Samuel Bostaph writes: Mises refers to his own method of constructing theories of human action as "praxeology." It is different from both purely logical reasoning and math. "Logic and mathematics deal with an ideal system of thought. The relations and implications of their system are coexistent and interdependent. We may say as well that they are synchronous or that they are out of time. A perfect mind could grasp them all in one thought. Man's inability to accomplish this makes thinking itself an action, proceeding step by step from the less satisfactory state of insufficient cognition to the more satisfactory state of better insight. But the temporal order in which knowledge is acquired must not be confused with the logical simultaneity of all parts of an aprioristic deductive system. Within such a system the notions of anteriority and consequence are metaphorical only. They do not refer to the system, but to our action in grasping it. The system itself implies neither the category of time nor that of causality There is functional correspondence between elements, but there is neither cause nor effect. "What distinguishes epistemologically the praxeological system from the logical system is precisely that it implies the categories both of time and of causality. The praxeological system too is aprioristic and deductive. As a system it is out of time. But change is one of its elements....So is the irreversibility of events. In the frame of the praxeological system any reference to functional correspondence is no less metaphorical and misleading than is the reference to anteriority and consequence in the frame of the logical system." (pp. 99-100, Human Action, 1966 ed.) Mason responds: Thank you, Samuel, for picking out that apt quote. After some hard slogging I understand it, and resonate to it! On the bad side, it is prolix and turgid, and padded with gratuitous Misesian neologisms. (The style calls to mind The Mikado who would sentence certain offenders to "listen to sermons by mystical Germans who preach from 9 to 4".) Yet it strikes a sympathetic chord, now that I finally get it - or think I do. Comte was more terse, if less complete, when he wrote that all science deals either with relations of coexistence, or of sequence. On the eve of Keynes, neo-classical economics, inspired by Clark's static analysis, had pretty well limited the subject to relations of coexistence: no praxaeology. The Austrians were notable exceptions, which helps explain why Clark and Knight attacked them so strenuously. It also helps explain the vacuum into which Keynes was able to rush and expand so fast, and why older neo-classical avatars had so much trouble understanding him. What still puzzles me is why the mass of economists rejected Austrian cycle analysis and waltzed off with Keynes, instead. I surmise it had something to do with clumsiness of exposition, coupled with Hayek's class-biased application of the theory in which he focused entirely on lower wage rates and a period of penance and suffering as the cure for depression. Wrong reading of the Zeitgeist! He zigged when he shoulda zagged. Better explanations gladly received. Mason Gaffney