This paper examines Marshall's economic thought in relation to the historico-ethical thinking in the age of social reform. For Marshall economics was not only a science of wealth but also a study of man; and he had the ideas of social science as ‘the reasoned history of man’. While he thought that the measuring rod of money made economics more exact science, he conceived economics ‘not so much in relation to the growth of wealth as to the quality of life’. He thought economic progress in relation to standards of life and to human well-being, which seems to have something common with Ruskin's ‘there is no life but life’.
