Item 16 - Richard Jones to William Whewell

4 pp.

Brasted - RJ has looked over WW's paper ['Mathematical Exposition of Some Doctrines of Political Economy', Trans. of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 1830]: 'you should add a passage stating that you take the axioms about rent merely hypothetically in order to shew the conclusions which right reasonings ought to have led those to who assume them - you cannot do this too decidedly because in truth the axioms as applied generally to rents all start naught and only apply as far as they apply at all to a very limited class of rents - both the labor and capital employed in agriculture being fixed in a vast majority of cases by iron necessity to the soil and utterly incapable of escaping from it. Rent consists of whatever is paid for permission to occupy land'. There is no definition which will embrace all its varieties. RJ corrects a couple more errors in WW's text - 'Nothing else strikes me you are aware that I am not very sanguine as to the success of any attempt to make mathematical reasoning do more than point out logical errors but I do not perceive that you profess to aim at much more - you should I think however repudiate more distinctly and earnestly than you have done any belief in the practical truth of the axioms or definitions of which you are tracing the necessary results - that is in their truth as general propositions, considered in connection with one particular state of society they are at all events partially true - I am aware of the passage in page 7 beginning It will be perceived but I do not think it enough'.