Note 177 — Chapter XIV

Pareto, in the introductory chapter of his Cours d'Économie Politique, defines economics in terms of the narrow abstraction which he has chosen for the explanation phenomenon, as the "science of ophelimity" (p. 6), and ophelimity is "an entirely subjective quality" (p. 4). There are two objections to this procedure: you neither completely explain your problem phenomena, nor do you exhaust the possibilities of your explanation phenomena—for the same sort of mental facts have bearing on ethical and other social problems as well as on economic problems.