations, a harmony that I call to the reader's attention in passing.
And, since the opportunity has arisen, I shall point out another one.
Since the inexorable necessities of material life are an obstacle to moral and intellectual development, it follows that more virtue will be found in the more affluent nations and classes. Good Heavens! What have I said, and what an uproar assails my ears! Today there is a veritable mania for attributing to the poorer classes a monopoly of all the devotion, all the self-sacrifice, all the noble qualities that constitute in man moral grandeur and beauty; and this mania has recently spread further under the influence of a revolutionthat, by bringing these classes to the surface of society, has not failed to raise up about them a horde of adulators.
I do not deny that wealth, and especially opulence, particularly when unjustly distributed, tends to develop certain special vices.
But is it possible to admit as a general proposition that virtue is the privilege of the poverty-stricken, and that vice is the unlovely and unfailing companion of the well-to-do? This would be to affirm that moral and intellectual development, which is compatible only with a certain degree of leisure and comfort, works to the detriment of intelligence and morality.
And I appeal to the honest judgment of the unfortunate classes themselves. To what horrible discords would such a paradox not lead?
We should therefore have to say that humanity is faced with the terrible alternatives of either remaining eternally poverty-stricken or of moving toward ever increasing immorality. In accordance with this logic, all the forces that lead to wealth, such as enterprise, thrift, orderliness, skill, honesty, are the seeds of vice; whereas those that hold us back in poverty, like improvidence, idleness, dissipation, negligence, are the precious buds of virtue. Could a more discouraging discord be imagined in the moral world? And if such were the case, who would dare speak to the people or proffer any advice? You complain of your sufferings, we should have to say, and you are anxious to see them end. You groan under the yoke of the most pressing material wants, and you long for the hour of deliverance; for you, too, desire a measure of leisure to develop your intellectual and emotional capacities. For this reason you seek to make your voice heard in the political arena and to protect your interests. But learn the nature of what you desire, and realize that the granting of your wishes would be fatal to you. Solvency, easy circumstances, wealth engender vice. Cling lovingly, then, to your poverty and your virtue.
The flatterers of the people thus fall into an obvious contradiction when they point to wealth as a vile cesspool of selfishness and vice, and at the same time urge the people—and often, in their haste, by the most illegal of means—toward that region which they consider so abominable.
No, such discord is not to be found in the natural order of society. It is not possible that all men should aspire to live in comfortable circumstances, that the natural way to attain it should be through the exercise of the strictest virtue, and that on reaching it, they should, nevertheless, fall again under the yoke of vice. Such rantings are fit only to kindle and keep alive the fires of class hatred. Were they true, they would give humanity only the choice between dire poverty and immorality. Being false, they make lies serve the cause of disorder, and, by their deceit, set against each other classes that should mutually love and assist each other.
Yes, unnatural inequality, inequality that the law creates by disturbing the natural and orderly development of the various classes of society, is, for all, a prolific source of resentments, jealousies, and vices. For this reason we must make sure whether or not this natural order leads to the progressive equalization and improvement of all classes; and we should be stopped short in this study by what is known in law as a peremptory exception if this twofold material progress inevitably entailed a twofold moral deterioration.
On the subject of human wants I have an observation to make that is important, even fundamental, for political economy: they are not a fixed, immutable quantity. By nature they are not static, but progressive.
This characteristic is to be noted even in the most material of our wants; it becomes more marked as we advance to those intellectual tastes and yearnings that distinguish man from beast.
It would seem that, if there is any one thing in which men must resemble one another, it is in their need for food; for, except for abnormalities, all stomachs are about the same. Nevertheless, foods that would have been a delicacy in one era have become coarse fare for another, and the diet which suits a lazzarone would cause a Dutchman anguish. Thus, this want, the most immediate, the most elemental, and, consequently, the most uniform of all, still varies according to age, sex, temperament, climate, and habit.
The same is true of all other wants. Hardly has man got himself a shelter when he wants a house; hardly has he clothed himself when he wants adornment; hardly has he satisfied the needs of his body when study, knowledge, art open to his desires a new and endless vista.
It is quite worth while to note the speed with which, through continued satisfaction, what was only a vague desire becomes a taste, and what was only a taste becomes a want and even a want that will not be denied.
Take, for example, a rough and industrious artisan. Accustomed to coarse fare, humble clothing, mediocre lodging, he thinks that he would be the happiest of men, that he would want nothing more, if he could mount to the rung of the ladder that he sees immediately above him. He is amazed that those who have got there are still tormenting themselves. Let the modest fortune he has dreamed of come his way, and he is happy; happy—alas! for a few days.
For soon he becomes familiar with his new position, and little by little he ceases to be aware of his longed-for good fortune. He dons with indifference the garment he had once coveted. He has created a new environment for himself, he associates with different people, from time to time he touches his lips to a different goblet, he aspires to climb another rung; and, if he will but look into his own heart, he will be well aware that, if his fortune has changed, his soul has remained what it was, an inexhaustible well of desires.
It would appear that Nature has given habit this peculiar power in order that it should be in us what the ratchet wheel is in mechanics, and that humanity, ever urged on toward higher and higher regions, should never stop at any level of civilization.
The sense of one's own worth acts, perhaps, even more powerfully in the same direction. The Stoic philosopher has often blamed man for wanting to appear rather than to be. But, if he take a broader view of things, is it quite certain that appearing is not for mankind one of the forms of being?
When, through industry, orderliness, and thrift, a family rises step by step toward those social regions where tastes are more and more refined, relations more polite, sentiments more delicate, minds more cultivated, who does not know the poignant grief that accompanies a reversal of fortune? In that case it is not the body alone that suffers. The descent breaks habits that have become, as we say, second nature; it impairs the sense of one's own worth and with it all the faculties of the soul. Therefore, it is not unusual, in such cases, to see the victim give way to despair and fall at once into a state of brutish degradation. As with the air we breathe, so with the social milieu. The mountaineer, accustomed to his pure air, soon wastes away in the narrow streets of our cities.
I hear a voice crying: Economist, already you falter. You had announced that your science was in harmony with ethics, and here you are justifying sybarite luxury.
Philosopher, I shall say in my turn, divest yourself of those garments you wear, which were never those of primitive man, break your furniture, burn your books, feed yourself on the raw meat of animals, and I shall reply to your objection. It is too easy to challenge the force of habit while readily consenting to be the living proof of what it can do.
It is possible to criticize this inclination that Nature has given the organs of our body, but criticism will not prevent it from being universal. We note its presence among all peoples, ancient and modern, savage and civilized, in the antipodes as in France. Without it, it is impossible to account for civilization. Now, when an inclination of the human heart is universal and indestructible, has social science the right not to take it into account?
Objection will be raised by the political theorists who claim the honor of being disciples of Rousseau. But Rousseau never denied the phenomenon of which I speak. He comments positively on the elasticity of our wants, on the force of habit, and even on the role that I assign to it of preventing humanity from taking any backward step. But what I admire, he deplores, and it could not be otherwise. Rousseau conjectures that there was a time when men had neither rights nor duties nor contacts with other men nor affections nor language, and that was the time when they were happy and perfect. He could not fail to abhor, therefore, the complicated social machinery that is ceaselessly moving mankind away from its earlier perfection. Those who believe, on the contrary, that perfection is to be found, not at the beginning, but at the end, of the evolutionary cycle, marvel at the driving force that impels us forward. But in regard to the existence of this driving force and the way it works, we are in agreement.
“Men,” he said, “enjoying much leisure, used it to procure for themselves various types of commodities unknown to their fathers, and this was the first yoke that they unconsciously placed about their necks and the beginning of the woes that they prepared for their descendants; for, in addition to the fact that they thus softened their bodies and their minds, these commodities having, through habit, lost nearly all their charm, and having at the same time degenerated into real wants, their loss became much more cruel than their possession had been sweet, and men were miserable at losing them without ever being happy at possessing them.”
Rousseau was convinced that God, nature, and man were wrong. I know that this opinion still sways many minds, but mine is not one of them.
After all, God forbid that I should attack man's noblest portion, his fairest virtue, dominion over himself, control over his passions, moderation in his desires, scorn of ostentatious luxury! I do not say that he should let himself become the slave of any artificial want. I do say that, generally speaking, his wants, such as both his physical and his immaterial nature makes them, combined with force of habit and his sense of his own worth, are capable of being indefinitely multiplied, because they stem from an inexhaustible source—desire. Who will censure a man merely because he is wealthy, if he is sober, restrained in his dress, not given to ostentation and soft living? But are there not loftier desires that he is permitted to gratify? Are there any limits to his longing for knowledge? Are his efforts to serve his country, to encourage the arts, to disseminate valuable information, to aid his less fortunate brethren, in any way incompatible with the proper use of wealth?
Furthermore, whether or not the philosopher approves, human wants are not a fixed and unchangeable quantity. This is a fact, certain, not to be gainsaid, universal. In no category, whether food, lodging, or education, were the wants of the fourteenth century as great as ours, and we may well predict that ours do not equal those to which our descendants will become accustomed.
This is an observation that holds good for all the elements that have a place in political economy: wealth, labor, value, services, etc., all of which share the extreme variability of their source, man. Political economy does not have, like geometry or physics, the advantage of speculating about objects that can be weighed or measured; and this is one of its initial difficulties and, subsequently, a perpetual source of error; for, when the human mind applies itself to a certain order of phenomena, it is naturally disposed to seek acriterion, a common measure to which it may refer everything, in order to give to the particular field of knowledge the character of anexact science. Thus, we note that most authors seek fixity, some in value, others in money, another in grain, still another in labor, that is to say, in measures exhibiting the very fluctuation they seek to avoid.




Thursday, March 29, 2012

Wants, Efforts, Satisfactions - Frédéric Bastiat - 2





We cannot doubt that self-interest is the mainspring of human nature. It must be clearly understood that this word is used here to designate a universal, incontestable fact, resulting from the nature of man, and not an adverse judgment, as would be the word selfishness. The moral sciences would be impossible if we perverted at the outset the terms that the subject demands.
Human effort does not always and inevitably intervene between sensation and satisfaction. Sometimes satisfaction is obtained by itself. More often effort is exerted on material objects, through the agency of forcesthat Nature has without cost placed at man's disposal.
If we give the name of utility to everything that effects the satisfaction of wants, then there are two kinds of utility. One kind is given us by Providence without cost to ourselves; the other kind insists, so to speak, on being purchased through effort.
Thus, the complete cycle embraces, or can embrace, these four ideas:
lf0187_figure_001Man is endowed with a faculty for improvement. He compares, he looks ahead, he learns, he profits by experience. If want is a pain, and effort too entails pains, there is no reason for him not to seek to reduce the pains of the effort if he can do so without impairing the satisfaction that is its goal. This is what he accomplishes when he succeeds in replacing onerous utility by gratuitous utility, which is the constant object of his search.
Our self-interest is such that we constantly seek to increase the sum of our satisfactions in relation to our efforts; and our intelligence is such—in the cases where our attempt is successful—that we reach our goal through increasing the amount of gratuitous utility in relation to onerous utility.
Every time progress of this type is achieved, a part of our efforts is freed to be placed on the available list, so to speak; and we have the option either of enjoying more rest or of working for the satisfaction of new desires if these are keen enough to stir us to action.
Such is the source of all progress in the economic order. It is also, as we easily comprehend, the source of all miscalculations, for progress and miscalculation both have their roots in that marvelous and special gift that God has bestowed upon man: free will.
We are endowed with the faculty of comparing, of judging, of choosing, and of acting accordingly. This implies that we can arrive at a good or a bad judgment, make a good or a bad choice—a fact that it is never idle to remind men of when we speak to them of liberty.
We are not, to be sure, mistaken about our own sensations, and we discern with an infallible instinct whether they are painful or pleasurable. But how many different forms our errors of judgment can take! We can mistake the cause and pursue eagerly, as something sure to give us pleasure, what can give us only pain; or we can fail to see the relation of cause and effect and be unaware that an immediate pleasure will be followed ultimately by greater pain; or again, we can be mistaken as to the relative importance of our wants and our desires.
We can give a wrong direction to our efforts not only through ignorance, but also through the perversity of our will. “Man,” said de Bonald, is an intellect served by bodily organs.” Indeed! Do we have nothing else? Do we not have passions?
When we speak, then, of harmony, we do not mean that the natural arrangement of the social world is such that error and vice have been excluded. To advance such a thesis in the face of the facts would be carrying the love of system to the point of madness. For this harmony to be without any discordant note, man would have to be without free will, or else infallible. We say only this: Man's principal social tendencies are harmonious in that, as every error leads to disillusionment and every vice to punishment, the discords tend constantly to disappear.
A first and vague notion of the nature of property can be deduced from these premises. Since it is the individual who experiences the sensation, the desire, the want; since it is the individual who exerts the effort; the satisfactions also must have their end in him, for otherwise the effort would be meaningless.
The same holds true of inheritance. No theory, no flights of oratory can succeed in keeping fathers from loving their children. The people who delight in setting up imaginary societies may consider this regrettable, but it is a fact. A father will expend as much effort, perhaps more, for his children's satisfactions as for his own. If, then, a new law contrary to Nature should forbid the bequest of private property, it would not only in itself do violence to the rights of private property, but it would also prevent the creation of new private property by paralyzing a full half of human effort.
Self-interest, private property, inheritance—we shall have occasion to come back to these topics. Let us first, however, try to establish the limits of the science with which we are concerned.
I am not one of those who believe that a science has inherently its own natural and immutable boundaries. In the realm of ideas, as in the realm of material objects, everything is linked together, everything is connected; all truths merge into one another, and every science, to be complete, must embrace all others. It has been well said that for an infinite intelligence there would be only one single truth. It is only our human frailty, therefore, that reduces us to study a certain order of phenomena as though isolated, and the resulting classifications cannot avoid a certain arbitrariness.
The true merit consists in the exact exposition of the facts, their causes and their effects. There is also merit, but a purely minor and relative one, in determining, not rigorously, which is impossible, but rationally, the type of facts to be considered.
I say this so that it may not be supposed that I wish to criticize my predecessors if I happen to give to political economy somewhat different limits from those that they have assigned to it.
In recent years economists have frequently been reproached for too great a preoccupation with the question ofwealth. It has been felt that they should have included as part of political economy everything that contributes, directly or indirectly, to human happiness or suffering; and it has even been alleged that they denied the existence of everything that they did not discuss, for example, the manifestations of altruism, as natural to the heart of man as self-interest. This is like accusing the mineralogist of denying the existence of the animal kingdom. Is not wealth—i.e., the laws of its production, distribution, and consumption—sufficiently vast and important a subject to constitute a special field of science? If the conclusions of the economist were in contradiction to those in the fields of government or ethics, I could understand the accusation. We could say to him, “By limiting yourself, you have lost your way, for it is not possible for two truths to be in conflict.” Perhaps one result of the work that I am submitting to the public may be that the science of wealth will be seen to be in perfect harmony with all the other sciences.
Of the three terms that encompass the human condition—sensation, effort, satisfaction—the first and the last are always, and inevitably, merged in the same individual. It is impossible to think of them as separated. We can conceive of a sensation that is not satisfied, a want that is not fulfilled, but never can we conceive of a want felt by one man and its satisfaction experienced by another.
If the same held true of the middle term, effort, man would be a completely solitary creature. The economic phenomenon would occur in its entirety within an isolated individual. There could be a juxtaposition of persons; there could not be a society. There could be a personal economy; there could not be a political economy.
But such is not the case. It is quite possible, and indeed it frequently happens, that one person's want owes itssatisfaction to another person's effort. The fact is that if we think of all the satisfactions that come to us, we shall all recognize that we derive most of them from efforts we have not made; and likewise, that the labor that we perform, each in our own calling, almost always goes to satisfy desires that are not ours.
Thus, we realize that it is not in wants or in satisfactions, which are essentially personal and intransmissible phenomena, but in the nature of the middle term, human effort, that we must seek the social principle, the origin of political economy. It is, in fact, precisely this faculty of working for one another, which is given to mankind and only to mankind, this transfer of efforts, this exchange of services, with all the infinitely complicated combinations of which it is susceptible in time and space, that constitutes the science of economics, demonstrates its origins, and determines its limits.
I therefore say: Political economy has as its special field all those efforts of men that are capable of satisfying, subject to services in return, the wants of persons other than the one making the effort, and, consequently, those wants and satisfactions that are related to efforts of this kind.
Thus, to cite an example, the act of breathing, although containing the three elements that make up the economic phenomenon, does not belong to the science of economics, and the reason is apparent: we are concerned here with a set of facts in which not only the two extremes—want and satisfaction—are nontransferable (as they always are), but the middle element, effort, as well. We ask no one's help in order to breathe; no giving or receiving is involved. By its very nature it is an individual act and a nonsocial one, which cannot be included in a science that, as its very name implies, deals entirely with interrelations.
But let special circumstances arise that require men to help one another to breathe, as when a workman goes down in a diving bell, or a doctor operates a pulmotor, or the police take steps to purify the air; then we have a want satisfied by a person other than the one experiencing it, we have a service rendered, and breathing itself, at least on the score of assistance and remuneration, comes within the scope of political economy.
It is not necessary that the transaction be actually completed. Provided only a transaction is possible, the laborinvolved becomes economic in character. The farmer who raises wheat for his own use performs an economic act in that the wheat is exchangeable.
To make an effort in order to satisfy another person's want is to perform a service for him. If a service is stipulated in return, there is an exchange of services; and, since this is the most common situation, political economy may be defined as the theory of exchange.
However keen may be the want of one of the contracting parties, however great the effort of the other, if the exchange is freely made, the two services are of equal value. Value, then, consists in the comparative estimation of reciprocal services, and political economy may also be defined as the theory of value.
I have just defined political economy and marked out the area it covers, without mentioning one essential element: gratuitous utility, or utility without effort.
All authors have commented on the fact that we derive countless satisfactions from this source. They have termed these utilities, such as air, water, sunlight, etc., natural wealth, in contrast to social wealth, and then dismissed them; and, in fact, since they lead to no effort, no exchange, no service, and, being without value, figure in no inventory, it would seem that they should not be included within the scope of political economy.
This exclusion would be logical if gratuitous utility were a fixed, invariable quantity always distinct from onerousutility, that is, utility created by effort; but the two are constantly intermingled and in inverse ratio. Man strives ceaselessly to substitute the one for the other, that is, to obtain, with the help of natural and gratuitous utilities, the same results with less effort. He makes wind, gravity, heat, gas do for him what originally he accomplished only by the strength of his own muscles.
Now, what happens? Although the result is the same, the effort is less. Less effort implies less service, and less service implies less value. All progress, therefore, destroys some degree of value, but how? Not at all by impairing the usefulness of the result, but by substituting gratuitous utility for onerous utility, natural wealth for social wealth. From one point of view, the part of value thus destroyed no longer belongs in the field of political economy, since it does not figure in our inventories; for it can no longer be exchanged, i.e., bought or sold, and humanity enjoys it without effort, almost without being aware of it. It can no longer be counted as relative wealth; it takes its place among the blessings of God. But, on the other hand, political economy would certainly be in error in not taking account of it. To fail to do so would be to lose sight of the essential, the main consideration of all: the final outcome, the useful result; it would be to misunderstand the strongest forces working for sharing in common and equality; it would be to see everything in the social order except the existing harmony. If this book is destined to advance political economy a single step, it will be through keeping constantly before the reader's eyes that part of value which is successively destroyed and then reclaimed in the form of gratuitous utility for all humanity.
I shall here make an observation that will prove how much the various sciences overlap and how close they are to merging into one.
I have just defined service. It is effort on the part of one man, whereas the want and the satisfaction are another's. Sometimes the service is rendered gratis, without payment, without any service exacted in return. It springs from altruism rather than from self-interest. It constitutes a gift and not an exchange. Consequently, it seems to belong, not to political economy (which is the theory of exchange), but to moral philosophy. In fact, acts of this nature are, because of their motivation, moral rather than economic phenomena. Nevertheless, we shall see that, by reason of their results, they pertain to the science with which we are here concerned. On the other hand, services rendered in return for effort, requiring payment, and, for this reason, essentially economic, do not on that account remain, in their results, outside the realm of ethics.
Accordingly, these two fields of knowledge have countless points in common; and, since two truths cannot be contradictory, when the economist views with alarm a phenomenon that the moralist hails as beneficial, we can be sure that one or the other is wrong. Thus do the various sciences hold one another to the path of truth.