A Treatise on Political Economy. Antoine Louis Claude Destutt De Tracy

on which we can avail ourselves of it, for however little the ideas which we attempt to calculate are mingled with those which I have named refractory, and which are truly incalculable, we are inevitably led into the most excessive miscalculations. It is what I think has happened but too frequently to skilful men, who by their knowledge, and even by their mistakes, have put us into the way of discovering their cause.

      I will limit myself to this small number of results. I perceive that it is to diffuse but little direct light on a subject, which is so much the more important and the more extensive, as unfortunately certitude is for the most part far from us. But if I have contributed to the formation of a just and clear idea of it I shall not have been useless. I have much more reason than Condorcet for saying “I have not thought that I was giving a good work, but merely a work calculated to give birth to better ones, &c.”^*

      Not wishing to occupy myself longer with the conjectural part of our knowledge, and not believing it necessary to add to the small number of principles which I have established before this long digression, and which embrace in my opinion every thing of importance in the logical art, such as it proceeds from true logical science; it only remains for me to endeavour to make a happy application of this art to the study of our will and its effects. It is this I am going to undertake, with a hope that my instruments being better, I may better succeed than perhaps men more skilful but not so well armed.