William Stanley Jevons Quotes

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We shall never have a science of economics unless we learn to discern the operation of law even among the most perplexing complications and apparent interruptions.

William Stanley Jevons
A correspondent, Captain Charles Christie R. E., to whom I have shown these sections after they were printed, objects reasonably enough that commodity should not have been represented by M, or Mass, but by some symbol, for instance Q, which would include quantity of space or time or force, in fact almost any kind of quantity.

William Stanley Jevons
All acts of reasoning seem to me to be different cases of one uniform process which may perhaps be best described as the substitution of similars... The chief difficulty consists in showing that all the forms of the old logic, as well as the fundamental rules of mathematical reasoning, may be explained upon the same principle; and it is to this difficult task I have devoted the most attention.

William Stanley Jevons
The new and wonderful results of the late Dr. Boole's mathematical system of Logic appear to develop themselves as most plain and evident consequences of the self-same process of substitution, when applied to the Primary Laws of Thought. Should my notion be true, a vast mass of technicalities may be swept from our logical text-books, and yet the small remaining part of logical doctrine will prove far more useful than all the learning of the Schoolmen.

William Stanley Jevons
It is clear that economics, if it is to be a science at all, must be a mathematical science.

William Stanley Jevons
The child which overbalances itself in learning to walk is experimenting on the law of gravity.

William Stanley Jevons
Logic should no longer be considered an elegant and learned accomplishment; it should take its place as an indispensable study for every well-informed person.

William Stanley Jevons
Some of the gold possessed by the Romans is doubtless mixed with what we now possess; and some small part of it will be handed down as long as the human race exists.

William Stanley Jevons
One of the first and most difficult steps in a science is to conceive clearly the nature of the magnitudes about which we are arguing.

William Stanley Jevons
There are many portions of economical doctrine which appear to me as scientific in form as they are consonant with facts.

William Stanley Jevons
The conclusion to which I am ever more clearly coming is that the only hope of attaining a true system of economics is to fling aside, once and forever, the mazy and preposterous assumptions of the Ricardian school. Our English economists have been living in a fool's paradise. The truth is with the French school, and the sooner we recognize the fact, the better it will be for all the world, except perhaps the few writers who are far too committed to the old erroneous doctrines to allow for renunciation.

William Stanley Jevons
Nature is to us like an infinite ballot-box, the contents of which are being continually drawn, ball after ball, and exhibited to us. Science is but the careful observation of the succession in which balls of various character present themselves; we register the combinations, notice those which seem to be excluded from occurrence, and from the proportional frequency of those which usually appear we infer the probable character of future drawings.

William Stanley Jevons
I shall endeavor to show that induction is really the inverse process of deduction.

William Stanley Jevons
I consider that interest is determined by the increment of produce which it enables a labourer to obtain, and is altogether independent of the total return which he receives for this labour.

William Stanley Jevons
There is no such thing as absolute cost of labour; it is all a matter of comparison. Every one gets the most which he can for his exertions; some can get little or nothing, because they have not sufficient strength, knowledge or ingenuity; others get much, because they have, comparatively speaking, a monopoly of certain powers.

William Stanley Jevons
Neither in deductive nor inductive reasoning can we add a tittle to our implicit knowledge, which is like that contained in an unread book or a sealed letter.... Reasoning explicates or brings to conscious possession what was before unconscious. It does not create, nor does it destroy, but it transmutes and throws the same matter into a new form.

William Stanley Jevons
Capital simply allows us to expend labour in advance.

William Stanley Jevons
All classes of society are trades unionists at heart, and differ chiefly in the boldness, ability, and secrecy with which they pursue their respective interests.

William Stanley Jevons
The difficulties of economics are mainly the difficulties of conceiving clearly and fully the conditions of utility.

William Stanley Jevons
Science arises from the discovery of Identity amid Diversity.

William Stanley Jevons
One pound invested for five years gives the same result as five pounds invested for one year, the product being five pound years.

William Stanley Jevons
A spade may be made of any size, and if the same number of strokes be made in the hour, the requisite exertion will vary nearly as the cube of the length of the blade.

William Stanley Jevons
What capital I give for the spade merely replaces what the manufacturer had already invested in the expectation that the spade would be needed.

William Stanley Jevons
By induction we gain no certain knowledge; but by observation, and the inverse use of deductive reasoning, we estimate the probability that an event which has occurred was preceded by conditions of specified character, or that such conditions will be followed by the event.... I have no objection to use the words cause and causation, provided they are never allowed to lead us to imagine that our knowledge of nature can attain to certainty.... We can never recur too often to the truth that our knowledge of the laws and future events of the external world are only probable.

William Stanley Jevons
Whoever wishes to acquire a deep acquaintance with Nature must observe that there are analogies which connect whole branches of science in a parallel manner, and enable us to infer of one class of phenomena what we know of another. It has thus happened on several occasions that the discovery of an unsuspected analogy between two branches of knowledge has been the starting point for a rapid course of discovery.

William Stanley Jevons
Charles Babbage proposed to make an automaton chess-player which should register mechanically the number of games lost and gained in consequence of every sort of move. Thus, the longer the automaton went on playing game, the more experienced it would become by the accumulation of experimental results. Such a machine precisely represents the acquirement of experience by our nervous organization.

William Stanley Jevons
It seems perfectly clear that Economy, if it is to be a science at all, must be a mathematical science. There exists much prejudice against attempts to introduce the methods and language of mathematics into any branch of the moral sciences. Most persons appear to hold that the physical sciences form the proper sphere of mathematical method, and that the moral sciences demand some other method-I know not what.

William Stanley Jevons
That in the same open market, at any one moment, there cannot be two prices for the same kind of article,

William Stanley Jevons
It is very commonly urged, that the failing supply of coal will be met by new modes of using it efficiently and economically.... It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption. The very contrary is the truth.

William Stanley Jevons
In any case I hold that there must arise a science of the development of economic forms and relations.

William Stanley Jevons