Chapter VII: The Machine Industry (2)

If, as seems at least presumably true, this principle of action by contact owes its origin to habits induced by manipulation, it will be seen to be of an anthropomorphic derivation. And if it further owes its acceptance as a principle universally applicable to material phenomena to the protracted discipline of life under the technology of handicraft, its universality must also take rank as an anthropomorphic imputation enforced by long habit. It is of the nature of habit, and moreover of workmanlike habit. Casting back into the past history of civilisation and into the contemporary lower cultures, it will appear that the principle (habit of thought) in question is prevalent everywhere and presumably through all human time; as it should be if it is traceable to so ubiquitous an experience as manipulation. But it will also appear that, except within the bounds, in time and space, of the high tide of craftsmanship and the machine technology, this principle does not arrogate to itself universal mandatory authority in the domain of external phenomena. Not only are the tenets of magic and theology at variance with the proposition that action can take place only by mechanical contact; but in the naïve thinking of commonplace humanity outside this machine-made Western civilisation, action at a distance is patently neither imbecile nor incomprehensible as a familiar trait of external objects in their everyday behaviour.

Nor is it by any means a grateful work of spontaneous predilection, all this mechanistic mutilation of objective reality into mere inert dimensions and resistance to pressure; as witness the widely prevalent revulsion, chronic or intermittent, against its acceptance as a final term of knowledge. Laymen seek respite in the fog of occult and esoteric faiths and cults, and so fall back on the will to believe things of which the senses transmit no evidence; while the learned and studious are, by stress of the same “aching void,” drawn into speculative tenets of ostensible knowledge that purport to go nearer to the heart of reality, and that elude all mechanistic proof or disproof. This revulsion against thinking in uncoloured mechanistic terms alone runs suggestively parallel with that other revulsion, already spoken of, against the geometrically adjusted routine of conduct imposed on modern life by the machine process; the two are in great part coincident, or concomitant, both in point of the class of persons affected by each and in point of the uncertain measure of finality attending the move so made in either case. Neither the manner of life imposed by the machine process, nor the manner of thought inculcated by habituation to its logic, will fall in with the free movement of the human spirit, born, as it is, to fit the conditions of savage life. So there comes an irrepressible--in a sense, congenital--recrudescence of magic, occult science, telepathy, spiritualism, vitalism, pragmatism.[149]

It was noted above that action by contact is not included, except by subsumption, in the mathematical formulations of technology or science. It should now be added that in all the concomitance and sequence with which the mathematical formulations of mechanical phenomena are occupied, the assumption of concomitance or sequence at a distance will fill the requirements of the formulæ quite as convincingly and commonly more simply than the assumption of concomitance by contact only. To realise the difficulties which beset this postulate of action by mechanical continuity solely, as well as the _prima facie_ imbecility of the principle itself, it is only necessary to call to mind the tortuous theories of gravitation designed to keep it intact, and the prodigy of incongruous intangibilities known as the ether,--a rigid and imponderable fluid.

Associated with the principle of action by mechanical continuity alone is a second metaphysical postulate of science,--the conservation of energy, or persistence of quantity. Like its fellow it does not admit of empirical proof; yet it is likewise held to be of universal application. This principle, that the quantity of matter or of energy does not increase or diminish, or, perhaps better, that the quantity of mechanical fact at large is invariable, has a better presumptive claim to rank as a by-product of the machine technology; although such a claim could doubtless be allowed only with broad qualifications. Not that the principle was not known or not formally accepted prior to the machine age; long ago the Roman scholar and the scholastic philosophers after him declared _ex nihilo nihil, in nihilum nil posse reverti_. But throughout the era of handicraft there continued also to be devoutly held the postulate that the material universe had a beginning in an act of creation, as also that it would some day come to an end, a quantitative collapse. As the era of handicraft advanced and, apparently, as the discipline of life under that technology enforced the habitual acceptance of the proposition that the quantity of material fact is constant, much ingenuity and much ambiguous speech was spent in an endeavour to reconcile the mechanical efficiency of the creative fiat with the dictum, _ex nihilo nihil fit_. But down to the close of that era it remains true that, by and large, the peoples of Christendom continued to believe in the mechanically creative efficiency of the Great Artificer; although, it must be admitted, with an ever growing apprehension that in this tenet of the faith they were face to face with a divine mystery. The eighteenth-century scientists, and many even in the nineteenth century, continued to profess belief in a creative origin of material things, as well as also in a providential guidance of material events,--which latter must have been conceived to be exerted by some other means than action through mechanical contact, since one term of the relation was conceived not to be of a mechanical nature.

It is not until the machine age is well under way and the machine technology has come to occupy the land, that faith in the theorem of the conservation of energy has grown robust enough to let the scientists lose interest in all questions of creation. The tenet has died by neglect, not by confutation. That it has done so among the adepts of the material sciences, and that it is doing so among the lay population at large in the modern industrial communities, is probably to be credited to the discipline of the machine process and the technological conceptions to which that discipline conduces. It conduces to this outcome in more than one way. This modern technology is a technology of mechanical process; it looks to and takes care of a sequence of mechanical action, rather than to the conditions of its inception or the sequel of its conclusion. A mind imbued with the logic of this machine process does not by habitual proclivity or with incisive effect attend to these alien matters that have no meaning within the horizon of that logic. The creative augmentation of material objects is a matter lying without the scope of the machine’s logic.

As has already been remarked, the principle (habit of thought) that the quantity of material fact is constant is necessarily of ancient derivation and long growth. Taken in a presumptive sense, and held loosely as a commonplace of experience, it must have come up and attained some force very early in the workmanlike experience of the race. And the closer the application to the work in hand, the more consistently would this principle of common sense approve itself; so that it should, as indeed is sufficiently evident, be well at home among the habitual generalisations current in the days of handicraft; although it does not seem to have been generally accepted at that time as a principle necessarily having a universal application,--as witness the ready credence then given to theological dogmas of creation and the like. The habits of accountancy that came on under the price system, as the scope of the market grew larger with the growth and diversification of handicraft, seem to have had a great effect in extending and confirming the habitual acceptance of such a theorem. A strict balance, a running equilibrium of the quantitative items involved, is the central fact of the accountant’s occupation. And this habit of scrutiny and balancing of quantities, and a meticulous tracing out and accounting for any apparent excess or deficiency in the sums handled, pervades the community at large, though in a less pronounced fashion, as well as that fraction of the population employed in trade. The discipline of the handicraft system in this respect gains incontinently in scope and vigour as the growth of that technological system, with its characteristic business management, goes forward.

When presently the machine technology comes forward this habitual preconception touching the invariability of material quantity finds new applications and new refinements of application, with the outcome that its guidance of men’s thinking grows ever more inclusive and more peremptory. But it is not until half a century after the Industrial Revolution that the principle may be said finally to have gained unquestioning acceptance as a theorem universally binding on material phenomena. By that time--about the second quarter of the nineteenth century--the unqualified validity of this theorem had become so unmitigated a matter of course as to have fairly shifted from the ground of empirical generalisation to that of metaphysical thesis. Men of science then quite ingenuously set about proving the law of the Conservation of Energy by appeal to experiments and reasoning that proceeded with absolute naïveté on the tacit assumption of the theorem to be proven.

* * * * *

In its bearing on the growth of institutions the machine technology has yet scarcely had time to make its mark. Such institutional factors as, e. g., the common law are necessarily of slow growth. A system of civil rights is not only a balanced scheme of habitual responses to those stimuli at whose impact they take effect; it is at the same time a scheme which has the sanction of avowed common consent, such as will express itself in rating these institutional elements as facts of immemorial usage or as integrally inherent in the nature of things from the beginning. Such civil institutions take shape as prescriptive custom, and matters of habit which so are supported by broad grounds of authenticity and correlation with other elements of a prescriptive scheme of things will adapt themselves only tardily to any change in the situation or to any new bias in the drift of discipline. What happened in the matter of civil rights under the system of handicraft is an illustration in point. There need be little question but the eighteenth century scheme of Natural Rights was an outcome of the protracted discipline characteristic of the era of handicraft, and an adaptation to the exigencies of daily life under that system.

The scheme of Natural Rights, with its principles of Natural Liberty and its insistence on individual self-help, was well adapted to the requirements of handicraft and the petty trade, whose spirit it reflects with admirable faithfulness. But it was of slow growth, as any scheme of institutions must be, in the nature of things. So much so that handicraft and the petty trade had been in effectual operation some half-a-dozen centuries, in ever increasing force, before the corresponding system of civil rights and moral obligations made good its pretensions to rule the economic affairs of the community. Indeed, it is only by the latter half of the eighteenth century that the system of Natural Rights came to passable maturity and finally took rank as a secure principle of enlightened common sense; and by that time the handicraft system was giving way to the machine industry. And even then this result was reached only in the most advanced industrial community of Europe, where the discipline of handicraft and trade had had the freest scope to work out its natural bent, with the least hindrance from other dominant interests at variance with its schooling.[150]

So it has come about that while the system of Natural Rights is an institutional by-product of workmanship under the handicraft system and is adapted to the exigencies of craftsmanship and the petty trade, it never fully took effect in the shaping of institutions until that phase of economic life was substantially past, or until the new era, of the machine industry and the large business brought on by the new technology, had come to rule the economic situation. So that hitherto the work of the machine industry has been organised and conducted under a code of legal rights and business principles adapted to the state of the industrial arts which the machine industry has displaced. Latterly, it is true, the requirements of the machine technology, in the way of large-scale organisation, continuity of operation, and interstitial balance of the industrial system, have begun to show themselves so patently at variance with these business principles engendered by the era of handicraft as to throw a shadow of doubt on the adequacy of these “Natural” metaphysics of natural liberty, self-help, free competition, individual initiative, and the like. But, harsh as has been the discrepancy between the received system of economic institutions on the one side and the working of the machine technology on the other, its effect in reshaping current habits of thought in these premises has hitherto come to nothing more definitive than an uneasy conviction that “Something will have to be done about it.” Indeed, so far is the machine process from having yet recast the principles of industrial management, as distinct from technological procedure, that the efforts inspired in responsible public officials and public-spirited citizens by this patent discrepancy have hitherto been directed wholly to regulating industry into consonance with the antiquated scheme of business principles, rather than to take thought of how best to conduct industrial affairs and the distribution of livelihood in consonance with the technological requirements of the machine industry.

It is true, among the workmen, and particularly among those skilled workmen who have been trained in the machine technology and are exposed to the full impact of the machine’s discipline, uncritical habitual faith in this institutional scheme is beginning to crumble, so far as regards that principle of Natural Rights that vests unlimited discretion in the owner of property, and so far as regards property in the material equipment of industry. But this is about as broad a proposition of such a kind as current facts of opinion and agitation will bear out, and this inchoate break with the received habitual views touching the dues and obligations of discretion in industrial matters is extremely vague and almost wholly negative. Even in those members of the community who are most directly and rigorously exposed to its discipline the machine process has hitherto wrought no such definite bias, no such positive habitual attitude of workmanlike initiative towards the conventions of industrial management as to result in a constructive deviation from the received principles.[151]

On the other hand the business principles engendered by the habit of mind that gave rise to the system of Natural Rights has had grave consequences for workmanship under the conditions imposed by the machine industry. As has been shown in some detail in the foregoing chapter, the individualistic organisation of the work, coupled with the personal incidence of the handicraft technology, and the stress thrown on price rating and self-help by the ever increasing recourse to bargain and sale (“free contract”) under that system, led in the end to the habitual rating of workmanship in terms of the price it would bring. Then as always workmanlike efficiency commanded the approval of thoughtful men, as being serviceable to the common good and as a substantial manifestation of human excellence; and at the same time, then as ever, efficient work was a source of comfort and complacency to the workman. But under the teaching of the price system efficiency came to be rated in terms of the pecuniary gain.

With the advent of the machine industry this pecuniary rating of efficiency gained a new impetus and brought new consequences for technology as well as for business enterprise. Typically, the machine industry runs on a large scale, as contrasted with handicraft, and it involves a relatively wide and exacting division of labour between workmanship and salesmanship. Under the conditions of large ownership implied in this modern industrial system the workmen no longer have, or can have, the responsibility of the pecuniary management of the industrial concern; on the other hand the same conditions of large ownership and extensive business connections require the businessmen in charge to delegate the immediate oversight of the plant and its technological processes to other hands, and to devote their own energies to the pecuniary management of the concern and its transactions. Hence it follows that as the machine system and the highly specialised business enterprise that goes with it reach a larger scale and a higher degree of elaboration the businessmen in charge are, by training and by progressive limitation of interest, less and less competent to take care of the technological exigencies of the machine system. But at the same time the discretion in technological matters still rests in their hands by force of their ownership. So that, while the responsibility of technological discretion still rests on them, and cannot be fully delegated to other hands, the exigencies of business enterprise and of the training which it involves will no longer permit them to meet this responsibility in a competent fashion.

The businessmen in control of large industrial enterprises are beginning to appreciate something of their own unfitness to direct or oversee, or even to control, technological matters, and so they have, in a tentative way, taken to employing experts to do the work for them. Such experts are known colloquially as “efficiency engineers” and are presumed to combine the qualifications of technologist and accountant. In point of fact it is as accountants, capable of applying the tests of accountancy in a new field, that these experts commend themselves to the businessmen in control, and the “efficiency” which they look to is an efficiency counted in terms of net pecuniary gain. “Efficiency” in these premises means pecuniary efficiency, and only incidentally or in a subsidiary sense does it mean industrial efficiency,--only in so far as industrial efficiency conduces to the largest net pecuniary gain. All the while the businessmen retain the decisive superior discretion in their own incompetent hands, since all the while the whole matter remains a business proposition. The “staff organisation,” in which vests the superior control of these technological affairs, consistently remains an organisation of worldly wisdom, business enterprise--not of technological proficiency,--a state of things not to be remedied so long as industry is carried on for business profits.

Meantime the workmen of all kinds and grades--labourers, mechanics, operatives, engineers, experts--all imbued with the same pecuniary principles of efficiency, go about their work with more than half an eye to the pecuniary advantage of what they have in hand. The attitude of the trades-unions towards their work and towards the industrial concerns in whose employ their work is done illustrates something of the habitual frame of mind of these men, who are avowed experts in the matter of workmanship.

Latterly many inconveniences have beset the community at large as well as particular sections and classes of the industrial community, due in the main to a consistent adherence to these business principles in the management of industrial affairs. The capitalist-employers, on the one hand, have gone on the full powers with which the modern institution of ownership and its broad implications has vested them; with the result that the public at large, investors, consumers of industrial products, users of “public utility” agencies serving such needs as light, fuel, transportation, communication, amusement, etc., feel very much aggrieved; as do also and more particularly the workmen with whom the capitalist-employers do business on the lines laid down by the authentic business principles involved in the discretionary ownership of the industrial plant and resources. On the other hand the workmen, resting their case on the same common-sense view that the individual is a self-sufficient economic unit who owes nothing to the community at large beyond what he may freely undertake “for a good and valuable consideration in hand paid,”--the workmen stand likewise on the full powers given them by the current institutions of ownership and contractual discretion, and so work what mischief they can to their employers and to the public at large, always blamelessly within the rules of the game as laid down of old on the pecuniary principles of business discretion, and in the light of such sense as their training has given them with regard to efficiency in the industries that have fallen into their hands. And then the “money power” comes in as a third pecuniarily trained factor, with ever increasing force and incisiveness, to muddle the whole situation mysteriously and irretrievably by looking after their own pecuniary interests in a fashion even more soberly legitimate and authentic, if possible, than the workmen’s management of their own affairs.

Of course, all this working at cross purposes is not altogether due to trained incapacity on the part of the several contestants to appreciate the large and general requirements of the industrial situation; perhaps it is not even chiefly due to such inability, but rather to an habitual, and conventionally rightful, disregard of other than pecuniary considerations. It would doubtless appear that a trained inability to apprehend any other than the immediate pecuniary bearing of their manœuvres accounts for a larger share in the conduct of the businessmen who control industrial affairs than it does in that of their workmen, since the habitual employment of the former holds them more rigorously and consistently to the pecuniary valuation of whatever passes under their hands; and the like should be true only in a higher degree of those who have to do exclusively with the financial side of business. The state of the industrial arts requires that these several factors should coöperate intelligently and without reservation, with an eye single to the exigencies of this modern wide-sweeping technological system; but their habitual addiction to pecuniary rather than technological standards and considerations leaves them working at cross purposes. So also their (pecuniary) interests are at cross purposes; and since these interests necessarily rule in any pecuniary culture, they must decide the line of conduct for each of the several factors engaged.

These discrepancies, obstructive tactics and disserviceable practices are commonly deplored and are presumably deplorable, and they doubtless merit extensive discussion on these grounds, but their merits in this bearing do not properly come into consideration here. The matter has been brought in here not with any view of defence, denunciation or remedy, but because it is a matter of grave consequence as regards the training given by business experience to these men in whose hands the current scheme of institutions has placed the technological fortunes of the community. And whether these pecuniary tactics and practices that fill so large a place in the attention and sentiments of this generation come chiefly of a lack of insight into current technological exigencies, or of a deliberate choice of evils enforced by the pecuniary necessities of the case, still their disciplinary value as bearing on the sense of workmanship taken in its larger scope will be much the same in either case. Habituation to bargaining and to the competitive principles of business necessarily brings it about that pecuniary standards of efficiency invade (contaminate) the sense of workmanship; so that work, workmen, equipment and products come to be rated on a scale of money values, which has only a circuitous and often only a putative relation to their workmanlike efficiency or their serviceability. Those occupations and those aptitudes that yield good returns in terms of price are reputed valuable and commendable,--the accepted test of success, and even of serviceability, being the gains acquired. Workmanship comes to be confused with salesmanship, until tact, effrontery and prevarication have come to serve as a standard of efficiency, and unearned gain is accepted as the measure of productiveness.

Efficiency conduces to the common good, and is also a meritorious and commendable trait in the person who exercises it. But under the canons of self-help and pecuniary valuation the test of efficiency in economic matters has come to be, not technological mastery and productive effect, but proficiency in pecuniary management and the acquisition of wealth. Both in his own estimation and in the eyes of his fellows, the man who gains much does well; he is conceived to do well both as a matter of personal efficiency and in point of serviceability to the common good. To “do well” in modern phrase means to engross something appreciably more of the community’s wealth than falls to the common run. But since gains, and hence efficiency, are conceived in terms of price, it follows that the man, workman or businessman, who can induce his fellows to pay him well for his services or his goods is accounted efficient and serviceable; from which it follows that under this canon of pecuniary efficiency men are conceived to serve the common good somewhat in proportion as they are able to induce the community to pay more for their services than they are worth.

The businessman who gains much at little cost, who gets something for nothing, is rated, in his own as well as in his neighbours’ esteem, as a public benefactor indispensable to the community’s welfare, and as contributing to the common good in direct proportion to the amount which he has been able to draw out of the aggregate product. It is perhaps needless to call to mind that of this character are the main facts in the history of all the great fortunes;[152] although the current accounts of their accumulation, being governed by pecuniary standards of efficiency and serviceability, dwell mainly on the services that have inured to the community from the traffic with which the great captains have interfered in their quest of gain. The prevalence of salesmanship, that is to say of business enterprise, and the consequent high repute of the salesmanlike activities and aptitudes in any community that is organised on a price system, is perhaps the most serious obstacle which the pecuniary culture opposes to the advance in workmanship. It intrudes into the most intimate and secret workings of the human spirit and contaminates the sense of workmanship in its initial move, and sets both the proclivity to efficient work and the penchant for serviceability at cross purposes with the common good.

But under the conditions engendered by the machine technology the scope of this pecuniary standard of workmanship has been greatly enlarged. On the whole the machine industry calls for a large-scale organisation, increasingly so as time has passed and the machine process has come more fully to dominate the industrial situation. By the same move initiative and discretion have come to vest in those who can claim ownership of the large material equipment so required, and the exercise of such initiative and discretion by these owners is loosely proportioned to the magnitude of their holdings. Smaller owners have the same freedom of initiative and discretion, in point of legal and conventional competency,--such freedom and equality between persons being of the essence of Natural Rights; but in point of practical fact, as determined by technological and business exigencies, there is but small discretion left such smaller holders. Initiative and discretion in modern industrial matters vest in the owners of the industrial plant, or in such moneyed concerns as may stand in an underwriting relation to the owners of the plant; such discretion is exercised through pecuniary transactions; and these pecuniary transactions whereby the conduct of industry is guided and controlled are entered into with a view to gain in terms of price. It is but a slight exaggeration to say that such transactions, which govern the course of industry, are carried out with an eye single to pecuniary gain,--the industrial consequences, and their bearing on the community’s welfare, being matters incidental to the transaction of business. In every-day phrase, under the rule of the current technology and business principles, industry is managed by businessmen for business ends, not by technological experts or for the material advantage of the community. And in this control of industrial affairs the smaller businessmen are in great part subject to the discretion of the larger.[153]

By ancient habit, handed down from the days of handicraft and petty trade, this pecuniary management is conventionally conceived to be directed to the production of goods and services, and the businessman is still conventionally rated as a producer and his gains accepted as a measure of his productive efficiency. In conventional speech “producer” means the owner of industrial plant, not the workmen employed nor the mechanical apparatus about which they are employed.[154] The “producers,” “manufacturers,” “captains of industry,” whose interests are safeguarded by current legislation and by the guardians of law and order are the businessmen who have a pecuniary interest in industrial affairs; and it is their pecuniary interests that are so safeguarded, in the naïve faith that the material interests of the community at large coincide with the opportunities for gain so secured to the businessmen.

It has already been spoken of above that the processes of industry are bound in a comprehensive system of give and take, in such a manner that no considerable fraction of this industrial system functions independently of the rest. The industrial system at large may be conceived as a comprehensive machine process, the several sub-processes of which technologically inosculate and ramify in what may be conceived as a network of elements working in a moving equilibrium, none of which can go on at its full productive efficiency except in duly balanced correlation with all the rest. This characterisation will strictly apply only so far as the machine technology has taken over the various branches of industry, but it applies in a loose though by no means idle fashion also as regards those elements of the industrial system in which the machine technology has not yet become dominant. In so far as the industrial system is of this character it will also hold that the business management of any one branch or line or parcel of industries will have its effect on the rest, primarily and proximately on those other branches or lines with which the given parcel stands in immediate relations of give and take, through the market or more directly through technological correlation,--as, e. g., in the transportation system. Business management which affects a large section of this balanced system will necessarily have a wide-reaching effect on the working of the system at large. Such business control of industry, as has just been remarked above, is exercised with a view to pecuniary gain; but pecuniary gain in these premises comes from changes, and apprehended changes, in the efficiency of the various industrial processes that are touched by such control, rather than from the workday functioning of the several items of equipment involved. The changes which so bring gain to these larger businessmen may be favourable to the effective working of industry, but they may also be unfavourable; and the opportunities for gain which they afford the larger businessmen may be equally profitable whether the disturbance in question is favourable or unfavourable to industrial efficiency. The gains to be derived from such disturbance are proportioned to the magnitude of the disturbance rather than to its industrial productiveness. It should follow, of course, that if the machine technology should come so to dominate the industrial situation as to bind all industry in a rigorously comprehensive balanced process, the material fortunes of the community would come to rest unreservedly and in all details in the hands of those larger businessmen who hold the final pecuniary discretion.

In qualification of this broad proposition it is to be noted that, while the gains of the superior rank of businessmen accrue in the manner indicated,--by means of disturbances which may indifferently be favourable or unfavourable to industry,--yet in the long run it is necessarily true that the gains which so inure to the pecuniary magnates must be derived from the net product of industry and will in the long run be larger in the aggregate the more productive the community’s industry is. What makes business profitable to the businessmen is, after all, their usufruct of the community’s industrial efficiency. In the long run nothing can accrue as income to the pecuniary magnates more than the surplus product of industry above the subsistence of the industrial community at large. But so long as the magnates have not come to a working arrangement on this basis and “pooled their interests” the proposition as formulated above appears to be adequate to the facts,--that the gains of these larger businessmen are a function of the magnitude of the disturbances which they create rather than of their productive effect.

It should also follow, and so far as the above characterisation holds it does follow, that the current pecuniary organisation of industry vests the usufruct of the community’s industrial proficiency in the owners of the industrial equipment. Proximately this usufruct of the industrial community’s technological knowledge and working capacity vests in the detail owners of the equipment, but only proximately. At the further remove it vests only in the businessmen whose command of large means enables them to create and control those pecuniary conjunctures of industry that bring about changes in the market value and ownership of the equipment.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Cf. Jacques Loeb, _Comparative Physiology of the Brain and Comparative Psychology_, ch. i.

[2] Cf. W. James, _Principles of Psychology_, ch. xxiv and xxv, where, however, the difference between tropism and instinct is not kept well in hand,--the tropisms having at that date not been subjected to inquiry and definition as has been true since then; William McDougall, _Introduction to Social Psychology_, ch. i.

[3] Loeb, _Comparative Physiology of the Brain_, pp. 177–178.

[4] Cf. Graham Wallas, _Human Nature in Politics_, especially ch. i.

[5] Cf., e. g., James, _Principles of Psychology_, ch. xxiv; William McDougall, _Introduction to Social Psychology_, ch. iii.

[6] Loeb, _Comparative Physiology of the Brain_, especially ch. xiii.

[7] It is of course only as physiological traits that the tropisms are conceived not to overlap, blend or interfere, and it is likewise only in respect of their physiological discontinuity that the like argument would bear on the instincts. In respect of their expression, in the way of orientation, movement, growth, secretion, and the like, the tropismatic response to dissimilar stimuli is often so apparently identical that expert investigators have at times been at a loss to decide to which one of two or several recognised tropismatic sensibilities a given motor response should be ascribed. But in respect of their ultimate physiological character, the intimate physiological process by which the given sensibility takes effect, the response due to different tropismatic sensibilities appears in each case to be distinctive and not to blend with any other response to a different stimulus, with which it may happen to synchronise.

[8] Cf., e. g., McDougall, _Introduction to Social Psychology_, ch. i-iii.

[9] Cf., e. g., Otto Ammon, _Die Gesellschaftsordnung_; G. Vacher de Lapouge, _Les sélections sociales_, and _Race et milieu social_, especially “Lois fondamentales de l’Anthroposociologie.”

[10] The all-pervading modern institution of private property appears to have been of such an origin, having cumulatively grown out of the self-regarding bias of men in their oversight of the community’s material interests.

[11] Cf. McDougall, _Social Psychology_, ch. x.

[12] Latterly the question of instincts has been a subject of somewhat extensive discussion among students of animal behaviour, and throughout this discussion the argument has commonly been conducted on neurological, or at the most on physiological ground. This line of argument is well and lucidly presented in a volume recently published (_The Science of Human Behavior_, New York, 1913) by Mr. Maurice Parmalee. The book offers an incisive critical discussion of the Nature of Instinct (ch. xi) with a specific reference to the instinct of workmanship (p. 252). The discussion runs, faithfully and competently, on neurological ground and reaches the outcome to be expected in an endeavour to reduce instinct to neurological (or physiological) terms. As has commonly been true of similar endeavours, the outcome is essentially negative, in that “instinct” is not so much explained as explained away. The reason of this outcome is sufficiently evident; “instinct,” being not a neurological or physiological concept, is not statable in neurological or physiological terms. The instinct of workmanship no more than any other instinctive proclivity is an isolable, discrete neural function; which, however, does not touch the question of its status as a psychological element. The effect of such an analysis as is offered by Mr. Parmalee is not to give terminological precision to the concept of “instinct” in the sense assigned it in current usage, but to dispense with it; which is an untoward move in that it deprives the student of the free use of this familiar term in its familiar sense and therefore constrains him to bring the indispensable concept of instinct in again surreptitiously under cover of some unfamiliar term or some terminological circumlocution. The current mechanistic analyses of animal behaviour are of great and undoubted value to any inquiry into human conduct, but their value does not lie in an attempt to make them supersede those psychological phenomena which it is their purpose to explain. That such supersession of psychological phenomena by the mechanistic formulations need nowise follow and need not be entertained appears, e. g., in such work as that of Mr. Loeb, referred to above, _Comparative Physiology of the Brain and Comparative Psychology_.

[13] Endless in the sense that the effects of such concatenation do not run to a final term in any direction.

[14] Many students of animal behaviour are still, as psychologists generally once were, inclined to contrast instinct with intelligence, and to confine the term typically to such automatically determinate action as takes effect without deliberation or intelligent oversight. This view would appear to be a remnant of an earlier theoretical position, according to which all the functions of intelligence were referred to a distinct immaterial entity, entelechy, associated in symbiosis with the physical organism. If all such preconceptions of a substantial dichotomy between physiological and psychological activity be abandoned it becomes a matter of course that intellectual functions themselves take effect only on the initiative of the instinctive dispositions and under their surveillance, and the antithesis between instinct and intelligence will consequently fall away. What expedients of terminology and discrimination may then be resorted to in the study of those animal instincts that involve a minimum of intellect is of course a question for the comparative psychologists. Cf., for instance, C. Lloyd Morgan, _Introduction to Comparative Psychology_ (2nd edition, 1906) ch. xii, especially pp. 206–209, and _Habit and Instinct_, ch. i and vi.

[15] Cf. H. S. Jennings, _Behavior of the Lower Animals_, ch. xii, xx, xxi.

[16] See McDougall, _Introduction to Social Psychology_, ch. iii and x.

[17] Cf. M. F. Washburn, _The Animal Mind_, ch. x, xi, where the simpler facts of habituation are suggestively presented in conformity with current views of empirical psychology.

[18] Cf., e. g., Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_; Seligmann, _The Veddas_.

[19] Hutton Webster, _Primitive Secret Societies_, especially ch. iii and iv.

[20] J. G. Frazer, _Early History of the Kingship_, ch. iv, p. 107.

[21] E. g., some native tribes of Australia; cf. Spencer and Gillen, _The Native Tribes of Central Australia_, especially ch. i.

[22] Skeat and Blagden, _Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula_.

[23] J. Murdoch, “The Point Barrow Eskimo,” _Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology_, 1887–1888; F. Boas, “The Central Eskimo,” _Ibid_, 1884–1885.

[24] E. H. Man, “On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands,” _J. A. I._, vol. xii.

[25] _Reports, Bureau of American Ethnology_, numerous papers by different writers, perhaps especially Mrs. Stevenson, “The Sia,” 11th Report (1889–1890).

[26] Current economic theory commonly proceeds on the “hedonistic calculus”, so called, (cf. Jeremy Bentham, Introduction to the _Principles of Morals and Legislation_) or the “hedonic principle”, as it has also been called, (cf. Pantaleoni, _Pure Economics_, ch. i). This “principle” affords the major premise of current theory. It postulates that individual self-seeking is the prime mover of all economic conduct. There is some uncertainty and disagreement among latterday economists as to the precise terms proper to be employed to designate this principle of conduct and its working-out; in the apprehension of later speculators Bentham’s “pleasure and pain” has seemed too bald and materialistic, and they have had recourse to such less precise and definable terms as “gratification,” “satisfactions,” “sacrifice,” “utility” and “disutility,” “psychic income,” etc., but hitherto without any conclusive revision of the terminology. These differences and suggested innovations do not touch the substance of the ancient postulate. Proceeding on this postulate the theoreticians have laid down the broad proposition that “present goods are preferred to future goods”; from which arise many meticulous difficulties of theory, particularly in any attempt to make the deliverances of theory square with workday facts. The modicum of truth contained in this proposition would appear to be better expressed in the formula: “Prospective security is preferred to prospective risk;” which seems to be nearly all that is required either as a generalisation of the human motives in the case or as a premise for the theoretical refinements aimed at, whereas the dictum that “present goods are preferred to future goods” must, on reflection, commend itself as substantially false. By and large, of course, goods are not wanted except for prospective use--beyond the measure of that urgent current consumption that plays no part in the theoretical refinements for which the dictum is invoked. It will immediately be apparent on reflection that even for the individual’s own advantage “present goods are preferred to future goods” only where and in so far as property rights are secure, and then only for future use. It is for productive use in the future, or more particularly for the sake of prospective revenue to be drawn from wealth so held, by lending or investing it, that such a preference becomes effective. Apart from this pecuniary advantage that attaches to property held over from the present to the future there appears to be no such preference even as a matter of individual self-seeking, and where such pecuniary considerations are not dominant there is no such preference for “present goods.” It is present “wealth,” not present “goods,” that is the object of desire; and present wealth is desired mainly for its prospective advantage. It is well known that in communities where there are habitually no businesslike credit extensions or investments for profit, savings take the form of hoarding, that is, accumulation for future use in preference to present consumption. There might be some division of opinion as to the character of the prospective use for which goods are sought, but there can be little question that much, if not most, of this prospective use is not of a self-regarding character and is not sought from motives of sensuous gain.

[27] Traditionally a theoretical presumption has been held to the contrary. It has been taken for granted that the institutional outcome of men’s native dispositions will be sound and salutary; but this presumption overlooks the effects of complication and deflection among instincts, due to cumulative habit. The tradition has come down as an article of uncritical faith from the historic belief in a beneficent Order of Nature; which in turn runs back to the early-modern religious conception of a Providential Order instituted by a shrewd and benevolent Creator; which rests on an anthropomorphic imputation of parental solicitude and workmanship to an assumed metaphysical substratum of things. This traditional view therefore is substantially theological and has that degree of validity that may be derived from the putative characteristics of any anthropomorphic divinity.

[28] Cf. e. g., F. H. Cushing, “A Study of Pueblo Pottery as illustrative of Zuñi Culture Growth,” _Report, Bureau of Ethnology_, 1882–1883 (vol. iv); J. W. Fewkes, “Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895,” sections on “Pottery” and “Paleography of the Pottery,” _ibid_, 1896–1897 (vol. xviii); W. H. Holmes, “The Ancient Art of Chiriqui,” _ibid_, 1884–1885 (vol. vi).

[29] The restrictions in this respect are mainly those which devote the “sacred” vessels, distinguished by peculiar shapes and decorations, to particular ceremonial uses.

[30] Cf. E. B. Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, especially ch. xvii.

[31] Cf. “The Evolution of the Scientific Point of View,” _University of California Chronicle_, Oct., 1908.

[32] So, e. g., the proficiency of Bushmen, Veddas, Australians, American Indians, and other peoples of a low technological plane, in tracking game has been remarked on with great admiration by all observers; and the efficiency of these and others of their like is no less admirable as regards swimming, boating, riding, climbing, stalking, etc.

[33] Cf. G. and A. de Mortillet, _Le Préhistorique_, especially the chapter “Données chronologiques,” pp. 662–664; W. G. Sollas, _Ancient Hunters_, ch. i and xiv.

[34] Cf. Sophus Müller, _L’Europe Préhistorique_.

[35] Cf., e. g., _Report of Bureau of American Ethnology_, 1884–1885, Franz Boas, “The Central Eskimo;” _ibid_, 1887–1888, John Murdoch, “The Point Barrow Eskimo.”

[36] What is assumed here is what is commonly held, viz. that the racial stocks that made up the late palæolithic population of Europe are still represented in a moderate way in the racial mixture that fills Europe today, and that these older racial types not only recur sporadically in the European population at large but are also present locally in sufficient force to give a particular character to the population of given localities. (See G. de Mortillet, _Formation de la nation française_, 4me partie, and Conclusions, pp. 275–329.) Great changes took place in the racial complexion of Europe in the beginning and early phases of the neolithic period, but since then no intrusion of new stocks has seriously disturbed the mixture of races, except in isolated areas, of secondary consequence to the cultural situation at large.

See also W. G. Sollas, Ancient Hunters and their Modern Representatives.

[37] These improved races are commonly, if not always, a product of hybridisation, though it is conceivable that such a race might arise as a “sport,” a Mendelian mutant. To establish such a race or “composite pure line” of hybrids and to propagate and improve it in the course of further breeding demands a degree of patient attention and consistent aim.

[38] The late neolithic, or “æneolithic,” culture brought to light by Pumpelly at Anau in Transcaspia shows the synchronism of advance between the technology of the mechanic arts on the one hand and of tillage and cattle-breeding on the other hand in a remarkably lucid way. The site is held to date back to some 8000 B. C. or earlier and shows continuous occupation through a period of several thousand years. The settlers at Anau brought cereals (barley and wheat) when the settlement was made; so that the cultivation of these grains must date back some considerable distance farther into the stone age of Asia. In succeeding ages the people of Anau made some further advance in the use of crop plants; whether by improvement and innovation at home or by borrowing has not been determined. Presently, in the course of the next few thousand years, they brought into domestication and adapted to domestic use by selective breeding the greater number of those species of animals that have since made up the complement of live stock in the Western culture. In the mechanic arts the visible advance is slight as compared with the work in cattle-breeding, though it cannot be called insignificant taken by itself. The more notable improvements in this direction are believed to be due to borrowing. Perhaps the most characteristic trait of the mechanic technology at Anau is the total absence of weapons in the lower half of the deposits.--Raphael Pumpelly, _Explorations in Turkestan: Prehistoric Civilizations of Anau_. (Carnegie Publication No. 73.) Washington, 1908.

[39] Cf. O. F. Cook, “Food Plants of Ancient America.” _Report of Smithsonian Institution_, 1903. E. J. Payne, _History of the New World Called America_, vol. i, (1892), pp. 336–427.

[40] Cf. E. J. Payne, as above.

[41] Cf., e. g., Lumholtz, _Unknown Mexico_, vol. i, ch. vi.

[42] Cf., e. g., J. W. Powell, “Mythology of the North American Indians,” Report, _Bureau of Eth._, 1879–1880 (vol. i); F. H. Cushing, “Outlines of Zuñi Creation Myths,” _ibid_, 1891–1892; J. O. Dorsey, “A Study of Siouan Cults,” _ibid_, 1889–1890.

[43] Witness, again, the tales collected under the caption of _The Day’s Work_, where the anthropomorphic romance of mechanics is made the most of by the same master who told the tales of the _Jungle Book_ and of “The Cat that Walked.”

[44] Cf. Presidential Address by Francis Darwin at the Dublin meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science; cf. also H. Bergson, _Évolution créatrice_, and particularly passages that deal with the élan de la vie.

[45] Cf. G. J. Romanes, _Animal Intelligence_, especially the Introduction.

[46] Cf. Jane E. Harrison, _Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion_, especially ch. iv; The same, _Themis_, especially ch. i, ii, iii and ix; with which compare the Pueblo cults referred to above.

[47] Cf., e. g., Skeat, _Malay Magic_, perhaps especially ch. v, section on the cultivation of rice.

[48] Hence animism, which applies its conceptions to inanimate rather than animate objects.

[49] The like applies in the case of the seasonal and meteorological myths; where it happens rarely if at all that the phenomena of the seasons or the forces that come in evidence in meteorological changes are personified directly or unambiguously. It is always some god or dæmon that controls or uses the wind and the weather, some indwelling sprite or manlike giant that inhabits and watches over the hill or spring or river, and it is always the interests of the indwelling personality rather than that of the tangible objects in the case that are to be safeguarded by the superstitious practices with which the myth surrounds men’s intercourse with these features of the landscape.

[50] As in the legends of Prometheus; compare legends and ritual of fire from various cultures in L. Frobenius, _The Childhood of Man_, ch. xxv-xxvii.

[51] For an interesting illustration of this point see a paper by Duncan Mackenzie on “Cretan Palaces” in the _Annual of the British School at Athens_ for 1907–1908, where the whole discussion hangs on the fact, unquestioned by any one of the disputants in a wide and warm controversy, that during some centuries of unwholesome nuisance from smoky fires in draughty rooms the great civilisation of the Mediterranean seaboard never hit on the ready solution of the difficulty by putting in a chimney.

[52] Cf., e. g., W. James, _Principles of Psychology_, ch. xxiv; McDougall, _Social Psychology_, ch. iii.

[53] Cf., e. g., M. F. Washburn, _The Animal Mind_, ch. xii, xiii.

[54] For illustrations see Dudley Kidd, _The Essential Kafir_, especially ch. ii, on “Native Beliefs.”

[55] Cf. “The Place of Science in Modern Civilisation,” _Journal of Sociology_, March, 1906, pp. 585–609; “The Evolution of the Scientific Point of View,” _University of California Chronicle_, vol. x, pp. 396–415.

[56] Cf. _Theory of the Leisure Class_, ch. iv, v.

[57] This technological blend of manual labour with magical practice is well seen, for instance, in the Malay ritual of rice culture.--W. W. Skeat, _Malay Magic_, various passages dealing with the ceremonial of the planting, growth and harvesting of the rice-crop.

[58] Cf. J. E. Harrison, _Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion_, especially ch. iv; J. G. Frazer, _Adonis, Attis, Osiris_, bk. i, ch. iii.

[59] Such seems to be the evidence, for instance, for Cybele, Astarte (Aphrodite, Ishtar), Mylitta, Isis, Demeter (Ceres), Artemis, and for such doubtfully late characters as Hera (Juno),--see Harrison, _Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion_; Frazer, _Adonis, Attis, Osiris_, and _The Golden Bough_. Quanon may be a doubtful case, as possibly also Amaterazu. The evidence from such American instances as the great mother goddesses of the Pueblos and other Indian tribes runs perhaps the other way, or at the best it may leave the point in doubt. See, for instance, Matilda C. Stevenson, “The Zuñi Indians,” _Report Bureau of American Ethnology_, 1901–1902, section on “Mythology;” The same, _ibid_, 1889–1890, “The Sia;” Frank H. Cushing, _ibid_, 1891–1892, “Zuñi Creation Myths.”

[60] Cf., e. g., Frazer, _Adonis, Attis, Osiris_, bk. ii, ch. iii, bk. iii, ch. vi and xi.

[61] Cf., e. g., Hutton Webster, _Primitive Secret Societies_, especially ch. iii, iv, v; Spencer and Gillen, _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, ch. vii, viii, ix, xvi.

[62] Cf. for instance, Codrington, _The Melanesians_; Seligmann, _The Melanesians of British New Guinea_.