THE INSTINCT OF WORKMANSHIP
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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
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TORONTO
THE INSTINCT OF
WORKMANSHIP
AND THE STATE OF THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS
BY
THORSTEIN VEBLEN
AUTHOR OF “THE THEORY OF THE LEISURE CLASS”
New York
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1914
_All rights reserved_
COPYRIGHT, 1914,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1914.
[Illustration]
TO
B K N
PREFACE
The following essay attempts an analysis of such correlation as is
visible between industrial use and wont and those other institutional
facts that go to make up any given phase of civilisation. It is assumed
that in the growth of culture, as in its current maintenance, the
facts of technological use and wont are fundamental and definitive,
in the sense that they underlie and condition the scope and method of
civilisation in other than the technological respect, but not in such
a sense as to preclude or overlook the degree in which these other
conventions of any given civilisation in their turn react on the state
of the industrial arts.
The analysis proceeds on the materialistic assumptions of modern
science, but without prejudice to the underlying question as to the
ulterior competency of this materialistic conception considered as
a metaphysical tenet. The inquiry simply accepts these mechanistic
assumptions of material science for the purpose in hand, since these
afford the currently acceptable terms of solution for any scientific
problem of the kind in the present state of preconceptions on this head.
As should appear from its slight bulk, the essay is of the nature
of a cursory survey rather than an exhaustive inquiry with full
documentation. The few references given and the authorities cited
in the course of the argument are accordingly not to be taken as an
inclusive presentation of the materials on which the inquiry rests. It
will also be remarked that where authoritative documents are cited the
citation is general and extensive rather than specific and detailed.
Wherever detailed references are given they will be found to bear on
specific facts brought into the argument by way of illustrative detail.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
PAGE
INTRODUCTORY 1
CHAPTER II
CONTAMINATION OF INSTINCTS IN PRIMITIVE TECHNOLOGY 38
CHAPTER III
THE SAVAGE STATE OF THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS 103
CHAPTER IV
THE TECHNOLOGY OF THE PREDATORY CULTURE 138
CHAPTER V
OWNERSHIP AND THE COMPETITIVE SYSTEM 187
CHAPTER VI
THE ERA OF HANDICRAFT 231
CHAPTER VII
THE MACHINE INDUSTRY 299
THE INSTINCT OF WORKMANSHIP
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
For mankind as for the other higher animals, the life of the species
is conditioned by the complement of instinctive proclivities and
tropismatic aptitudes with which the species is typically endowed. Not
only is the continued life of the race dependent on the adequacy of its
instinctive proclivities in this way, but the routine and details of
its life are also, in the last resort, determined by these instincts.
These are the prime movers in human behaviour, as in the behaviour
of all those animals that show self-direction or discretion. Human
activity, in so far as it can be spoken of as conduct, can never exceed
the scope of these instinctive dispositions, by initiative of which man
takes action. Nothing falls within the human scheme of things desirable
to be done except what answers to these native proclivities of man.
These native proclivities alone make anything worth while, and out of
their working emerge not only the purpose and efficiency of life, but
its substantial pleasures and pains as well.
* * * * *
Latterly the words “instinct” and “instinctive” are no longer well
seen among students of those biological sciences where they once had
a great vogue. Students who occupy themselves with the psychology
of animal behaviour are cautiously avoiding these expressions, and
in this caution they are doubtless well advised. For such use the
word appears no longer to be serviceable as a technical term. It has
lost the requisite sharp definition and consistency of connotation,
apparently through disintegration under a more searching analysis
than the phenomena comprised under this concept had previously been
subjected to. In these biological sciences interest is centering not on
the question of what activities may be set down to innate propensity
or predisposition at large, but rather on the determination of the
irreducible psychological--and, indeed, physiological--elements that
go to make up animal behaviour. For this purpose “instinct” is a
concept of too lax and shifty a definition to meet the demands of exact
biological science.
For the sciences that deal with the psychology of human conduct a
similarly searching analysis of the elementary facts of behaviour
is doubtless similarly desirable; and under such closer scrutiny of
these facts it will doubtless appear that here, too, the broad term
“instinct” is of too unprecise a character to serve the needs of an
exhaustive psychological analysis. But the needs of an inquiry into
the nature and causes of the growth of institutions are not precisely
the same as those of such an exhaustive psychological analysis. A
genetic inquiry into institutions will address itself to the growth
of habits and conventions, as conditioned by the material environment
and by the innate and persistent propensities of human nature; and
for these propensities, as they take effect in the give and take of
cultural growth, no better designation than the time-worn “instinct”
is available.
In the light of recent inquiries and speculations it is scarcely to
be questioned that each of these distinguishable propensities may be
analysed into simpler constituent elements, of a quasi-tropismatic
or physiological nature;[1] but in the light of every-day experience
and common notoriety it is at the same time not to be questioned that
these simple and irreducible psychological elements of human behaviour
fall into composite functional groups, and so make up specific and
determinate propensities, proclivities, aptitudes that are, within the
purview of the social sciences, to be handled as irreducible traits
of human nature. Indeed, it would appear that it is in the particular
grouping and concatenation of these ultimate psychological elements
into characteristic lines of interest and propensity that the nature of
man is finally to be distinguished from that of the lower animals.
These various native proclivities that are so classed together as
“instincts” have the characteristic in common that they all and
several, more or less imperatively, propose an objective end of
endeavour. On the other hand what distinguishes one instinct from
another is that each sets up a characteristic purpose, aim, or
object to be attained, different from the objective end of any other
instinct. Instinctive action is teleological, consciously so, and the
teleological scope and aim of each instinctive propensity differs
characteristically from all the rest. The several instincts are
teleological categories, and are, in colloquial usage, distinguished
and classed on the ground of their teleological content. As the term
is here used, therefore, and indeed as it is currently understood,
the instincts are to be defined or described neither in mechanical
terms of those anatomical or physiological aptitudes that causally
underlie them or that come into action in the functioning of any
given instinct, nor in terms of the movements of orientation or taxis
involved in the functioning of each. The distinctive feature by the
mark of which any given instinct is identified is to be found in the
particular character of the purpose to which it drives.[2] “Instinct,”
as contra-distinguished from tropismatic action, involves consciousness
and adaptation to an end aimed at.
It is, of course, not hereby intended to set up or to prescribe a
definition of “instinct” at large, but only to indicate as closely as
may be what sense is attached to the term as here used. At the same
time it is believed that this definition of the concept does violence
neither to colloquial usage nor to the usage of such students as have
employed the term in scientific discussion, particularly in discussion
of the instinctive proclivities of mankind. But it is not to be
overlooked that this definition of the term may be found inapplicable,
or at least of doubtful service, when applied to those simpler and
more immediate impulses that are sometimes by tradition spoken of as
“instinctive,” even in human behaviour,--impulses that might with
better effect be designated “tropismatic.” In animal behaviour, for
instance, as well as in such direct and immediate impulsive human
action as is fairly to be classed with animal behaviour, it is often a
matter of some perplexity to draw a line between tropismatic activity
and instinct. Notoriously, the activities commonly recognised as
instinctive differ widely among themselves in respect of the degree of
directness or immediacy with which the given response to stimulus takes
place. They range in this respect all the way from such reactions as
are doubtfully to be distinguished from simple reflex action on the
one hand, to such as are doubtfully recognised as instinctive because
of the extent to which reflection and deliberation enter into their
execution on the other hand. By insensible gradation the lower (less
complex and deliberate) instinctive activities merge into the class of
unmistakable tropismatic sensibilities, without its being practicable
to determine by any secure test where the one category should be
declared to end and the other to begin.[3] Such quasi-tropismatic
activities may be rated as purposeful by an observer, in the sense
that they are seen to further the life of the individual agent or of
the species, while there is no consciousness of purpose on the part
of the agent under observation; whereas “instinct,” in the narrower
and special sense to which it seems desirable to restrict the term for
present use, denotes the conscious pursuit of an objective end which
the instinct in question makes worth while.
* * * * *
The ends of life, then, the purposes to be achieved, are assigned
by man’s instinctive proclivities; but the ways and means of
accomplishing those things which the instinctive proclivities so make
worth while are a matter of intelligence. It is a distinctive mark of
mankind that the working-out of the instinctive proclivities of the
race is guided by intelligence to a degree not approached by the other
animals. But the dependence of the race on its endowment of instincts
is no less absolute for this intervention of intelligence; since it is
only by the prompting of instinct that reflection and deliberation come
to be so employed, and since instinct also governs the scope and method
of intelligence in all this employment of it. Men take thought, but
the human spirit, that is to say the racial endowment of instinctive
proclivities, decides what they shall take thought of, and how and to
what effect.
Yet the dependence of the scheme of life on the complement of
instinctive proclivities hereby becomes less immediate, since a more or
less extended logic of ways and means comes to intervene between the
instinctively given end and its realisation; and the lines of relation
between any given instinctive proclivity and any particular feature of
human conduct are by so much the more devious and roundabout and the
more difficult to trace. The higher the degree of intelligence and the
larger the available body of knowledge current in any given community,
the more extensive and elaborate will be the logic of ways and means
interposed between these impulses and their realisation, and the more
multifarious and complicated will be the apparatus of expedients and
resources employed to compass those ends that are instinctively worth
while.
This apparatus of ways and means available for the pursuit of whatever
may be worth seeking is, substantially all, a matter of tradition out
of the past, a legacy of habits of thought accumulated through the
experience of past generations. So that the manner, and in a great
degree the measure, in which the instinctive ends of life are worked
out under any given cultural situation is somewhat closely conditioned
by these elements of habit, which so fall into shape as an accepted
scheme of life. The instinctive proclivities are essentially simple and
look directly to the attainment of some concrete objective end; but
in detail the ends so sought are many and diverse, and the ways and
means by which they may be sought are similarly diverse and various,
involving endless recourse to expedients, adaptations, and concessive
adjustment between several proclivities that are all sufficiently
urgent.
Under the discipline of habituation this logic and apparatus of ways
and means falls into conventional lines, acquires the consistency of
custom and prescription, and so takes on an institutional character
and force. The accustomed ways of doing and thinking not only become
an habitual matter of course, easy and obvious, but they come likewise
to be sanctioned by social convention, and so become right and proper
and give rise to principles of conduct. By use and wont they are
incorporated into the current scheme of common sense. A elements of
the approved scheme of conduct and pursuit these conventional ways
and means take their place as proximate ends of endeavour. Whence, in
the further course of unremitting habituation, as the attention is
habitually focussed on these proximate ends, they occupy the interest
to such an extent as commonly to throw their own ulterior purpose
into the background and often let it be lost sight of; as may happen,
for instance, in the acquisition and use of money. It follows that
in much of human conduct these proximate ends alone are present in
consciousness as the object of interest and the goal of endeavour, and
certain conventionally accepted ways and means come to be set up as
definitive principles of what is right and good; while the ulterior
purpose of it all is only called to mind occasionally, if at all, as an
afterthought, by an effort of reflection.[4]
* * * * *
Among psychologists who have busied themselves with these questions
there has hitherto been no large measure of agreement as to the
number of specific instinctive proclivities that so are native to
man; nor is there any agreement as to the precise functional range
and content ascribed to each. In a loose way it is apparently taken
for granted that these instincts are to be conceived as discrete and
specific elements in human nature, each working out its own determinate
functional content without greatly blending with or being diverted by
the working of its neighbours in that spiritual complex into which they
all enter as constituent elements.[5] For the purposes of an exhaustive
psychological analysis it is doubtless expedient to make the most of
such discreteness as is observable among the instinctive proclivities.
But for an inquiry into the scope and method of their working-out in
the growth of institutions it is perhaps even more to the purpose
to take note of how and with what effect the several instinctive
proclivities cross, blend, overlap, neutralise or reënforce one another.
The most convincing genetic view of these phenomena throws the
instinctive proclivities into close relation with the tropismatic
sensibilities and brings them, in the physiological respect, into
the same general class with the latter.[6] If taken uncritically and
in general terms this view would seem to carry the implication that
the instincts should be discrete and discontinuous among themselves
somewhat after the same fashion as the tropismatic sensibilities with
which they are in great measure bound up; but on closer scrutiny such
a genetic theory of the instincts does not appear to enforce the view
that they are to be conceived as effectually discontinuous or mutually
exclusive, though it may also not involve the contrary,--that they
make a continuous or ambiguously segmented body of spiritual elements.
The recognised tropisms stand out, to all appearance, as sharply
defined physiological traits, transmissible by inheritance intact and
unmodified, separable and unblended, in a manner suggestively like the
“unit characters” spoken of in latter day theories of heredity.[7]
While the instinctive sensibilities may not be explained as derivatives
of the tropisms, there is enough of similarity in the working of the
two to suggest that the two classes of phenomena must both be accounted
for on somewhat similar physiological grounds. The simple and more
narrowly defined instinctive dispositions, which have much of the
appearance of immediate reflex nervous action and automatically defined
response, lend themselves passably to such an interpretation,--as, for
example, the gregarious instinct, or the instinct of repulsion with its
accompanying emotion of disgust. Such as these are shared by mankind
with the other higher animals on a fairly even footing; and these are
relatively simple, immediate, and not easily sophisticated or offset
by habit. These seem patently to be of much the same nature as the
tropismatic sensibilities; though even in these simpler instinctive
dispositions the characteristic quasi-tropismatic sensibility
distinctive of each appears to be complicated with obscure stimulations
of the nerve centres arising out of the functioning of one or another
of the viscera. And what is true of the simpler instincts in this
respect should apply to the vaguer and more complex instincts also, but
with a larger allowance for a more extensive complication of visceral
and organic stimuli.
Whether these subconscious stimulations of the nerve centres through
the functioning of the viscera are to be conceived in terms of
tropismatic reaction is a difficult question which has had little
attention hitherto. But in any case, whatever the expert students
of these phenomena may have to say of this matter, the visceral or
organic stimuli engaged in any one of the instinctive sensibilities
are apparently always more than one and are usually somewhat complex.
Indeed, while it seems superficially an easy matter to refer any one of
the simple instincts directly to some certain one of the viscera as the
main or primary source from which its appropriate stimulation comes to
the nerve centres, it is by no means easy to decide what one or more of
the viscera, or of the other organs that are not commonly classed as
viscera, will have no part in the matter.
It results that, on physiological grounds, the common run of human
instincts are not to be conceived as severally discrete and elementary
proclivities. The same physiological processes enter in some measure,
though in varying proportions, into the functioning of each. In
instinctive action the individual acts as a whole, and in the conduct
which emerges under the driving force of these instinctive dispositions
the part which each several instinct plays is a matter of more or less,
not of exclusive direction. They must therefore incontinently touch,
blend, overlap and interfere, and can not be conceived as acting each
and several in sheer isolation and independence of one another. The
relations of give and take among the several instinctive dispositions,
therefore--of inosculation, “contamination” and cross purposes--are
presumably slighter and of less consequence for the simpler and
more apparently tropismatic impulses while on the other hand the
less specific and vaguer instinctive predispositions, such as the
parental bent or the proclivity to construction or acquisition, will
be so comprehensively and intricately bound in a web of correlation
and inter-dependence--will so unremittingly contaminate, offset or
fortify one another, and have each so large and yet so shifting a
margin of common ground with all the rest--that hard and fast lines
of demarcation can scarcely be drawn between them. The best that
can practically be had in the way of a secure definition will be a
descriptive characterisation of each distinguishable propensity,
together with an indication of the more salient and consequential
ramifications by which each contaminates or is contaminated by the
working of other propensities that go to make up that complex of
instinctive dispositions that constitutes the spiritual nature of the
race. So that the schemes of definition that have hitherto been worked
out are in great part to be taken as arrangements of convenience,
serviceable apparatus for present use, rather than distinctions
enforced at all points by an equally sharp substantial discreteness of
the facts.[8]
This fact, that in some measure the several instincts spring from a
common ground of sentient life, that they each engage the individual
as a whole, has serious consequences in the domain of habit, and
therefore it counts for much in the growth of civilisation and in the
everyday conduct of affairs. The physiological apparatus engaged in the
functioning of any given instinct enters in part, though in varying
measure, into the working of some or of any other instinct; whereby,
even on physiological grounds alone, the habituation that touches
the functioning of any given instinct must, in a less degree but
pervasively, affect the habitual conduct of the same agent when driven
by any other instinct. So that on this view the scope of habit, in so
far as it bears on the instinctive activities, is necessarily wider
than the particular concrete line of conduct to which the habituation
in question is due.
* * * * *
The instincts are hereditary traits. In the current theories of
heredity they would presumably be counted as secondary characteristics
of the species, as being in a sense by-products of the physiological
activities that give the species its specific character; since these
theories in the last resort run in physiological terms. So the
instinctive dispositions would scarcely be accounted unit characters,
in the Mendelian sense, but would rather count as spiritual traits
emerging from a certain concurrence of physiological unit characters
and varying somewhat according to variations in the complement of
unit characters to which the species or the individual may owe his
constitution. Hence would arise variations of individuality among
the members of the race, resting in some such manner as has just
been suggested on the varying endowment of instincts, and running
back through these finally to recondite differences of physiological
function. Some such account of the instinctive dispositions and their
relation to the physical individual seems necessary as a means of
apprehending them and their work without assuming a sheer break between
the physical and the immaterial phenomena of life.
* * * * *
Characteristic of the race is a degree of vagueness or generality,
an absence of automatically determinate response, a lack of concrete
eventuality as it might be called, in the common run of human
instincts. This vague and shifty character of the instincts, or
perhaps rather of the habitual response to their incitement, is to
be taken in connection with the breadth and variability of their
physiological ground as spoken of above. For the long-term success
of the race it is manifestly of the highest value, since it leaves a
wide and facile margin of experimentation, habituation, invention and
accommodation open to the sense of workmanship. At the same time and by
the same circumstance the scope and range of conventionalisation and
sophistication are similarly flexible, wide and consequential. No doubt
the several racial stocks differ very appreciably in this respect.
The complement of instinctive dispositions, comprising under that term
both the native propensity and its appropriate sentiment, makes up what
would be called the “spiritual nature” of man--often spoken of more
simply as “human nature.” Without allowing it to imply anything like
a dualism or dichotomy between material and immaterial phenomena, the
term “spiritual” may conveniently be so used in its colloquial sense.
So employed it commits the discussion to no attitude on the question
of man’s single or dual constitution, but simply uses the conventional
expression to designate that complement of functions which it has by
current usage been employed to designate.
The human complement of instincts fluctuates from one individual
to another in an apparently endless diversity, varying both in the
relative force of the several instinctive proclivities and in the
scheme of co-ordination, coalescence or interference that prevails
among them. This diversity of native character is noticeable among
all peoples, though some of the peoples of the lower cultures show a
notable approach to uniformity of type, both physical and spiritual.
The diversity is particularly marked among the civilised peoples,
and perhaps in a peculiar degree among the peoples of Europe and her
colonies. The extreme diversity of native character, both physical
and spiritual, noticeable in these communities is in all probability
due to their being made up of a mixture of racial stocks. In point
of pedigree, all individuals in the peoples of the Western culture
are hybrids, and the greater number of individuals are a mixture of
more than two racial stocks. The proportions in which the several
transmissible traits that go to make up the racial type enter into
the composition of these hybrid individuals will accordingly vary
endlessly. The number of possible permutations will therefore be
extremely large; so that the resulting range of variation in the
hybrids that so result from the crossing of these different racial
stocks will be sufficiently large, even when it plays within such
limits as to leave the generic human type intact. From time to time
the variation may even exceed these limits of human normality and give
a variant in which the relative emphasis on the several constituent
instinctive elements is distributed after a scheme so far from the
generically human type as to throw the given variant out of touch
with the common run of humanity and mark him as of unsound mind or as
disserviceable for the purposes of the community in which he occurs, or
even as disserviceable for life in any society.
Yet, even through these hybrid populations there runs a generically
human type of spiritual endowment, prevalent as a general average of
human nature throughout, and suitable to the continued life of mankind
in society. Disserviceably wide departures from this generically human
and serviceable type of spiritual endowment will tend constantly to be
selectively eliminated from the race, even where the variation arises
from hybridism. The like will hold true in a more radical fashion as
applied to variants that may arise through a Mendelian mutation.
So that the numerous racial types now existing represent only
such mutants as lie within the limits of tolerance imposed by the
situation under which any given mutant type has emerged and survived.
A surviving mutant type is necessarily suited more or less closely
to the circumstances under which it emerged and first made good its
survival, and it is presumably less suited to any other situation.
With a change in the situation, therefore, such as may come with the
migration of a given racial stock from one habitat to another, or with
an equivalent shifting growth of culture or change of climate, the
requirements of survival are likely to change. Indeed, so grave are the
alterations that may in this way supervene in the current requirements
for survival, that any given racial stock may dwindle and decay for no
other reason than that the growth of its culture has come to subject
the stock to methods of life widely different from those under which
its type of man originated and made good its fitness to survive. So,
in the mixture of races that make up the population of the Western
nations a competitive struggle for survival has apparently always
been going on among the several racial stocks that enter into the
hybrid mass, with varying fortunes according as the shifting cultural
demands and opportunities have favoured now one, now another type of
man. These cultural conditions of survival in the racial struggle
for existence have varied in the course of centuries, and with grave
consequences for the life-history of the race and of its culture;
and they are perhaps changing more substantially and rapidly in the
immediate present than at any previous time within the historical
period. So that, for instance, the continued biological success of any
given one of these stocks in the European racial mixture has within a
moderate period of time shifted from the ground of fighting capacity,
and even in a measure from the ground of climatic fitness, to that of
spiritual fitness to survive under the conditions imposed by a new
cultural situation, by a scheme of institutions that is insensibly but
incessantly changing as it runs.[9]
These unremitting changes and adaptations that go forward in the scheme
of institutions, legal and customary, unremittingly induce new habits
of work and of thought in the community, and so they continually
instil new principles of conduct; with the outcome that the same
range of instinctive dispositions innate in the population will work
out to a different effect as regards the demands of race survival.
To all appearance, what counts first in this connection toward the
selective survival of the several European racial stocks is their
relative fitness to meet the material requirements of life,--their
economic fitness to live under the new cultural limitations and with
the new training which this altered cultural situation gives. But the
fortunes of the Western civilisation as a cultural scheme, apart from
the biological survival or success of any given racial constituent
in the Western peoples, is likewise bound up with the viability of
European mankind under these institutional changes, and dependent
on the spiritual fitness of inherited human nature successfully and
enduringly to carry on the altered scheme of life so imposed on these
peoples by the growth of their own culture. Such limitations imposed on
cultural growth by native proclivities ill suited to civilised life are
sufficiently visible in several directions and in all the nations of
Christendom.
* * * * *
What is known of heredity goes to say that the various racial types of
man are stable; so that during the life-history of any given racial
stock, it is held, no heritable modification of its typical make-up,
whether spiritual or physical, is to be looked for. The typical human
endowment of instincts, as well as the typical make-up of the race
in the physical respect, has according to this current view been
transmitted intact from the beginning of humanity, that is to say from
whatever point in the mutational development of the race it is seen
fit to date humanity,--except so far as subsequent mutations have
given rise to new racial stocks, to and by which this human endowment
of native proclivities has been transmitted in a typically modified
form. On the other hand the habitual elements of human life change
unremittingly and cumulatively, resulting in a continued proliferous
growth of institutions. Changes in the institutional structure are
continually taking place in response to the altered discipline of
life under changing cultural conditions, but human nature remains
specifically the same.
The ways and means, material and immaterial, by which the native
proclivities work out their ends, therefore, are forever in process of
change, being conditioned by the changes cumulatively going forward in
the institutional fabric of habitual elements that governs the scheme
of life. But there is no warrant for assuming that each or any of these
successive changes in the scheme of institutions affords successively
readier, surer or more facile ways and means for the instinctive
proclivities to work out their ends, or that the phase of habituation
in force at any given point in this sequence of change is more suitable
to the untroubled functioning of these instincts than any phase that
has gone before. Indeed, the presumption is the other way. On grounds
of selective survival it is reasonably to be presumed that any given
racial type that has endured the test of selective elimination,
including the complement of instinctive dispositions by virtue of which
it has endured the test, will on its first emergence have been passably
suited to the circumstances, material and cultural, under which the
type emerged as a mutant and made good its survival; and in so far as
the subsequent growth of institutions has altered the available scope
and method of instinctive action it is therefore to be presumed that
any such subsequent change in the scheme of institutions will in some
degree hinder or divert the free play of its instinctive proclivities
and will thereby hinder the direct and unsophisticated working-out of
the instinctive dispositions native to this given racial type.
What is known of the earlier phases of culture in the life-history
of the existing races and peoples goes to say that the initial phase
in the life of any given racial type, the phase of culture which
prevailed in its environment when it emerged, and under which the
stock first proved its fitness to survive, was presumably some form of
savagery. Therefore the fitness of any given type of human nature for
life after the manner and under the conditions imposed by any later
phase in the growth of culture is a matter of less and less secure
presumption the farther the sequence of institutional change has
departed from that form of savagery which marked the initial stage in
the life-history of the given racial stock. Also, presumably, though
by no means assuredly, the younger stocks, those which have emerged
from later mutations of type, have therefore initially fallen into and
made good their survival under the conditions of a relatively advanced
phase of savagery,--these younger races should therefore conform with
greater facility and better effect to the requirements imposed by a
still farther advance in that cumulative complication of institutions
and intricacy of ways and means that is involved in cultural growth.
The older or more primitive stocks, those which arose out of earlier
mutations of type and made good their survival under a more elementary
scheme of savage culture, are presumably less capable of adaptation to
an advanced cultural scheme.
But at the same time it is on the same grounds to be expected that
in all races and peoples there should always persist an ineradicable
sentimental disposition to take back to something like that scheme
of savagery for which their particular type of human nature once
proved its fitness during the initial phase of its life-history. This
seems to be what is commonly intended in the cry, “Back to Nature!”
The older known racial stocks, the offspring of earlier mutational
departures from the initially generic human type, will have been
selectively adapted to more archaic forms of savagery, and these show
an appreciably more refractory penchant for elementary savage modes
of life, and conform to the demands and opportunities of a “higher”
civilisation only with a relatively slight facility, amounting in
extreme cases to a practical unfitness for civilised life. Hence the
“White Man’s burden” and the many perplexities of the missionaries.
* * * * *
Under the Mendelian theories of heredity some qualification of these
broad generalisations is called for. As has already been noted above,
the peoples of Europe, each and several, are hybrid mixtures made up
of several racial stocks. The like is true in some degree of most of
the peoples outside of Europe; particularly of the more important and
better known nationalities. These various peoples show more or less
distinct and recognisable national types of physique--or perhaps rather
of physiognomy--and temperament, and the lines of differentiation
between these national types incontinently traverse the lines that
divide the racial stocks. At the same time these national types have
some degree of permanence; so much so that they are colloquially spoken
of as types of race. While no modern anthropologist would confuse
nationality with race, it is not to be overlooked that these national
hybrid types are frequently so marked and characteristic as to simulate
racial characters and perplex the student of race who is intent on
identifying the racial stocks out of which any one of these hybrid
populations has been compounded. Presumably these national and local
types of physiognomy and temperament are to be rated as hybrid types
that have been fixed by selective breeding, and for an explanation of
this phenomenon recourse is to be taken to the latterday theories of
heredity.
To any student familiar with the simpler phenomena of hybridism it will
be evident that under the Mendelian rules of hybridisation the number
of biologically successful--viable--hybrid forms arising from any cross
between two or more forms may diverge very widely from one another and
from either of the parent types. The variation must be extreme both in
the number of hybrid types so constructed and in the range over which
the variation extends,--much greater in both respects than the range of
fluctuating (non-typical) variations obtainable under any circumstances
in a pure-bred race, particularly in the remoter filial generations.
It is also well known, by experiment, that by selective breeding from
among such hybrid forms it is possible to construct a composite type
that will breed true in respect of the characters upon which the
selection is directed, and that such a “pure line” may be maintained
indefinitely, in spite of its hybrid origin, so long as it is not
crossed back on one or other of the parent stocks, or on a hybrid stock
that is not pure-bred in respect of the selected characters.
So, if the conditions of life in any community consistently favour
a given type of hybrid, whether the favouring conditions are of a
cultural or of a material nature, something of a selective trend will
take effect in such a community and set toward a hybrid type which
shall meet these conditions. The result will be the establishment of a
composite pure line showing the advantageous traits of physique and
temperament, combined with a varying complement of other characters
that have no such selective value. Traits that have no selective value
in the given case will occur with fortuitous freedom, combining in
unconstrained diversity with the selectively decisive traits, and so
will mark the hybrid derivation of this provisionally established
composite pure line. With continued intercrossing within itself any
given population of such hybrid origin as the European peoples, would
tend cumulatively to breed true to such a selectively favourable hybrid
type, rather than to any one of the ultimate racial types represented
by the parent stocks out of which the hybrid population is ultimately
made up. So would emerge a national or local type, which would show
the selectively decisive traits with a great degree of consistency
but would vary indefinitely in respect of the selectively idle traits
comprised in the composite heredity of the population. Such a composite
pure line would be provisionally stable only; it should break down
when crossed back on either of the parent stocks. This “provisionally
stable composite pure line” should disappear when crossed on pure-bred
individuals of one or other of the parent stocks from which it is
drawn,--pure-bred in respect of the allelomorphic characters which give
the hybrid type its typical traits.
But whatever the degree of stability possessed by these hybrid national
or local types, the outcome for the present purpose is much the same;
the hybrid populations afford a greater scope and range of variation in
their human nature than could be had within the limits of any pure-bred
race. Yet, for all the multifarious diversity of racial and national
types, early and late, and for all the wide divergence of hybrid
variants, there is no difficulty about recognising a generical human
type of spiritual endowment, just as the zoölogists have no difficulty
in referring the various races of mankind to a single species on the
ground of their physical characters. The distribution of emphasis among
the several instinctive dispositions may vary appreciably from one
race to another, but the complement of instincts native to the several
races is after all of much the same kind, comprising substantially the
same ends. Taken simply in their first incidence, the racial variations
of human nature are commonly not considerable; but a slight bias of
this kind, distinctive of any given race, may come to have decisive
weight when it works out cumulatively through a system of institutions,
for such a system embodies the cumulative sophistications of untold
generations during which the life of the community has been dominated
by the same slight bias.[10]
Racial differences in respect of these hereditary spiritual traits
count for much in the outcome, because in the last resort any race is
at the mercy of its instincts. In the course of cultural growth most of
those civilisations or peoples that have had a long history have from
time to time been brought up against an imperative call to revise their
scheme of institutions in the light of their native instincts, on pain
of collapse or decay; and they have chosen variously, and for the most
part blindly, to live or not to live, according as their instinctive
bias has driven them. In the cases where it has happened that
those instincts which make directly for the material welfare of the
community, such as the parental bent and the sense of workmanship, have
been present in such potent force, or where the institutional elements
at variance with the continued life-interests of the community or the
civilisation in question have been in a sufficiently infirm state,
there the bonds of custom, prescription, principles, precedent, have
been broken--or loosened or shifted so as to let the current of life
and cultural growth go on, with or without substantial retardation. But
history records more frequent and more spectacular instances of the
triumph of imbecile institutions over life and culture than of peoples
who have by force of instinctive insight saved themselves alive out of
a desperately precarious institutional situation, such, for instance,
as now faces the peoples of Christendom.
* * * * *
Chief among those instinctive dispositions that conduce directly to
the material well-being of the race, and therefore to its biological
success, is perhaps the instinctive bias here spoken of as the sense
of workmanship. The only other instinctive factor of human nature that
could with any likelihood dispute this primacy would be the parental
bent. Indeed, the two have much in common. They spend themselves on
much the same concrete objective ends, and the mutual furtherance of
each by the other is indeed so broad and intimate as often to leave
it a matter of extreme difficulty to draw a line between them. Any
discussion of either, therefore, must unavoidably draw the other into
the inquiry to a greater or less extent, and a characterisation of the
one will involve some dealing with the other.
As the expression is here understood, the “Parental Bent” is an
instinctive disposition of much larger scope than a mere proclivity
to the achievement of children.[11] This latter is doubtless to be
taken as a large and perhaps as a primary element in the practical
working of the parental solicitude; although, even so, it is in no
degree to be confused with the quasi-tropismatic impulse to the
procreation of offspring. The parental solicitude in mankind has a
much wider bearing than simply the welfare of one’s own children. This
wider bearing is particularly evident in those lower cultures where
the scheme of consanguinity and inheritance is not drawn on the same
close family lines as among civilised peoples, but it is also to be
seen in good vigour in any civilised community. So, for instance, what
the phrase-makers have called “race-suicide” meets the instinctive
and unsolicited reprobation of all men, even of those who would not
conceivably go the length of contributing in their own person to the
incoming generation. So also, virtually all thoughtful persons,--that
is to say all persons who hold an opinion in these premises,--will
agree that it is a despicably inhuman thing for the current generation
wilfully to make the way of life harder for the next generation,
whether through neglect of due provision for their subsistence and
proper training or through wasting their heritage of resources and
opportunity by improvident greed and indolence. Providence is a virtue
only so far as its aim is provision for posterity.
It is difficult or impossible to say how far the current solicitude
for the welfare of the race at large is to be credited to the parental
bent, but it is beyond question that this instinctive disposition has a
large part in the sentimental concern entertained by nearly all persons
for the life and comfort of the community at large, and particularly
for the community’s future welfare. Doubtless this parental bent in
its wider bearing greatly reënforces that sentimental approval of
economy and efficiency for the common good and disapproval of wasteful
and useless living that prevails so generally throughout both the
highest and the lowest cultures, unless it should rather be said that
this animus for economy and efficiency is a simple expression of the
parental disposition itself. It might on the other hand be maintained
that such an animus of economy is an essential function of the instinct
of workmanship, which would then be held to be strongly sustained at,
this point by a parental solicitude for the common good.
In making use of the expression, “instinct of workmanship” or “sense
of workmanship,” it is not here intended to assume or to argue that
the proclivity so designated is in the psychological respect a simple
or irreducible element; still less, of course, is there any intention
to allege that it is to be traced back in the physiological respect
to some one isolable tropismatic sensibility or some single enzymotic
or visceral stimulus. All that is matter for the attention of those
whom it may concern. The expression may as well be taken to signify a
concurrence of several instinctive aptitudes, each of which might or
might not prove simple or irreducible when subjected to psychological
or physiological analysis. For the present inquiry it is enough to
note that in human behaviour this disposition is effective in such
consistent, ubiquitous and resilient fashion that students of human
culture will have to count with it as one of the integral hereditary
traits of mankind.[12]
As has already appeared, neither this nor any other instinctive
disposition works out its functional content in isolation from the
instinctive endowment at large. The instincts, all and several, though
perhaps in varying degrees, are so intimately engaged in a play of give
and take that the work of any one has its consequences for all the
rest, though presumably not for all equally. It is this endless[13]
complication and contamination of instinctive elements in human
conduct, taken in conjunction with the pervading and cumulative effects
of habit in this domain, that makes most of the difficulty and much of
the interest attaching to this line of inquiry.
There are few lines of instinctive proclivity that are not crossed and
coloured by some ramification of the instinct of workmanship. No doubt,
response to the direct call of such half-tropismatic, half-instinctive
impulses as hunger, anger, or the promptings of sex, is little if at
all troubled with any sentimental suffusion of workmanship; but in
the more complex and deliberate activities, particularly where habit
exerts an appreciable effect, the impulse and sentiment of workmanship
comes in for a large share in the outcome. So much so, indeed, that,
for instance, in the arts, where the sense of beauty is the prime
mover, habitual attention to technique will often put the original,
and only ostensible, motive in the background. So, again, in the life
of religious faith and observance it may happen now and again that
theological niceties and ritual elaboration will successfully, and
in great measure satisfactorily, substitute themselves for spiritual
communion; while in the courts of law a tenacious following out of
legal technicalities will not infrequently defeat the ends of justice.
As the expression is here understood, all instinctive action is
intelligent in some degree; though the degree in which intelligence is
engaged may vary widely from one instinctive disposition to another,
and it may even fall into an extremely automatic shape in the case
of some of the simpler instincts, whose functional content is of a
patently physiological character. Such approach to automatism is even
more evident in some of the lower animals, where, as for instance in
the case of some insects, the response to the appropriate stimuli is
so far uniform and mechanically determinate as to leave it doubtful
whether the behaviour of the animal might not best be construed
as tropismatic action simply.[14] Such tropismatic directness of
instinctive response is less characteristic of man even in the case
of the simpler instinctive proclivities; and the indirection which so
characterises instinctive action in general, and the higher instincts
of man in particular, and which marks off the instinctive dispositions
from the tropisms, is the indirection of intelligence. It enters more
largely in the discharge of some proclivities than of others; but
all instinctive action is intelligent in some degree. This is what
marks it off from the tropisms and takes it out of the category of
automatism.[15]
Hence all instinctive action is teleological. It involves holding to
a purpose. It aims to achieve some end and involves some degree of
intelligent faculty to compass the instinctively given purpose, under
surveillance of the instinctive proclivity that prompts the action. And
it is in this surveillance and direction of the intellectual processes
to the appointed end that the instinctive dispositions control and
condition human conduct; and in this work of direction the several
instinctive proclivities may come to conflict and offset, or to concur
and reënforce, one another’s action.
The position of the instinct of workmanship in this complex of
teleological activities is somewhat peculiar, in that its functional
content is serviceability for the ends of life, whatever these ends
may be; whereas these ends to be subserved are, at least in the main,
appointed and made worth while by the various other instinctive
dispositions. So that this instinct may in some sense be said to be
auxiliary to all the rest, to be concerned with the ways and means of
life rather than with any one given ulterior end. It has essentially
to do with proximate rather than ulterior ends. Yet workmanship is
none the less an object of attention and sentiment in its own right.
Efficient use of the means at hand and adequate management of the
resources available for the purposes of life is itself an end of
endeavour, and accomplishment of this kind is a source of gratification.
All instinctive action is intelligent and teleological. The generality
of instinctive dispositions prompt simply to the direct and unambiguous
attainment of their specific ends, and in his dealings under their
immediate guidance the agent goes as directly as may be to the end
sought,--he is occupied with the objective end, not with the choice of
means to the end sought; whereas under the impulse of workmanship the
agent’s interest and endeavour are taken up with the contriving of ways
and means to the end sought.
The point of contrast may be unfamiliar, and an illustration may
be pertinent. So, in the instinct of pugnacity and its attendant
sentiment of anger[16] the primary impulse is doubtless to a direct
frontal attack, assault and battery pure and simple; and the more
highly charged the agent is with the combative impulse, and the higher
the pitch of animation to which he has been wrought up, the less is
he inclined or able to take thought of how he may shrewdly bring
mechanical devices to bear on the object of his sentiment and compass
his end with the largest result per unit of force expended. It is
only the well-trained fighter that will take without reflection to
workmanlike ways and means at such a juncture; and in case of extreme
exasperation and urgency even such a one, it is said, may forget
his workmanship in the premises and throw himself into the middle
of things instead of resorting to the indirections and leverages to
which his workmanlike training in the art of fighting has habituated
him. So, again, the immediate promptings of the parental bent urge
to direct personal intervention and service in behalf of the object
of solicitude. In persons highly gifted in this respect the impulse
asserts itself to succour the helpless with one’s own hands, to do for
them in one’s own person not what might on reflection approve itself
as the most expedient line of conduct in the premises, but what will
throw the agent most personally into action in the case. Notoriously,
it is easier to move well-meaning people to unreflecting charity on an
immediate and concrete appeal than it is to secure a sagacious, well
sustained and well organised concert of endeavour for the amelioration
of the lot of the unfortunate. Indeed, refinements of workmanlike
calculation of causes and effects in such a case are instinctively felt
to be out of touch with the spirit of the thing. They are distasteful;
not only are they not part and parcel of the functional content of
the generous impulse, but an undue injection of these elements of
workmanship into the case may even induce a revulsion of feeling and
defeat its own intention.
The instinct of workmanship, on the other hand, occupies the interest
with practical expedients, ways and means, devices and contrivances of
efficiency and economy, proficiency, creative work and technological
mastery of facts. Much of the functional content of the instinct of
workmanship is a proclivity for taking pains. The best or most finished
outcome of this disposition is not had under stress of great excitement
or under extreme urgency from any of the instinctive propensities with
which its work is associated or whose ends it serves. It shows at its
best, both in the individual workman’s technological efficiency and in
the growth of technological proficiency and insight in the community
at large, under circumstances of moderate exigence, where there is work
in hand and more of it in sight, since it is initially a disposition to
do the next thing and do it as well as may be; whereas when interest
falls off unduly through failure of provocation from the instinctive
dispositions that afford an end to which to work, the stimulus to
workmanship is likely to fail, and the outcome is as likely to be an
endless fabrication of meaningless details and much ado about nothing.
On the other hand, in seasons of great stress, when the call to any one
or more of the instinctive lines of conduct is urgent beyond measure,
there is likely to result a crudity of technique and presently a loss
of proficiency and technological mastery.
It is, further, pertinent to note in this connection that the instinct
of workmanship will commonly not run to passionate excesses; that it
does not, under pressure, tenaciously hold its place as a main interest
in competition with the other, more elemental instinctive proclivities;
but that it rather yields ground somewhat readily, suffers repression
and falls into abeyance, only to reassert itself when the pressure
of other, urgent interests is relieved. What was said above as to
the paramount significance of the instinct of workmanship for the
life of the race will of course suffer no abatement in so recognising
its characteristically temperate urgency. The grave importance that
attaches to it is a matter of its ubiquitous subservience to the ends
of life, and not a matter of vehemence.
The sense of workmanship is also peculiarly subject to bias. It does
not commonly, or normally, work to an independent, creative end of
its own, but is rather concerned with the ways and means whereby
instinctively given purposes are to be accomplished. According,
therefore, as one or another of the instinctive dispositions is
predominant in the community’s scheme of life or in the individual’s
every-day interest, the habitual trend of the sense of workmanship
will be bent to one or another line of proficiency and technological
mastery. By cumulative habituation a bias of this character may come
to have very substantial consequences for the range and scope of
technological knowledge, the state of the industrial arts, and for the
rate and direction of growth in workmanlike ideals.
* * * * *
Changes are going forward constantly and incontinently in the
institutional apparatus, the habitual scheme of rules and principles
that regulate the community’s life, and not least in the technological
ways and means by which the life of the race and its state of culture
are maintained; but changes come rarely--in effect not at all--in the
endowment of instincts whereby mankind is enabled to employ these
means and to live under the institutions which its habits of life
have cumulatively created. In the case of hybrid populations, such
as the peoples of Christendom, some appreciable adaptation of this
spiritual endowment to meet the changing requirements of civilisation
may be counted on, through the establishment of composite pure
lines of a hybrid type more nearly answering to the later phases
of culture than any one of the original racial types out of which
the hybrid population is made up. But in so slow-breeding a species
as man, and with changes in the conditions of life going forward
at a visibly rapid pace, the chance of an adequate adaptation of
hybrid human nature to new conditions seems doubtful at the best. It
is also to be noted that the vague character of many of the human
instincts, and their consequent pliability under habituation, affords
an appreciable margin of adaptation within which human nature may
adjust itself to new conditions of life. But after all has been said
it remains true that the margin within which the instinctive nature
of the race can be effectively adapted to changing circumstances is
relatively narrow--narrow as contrasted with the range of variation in
institutions--and the limits of such adaptation are somewhat rigid. As
the matter stands, the race is required to meet changing conditions
of life to which its relatively unchanging endowment of instincts is
presumably not wholly adapted, and to meet these conditions by the
use of technological ways and means widely different from those that
were at the disposal of the race from the outset. In the initial
phases of the life-history of the race, or of any given racial stock,
the exigencies to which its spiritual (instinctive) nature was
selectively required to conform were those of the savage culture, as
has been indicated above,--presumably in all cases a somewhat “low” or
elementary form of savagery. This savage mode of life, which was, and
is, in a sense, native to man, would be characterised by a considerable
group solidarity within a relatively small group, living very near
the soil, and unremittingly dependent for their daily life on the
workmanlike efficiency of all the members of the group. The prime
requisite for survival under these conditions would be a propensity
unselfishly and impersonally to make the most of the material means
at hand and a penchant for turning all resources of knowledge and
material to account to sustain the life of the group.
At the outset, therefore, as it first comes into the life-history of
any one or all of the racial stocks with which modern inquiry concerns
itself, this instinctive disposition will have borne directly on
workmanlike efficiency in the simple and obvious sense of the word.
By virtue of the stability of the racial type, such is still its
character, primarily and substantially, apart from its sophistication
by habit and tradition. The instinct of workmanship brought the life
of mankind from the brute to the human plane, and in all the later
growth of culture it has never ceased to pervade the works of man. But
the extensive complication of circumstances and the altered outlook of
succeeding generations, brought on by the growth of institutions and
the accumulation of knowledge, have led to an extension of its scope
and of its canons and logic to activities and conjunctures that have
little traceable bearing on the means of subsistence.
CHAPTER II
CONTAMINATION OF INSTINCTS IN PRIMITIVE TECHNOLOGY
All instinctive behaviour is subject to development and hence to
modification by habit.[17] Such impulsive action as is in no degree
intelligent, and so suffers no adaptation through habitual use, is
not properly to be called instinctive; it is rather to be classed as
tropismatic. In human conduct the effects of habit in this respect
are particularly far-reaching. In man the instincts appoint less of
a determinate sequence of action, and so leave a more open field for
adaptation of behaviour to the circumstances of the case. When instinct
enjoins little else than the end of endeavour, leaving the sequence
of acts by which this end is to be approached somewhat a matter of
open alternatives, the share of reflection, discretion and deliberate
adaptation will be correspondingly large. The range and diversity of
habituation is also correspondingly enlarged.
In man, too, by the same fact, habit takes on more of a cumulative
character, in that the habitual acquirements of the race are handed on
from one generation to the next, by tradition, training, education,
or whatever general term may best designate that discipline of
habituation by which the young acquire what the old have learned.
By similar means the like elements of habitual conduct are carried
over from one community or one culture to another, leading to further
complications. Cumulatively, therefore, habit creates usages, customs,
conventions, preconceptions, composite principles of conduct that run
back only indirectly to the native predispositions of the race, but
that may affect the working-out of any given line of endeavour in much
the same way as if these habitual elements were of the nature of a
native bias.
Along with this body of derivative standards and canons of conduct,
and handed on by the same discipline of habituation, goes a cumulative
body of knowledge, made up in part of matter-of-fact acquaintance with
phenomena and in greater part of conventional wisdom embodying certain
acquired predilections and preconceptions current in the community.
Workmanship proceeds on the accumulated knowledge so received and
current, and turns it to account in dealing with the material means
of life. Whatever passes current in this way as knowledge of facts
is turned to account as far as may be, and so it is worked into a
customary scheme of ways and means, a system of technology, into which
new elements of information or acquaintance with the nature and use of
things are incorporated, assimilated as they come.
The scheme of technology so worked out and carried along in the routine
of getting a living will be serviceable for current use and have a
substantial value for a further advance in technological efficiency
somewhat in proportion as the knowledge so embodied in technological
practice is effectually of the nature of matter-of-fact. Much of
the information derived from experience in industry is likely to be
of this matter-of-fact nature; but much of the knowledge made use of
for the technological purpose is also of the nature of convention,
inference and authentic opinion, arrived at on quite other grounds
than workmanlike experience. This alien body of information, or
pseudo-information, goes into the grand total of human knowledge quite
as freely as any matter of fact, and it is therefore also necessarily
taken up and assimilated in that technological equipment of knowledge
and proficiency by use of which the work in hand is to be done.
But the experience which yields this useful and pseudo-useful knowledge
is got under the impulsion and guidance of one and another of the
instincts with which man is endowed, and takes the shape and color
given it by the instinctive bias in whose service it is acquired. At
the same time, whatever its derivation, the knowledge acquired goes
into the aggregate of information drawn on for the ways and means of
workmanship. Therefore the habits formed in any line of experience,
under the guidance of any given instinctive disposition, will have
their effect on the conduct and aims of the workman in all his work
and play; so that progress in technological matters is by no means an
outcome of the sense of workmanship alone.
It follows that in all their working the human instincts are in this
way incessantly subject to mutual “contamination,” whereby the working
of any one is incidentally affected by the bias and proclivities
inherent in all the rest; and in so far as these current habits and
customs in this way come to reënforce the predispositions comprised
under any one instinct or any given group of instincts, the bias
so accentuated comes to pervade the habits of thought of all the
members of the community and gives a corresponding obliquity to the
technological groundwork of the community. So, for instance, addiction
to magical, superstitious or religious conceptions will necessarily
have its effect on the conceptions and logic employed in technological
theory and practice, and will impair its efficiency by that much. A
people much given to punctilios of rank and respect of persons will
in some degree carry these habitual predilections over into the field
of workmanship and will allow considerations of authenticity, of
personal weight and consequence, to decide questions of technological
expediency; so that ideas which have none but a putative efficiency may
in this way come in for a large share in the state of the industrial
arts. A people whose culture has for any reason taken on a pronounced
coercive (predatory) character, with rigorous class distinctions, an
arbitrary governmental control, formidable gods and an authoritative
priesthood, will have its industrial organisation and its industrial
arts fashioned to meet the demands and the logic of these institutions.
Such an institutional situation exerts a great and pervasive constraint
on the technological scheme in which workmanship takes effect under
its rule, both directly by prescribing the things to do and the time,
place and circumstance of doing them, and indirectly through the habits
of thought induced in the working population living under its rule.
Innovation, the utilisation of newly acquired technological insight, is
greatly hindered by such institutional requirements that are enforced
by other impulses than the sense of workmanship.
In the known lower cultures such institutional complications as might
be expected greatly to hinder or deflect the sense of workmanship
are commonly neither large, rigorous nor obvious. Something of the
kind there apparently always is, in the way, for instance, of the
customary prerogatives and perquisites of the older men, as well as
their tutelary oversight of the younger generation and of the common
interests of the group.[18] When this rule of seniority is elaborated
into such set forms as the men’s (secret) societies, with exacting
initiatory ceremonies and class tabus,[19] its effect on workday
life is often very considerable, even though the community may show
little that can fairly be classed as autocracy, chieftainship, or
even aristocratic government. In many or all of these naïve and
early developments of authority, and perhaps especially in those
cultures where the control takes this inchoate form of a customary
“gerontocracy,”[20] its immediate effect is that an abiding sense
of authenticity comes to pervade the routine of daily life, such
as effectually to obstruct all innovation, whether in the ways and
means of work or in the conduct of life more at large. Control by a
gerontocracy appears to reach its best development and to run with the
fullest consistency and effect in communities where an appreciable
degree of predatory exploit is habitual, and the inference is ready,
and at least plausible, that this institution is substantially of a
predatory origin, that the principles (habits of thought) on which it
rests are an outgrowth of pugnacity, self-aggrandisement and fear.
Under favouring conditions of friction and jealousy between groups
these propensities will settle into institutional habits of authority
and deference, and so long as the resultant exercise of control
is vested by custom in the class of elders the direct consequence
is a marked abatement of initiative throughout the community and
a consequent appearance of conservatism and stagnation in its
technological scheme as well as in the customary usages under whose
guidance the community lives.[21] So these instinctive propensities
which have no primary significance in the way of workmanship may come
to count very materially in shaping the group’s technological equipment
of ideas and in deflecting the sense of workmanship from the naïve
pursuit of material efficiency.
The rule of the elders appears to have been extremely prevalent in the
earlier phases of culture. So much so that it may even be set down as
the most characteristic trait of the upper savagery and of the lower
barbarism; whether it takes the elaborately institutionalised form of
a settled gerontocracy, as among the Australian blacks, with sharply
defined class divisions and perquisites and a consistent subjection of
women and children; or the looser customary rule of the Elders, with
a degree of deference and circumspection on the part of the younger
generation and an uncertain conventional inferiority of women and
children, as seen among the pagans of the Malay peninsula,[22] the
Eskimo of the Arctic seaboard,[23] the Mincopies of the Andamans,[24]
or, on a somewhat higher level, the Pueblo Indians of the American
South-west.[25] Illustrative instances of such an inchoate organisation
of authority are very widely distributed, but the communities that
follow such a naïve scheme of life are commonly neither large,
powerful, wealthy, nor much in the public eye. The presumption is that
the sense of authenticity which pervades these and similar cultures,
amounting to a degree of tabu on innovation, has had much to do
with the notably slow advance of technology among savage peoples.
Such appears presumably to have been the prevalent run of the facts
throughout the stone age in all quarters of the Earth.
It is not altogether plain just what are the innate predispositions
chiefly involved in this primitive social control which at its
untroubled best develops into a “gerontocracy.” There can apparently
be little question but that its prime motive force is the parental
bent, expressing itself in a naïve impulsive surveillance of the
common interests of the group and a tutelage of the incoming
generation. But here as in other social relations the self-regarding
sentiments unavoidably come into play; so that (_a_) the tutelage
of the elders takes something of an authoritative tone and blends
self-aggrandisement with their quasi-parental solicitude, giving an
institutional outcome which makes the young generation subservient
to the elders, ostensibly for the mutual and collective good of
both parties to the relation; (_b_) if predatory or warlike exploit
in any degree becomes habitual to the community the sentiment of
self-aggrandisement gets the upper hand, and subservience to the
able-bodied elders becomes the dominant note in this relation of
tutelage, and their parental interest in the welfare of the incoming
generation in a corresponding degree goes into abeyance under the
pressure of the appropriate sentiments of pugnacity and self-seeking,
giving rise to a coercive régime of a more or less ruthless character;
(_c_) correlatively, along with unwearying insistence on their own
prerogatives and collective discretion, on the part of the elders,
there goes, on the part of the community at large, a correspondingly
habitual acceptance of their findings and the precedents they have
established, resulting in a universal addiction to the broad principles
of unmitigated authenticity, with no power anywhere capable of breaking
across the accumulated precedents and tabus. Even the ruling class of
elders, being an unwieldy deliberative body or executive committee,
is held by parliamentary inertia, as well as by a circumspect regard
for their prescriptive rights, to a due observance of the customary
law. The force of precedent is notoriously strong on the lower levels
of culture. Under the rule of the elders deference to precedent grows
into an inveterate habit in the young, and when presently these come to
take their turn as discretionary elders the habit of deference to the
precedents established by those who have gone before still binds them,
and the life and thought of the community never escape the dead hand of
the parent.
When worked out into an institution of control in this way, and crossed
with the other instinctive propensities that go to make governmental
authority, it is apparently unavoidable that the parental bent should
suffer this curious inversion. In the simplest and unsophisticated
terms, its functional content appears to be an unselfish solicitude
for the well-being of the incoming generation--a bias for the highest
efficiency and fullest volume of life in the group, with a particular
drift to the future; so that, under its rule, contrary to the dictum of
the economic theorists, future goods are preferred to present goods[26]
and the filial generation is given the preference over the parental
generation in all that touches their material welfare. But where the
self-regarding sentiments, self-complacency and self-abasement, come
largely into play, as they are bound to do in any culture that partakes
appreciably of a predatory or coercive character, the prerogatives of
the ruling class and the principles of authentic usage become canons
of truth and right living and presently take precedence of workmanlike
efficiency and the fulness of life of the group. It results that
conventional tests of validity presently accumulate and increasingly
deflect and obstruct the naïve pursuit of workmanlike efficiency, in
large part by obscuring those matters of fact that lend themselves to
technological insight.
But like other innate predispositions the parental bent continually
reasserts itself in its native and untaught character, as an ever
resilient solicitude for the welfare of the young and the prospective
fortunes of the group. As such it constantly comes in to reënforce the
instinct of workmanship and sustain interest in the direct pursuit of
efficiency in the ways and means of life. So closely in touch and so
concurrent are the parental bent and the sense of workmanship in this
quest of efficiency that it is commonly difficult to guess which of the
two proclivities is to be credited with the larger or the leading part
in any given line of conduct; although taken by and large the two are
after all fairly distinct in respect of their functional content. This
thorough and far-going concurrence of the two may perhaps be taken to
mean that the instinct of workmanship is in the main a propensity to
work out the ends which the parental bent makes worth while.
It seems to be these two predispositions in conjunction that have
exercised the largest and most consistent control over that growth
of custom and conventional principles that has standardised the life
of mankind in society and so given rise to a system of institutions.
This control bears selectively on the whole range of institutions
created by habitual response to the call of the other instincts and
has the effect of a “common-sense” surveillance which prevents the
scheme of life from running into an insufferable tangle of grotesque
extravagances. That their surveillance has not always been decisive
need scarcely be specifically called to mind; human culture in all
ages presents too many imbecile usages and principles of conduct to
let anyone overlook the fact that disserviceable institutions easily
arise and continue to hold their place in spite of the disapproval of
native common sense. The selective control exercised over custom and
usage by these instincts of serviceability is neither too close nor too
insistent. Wide, even extravagant, departures from the simple dictates
of this native common sense occur even within the narrow range of the
domestic and minor civil institutions, where these two common-sense
predispositions should concur to create a prescriptive usage looking
directly to the continuation and welfare of the race. Considerations,
or perhaps rather conventional preconceptions, running on other
grounds, as, for instance, on grounds of superstition or religion, of
propriety and gentility, of pecuniary or political expediency, have
come in for a large share in ordering the institutions of family and
neighbourhood life. Yet doubtless it is the parental bent and the sense
of workmanship in concurrence that have been the primary and persistent
factors in (selectively) shaping the household organisation among
all peoples, however great may have been the force of other factors,
instinctive and habitual, that have gone to diversify the variegated
outcome.
It appears, then, that so long as the parental solicitude and the
sense of workmanship do not lead men to take thought and correct the
otherwise unguarded drift of things, the growth of institutions--usage,
customs, canons of conduct, principles of right and propriety, the
course of cumulative habituation as it goes forward under the driving
force of the several instincts native to man,--will commonly run at
cross purposes with serviceability and the sense of workmanship.[27]
That such should be the case lies in the nature of things, as will
readily appear on reflection. Under given circumstances and under the
impulsion of a given instinctive propensity a given line of behaviour
becomes habitual and so is installed by use and wont as a principle
of conduct. The principle or canon of conduct so gained takes its
place among the habitual verities of life in the community and is
handed on by tradition. Under further impulsion of the same and other
instinctive propensities, and under altered circumstances, conduct in
other, unrelated lines will be referred to this received principle
as a bench-mark by which its goodness is appraised and to which all
conduct is accommodated, giving a result which is related to the
exigencies of the case only at the second remove and by channels of
habit which have only a conventional relevancy to the case. The farther
this manner of crossing and grafting of habitual elements proceeds
in the elaboration of principles and usage, the larger will be the
mass and the graver will be the complication of materially irrelevant
considerations present in any given line of conduct, the more extensive
and fantastic will be the fabric of conventionalities which come to
condition the response to any one of the innate human propensities, and
the more “irrelevant, incompetent and impertinent” will be the line of
conduct prescribed by use and wont. Except by recourse to the sense
of workmanship there is no evading this complication of ineptitudes
and irrelevancies, and such recourse is not easily had. For the bias
of settled habit goes to sustain the institutional fabric of received
sophistications, and these sophistications are bound in such a network
of give and take that a disturbance of the fabric at any point will
involve more or less of a derangement throughout.
This body of habitual principles and preconceptions is at the same
time the medium through which experience receives those elements
of information and insight on which workmanship is able to draw in
contriving ways and means and turning them to account for the uses of
life. And the conventional verities count in this connexion almost
wholly as obstructions to workmanlike efficiency. Worldly wisdom,
insight into the proprieties and expediencies of human intercourse,
the scheme of tabus, consanguinities, and magical efficacies, yields
very little that can effectually be turned to account for technological
ends. The experience gained by habituation under the stress of these
other proclivities and their derivative principles is necessarily
made use of in workmanship, and so enters into the texture of the
technological system, but a large part of it is of very doubtful value
for the purpose. Much of this experience runs at cross purposes with
workmanship, not only in that the putative information which this
experience brings home to men has none but a putative serviceability,
but also in that the habit of mind induced by its discipline obscures
that insight into matter of fact that is indispensable to workmanlike
efficiency.
* * * * *
But the most obstructive derangement that besets workmanship is what
may be called the self-contamination of the sense of workmanship
itself. This applies in a peculiar degree to the earlier or more
elementary phases of culture, but it holds true only with lessening
force throughout the later growth of civilisation. The hindrance
to technological efficiency from this source will often rise to
large proportions even in advanced communities, particularly where
magical, religious or other anthropomorphic habits of thought are
prevalent. The difficulty has been spoken of as anthropomorphism, or
animism,--which is only a more archaic anthropomorphism. The essential
trait of anthropomorphic conceptions, so far as bears on the present
argument, is that conduct, more or less fully after the human fashion
of conduct, is imputed to external objects; whether these external
objects are facts of observation or creatures of mythological fancy.
Such anthropomorphism commonly means an interpretation of phenomena in
terms of workmanship, though it may also involve much more than this,
particularly in the higher reaches of myth-making. But the simpler
anthropomorphic or animistic beliefs that pervade men’s every-day
thinking commonly amount to little if anything more than the naïve
imputation of a workmanlike propensity in the observed facts. External
objects are believed to do things; or rather it is believed that they
are seen to do things.
The reason of this imputation of conduct to external things is
simple, obvious, and intimate in all men’s apprehension; so much
so, indeed, as not readily to permit its being seen in perspective
and appreciated at anything like its effectual force. All facts of
observation are necessarily seen in the light of the observer’s habits
of thought, and the most intimate and inveterate of his habits of
thought is the experience of his own initiative and endeavours. It is
to this “apperception mass” that objects of apperception are finally
referred, and it is in terms of this experience that their measure is
finally taken. No psychological phenomenon is more familiar than this
ubiquitous “personal equation” in men’s apprehension of whatever facts
come within their observation.
The sense of workmanship is like all human instincts in the respect
that when the occasion offers, the agent moved by its impulse not
only runs through a sequence of actions suitable to the instinctive
end, but he is also given to dwelling, more or less sentimentally,
on the objects and activities about which his attention is engaged
by the promptings of this instinctive propensity. In so far as he is
moved by the instinct of workmanship man contemplates the objects with
which he comes in contact from the point of view of their relevancy to
ulterior results, their aptitude for taking effect in a consequential
outcome. Habitual occupation with workmanlike conceptions,--and in the
lower cultures all men and women are habitually so occupied, since
there is no considerable class or season not engaged in the quest of
a livelihood,--this occupation with workmanlike interests, leaving
the attention alert in the direction towards workmanlike phenomena,
carries with it habitual thinking in the terms in which the logic of
workmanship runs. The facts of observation are conceived as facts
of workmanship, and the logic of workmanship becomes the logic of
events. Their apprehension in these terms is easy, since it draws into
action the faculties of apperception and reflection that are already
alert and facile through habitual use, and it assimilates the facts
in an apperceptive system of relationships that is likewise ready
and satisfactory, convincing through habitual service and by native
proclivity to this line of systematisation. By instinct and habit
observed phenomena are apprehended from this (teleological) point of
view, and they are construed, by way of systematisation, in terms of
such an instinctive pursuit of some workmanlike end. In latterday
psychological jargon, human knowledge is of a “pragmatic” character.
As all men habitually act under the guidance of instincts, and
therefore by force of sentiment instinctively look to some end in all
activity, so the objects with which the primitive workman has to do are
also conceived as acting under impulse of an instinctive kind; and a
bent, a teleological or pragmatic nature, is in some degree imputed to
them and comes as a matter of course to be accepted as a constituent
element in their apprehended make-up. A putative pragmatic bent innate
in external things comes in this way to pass current as observed matter
of fact. By force of the sense of workmanship external objects are
in great part apperceived in respect of what they will do; and their
most substantial characteristic therefore, their intimate individual
nature, in so far as they are conceived as individual entities, is that
they will do things.
In the workmanlike apprehension of them the nature of things is
twofold: (_a_) what can be done with them as raw material for use
under the creative hand of the workman who makes things, and (_b_)
what they will do as entities acting in their own right and working
out their own ends. The former is matter of fact, the latter matter of
imputation; but both alike, and in the naïve apprehension of uncritical
men both equally, are facts of observation and elements of objective
knowledge. The two are, of course, of very unequal value for the
purposes of workmanship. It should seem, at least on first contact with
the distinction, that the former category alone can have effectually
conduced or contributed to workmanlike efficiency, and so it should be
the only substantial factor in the growth of technological insight and
proficiency: while the latter category of knowledge should presumably
have always been an unmitigated hindrance to effective work and to
technological advance. But such does not appear on closer scrutiny
to have been the case in the past: whether such sheer discrimination
against the technological serviceability of all these putative facts
would hold good in latterday civilisation is a question which may
perhaps best be left to the parties in interest in “pragmatic” and
theological controversy.
These two categories of knowledge, or of _cognoscenda_, are
incongruous, of course, and they seem incompatible when applied to the
same phenomena, the same external objects. But such incongruity does
not disturb anyone who is at all content to take facts at their face
value,--for both ways of apprehending the facts are equally given in
the face value of the facts apprehended. And on the known lower levels
of culture it appears that in the workman’s apprehension of the facts
with which he has to do there is no evident strain due to this twofold
nature and twofold interpretation of the objects of knowledge. So,
for instance, the Pueblo potter (woman) may (putatively) be aware of
certain inherent, quasi-spiritual, pragmatic qualities, claims and
proclivities personal to the clay beds from which her raw material
is drawn: different clay beds have, no doubt, a somewhat different
quasi-personality, which has, among other things, to do with the
goodness of the raw material they afford. Even the clay in hand will
have its pragmatic peculiarities and idiosyncracies which are duly
to be respected; and, notably, the finished pot is an entity with a
life-history of its own and with temperament, fortunes and fatalities
that make up the substance of good and evil in its world.[28] But all
that does not perceptibly affect the technology of the Pueblo potter’s
art, beyond carrying a sequence of ceremonial observance that may run
along by the side of the technological process; nor does it manifestly
affect the workmanlike use of the pot during its lifetime, except
that the pragmatic nature of the given pot will decide, on grounds
of ceremonial competency, to what use it may be put.[29] Matter of
fact and matter of imputation run along side by side in inextricable
contact but with slight apparent mutual interference across the line.
The potter digs her clay as best she has learned how, and it is a
matter of workmanlike efficiency, in which empirical knowledge of the
mechanical qualities of the material is very efficiently combined
with the potter’s trained proficiency in the discretionary use of her
tools; the tools, of course, also have their (putative) temperamental
idiosyncracies, but they are employed in her hands in uncritical
conformity with such matter-of-fact laws of physics as she has learned.
The clay is washed, kneaded and tempered with the same circumspect
regard to the opaque facts known about clay through long handling of
it. What and how much tempering material may best be used, and how
it is to be worked in, may all have a recondite explanation in the
subtler imputed traits of the clay; a certain clay may have a putative
quasi-spiritual affinity for certain tempering material; but the work
of selection and mixing is carried out with a watchful regard to the
mechanical character of the materials and without doubt that the given
materials will respond in definite, empirically ascertained ways to the
pressure brought on them by the potter’s hands, and without questioning
the matter of fact that such and so much of manipulation will mix
such and so much of tempering material with the given lot of clay.
The clay is “as wax in her hands;” what comes of it is the product of
her insight and proficiency. Still the pragmatic nature of all these
materials viewed as distinct entities is never to be denied, and in
those respects in which she does not creatively design, manipulate
and construct the work of her hands, its putative self-sufficiency of
existence, meaning and propensity goes on its own recognisances unshorn
and inalienable.
Technological efficiency rests on matter-of-fact knowledge, as
contrasted with knowledge of the traits imputed to external objects in
making acquaintance with them. Therefore every substantial advance in
technological mastery necessarily adds something to this body of opaque
fact, and with every such advance proportionably less of the behaviour
of inanimate things will come to be construed in terms of an imputed
workmanlike or teleological bent. At the same time the imputation of
a teleological meaning or workmanlike bent to the external facts that
are made use of is likely to take a more circumspect, ingenious and
idealised form. Under the circumstances that condition an increasing
technological mastery there is an ever-growing necessity to avoid
conflict between the imputed traits of external objects and those
facts of their behaviour that are constantly in evidence in their
technological use. In so far, therefore, as a simple and immediate
imputation of workmanlike self-direction is seen manifestly to traverse
the facts of daily use its place will be supplied by more shadowy
anthropomorphic agencies that are assumed to carry on their life
and work in some degree of detachment from the material objects in
question, and to these anthropomorphic agencies which so lie obscurely
in the background of the observed facts will be assigned a larger and
larger share of the required initiative and self-direction. For so
alien to mankind, with its instinctive sense of workmanship, is the
mutilation of brute creation into mere opaque matter-of-fact, and
so indefeasibly does the “consciousness of kind” assert itself, that
each successive renunciation of such an imputed bias of workmanship in
concrete objects is sought to be redeemed by pushing the imputation
farther into the background of observed phenomena and running their
putative workmanlike bias in more consummately anthropomorphic terms.
So an animistic conception[30] of things comes presently to supplement,
and in part supplant, the more naïve and immediate imputation of
workmanship, leading up to farther and more elaborate myth-making;
until in the course of elaboration and refinement there may emerge a
monotheistic and providential Creator seated in an infinitely remote
but ubiquitous space of four dimensions.
This imputation of bias and initiative has doubtless lost ground
among civilised communities, as contrasted with the matter-of-fact
apprehension of things, so that where it once was the main body of
knowledge it now is believed to live and move only within that margin
of things not yet overtaken by matter-of-fact information,--at least
so it is held in the vainglorious scepticism of the Western culture.
Meantime it is to be noted that the proclivity to impute a workmanlike
bias to external facts has not been lost, nor has it become inoperative
even among the adepts of Occidental scepticism. On the one hand it
still enables the modern scientist to generalise his observations in
terms of causation,[31] and on the other hand it has preserved the life
of God the Father unto this day. It is as the creative workman, the
Great Artificer, that he has taken his last stand against the powers of
spiritual twilight.
Out of the simpler workday familiarity with the raw materials and
processes employed in industry, in the lower cultures, there emerges
no system of knowledge avowed as such; although in all known instances
of such lower cultures the industrial arts have taken on a systematic
character, such as often to give rise to definite, extensive and
elaborate technological processes as well as to manual and other
technological training; both of which will necessarily involve
something like an elementary theory of mechanics systematised on
grounds of matter-of-fact, as well as a practical routine of empirical
ways and means. In the lower cultures the growth of this body of opaque
facts and of its systematic coherence is simply the habitual growth
of technological procedure. Considered as a knowledge of things it is
prosy and unattractive; it does not greatly appeal to men’s curiosity,
being scarcely interesting in itself, but only for the use to be
made of it. Its facts are not lighted up with that spiritual fire of
pragmatic initiative and propensity which animates the same phenomena
when seen in the light of an imputed workmanlike behaviour and so
construed in terms of conduct. On the other hand, when the phenomena
are interpreted anthropomorphically they are indued with a “human
interest,” such as will draw the attention of all men in all ages, as
witness the worldwide penchant for myth-making.
Such animistic imputation of end and endeavour to the facts of
observation will in no case cover the whole of men’s apprehension of
the facts. It is a matter of imputation, not of direct observation;
and there is always a fringe of opaque matter-of-fact bound up with
even the most animistically conceived object. Such is unavoidably the
case. The animistic conception imputes to its subject a workmanlike
propensity to do things, and such an imputation necessarily implies
that, as agent, the object in question engages in something like a
technological process, a workmanlike manipulation wherein he has his
will with the raw materials upon which his workmanlike force and
proficiency spends itself. Workmanship involves raw material, and in
the respect in which this raw material is passively shaped to his
purposes by the workman’s manipulation it is not conceived to be
actively seeking its own ends on its own initiative. So that by force
of the logic of workmanship the imputation of a workmanlike (animistic)
propensity to brute facts, itself involves the assumption of crude
inanimate matter as a correlate of the putative workmanlike agent. The
anthropomorphic fancy of the primitive workman, therefore, can never
carry the teleological interpretation of phenomena to such a finality
but that there will always in his apprehension be an inert residue of
matter-of-fact left over. The material facts never cease to be, within
reasonable limits, raw material; though the limits may be somewhat
vague and shifting. And this residue of crude matter-of-fact grows and
gathers consistency with experience and always remains ready to the
hand of the workman for what it is worth, unmagnified and unbeautified
by anthropomorphic interpretation.
The animistic, or better the anthropomorphic, elements so comprised by
imputation in the common-sense apprehension of things will pass in the
main for facts of observation. With the current of time and experience
this may under favourable conditions grow into a developed animistic
system and come to the dignity of myth, and ultimately of theology.
But as it plays its part in the cruder uses of technology its common
and most obstructive form is the inchoate animism or anthropomorphic
bias spoken of above. In its bearing on technological efficiency, it
commonly vitiates the available facts in a greater or less degree.
Matter-of-fact knowledge alone will serve the uses of workmanship,
since workmanship is effective only in so far as its outcome is
matter-of-fact work. Any higher and more subtle potencies found in or
imputed to the facts about which the artificer is engaged can only
serve to divert and defeat his efforts, in that they lead him into
methods and expedients that have only a putative effect.
* * * * *
This obstructive force of the anthropomorphic interpretation of
phenomena is by no means the same in all lines of activity. The
difficulty, at least in the earlier days, seems to be greatest along
those lines of craft where the workman has to do with the mechanical,
inanimate forces--the simplest in point of brute concreteness and the
least amenable to a consistent interpretation in animistic terms.
While man is conventionally distinguished from brute creation as a
“tool-using animal,” his early progress in the devising and use of
efficient tools, taking the word in its native sense, seems to have
gone forward very slowly, both absolutely and as contrasted with those
lines of workmanship in which he could carry his point by manual
dexterity unaided by cunningly devised implements and mechanical
contrivances;[32] and still more striking is the contrast between
the incredibly slow and blindfold advance of the savage culture
shown in the sequence of those typical stone implements which serve
conventionally as land-marks of the early technology, on the one hand,
and the concomitant achievements of the same stone-age peoples in the
domestication and use of plants and animals on the other hand.
No man can offer a confident conjecture as to how long a time and what
a volume of experience was taken up in the growth of technological
insight and proficiency up to the point when the neolithic period
begins in European prehistory. In point of duration it has been found
convenient to count it up roughly in units of geologic time, where a
thousand years are as a day. Attempts to reduce it to such units as
centuries or millennia have hitherto not come to anything appreciable.
In the present state of information on this head it is doubtless a safe
conjecture that the interval between the beginning of the human era and
the close of palæolithic time, say in Europe or within the cultural
sequence in which Europe belongs, is to be taken as some multiple of
the interval that has elapsed from the beginning of the neolithic
culture in Europe to the present;[33] and the neolithic period itself
was in its turn no doubt of longer duration than the history of Europe
since the bronze first came in.[34]
The series of stone implements recovered from palæolithic deposits show
the utmost reach of palæolithic technology on its mechanical side,
in the way of workmanlike mastery of brute matter simply; for these
implements are the tools of the tool-makers of that technological era.
They indicate the ultimate terms of the technological situation on the
mechanical side, for the craftsman working in more perishable materials
could go no farther than these primary elements of the technological
equipment would carry him.
The strict limitation imposed on the technology of any culture, on its
mechanical side, by the “state of the industrial arts” in respect of
the primary tools and materials available, whether availability is a
question of knowledge or of material environment, is illustrated, for
instance, by the case of the Eskimo, the North-west Coast Indians,
or some of the islands of the South Sea. In each of these cultures,
perhaps especially in that of the Eskimo, technological mastery had
been carried as far as the circumstances of the case would permit,
and in each case the decisive circumstances that limit the scope and
range of workmanship are the character of the primary tools of the
tool-maker and the limits of his knowledge of the mechanical properties
of the materials at his disposal for such use. The Eskimo culture, for
instance, is complete after its kind, worked out to the last degree
of workmanlike mastery possible with the Eskimo’s knowledge of those
materials on which he depended for his primary tools and on which
he was able to draw for the raw materials of his industry. At the
same time the Eskimo shows how considerable a superstructure of the
secondary mechanic arts may be erected on a scant groundwork of the
primary mechanical resources.[35]
In the light of such a familiar instance as the Eskimo or the
Polynesian culture it is evident that very much must be allowed, in
the case, _e. g._, of the European stone age, for work in perishable
materials that have disappeared; but after all allowance of this
kind, the showing for palæolithic man is not remarkable, considering
the ample time allowed him, and considering also that, in Europe at
least, he was by native gift nowise inferior to some of the racial
elements that still survive in the existing population and that are not
notoriously ill furnished either in the physical or the intellectual
respect. And what is true of palæolithic times as regards the native
character of this population is true in a more pronounced degree for
later prehistoric times.[36]
The very moderate pace of the technological advance in early times in
the mechanic arts stands out more strikingly when it is contrasted with
what was accomplished in those arts, or rather in those occupations,
that have to do immediately with living matter. Some of the crop
plants, for instance, and presently some of the domestic animals,
make their appearance in Denmark late in the period of the kitchen
middens; which falls in the early stone age of the Danish chronology,
that is to say in the early part of the neolithic period as counted in
terms of the European chronology at large. These, then, are improved
breeds of plants and animals, very appreciably different from their
wild ancestors, arguing not only a shrewd insight and consistent
management in the breeding of these domesticated races but also a
long continued and intelligent use of these items of technological
equipment, during which the nature and uses of the plants and animals
taken into domestication must have been sufficiently understood and
taken advantage of, at the same time that a workmanlike selection and
propagation of favourable variations was carried out. Some slight
reflection on what is implied in the successful maintenance, use and
improvement of several races of crop plants and domestic animals will
throw that side of the material achievements of the kitchen-midden
peoples into sufficiently high contrast with their chipped flint
implements and the degree of mechanical insight and proficiency which
these implements indicate.
To this Danish illustrative case it may of course be objected, and with
some apparent reason, that these plants and animals which begin to come
in evidence in a state of domestication in the kitchen middens, and
which presently afforded the chief means of life to the later stone-age
population, were introduced in a domestic state from outside; and
that this technological gain was the product of another and higher
culture than that into which they were thus intruded. The objection
will have what force it may; the facts are no doubt substantially
as set forth. However, the domestication and use of these races of
plants and animals embodied no less considerable a workmanlike mastery
of its technological problem wherever it was worked out, whether in
Denmark--as is at least highly improbable--or in Turkestan, as may
well have been the case. And the successful introduction of tillage
and cattle-breeding among the kitchen-midden peoples from a higher
culture, without the concomitant introduction of a corresponding gain
in the mechanic arts from the same source, leaves the force of the
argument about as it would be in the absence of this objection. The
comparative difficulty of acquiring the mechanic arts, as compared
with the arts of husbandry, would appear in much the same light
whether it were shown in the relatively slow acquirement of these arts
through a home growth of technological mastery or in the relatively
tardy and inept borrowing of them from outside. So far as bears on
the present question, much the same habits of mind take effect in the
acquirement of such a technological gain whether it takes place by
home growth or by borrowing from without. In either case the point
is that the peoples of the kitchen-middens appear to have been less
able to learn the use of serviceable mechanical expedients than to
acquire the technology of tillage and cattle-breeding. The appearance
of tillage and cattle-breeding (“mixed farming”) at this period of
Danish prehistory, without the concomitant appearance of anything like
a similar technological gain in the mechanic arts, argues either (_a_)
that in the culture from which husbandry was ultimately borrowed
and in which the domestication was achieved there was no similarly
substantial gain made in the mechanic arts at the same time, so that
this culture from which the crop plants and animals originally came
into the North of Europe had no corresponding mechanical gain to offer
along with husbandry; or (_b_) that the kitchen-midden peoples, and the
other peoples through whose hands the arts of husbandry passed on their
way to the North, were unable to profit in a like degree by what was
offered them in the primary mechanic arts. The known evidence seems to
say that the visible retardation in the mechanic arts, as compared with
husbandry, in prehistoric Denmark was due partly to the one, partly to
the other of these difficulties.
To avoid confusion and misconception it may be pertinent to recall
that, taken absolutely, the rate and magnitude of advance in the
primary mechanic arts in Denmark at this time was very considerable;
so much so indeed that the visible absolute gain in this respect has
so profoundly touched the imagination of the students of that culture
as to let them overlook the disparity, in point of the rate of gain,
between the mechanic arts and husbandry. In the same connection it
is also to be remarked that the entire neolithic culture of the
kitchen-middens, as well as their husbandry, was introduced from
outside of Europe, having been worked out in its early rudiments before
the kitchen-midden peoples reached the Baltic seaboard. At the same
time the raw materials for the mechanic arts of the neolithic culture
were available to the kitchen-midden technologist in abundant quantity
and unsurpassed quality; while the raw material of husbandry, the crop
plants and domestic animals, were exotics. Further, in point of race,
and therefore presumably in point of native endowment, the peoples of
the Baltic seaboard at that time were substantially the same mixture of
stocks that has in modern times carried the technology of the mechanic
arts in western Europe and its colonies to a pitch of mastery never
approached before or elsewhere. And the retardation in the mechanic
arts as contrasted with husbandry is no greater, probably less, in
neolithic Denmark than in any other culture on the same general level
of efficiency.
Wherever the move may have been made, in one or in several places,
and whatever may have been the particular circumstances attending the
domestication and early use of crop plants and animals, the case sums
up to about the same result. Through long ages of work and play men
(perhaps primarily women) learned the difficult and delicate crafts of
husbandry and carried their mastery of these pursuits to such a degree
of proficiency, and followed out the lead given by these callings
with such effect, that by the (geologic) date of early neolithic
times in Europe virtually all the species of domesticable animals in
three continents had been brought in and had been bred into improved
races.[37] At the same time the leading crop plants of the old world,
those on whose yield the life of the Western peoples depends today,
had been brought under cultivation, improved and specialised with
such effect that all the advance that has been made in these respects
since the early neolithic period is greatly less than what had been
accomplished up to that time. By early neolithic times as counted in
West Europe, or by the early bronze age as counted in western Asia,
the leading domestic animals had been distributed, in domesticated and
improved breeds, throughout central and western Asia and the inhabited
regions of Europe and North Africa. The like is true for the main
crop plants that now feed the occidental peoples, except that these,
in domesticated and specialised breeds, were distributed through this
entire cultural region at an appreciably earlier date,--earlier by some
thousands of years.[38] In late modern times there have been added
to the civilised world’s complement of crop plants a very large and
important contingent whose domestication and development was worked out
in America and the regions of the Pacific; though most of these belong
in the low latitudes and are on that account less available to the
Western culture than what has come down from the prehistoric cultures
of the old world. These are also the work of the stone age, in large
part no doubt dating back to palæolithic times.
America, with the Polynesian and Indonesian cultural regions, shows
the correlation and the systematic discrepancy in time between the
rate, range and magnitude of the advance in tillage on the one
hand and of the primary mechanic arts on the other hand. When this
culture was interrupted it had, in the mechanical respect, reached
an advanced neolithic phase at its best; but its achievements in the
crop plants are perhaps to be rated as unsurpassed by all that has
been done elsewhere in all time.[39] In the primary mechanic arts this
cultural region had in the same time reached a stage of perfection
comparable at its best with pre-dynastic Egypt, or neolithic Denmark,
or pre-Minoan Crete. The really great advance achieved was in the
selection, improvement, use and cultivation of the crop plants; and
not in any appreciable degree even in the mechanical appliances
employed in the cultivation and consumption of these crops; though
something considerable is to be noted in this latter respect in such
inventions as the mandioca squeezer and the metate; and great things
were done in the way of irrigation and road building.[40] But the
contrast, for instance, between the metate and the contrivances for
making paper bread on the one side, and the technologically consummate
corn-plant (maize) on the other, should be decisive for the point
here in question. The mechanic appliances of corn cultivation had not
advanced beyond the digging stick, a rude hoe and a rudimentary spade,
though here as well as in other similar connections the local use of
well-devised irrigation works, terraced fields,[41] and graneries is
not to be overlooked; but the corn itself had been brought from its
grass-like ancestral form to the maize of the present corn crop. Like
most of the American crop plants the maize under selective cultivation
had been carried so far from its wild form as no longer to stand a
chance of survival in the wild state, and indeed so far that it is
still a matter of controversy what its wild ancestor may have been.
Perhaps the races of this American-Polynesian region are gifted
with some special degree of spiritual (instinctive) fitness for
plant-breeding. They seem to be endowed with a particular proclivity
for sympathetically identifying themselves with and patiently waiting
upon the course of natural phenomena, perhaps especially the phenomena
of animate nature, which never seem alien or incomprehensible to the
Indian. Such at least is the consistent suggestion carried by their
myths, legends and symbolism. The typical American cosmogony is a
tissue of legends of fecundity and growth, even more than appears
to hold true of primitive cosmogonies elsewhere.[42] And yet some
caution in accepting such a generalisation is necessary in view,
for instance, of the mythological output along similar lines on the
Mediterranean seaboard in early times. By native gift the Indian is
a “nature-faker,” given to unlimited anthropomorphism. Mechanical,
matter-of-fact appreciation of external and material phenomena seems
to be in a peculiar degree difficult, irrelevant and incongruous with
the genius of the race. But even if it should seem that this race, or
group of races, is peculiarly given to such sympathetic interpretation
of natural phenomena in terms of human instinct, the difference between
them and the typical racial stocks of the old world in this respect is
after all a difference in degree, not in kind. The like proclivity is
in good evidence throughout, wherever any race of men have endeavoured
to put their acquaintance with natural phenomena into systematic form.
The bond of combination in the making of systems, whether cosmologic,
mythic, philosophic or scientific, has been some putative human trait
or traits. It may be that in their appreciation of facts and their
making of systems the American races have by some peculiar native gift
been inclined to an interpretation in terms of fertility, growth,
nurture and life-cycles.
* * * * *
Any predisposition freely to accept and use the deliverances of
sensible perception on their own recognisances simply, in the terms in
which they come, and to connect them up in a system of knowledge in
their own terms, without imputation of a spiritual (anthropomorphic)
substratum,--for the purposes of workmanship such a predisposition
should be of the first importance for effective work in the mechanic
arts; and a strong instinctive bias to the contrary should be
correspondingly pernicious. Any instinctive bias to colour, distort
and derange the facts by imputing elements of human nature will
unavoidably act to hinder and deflect the agent from an effectual
pursuit of mechanical design. But the like is not true in the same
degree as regards men’s dealings with animate nature. Anthropomorphic
interpretation is more at home and less disserviceable here. With less
serious derangement in the objective results, plants and animals may
be construed to have a conscious purpose in life and to pursue their
ends somewhat after the human fashion; witness the facility with which
the story-tellers recount plausible episodes (feigned or real) from the
life of animals and plants, and the readiness with which such tales
get a hearing. Readers and hearers find no great difficulty, if any,
in giving make-believe credence to the tales so long as they recount
only such adventures as are physically possible to the animals of
which (whom?) they are told; the hearers are always ready to go with
the story-teller down this highway of make-believe into the subhuman
fairy land. Mechanical phenomena, happenings in the mechanic arts,
characteristics of the existence of inanimate objects and the changes
which they undergo, lend themselves with much less happy effect to the
anthropomorphic story-teller’s make-believe. Episodes from the feigned
life-history of tools, machines and raw materials are not drawn on with
anything like the same frequency, nor do the tales that recount them
meet with the same untiring attention. There is always an unreality
about them which even the most robust make-believe can overcome only
for a short and doubtful interval. Witness the relative barrenness
of primitive folk-tales on this inanimate side, as compared with the
exuberance of the myths and legends that interpret the life of plants
and animals; and where inanimate phenomena are drawn into the net of
personation it happens almost unavoidably that a feigned person is
thrown into the foreground of the tale plausibly to take the part of
bearer, controller or intrigant in the episodes related.[43]
Even more to the same purpose, as showing the same insidious facility
of anthropomorphic interpretation, are the bona-fide constructions of
scientists and pseudo-scientists running on the imputation of purpose
and deliberation to explain the behaviour of animals. Indeed, at the
worst, and still in good faith, it may go so far as to impute some sort
of quasi-conscious striving on the part of plants.[44] As good and
temperate an instance as may be had of such anthropomorphic imputation
of workmanlike gifts is afforded, for instance, by the work of Romanes
on the behaviour of animals.[45] It goes to show how very plausibly
some of the lower animals may be credited with these spiritual
aptitudes and how far and well the imputation may be made to serve
the scientist’s end. So plausible, indeed, is this anthropomorphism
as to disarm even the scepticism of the trained sceptic. It will also
appear in the later course of this inquiry that anthropomorphism, and
especially the imputation of workmanship, has borne a much greater part
in the work of the scientists than the members of that craft would like
to avow; so that the scientific use of the anthropomorphic fancy is by
no means a unique distinction of Romanes and the large group or school
of biologists of which his work is typical; nor does the presence of
this bias in their work by any means strip it of scientific value.
In point of fact, it seems to touch the substance of their objective
results much less seriously than might be apprehended.
The modern scientist’s watchward is scepticism and caution; and what
he may be led to do concessively, in spite of himself, by too broad a
consciousness of kind, the savage does joyously and with conviction.
His measure of what he sees about him is himself, and his apprehension
of what takes place is a comprehension of how such things would be
done in the course of human conduct if they were physically possible
to man. The man (more often perhaps the woman) who busies himself with
the beginnings of plant and animal-breeding will sympathetically put
himself in touch with their inclinations and aptitudes with a degree of
intimacy and assurance never approached by the followers of Romanes.
It is for him to use common sense and fall in with the drift and
idiosyncracies of these others who are, mysteriously, denied the gift
of speech. By the unambiguous leading of the anthropomorphic fancy he
puts himself in the place of his ward, his animal or vegetable friend
and cousin, and can so learn something of what is going on in the
putative vegetable or animal mind, through patient observation of what
comes to light in response to his attentions in the course of his joint
life with them. The plant or animal manifestly does things, and the
question follows, Why do these speechless others do those things which
they are seen to do?--things which often do not lie within the range
of things desirable to be accomplished, humanly speaking. Manifestly
these non-human others seek other ends and seek them in other ways than
man. Some of the objective results which it lies in their nature to
accomplish in so working out their scheme of life are useful to their
human cousins; and it stands to reason that when they are dealt kindly
with, when man takes pains to further their ends in life, they will
take thought and respond somewhat in kind. To turn the proposition
about, those things which men find, by trial and error, to bring a
good and kindly return from the speechless others are manifestly
well received by them and must obviously be of a kind to fall in
with their bent and minister to their inclinations; and prudence and
fellow-feeling combine to lead men farther along the way so indicated
at each move in the propitious direction.
To the unsophisticated--and even to the sophisticated sceptic--it
is manifest that animate objects do things. What they aim to do, as
well as the logic of their conduct in carrying out their designs,
are not precisely the same as in the case of man. But by staying by
and learning what they are bent on doing, and observing how they go
about it, any peculiarity in the nature of their needs, spiritual
and physical, and in their manner of approaching their ends, may be
learned and assimilated; and their life-work can be furthered and
amplified by judiciously ministering to their ascertained needs and
making the way smooth for them in what they undertake, so long as their
undertakings are such as man is interested in bringing to a successful
issue. Of course they work toward ends that are good in their sight,
though not always such as men would seek; but that is their affair
and is not to be pried into beyond the bounds of a decent neighbourly
interest. And they work by methods in some degree other, often wiser,
than those of men, and these it is man’s place to learn if he would
profit by their companionship.
Much of the scheme of life of these speechless others is a scheme
of fecundity, growth and nurture, and all these matters are natural
to women rather than to men; and so in the early stages of culture
the consciousness of kind and congruity has made it plain to all the
parties in interest that the care of crops and animals belongs in the
fitness of things to women. Indeed there is such a spiritual (magical)
community between women and the fecundity of animate things that any
intrusion of the men in the affairs of growth and fertility may by
force of contrast come to be viewed with the liveliest apprehension.
Since the life of plants and animals is primarily of a spiritual
nature, since the initiative and trend of vegetable and animal life is
of this character, it follows that some sort of propitious spiritual
contact and communion should be maintained between mankind and that
world of fertility and growth in which these animate things live and
move. So a line of communication, of a spiritual kind, is kept open
with the realm of the speechless ones by means of a sign-language
systematised into ritual, and by a symbolism of amity reënforced with
gifts and professions of good-will. Hence a growth of occult meanings
and ceremonial procedure, to which the argument will have to return
presently.[46]
By this indirect, animistic and magical, line of approach the
matter-of-fact requirements of tillage and cattle-breeding can be
determined and fulfilled in a very passable fashion, given only the
necessary time and tranquillity. Time is by common consent allowed the
stone-age culture in abundant measure; and common consent is coming,
through one consideration and another, to admit that the requisite
conditions of peace and quiet industry are also a characteristic
feature of that early time. The fact, broad and profound, that the
known crop plants and animals were for the most part domesticated in
that time is perhaps in itself the most persuasive argument for the
prevalence of peaceful conditions among those peoples, whoever they
may have been, to whose efforts, or rather to whose routine of genial
superstition, this domestication is to be credited. This domestication
and use of plants and animals was of course not a mere blindfold
diversion. Here as ever the instinct of workmanship was present
with its prompting to make the most of what comes to hand; and the
technology of husbandry, like the technology of any other industrial
enterprise, has been the outcome of men’s abiding penchant for making
things useful.
The peculiar advantage of tillage and cattle-breeding over the primary
mechanic arts, that by which the former arts gained and kept their
lead, seems to have been the simple circumstance that the propensity
of workmanlike men to impute a workmanlike (teleological) nature to
phenomena does not leave the resulting knowledge of these phenomena
so wide of the mark in the case of animate nature as in that of brute
matter. It will probably not do to say that the anthropomorphic
imputation has been directly serviceable to the technological end
in the case of tillage and cattle-breeding; it is rather that the
disadvantage or disserviceability of such an interpretation of facts
has been greater in the mechanic arts in early times. The instinct of
workmanship, through the sentimental propensity to impute workmanlike
qualities and conduct to external facts, has defeated itself more
effectually in the mechanic arts. And as in the course of time, under
favourable local conditions, the habitual imputation of teleological
capacities has in some measure fallen into disuse, the mechanic arts
have gained; and every such gain has in its turn, as conditions
permitted, acted cumulatively toward the discredit and disuse of the
teleological method of knowledge, and therefore toward an acceleration
of technological gain in this field.
The inanimate factors which early man has to turn to account as a
condition precedent to any appreciable advance in the industrial arts,
outside of husbandry and of the use of fruits and fibres associated
with it, do not lend themselves to an effectual approximation from the
anthropomorphic side. Flint and similar minerals are refractory, they
have no spiritual nature and no scheme or cycle of life that can be
interpreted in some passable fashion as the outcome of instinctive
propensities and workmanlike management. Anthropomorphic insight
does not penetrate into the secret ways of brute matter, for all the
reasonable concession to idiosyncracies, to recondite conceits, occult
means and devious methods, with which unsophisticated man stands ready
to meet them. He can see as far into a millstone as anyone along that
line; but that is not far enough to be of any use, and he is debarred
by his workmanlike common sense from systematically looking into the
matter along any other line. It is only the blindfold, unsystematic
accretions of opaque fact coming in, disjointed and unsympathetic, from
the inhuman side of his technological experience that can help him out
here. And experience of that kind can come upon him only inadvertently,
for he has no basis on which to systematise these facts as they come,
and so he has no means of intelligently seeking them. His intelligent
endeavours to get at the nature of things will perforce go on the mass
of knowledge which his intelligence has already comprehended, which
is a knowledge of human conduct. Anthropomorphism is almost wholly
obstructive in this field of brute matter, and in early times, before
much in the way of accumulated matter-of-fact knowledge had forced
itself upon men, the propensity to a teleological interpretation
seems to have been nearly decisive against technological progress in
the primary and indispensable mechanic arts. And in later phases of
culture, where anthropomorphic interpretations of workmanship have been
worked out into a rounded system of magic and religion, they have at
times brought the technological advance to a full stop, particularly on
the mechanical side, and have even led to the cancelment of gains that
should have seemed secure.
It is likewise a notable fact that, as already intimated above,
myth and legend have found this brute matter as refractory in their
service as the instinct of workmanship has found it in the genesis of
technology; and for the good reason that the same human penchant for
teleological insight and elaboration has ruled in the one as in the
other. Inanimate matter and the phenomena in which inanimate matter
manifests its nature and force have, of course, taken a large place
in folk-lore; but the folk-lore, whether myth, legend or magic, in
which inanimate matter is conceived as speaking in its own right and
working out its own spiritual content is relatively very scant. In
magic it commonly plays a part as an instrumentality only, and indeed
as an instrument which owes its magical efficacy to some efficacious
circumstance external to it. It has most frequently an induced rather
than intrinsic efficacy, being the vehicle whereby the worker of magic
materialises and conveys his design to its execution. It is susceptible
of magical use, rather than creative of magical effects.[47] No
doubt this characterisation of the magical offices of inert matter
applies to early and primitive times and situations rather than to the
high-wrought later systems of occult science and alchemical lore that
are built on some appreciable knowledge of metallurgy and chemical
reactions. So likewise early myth and legend have had to take recourse
to the intervention of personal, or at least animate agents, to make
headway in the domain of brute matter, which figures commonly as
means in the hands of manlike agents of some sort, rather than as a
self-directing agent with initiative and a natural bent of its own. The
phenomena of inanimate nature are likely to be thrown into the hands of
such putative agents, who are then conceived to control them and turn
them to account for ulterior ends not given in the native character of
the inanimate objects themselves.[48] Even so exceptionally available
a range of phenomena as those of fire have not escaped this inglorious
eventuality. In the mythical legends of fire it will be found that
the fire and all its works come into the plot of the story only as
secondary elements, and the interest centres about the fortunes of some
manlike agency to whose initiative and exploits all the phenomena of
fire are referred as their cause or occasion.[49] The legends of fire
have commonly become legends of a fire-bringer, etc.,[50] and have come
to turn about the plots and counterplots of anthropomorphic beasts and
divinities who are conceived to have wrestled for, with and about the
use of fire.
So, on the other hand, as an illustration from the side of technology,
to show how matters stood in this connection through the best days of
anthropomorphism, fire had been in daily and indispensable use through
an indefinite series of millennia before men, in the early modern
times of Occidental civilisation, learned the use of a chimney. And
all that hindered the discovery of this simple mechanical expedient
seems to have been the fatal propensity of men to impute a teleological
nature and workmanlike design to this phenomenon with which no truce or
working arrangement can be negotiated in spiritual terms.[51]
* * * * *
A doubt may plausibly suggest itself as to the competency of such
an explanation of these phenomena. It would seem scarcely to lie
in the nature of an instinct of workmanship to enlist the workman
in the acquisition of knowledge which he cannot use, and guide him
in elaborating it into a system which will defeat his own ends; to
build up obstructions to its own working, and yet in the long run to
overcome them. In part this discrepancy in the outcome arises from the
fact that the sense of workmanship affords a norm of systematisation
for the facts that come into knowledge. This leads to something like
a dramatisation of the facts, whereby they fall into some sort of
a sequence of conduct among themselves, become personalised, are
conceived as gifted with discrimination, inclinations, preferences and
initiative; and in so far as the facts are conceived to be involved
in immaterial or hyperphysical relations of this character they
cannot effectually be made use of for the purposes of technology. All
conceptions that exceed the scope of material fact are useless for
technology, and in so far as such conceptions are intruded into the
body of information drawn on by the workman they become obstructive.
But in good part the discrepancies of the outcome are due to
complications with an instinctive curiosity, the presence of which has
tacitly been assumed throughout the argument,--an “idle” curiosity by
force of which men, more or less insistently, want to know things,
when graver interests do not engross their attention. Comparatively
little has been made of this instinctive propensity by the students of
culture, though the fact of its presence in human nature is broadly
recognised by psychologists,[52] and the like penchant comes in
evidence among the lower animals, as appears in many investigations
of animal behaviour.[53] Indeed, it has been taken somewhat lightly,
in a general way, as being a genial infirmity of human nature rather
than a creative factor in civilisation. And the reason of its being
dealt with in so slight a manner is probably to be found in the nature
of the instinct itself. With the instinct of workmanship it shares
that character of pliancy and tractability common in some degree to
the whole range of instincts, and especially characteristic of those
instinctive predispositions that distinguish human nature from the
simpler and more refractory spiritual endowment of the lower animals.
Like the other instinctive propensities, it is to be presumed, the
idle curiosity takes effect only within the bounds of that metabolic
margin of surplus energy that comes in evidence in all animal life,
but that appears in larger proportions in the “higher” animals and in
a peculiarly obtrusive manner in the life of man. It seems to be only
after the demands of the simpler, more immediately organic functions,
such as nutrition, growth and reproduction, have been met in some
passably sufficient measure that this vaguer range of instincts which
constitutes the spiritual predispositions of man can effectually draw
on the energies of the organism and so can go into effect in what
is recognised as human conduct. The wider the margin of disposable
energy, therefore, the more freely should the characteristically
human predispositions assert their sway, and the more nearly this
metabolic margin is drained by the elemental needs of the organism
the less chance should there be that conduct will be guided by what
may properly be called the spiritual needs of man. It is accordingly
characteristic of this whole range of vaguer and less automatically
determinate predispositions that they transiently yield somewhat
easily to the pressure of circumstances. This is eminently true of the
idle curiosity, as it is also true in a somewhat comparable degree
of the sense of workmanship. But these instincts at the same time,
and perhaps by the same fact, have also the other concomitant and
characteristically human trait of a ubiquitous resiliency whenever and
in so far as there is nothing to hinder. Their staying power is, in
a way, very great, though their driving force is neither massive nor
intractable. So that even though the idle curiosity, like the sense of
workmanship, may be momentarily thrust aside by more urgent interests,
yet its long-term effects in human culture are very considerable. Men
will commonly make easy terms with their curiosity when there is a
call to action under the spur of a more elemental need, and even when
circumstances appear to be favourable to its untroubled functioning a
sustained and consistent response to its incitement is by no means an
assured consequence. The common man does not eagerly pursue the quest
of the idle curiosity, and neither its guidance nor its award of fact
is mandatory on him.[54] Sporadic individuals who are endowed with
this supererogatory gift largely in excess of the common run, or who
yield to its enticements with very exceptional abandon, are accounted
dreamers, or in extreme cases their more sensible neighbours may even
rate them as of unsound mind. But the long-term consequences of the
common run of curiosity, helped out by such sporadic individuals in
whom the idle curiosity runs at a higher tension, counts up finally,
because cumulatively, into the most substantial cultural achievement of
the race,--its systematised knowledge and quasi-knowledge of things.
This instinctive curiosity, then, comes in now and again serviceably to
accelerate the gain in technological insight by bringing in material
information that may be turned to account, as well as by persistently
disturbing the habitual body of knowledge on which workmanship draws.
Human curiosity is doubtless an “idle” propensity, in the sense that
no utilitarian aim enters in its habitual exercise; but the material
information which is by this means drawn into the agent’s available
knowledge may none the less come to serve the ends of workmanship.
A good share of the facts taken cognisance of under the spur of
curiosity is of no effect for workmanship or for technological insight,
and that any of it should be found serviceable is substantially a
fortuitous circumstance. This character of “idleness,” the absence of a
utilitarian aim or utilitarian sentiment in the impulse of curiosity,
is doubtless a great part of the reason for its having received such
scant and rather slighting treatment at the hands of the psychologists
and of the students of civilisation alike.
Of the material so offered as knowledge, or fact, workmanship makes use
of whatever is available. In ways already indicated this utilisation
of ascertained “facts” is both furthered and hindered by the fact that
the information which comes to hand through the restless curiosity of
man is reduced to systematic shape, for the most part or wholly, under
canons of workmanship. For the large generality of human knowledge this
will mean that the raw material of observed fact is selectively worked
over, connected up and accumulated on lines of a putative teleological
order of things, cast in something like a dramatic form. From which
it follows that the knowledge so gained is held and carried over from
generation to generation in a form which lends itself with facility to
a workmanlike manipulation; it is already digested for assimilation
in a scheme of teleology that instinctively commends itself to the
workmanlike sense of fitness. But it also follows that in so far as
the personalised, teleological, or dramatic order so imputed to the
facts does not, by chance, faithfully reflect the causal relations
subsisting among these facts, the utilisation of them as technological
elements will amount to a borrowing of trouble. So that the concurrence
of curiosity and workmanship in the assimilation of facts in this
way may, and in early culture must, result in a retardation of the
technological advance, as contrasted with what might conceivably
have been the outcome of this work of the idle curiosity if it had
not been congenitally contaminated with the sense of workmanship and
thereby lent itself to conceptions of magical efficacy rather than to
mechanical efficiency.[55]
* * * * *
The further bearing of the parental bent on the early growth of
technology also merits attention in this connection. This instinct
and the sentiments that arise out of its promptings will have had
wide and free play in early times, when the common good of the group
was still perforce the chief economic interest in the habitual view
of all its members. It will have had an immediate effect on the
routine of life and work, presumably far beyond what is to be looked
for at any later stage. In the time when pecuniary competition had
not yet become an institution, grounded in the ownership of goods in
severalty and on their competitive consumption, the promptings of this
instinct will have been more insistent and will have met with a more
unguarded response than later on, after these institutional changes
have taken effect. A manifest and inveterate distaste of waste, in
great part traceable on analysis to this instinct, still persistently
comes in evidence in all communities, although it is greatly disguised
and distorted by the principles of conspicuous waste[56] among all
those peoples that have adopted private ownership of goods; and
serviceability to the common good likewise never ceases to command
at least a genial, speculative approval from the common run of men,
though this, too, may often take some grotesque or nugatory form due to
preconceptions of a pecuniary kind. This bias for serviceability and
against waste falls in directly with the promptings of the instinct
of workmanship, so that these two instinctive predispositions will
reënforce one another in conducing to an impersonally economical use
of materials and resources as well as to the full use of workmanlike
capacities, and to an endless taking of pains.
Some reference has also been made already to the technological value of
those kindly, “humane” sentiments that are bound up with the parental
bent,--if they may not rather be said substantially to constitute the
parental bent. It is of course in the non-mechanical arts of plant and
animal breeding that these humane extensions of the parental instinct
have their chief if not their only industrial value, both in furthering
the day’s work and in contributing to the advance of technology. In the
primary mechanic arts, _e. g._, an affectionate disposition of this
kind toward the inanimate appliances with which their work is occupied
does no doubt still, as ever, to some extent animate the workmen as
well as those who may have the remoter oversight of the work. But the
part played by such humane sentiments is after all relatively slight
in men’s dealings with brute matter, nor do they invariably conduce
to expeditious work or to a hard-headed insight into the mechanics
of those things with which this work has to do. In fact such tender
emotions so placed may somewhat easily become a source of mischief,
in a manner similar to the mischievous technological consequences of
anthropomorphism already spoken of.
It is otherwise with the bearing of the parental bent on the arts of
tillage and cattle-breeding. Here its promptings are almost wholly
serviceable to technological gain as well as to assiduous workmanship.
The kindly sentiments intrinsic to the parental bent are admirably in
place in the care of plants and animals, and their good effects in
so giving a propitious turn to the technology of early tillage and
cattle-breeding are only re-enforced by the parental and workmanlike
inclination to husband resources and make the most of what comes to
hand. The particular turn given to the anthropomorphic bias by this
line of preconceptions also is rather favourable than otherwise to
a working insight into the requirements of the art. And it has had
certain specific consequences for the early technology of husbandry, as
well as for the early culture in which husbandry was the chief material
factor, such as to call for a more circumstantial account.
Under the canons of workmanship a teleological animus--an instinctive
or “spiritual” nature--is imputed to the plants and animals brought
into domestication. The art of husbandry proceeds on the apprehended
needs and proclivities so imputed, and the technology of the craft
therefore takes the form of a “tendance” designed to further these
quasi-animistically conceived beings in whatever ends they have at
heart by virtue of their natural bent, and to so direct this tendance
upon them as will conduce to shaping their scheme of life in ways
advantageous to man. Like other sentient beings, as is known to
shrewd and unsophisticated man, they have spiritual needs as well
as material needs, and they are putatively to be influenced by the
attitude of their human cousins towards them and their conduct,
interests, and adventures. Further, their life and comfort are
manifestly conditioned by the run of the seasons and of the weather;
various inclemencies are discouraging and discomforting to them, as to
mankind, and other vicissitudes of rain and shine and tempest are of
the gravest consequence to them for good or ill. Under these delicate
circumstances it is incumbent on the keepers of crops and flocks to
walk circumspectly and cultivate the good-will not only of their crops
and flocks but also of the natural phenomena that count for so much in
the life of the crops and flocks. These natural phenomena are of course
also conceived anthropomorphically, in the sense that they too are seen
to follow their natural bent and do what they will,--or perhaps more
commonly what the personal agents will, in whose keeping these natural
phenomena are conceived to lie; for unsophisticated man has no other
available terms in which to conceive them and their behaviour than the
terms of initiative, design and endeavour immediately given in his own
conscious action.
Now, as has already been said, the scheme of life of the crops and
flocks is, at least in the main, and particularly in so far as it
vitally and always interests their keepers, a scheme of fecundity,
fertility and growth. But these matters, visibly and by conscious
sentiment, pertain in a peculiarly intimate sense to the women. They
are matters in which the sympathetic insight and fellow-feeling of
womankind should in the nature of things come very felicitously to
further the propitious course of things. Besides which the life of the
women falls in these same lines of fecundity, nurture and growth, so
that their association and attendance on the flocks and crops should
further the propitious course of things also by the subtler means of
sympathetic suggestion. There is a magical congruity of great force
as between womankind and the propagation of growing things. And these
subtler ways of influencing events are especially to the point in all
contact with these non-human sentient beings, since they are speechless
and must therefore in the main be led by living example rather than by
precept and expostulation. And, again, being sentient, somewhat after
the fashion of mankind, it is not to be believed that they have not the
gift visibly common to mankind and many animals, of following their
leader by force of sympathetic imitation. It may not be easy to say
how far this instinctive impulse of imitation, necessarily credited to
all phenomena to which anthropomorphic traits are imputed, is to be
accounted the ground of all sympathetic magic; but it is at least to be
accepted as sufficient to account for much of what is done to induce
fertility in flocks and crops.
So that on many accounts it is evident that in the nature of things,
the care of flocks and crops is the women’s affair, and it follows
that all intercourse with the flocks and crops in the early days had
best be conducted by the women, who alone may be presumed intuitively
to apprehend what is timely, due and permissible in these premises.
It is all the more evident that communion with these wordless others
should fall to the women, since the like wordless communion with their
own young is perhaps the most notable and engaging trait of their
own motherhood. The parental bent also throws a stress of sentiment
on this simple and obvious phase of motherhood, such as has made
it in all men’s apprehension the type of all kindly and unselfish
tendance; at the same time this ubiquitous parental instinct tends
constantly to place motherhood in the foreground in all that concerns
the common good, in as much as all that is worth while, humanly
speaking, has its beginning here. In that early phase of culture in
which the beginnings of tillage and cattle-breeding were made and in
which the common good of the group was still the chief daily interest
about which men’s solicitude and forethought are habitually engaged,
motherhood will always have been the central fact in the scheme of
human things. So that in this cultural phase the parental bent and
the sense of workmanship will have worked together to bring the women
into the chief place in the technological scheme; and the sense of
imitative propriety, as well as the recognised constraining force
exercised by example and mimetic representation through the impulse of
imitation, will have guided workmanship shrewdly to play up womankind
and motherhood in an ever-growing scheme of magical observances
designed to further the natural increase of flocks and crops. Where
anthropomorphic imputation runs free and with conviction, such
observances, designed to act sympathetically on the natural course of
phenomena, unavoidably become an integral feature of the technological
scheme, no less indispensable and putatively no less efficacious to
this end than the mechanical operations with which these observances
are associated. There is no practicable line of division to be drawn
between sympathetic magic and anthropomorphic technology; and in
the known cultures of this early type it is for the most part an
open question whether the magical observances are to be accounted an
adjunct to what we would recognise as the technological routine of the
art, or conversely. The two are not commonly held apart as distinct
categories, and both are efficacious and indispensable; and in both the
felt efficacy runs on much the same grounds of imputed anthropomorphic
traits.[57]
On grounds of magical-technological expediency, then, as well as by
force of the sense of intrinsic propriety, women come to take the
leading rôle in the industrial community of the early time, and the
community’s material interests come to centre about them and their
relation to the natural products of the fields; and since this interest
bears immediately on the fecundity of the flocks and crops, it is
particularly in their character of motherhood that the women come
most vitally into the case. The natural produce on which the life of
the group depends, therefore, will appertain to the women, in some
intimate sense of congruity, so that in the fitness of things this
produce will properly come to the good of the community through their
hands and will logically be dispensed somewhat at their discretion.
So great is the reach of this logic of congruity that in the known
cultures which show much reminiscence of this early technological phase
it is commonly possible to detect some remnant of such discretionary
control of the natural produce by the women. And modern students,
imbued with modern preconceptions of ownership and predaceous mastery,
have even found themselves constrained by this evidence to discover
a system of matriarchy and maternal ownership in these usages that
antedate the institution of ownership. Conceivably, the usages growing
out of this preferential position of women in the technology and
ritual of early husbandry will, now and again, by the uniform drift of
habituation have attained such a degree of consistency, been wrought
into so rigid a form of institutions, as to have been carried over
into a later phase of culture in which the ownership of goods is of
the essence of the scheme; and in such case these usages may then have
come to be reconstrued in terms of ownership, to the effect that the
ownership of agricultural products vests of right in the woman, the
mother of the household.
But if the magical-technological fitness and efficacy of women has
led to the growth of institutions vesting the disposal of the produce
in the women, in a more or less discretionary way, the like effect
has been even more pronounced, comprehensive and lasting as regards
the immaterial developments of the case. With great uniformity the
evidence from the earlier peaceable agricultural civilisations runs
to the effect that the primitive ritual of husbandry, chiefly of a
magical character, is in the hands of the women and is made up of
observances presumed to be particularly consonant with the phenomena
of motherhood.[58] And presently, when the more elaborate phases of
these magical rites of husbandry come, by further superinduction of
anthropomorphism, to grow into religious observances and mythological
tenets, the greater _daimones_ and divinities that emerge in the
shuffle are women, and again it is the motherhood of women that is in
evidence. The deities, great and small, are prevailingly females; and
the great ones among them seem invariably to have set out with being
mothers.
In the creation of female and maternal divinities the parental
instinct has doubtless greatly re-enforced the drift of the instinct
of workmanship in the same direction. The female deities have two main
attributes or characteristics because of which they came to hold their
high place; they are goddesses of fertility in one way or another,
and they are mothers of the people. It is perhaps unnecessary to hold
these two concomitant attributions apart, as many if not most of the
great deities claim precedence on both grounds. But the lower orders of
female divinities in the matriarchal scheme of things divine will much
more commonly specialise in fertility of crops than in maternity of the
people. The number of divinities that have mainly or solely to do with
fertility is greater than that of those which figure as mothers of the
people, either locally or generally. And perhaps in the majority of
cases there is some suggestive evidence that the great female deities
have primarily been goddesses of fertility having to do with the growth
of crops--and, usually in the second place, of animals--rather than
primarily mothers of the tribe;[59] which would suggest that their
genesis and character is due to the canons of the sense of workmanship
more than to the parental bent, although the latter seems to have had
its part in shaping many of them if not all.
The female divinities belong characteristically to the early or
simpler agricultural civilisation, and what has been said goes to
argue that they rest on technological grounds in the main; indeed, in
their genesis and early growth, they are in good part of the nature of
technological expedients. They are at home with the female technology
of early tillage especially, and perhaps only in the second place do
they serve the magical and religious needs of peoples given mainly to
breeding flocks and herds; although it is to be noted that most of the
greater known goddesses of the ancient Western world, as well as many
of the minor ones, are also found to be closely related to various
of the domestic animals. In America and the Far East, of course, any
connection with the domestication of animals would appear improbable.
With a change of base, from this early husbandry to a civilisation
in which the main habitual interest is of another kind, and in which
the habitual outlook of men is less closely limited by the same
anthropomorphic conceptions of nurture and growth, the goddesses begin
to lose their preferential claim on men’s regard and fall into place
as adjuncts or consorts of male divinities designed on other lines
and built out of different materials and serving new ends.[60] But
the hegemony of the mother goddesses has unquestionably been very
wide-reaching and very enduring, as it should be to answer to the
extent in time and space of the civilisation of tillage as well as to
its paramount importance in the life of mankind, and as it is shown to
have been by the archæological and ethnological evidence.
A further concomitant variation in the cultural scheme, associated
with and presumably traceable to the same technological ground, is
maternal descent, the counting of relationship primarily or solely in
the female line. In the present state of the evidence on this head it
would probably be too broad a proposition to say that the counting
of relationship by the mother’s side is due wholly to preconceptions
arising out of the technology of fertility and growth and that it so is
remotely a creature of the instinct of workmanship; but it is at least
equally probable that that ancient conceit must be abandoned according
to which the system of maternal descent arises out of an habitual doubt
of paternity. The mere obvious congruity of the cognatic system as
contrasted with the agnatic, has presumably had as much to do with the
matter as anything, and under the rule of the primitive technology
of tillage and cattle-breeding this obvious congruity of the cognate
relationship will have been very materially re-enforced by the current
preconceptions regarding the preferential importance of the female
line for the welfare of the household and the community. And so long
as that technological era lasted, and until the more strenuous culture
of predation and coercion came on and threw the male element in the
community into the place of first consequence, maternal descent as well
as the mother goddess appear to have held their own.
* * * * *
It will have been noticed that through all this argument runs the
presumption that the culture which included the beginnings and early
growth of tillage and cattle-breeding was substantially a peaceable
culture. This presumption is somewhat at variance with the traditional
view, particularly with the position taken as a matter of course by
earlier students of ethnology in the nineteenth century. Still it is
probably not subject to very serious question today. As the evidence
has accumulated it has grown increasingly manifest that the ancient
assumption of a primitive state of nature after the school of Hobbes
cannot be accepted. The evidence from contemporary sources, as to
the state of things in this respect among savages and many of the
lower barbarians, points rather to peace than to war as the habitual
situation, although this evidence is by no means unequivocal; besides
which, the evidence from these contemporary lower cultures bears
only equivocally on the point of first interest here,--viz., the
antecedents of the Western civilisation. What is more to the point,
though harder to get at in any definitive way, is the prehistory of
this civilisation. Here the inquiry will perforce go on survivals and
reminiscences and on the implications of known facts of antiquity as
well as of certain features still extant in the current cultural scheme.
It seems antecedently improbable that the domestication of the crop
plants and animals could have been effected at all except among
peoples leading a passably peaceable, and presently a sedentary life.
And the length of time required for what was achieved in remote
antiquity in this respect speaks for the prevalence of (passably)
peaceable conditions over intervals of time and space that overpass all
convenient bounds of chronology and localisation. Evidence of maternal
descent, maternal religious practices and maternal discretion in the
disposal of goods meet the inquiry in ever increasing force as soon
as it begins to penetrate back of the conventionally accepted dawn of
history; and survivals and reminiscences of such institutions appear
here and there within the historical period with increasing frequency
the more painstaking the inquiry becomes. And that institutions of
this character require a peaceable situation for their genesis as well
as for their survival is not only antecedently probable on grounds of
congruity, but it is evidenced by the way in which they incontinently
decay and presently disappear wherever the cultural situation takes
on a predatory character or develops a large-scale civilisation, with
a coercive government, differentiation of classes--especially in the
pecuniary respect--warlike ideals and ambitions, and a considerable
accumulation of wealth.
Some further discussion of this early peaceable situation will
necessarily come up in connection with the technological grounds of
its disappearance at the transition to that predatory culture which
has displaced it in all cases where an appreciably advanced phase of
civilisation has been reached.
CHAPTER III
THE SAVAGE STATE OF THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS
Technological knowledge is of the nature of a common stock, held
and carried forward collectively by the community, which is in
this relation to be conceived as a going concern. The state of the
industrial arts is a fact of group life, not of individual or private
initiative or innovation. It is an affair of the collectivity, not
a creative achievement of individuals working self-sufficiently in
severalty or in isolation. In the main, the state of the industrial
arts is always a heritage out of the past; it is always in process
of change, perhaps, but the substantial body of it is knowledge that
has come down from earlier generations. New elements of insight and
proficiency are continually being added and worked into this common
stock by the experience and initiative of the current generation,
but such novel elements are always and everywhere slight and
inconsequential in comparison with the body of technology that has been
carried over from the past.
Each successive move in advance, every new wrinkle of novelty,
improvement, invention, adaptation, every further detail of workmanlike
innovation, is of course made by individuals and comes out of
individual experience and initiative, since the generations of mankind
live only in individuals. But each move so made is necessarily made by
individuals immersed in the community and exposed to the discipline of
group life as it runs in the community, since all life is necessarily
group life. The phenomena of human life occur only in this form. It is
only as an outcome of this discipline that comes with the routine of
group life, and by help of the commonplace knowledge diffused through
the community, that any of its members are enabled to make any new
move that may in this way be traceable to their individual initiative.
Any new technological departure necessarily takes its rise in the
workmanlike endeavours of given individuals, but it can do so only by
force of their familiarity with the body of knowledge which the group
already has in hand. A new departure is always and necessarily an
improvement on or alteration in that state of the industrial arts that
is already in the keeping of the group at large; and every expedient
or innovation, great or small, that so is hit upon goes into effect
by going into the common stock of technological resources carried by
the group. It can take effect only in this way. Such group solidarity
is a necessity of the case, both for the acquirement and use of this
immaterial equipment that is spoken of as the state of the industrial
arts and for its custody and transmission from generation to generation.
Within this common stock of technology some special branch or line of
proficiency, bearing on some special craft or trade, may be held in
a degree of isolation by some caste-like group within the community,
limited by consanguinity, initiation, and the like, and so it may be
held somewhat out of the common stock and transmitted in some degree
of segregation. In the lower cultures the elements of technology that
are so engrossed by a fraction of the community and held out of the
common stock are most commonly of a magical or ceremonial nature,
rather than effective elements of workmanship; since any such matters
of ritual observance lend themselves with greater facility to exclusive
use and transmission within lines of class limitation than do the
matter-of-fact devices of actual workmanship. In the lower cultures
the exclusive training and information so held and transmitted in
segregation by various secret organisations appear in the main to be
of this magical or ceremonial character;[61] although there is no
reason to doubt that this technological make-believe is taken quite
seriously and counts as a substantial asset in the apprehension of its
possessors. In a more advanced state of the industrial arts, where
ownership and the specialisation of industry have had their effect,
trade secrets, patent and copyrights are often of substantial value,
and these are held in segregation from the common stock of technology.
But it is evident without argument that facts of this class are after
all of no grave or enduring consequence in comparison with the great
commonplace body of knowledge and skill current in the community. At
the same time, any such segregated line of technological gain and
transmission, if it has any appreciable significance for the state of
the industrial arts and is not wholly made up of ritual observances,
leans so greatly on the technological equipment at large that its
isolation is at the most partial and one-sided; it takes effect only
by the free use of the general body of knowledge which is not so
engrossed, and it has also in all cases been acquired and elaborated
only by the free use of that commonplace knowledge that is held in
no man’s exclusive possession. Such is more particularly the case in
all but those latest phases of the industrial development in which
the volume of the technology and the consequent specialisation of
occupations have been carried very far.
In the earlier, or rather in all but the late phases of culture and
technology, this immaterial equipment at large is accessible to all
members of the community as a matter of course through the unavoidable
discipline that comes with the workday routine of getting along. Few,
if any, can avoid acquiring the essential elements of the industrial
scheme by use of which the community lives, although they need not
each gain any degree of proficiency in all the manual operations or
industrial processes in which this technological scheme goes into
effect, and few can avoid being so trained into the logic of the
current scheme that their habitual thinking will in all these bearings
run within the bounds of experience embodied in this general scheme.
All have free access to this common stock of immaterial equipment,
but in all known cultures there is also found some degree of special
training and some appreciable specialisation of knowledge and
occupations; which is carried forward by expert workmen whose peculiar
and exceptional proficiency is confined to some one or a few distinct
lines of craft. And in all, or at least in all but the lowest known
cultures, the available evidence goes to say that this joint stock of
technological mastery can be maintained and carried forward only by
way of some such specialisation of training and differentiation of
employments. No one is competent to acquire such mastery of all the
lines of industry included in the general scheme as would enable him
(or her) to transmit the state of the industrial arts to succeeding
generations unimpaired at all points.
Some degree of specialisation there always is, even where there appears
to be no urgent technological need of it. The circumstances of their
life differ sufficiently for different individuals, so that a certain
individuation in workmanship will result from commonplace experience,
even apart from any deliberate specialisation of occupations. And with
any considerable increase in the size of the group a more or less
deliberate specialisation of occupations will also set in. Individuals
who are in this way occupied wholly or mainly with some one particular
line of work will carry proficiency in this line to a higher pitch than
the generality of workmen and will bring out details of technological
procedure that may never fully become the common possession of the
group at large, that may not in all details become part of the
commonplace technological information current in the community. There
seems, in fact, never to have been a time when the industrial scheme
was so slight and narrow that all members of the community could master
it in the greatest feasible degree of proficiency at every point. But
at the same time it holds true for all the more archaic phases of the
development that all members of the community appear always to have had
a comprehensive and passably exhaustive acquaintance with the technique
of all industries practised in their time.
This necessary specialisation and detail training has large
consequences for the growth of technology as well as for its custody
and transmission. It follows that a large and widely diversified
industrial scheme is impossible except in a community of some
size,--large enough to support a number and variety of special
occupations. In effect, substantial gains in industrial insight and
proficiency can apparently be worked out only through such close
and sustained attention to a given line of work as can be given
only within the lines of a specialised occupation. At the same time
the industrial community must comprise a full complement of such
specialised occupations, and must also be bound together in a system of
communication sufficiently close and facile to allow the technological
contents of all these occupations to be readily assimilated into a
systematic whole. The industrial system so worked out need not be of
the same extent as any one local group of the people who get their
living by its use; but it seems to be required that if several local
groups are effectively to be comprised in a single industrial system
conditions of peace must prevail among them. Community of language
seems also to be nearly necessary to the maintenance of such a system.
Where the various local groups are on hostile terms, each will tend to
have an industrial system of its own, with a technological character
somewhat distinct from its neighbours.[62] If the degree of isolation
is pronounced, so that traffic and communication do not run freely
between groups, the size of the local group will limit the state of
the industrial arts somewhat rigidly; and on the other hand a marked
advance in the industrial arts, such as the domestication of crop
plants or animals or the introduction of metals, is likely to bring
about such a redistribution of population and industry as to increase
the effective size of the community.[63]
Among the peoples on the lower levels of culture there prevails
commonly a considerable degree of isolation, or even of estrangement.
In a great degree each community is thrown on its own resources, and
under these circumstances the size of the community may become a matter
of decisive importance for the industrial arts. Where a serious decline
in the numbers of any of these savage or barbarous peoples is recorded
it is also commonly noted that they have suffered a concomitant decay
in their technological knowledge and workmanship.[64] In view of these
considerations it is probably safe to say that under settled conditions
any community is, commonly, no larger than is required to keep up and
carry forward the state of the industrial arts as it runs. The known
evidence appears to warrant the generalisation that the state of the
industrial arts is limited by the size of the industrial community,
and that whenever a given community is broken up or suffers a serious
diminution of numbers its technological heritage will deteriorate and
dwindle even though it may apparently have been meagre enough before.
The considerations recited above are matters of commonplace observation
and might fairly be taken for granted without argument. But so much
of current and recent theoretical speculation proceeds on tacit
assumptions at variance with these commonplaces that it seems pertinent
to recall them, particularly since they will come in as premises in
later passages of the inquiry.
* * * * *
Given the material environment, the rate and character of the
technological gains made in any community will depend on the initiative
and application of its members, in so far as the growth of institutions
has not seriously diverted the genius of the race from its natural
bent; it will depend immediately and obviously on individual talent for
workmanship--on the workmanlike bent and capacity of the individual
members of the community. Therefore any difference of native endowment
in this respect between the several races will show itself in the
character of their technological achievements as well as in the rate
of gain. Races differ among themselves in this matter, both as to the
kind and as to the degree of technological proficiency of which they
are capable.[65] It is perhaps as needless to insist on this spiritual
difference between the various racial stocks as it would be difficult
to determine the specific differences that are known to exist, or to
exhibit them convincingly in detail. To some such ground much of the
distinctive character of different peoples is no doubt to be assigned,
though much also may as well be traceable to local peculiarities of
environment and of institutional circumstances. Something of the kind,
a specific difference in the genius of the people, is by common consent
assigned, for instance, in explanation of the pervasive difference in
technology and workmanship between the Western culture and the Far
East. The like difference in “genius” is still more convincingly shown
where different races have long been living near one another under
settled cultural conditions.[66]
It should be noted in the same connection that hybrid peoples, such
as those of Europe or of Japan, where somewhat widely distinct racial
stocks are mingled, should afford a great variety and wide individual
variation of native gifts, in workmanship as in other respects.
Hybrid stocks, indeed, have a wider range of usual variability than
the combined extreme limits of the racial types that enter into the
composition of the hybrid. So that a great variety, even aberration
and eccentricity, of native gifts is to be looked for in such cases,
and this wide range of variation in workmanlike initiative should
show itself in the technology of any such peoples. Yet there may
still prevail a strikingly determinate difference between any two
such hybrid populations, both in the characteristic features of their
technology and in their routine workmanship; as is illustrated in
the contrast between Japan and the Western nations. These racial
differences in point of endowment may be slight in the first instance,
but as they work cumulatively their ulterior effect may still be
very marked; and they may result in marked differences not only in
respect of the character of the technological situation at a given
point of time but also in the rate of advance and the direction taken
by the technological advance. So in the case of the Far East, as
contrasted with the Occidental peoples, the genius of the races engaged
has prevailingly taken the direction of proficiency in handicraft,
rather than that somewhat crude but efficient recourse to mechanical
expedients which chiefly distinguishes the technology of the West.
* * * * *
The stability of racial types makes it possible to study the innate
characters of the existing population under less complex and confusing
circumstances than those of the cultural situation in which this
population is now found. By going back into the earlier phases of
the Western culture the scrutiny of the living population of Europe
and its colonies can, in effect, be pushed back in a fragmentary way
over an interval of some thousands of years. Such acquaintance as may
in this way be gained with the spiritual make-up of the peoples of
the Western culture at any point in its past history and prehistory
should bear immediately and without serious abatement on the native
character of the generation in whose hands the fortunes of that culture
now rest; provided only that the inquiry assures itself of the racial
continuity, racial identity, of these peoples through this period of
time. This question of race identity is no longer a matter of serious
debate so far as concerns the peoples of northern and western Europe,
within the effective bounds of the Occidental civilisation and as far
back as the beginning of the neolithic period. Assuredly there is
debate and uncertainty as to local details of racial mixture in nearly
all parts of this cultural area at some point in past time, but these
uncertainties of detail are not of such a nature or such magnitude as
to vitiate the data for an inquiry into the general characteristics of
the races concerned. By and large, the mixture of races in north Europe
has apparently not varied greatly since early neolithic times, and the
changes that have taken place are known with some confidence, in the
main. Much the same holds true for the Mediterranean seaboard, although
the changes in that region appear to have been more considerable and
are perhaps less readily traceable. For northern and western Europe
taken together, in spite of considerable local fluctuations, the
variations in the general racial composition of the peoples has, on
the whole, not been extensive or extremely serious since the latter
part of the stone age. The three great racial stocks[67] of Western
civilisation have apparently shared their joint dominance in this
culture among themselves since about the time when the use of bronze
first came into Europe, which should be before the close of the stone
age. And these three stocks are not greatly alien to one another; two
of them, the Mediterranean and the blond, being apparently somewhat
closely related in point of descent and therefore presumably in point
of spiritual make-up.
It is with less confidence that any student of these modern cultures
can test his case by evidence drawn from existing or historical
communities living on the savage or lower barbarian plane and not
closely related, racially, to the peoples of Western Europe. The
discrepancies in such a case are of two kinds: (_a_) The racial
type, and therefore the spiritual (instinctive) make-up of these
alien savages or barbarians, is not the same as that of the modern
Europeans; hence the culture worked out under the control of their
somewhat different endowment of instincts should come to a different
result, particularly since any such racial discrepancy in the matter
of instincts should be expected to work cumulatively to a different
cultural outcome. These alien communities of the lower cultures can
therefore not be accepted off-hand as representing an earlier phase
of Occidental civilisation. This infirmity attaches to any recourse
to an existing savage or barbarian community for object-lessons to
illustrate the working of European human nature in similarly primitive
circumstances, in the degree in which the community in question may be
remote from the Europeans in point of racial type; which reduces itself
to a difficult question as to the point in the family-tree of the races
of man from which the two contrasted races have diverged, and of the
number, character, and magnitude of the racial mutations that may have
intervened between the presumed point of divergence and the existing
racial types so contrasted. (_b_) It is commonly said, and it is
presumably true enough, that all known communities on the lower levels
of culture are far from a state of primitive savagery; that they are
not to be taken as genuinely archaic, but are the result either of a
comparatively late reversion, under special circumstances, from a past
higher stage, or they are peoples which have undergone so protracted
an experience in savagery that their present state is one of extreme
sophistification in all “the beastly devices of the heathen,” rather
than substantially an early or archaic type of culture, such as would
have marked a transient stage in the development of those peoples that
have attained civilised life.
No doubt there is some substance to these objections, but they contain
rather a modicum of truth than an inclusive presentation of the facts
relevant to the case. As to (_a_), the races of man are, after all,
more alike than unlike, and the evidence drawn from the experience of
any one racial stock or mixture is not to be disregarded as having no
significance for the probable course of things experienced by any other
racial stock during a corresponding interval in its life-history. Yet
there is doubtless a wide and debatable margin of error to be allowed
for in the use of all evidence of this class. As to (_b_), by virtue of
the stability of racial types the populations of existing communities
of the lower cultures should be today what they were at the outset,
in respect of the most substantial factor in their present situation,
their spiritual (instinctive) make-up; and this unaltered complement
of instincts should, under similar circumstances and with a moderate
allowance of time, work out substantially the same general run of
cultural results whether the resulting phase of culture were reached
by approach from a near and untroubled beginning or by regression from
a “higher plane.” So that the existing communities of savages or lower
barbarians should present a passably competent object lesson in archaic
savagery and barbarism whether their past has been higher, lower, or
simply more of the same.
All this, of course, assumes the stability of racial types. But since,
tacitly, that assumption is habitually made by ethnologists, all that
calls for apology or explanation here is the avowal of it. The greater
proportion of ethnological generalisations on this range of questions
would be quite impotent without that assumption as their major premise.
What has not commonly been assumed or admitted, except by subconscious
implication, is the necessary corollary that these stable types with
which ethnologists and anthropologists busy themselves must have
arisen by mutation from previously existing types, rather than by a
long continued and divergent accumulation of insensible variations. A
result of avowing such a view of the genesis of races will be that the
various races cannot be regarded as being all of the same date and
racial maturity, or of the same significance for any discussion bearing
on the higher cultures. The races engaged in the Western culture will
presumably be found to be of relatively late date, as having arisen
out of relatively late mutational departures, as rated in terms of the
aggregate life-history of mankind. Presumably also many of the other
races will be found to be somewhat widely out of touch with the members
of this Occidental aggregation of racial stocks; some more, others less
remotely related to them, according as their mutational pedigree may be
found to indicate.
An advantage derivable from such an avowal of the stability of types,
as against its covert assumption and overt disavowal, is that it
enables the student to look for the beginning, in time and space, of
any given racial stock with which his inquiry is concerned, and to
handle it as a unit throughout its life-history.
* * * * *
In all probability each of the leading racial stocks of Europe began
its life-history on what would currently be accounted a low level of
savagery. And yet this phase of savagery, whatever it may have been
like, will have been removed from the first beginnings of human culture
by a long series of thousands of years. That such was the case, for
instance, with the European blond is scarcely to be questioned;[68] and
it is at least highly probable that the other stocks now associated
with the blond, though probably older, must also have come into being
relatively late in the life-history of the species.
Vague as this dating may be, it signifies that the initial phase
in the life-history of at least one, and presumably of all, of the
leading races of Europe falls in a savage culture of a relatively
advanced kind as compared with the rudest human beginnings. Therefore
when these stocks began life, and so were required to make good their
survival, the selective conditions imposed on them, and to which they
were required to conform on pain of extinction, were the conditions of
a savage culture which had already made some appreciable advance in
the arts of life. They had not to meet brute nature in the helpless
nakedness of those remote ancestors in whom humanity first began.
Mutationally speaking, the stock was born to the use of tools and to
the facile mastery of a relatively advanced technology. And conversely
it is a fair inference that these stocks that have peopled Europe
would have been unfit to survive if they had come into the world
before some appreciable advance in technology had been made. That is
to say, these stocks could not by native gift have been fit for a wild
life, in the unqualified sense of the term; nor have they ever lived
a life of nature in any such sense. They came into the savage world
after the race had lived through many thousand years of technological
experience and (presumably) many successive mutational alterations of
racial type, and they were fitted to the exigencies of the savage
world into which they came rather than those of any earlier phase of
savagery. The youngest of them, the latest mutant, emerged in early
neolithic times, and since he eminently made good his fitness to
survive under those conditions he presumably emerged with such an
endowment of traits, physical and spiritual, as those conditions called
for; and also presumably with no appreciable burden of aptitudes,
propensities, instincts, capacities that would be disserviceable, or
perhaps even that would be wholly unserviceable, in the circumstances
in which he was placed. And since the other racial elements of the
European population, at least the two main ones, do not differ at all
radically from the blond in their native capacities, it is likewise to
be presumed that they also emerged from a mutation under circumstances
of culture, and especially of technology, not radically different in
degree from those that first surrounded the blond.
The difference between these three racial stocks is much more evident
in their physical traits than in their instinctive gifts or their
intellectual capacity; and yet the similarity of the three is so great
and distinctive even on the physical side that anthropologists are
inclined to class the three together as all and several distinctively
typical of a “white” or “caucasic” race, to which they are held
collectively to belong. Something to the like effect seems to hold
true for the distinctive groups of racial stocks that have made the
characteristic civilisations of the Far East on the one hand and of
southern Asia on the other hand; and something similar might, again,
be said for the group of stocks that were concerned in the ancient
civilisations of America.
It may be pertinent to add that, except for a long antecedent growth
of technology, that is to say a long continued cumulative experience
in workmanship, with the resultant accumulated knowledge of the ways
and means of life, none of the characteristic races of Europe could
have survived. In the absence of these antecedent technological gains,
together with the associated growth of institutions, such mutants, with
their characteristic gifts and limitations, must have perished.
* * * * *
On that level of savagery on which these European stocks began, and to
which the several European racial types with their typical endowment
of instincts are presumably adapted, men appear to have lived a fairly
peaceable, though by no means an indolent life; in relatively small
groups or communities; without any of the more useful domestic animals,
though probably with some domestic plants; and busied with getting
their living by daily work. Since they survived under the conditions
offered them it is to be presumed that these men and women, say of the
early neolithic time, took instinctively and kindly to those activities
and mutual relations that would further the life of the group; and
that, on the whole, they took less kindly and instinctively to such
activities as would bring damage and discomfort on their neighbours and
themselves.[69] Any racial type of which this had not been true, under
the conditions known then to have prevailed in their habitat, must have
presently disappeared from the face of the land, and the later advance
of the Western culture would not have known their breed. Some other
racial type, temperamentally so constituted as better to meet these
requirements of survival under neolithic conditions, would have taken
their place and would have left their own offspring to populate the
region.[70]
What is known of the conditions of life in early neolithic times[71]
indicates that the first requisite of competitive survival was a
more or less close attention to the business in hand, the providing
of subsistence for the group and the rearing of offspring--a closer
attention, for instance, than was given to this business by those other
rival stocks whom the successful ones displaced; all of which throws
into the foreground as indispensable native traits of the successful
race the parental bent and the sense of workmanship, rather than those
instinctive traits that make for disturbance of the peace.[72]
But through it all the suggestion insinuates itself that the latest, or
youngest, of the three main European stocks, the blond, has more rather
than less of the pugnacious and predatory temper than the other two,
and that this stock made its way to the front in spite of, if not by
force of these traits. The advantage of the blond as a fighter seems to
have been due in part to an adventurous and pugnacious temper, but also
in part to a superior physique,--superior for the purpose of fighting
hand to hand or with the implements chiefly used in warfare and piracy
down to a date within the nineteenth century. The same physical traits
of mass, stature and katabolism will likewise have been of great
advantage in the quest of a livelihood under the conditions that
prevailed in the North-sea region, the habitat of the dolicho-blond, in
the stone age. Something to the same effect is true of the spiritual
traits which are said to characterise the blond,--a certain canny
temerity and unrest.[73] So that the point is left somewhat in doubt;
the traits which presently made the northern blond the most formidable
disturber of the peace of Europe and kept him so for many centuries
may at the outset have been chiefly conducive to the survival of the
type by their serviceability for industrial purposes under the peculiar
circumstances of climate and topography in which the race first came up
and made good its survival.
In modern speculations on the origins of culture and the early
history of mankind it has until recently been usual to assume,
uncritically, that human communities have from the outset of the race
been entangled in an inextricable web of mutual hostilities and beset
with an all-pervading sentiment of fear; that the “state of nature”
was a state of blood and wounds, expressing itself in universal
malevolence and suspicion. Latterly, students of primitive culture,
and more especially those engaged at first hand in field work, who
come in contact with peoples of the lower culture, have been coming
to realise that the facts do not greatly support such a presumption,
and that a community which has to make its own living by the help of
a rudimentary technological equipment can not afford to be habitually
occupied with annoying its neighbours, particularly so long as its
neighbours have not accumulated a store of portable wealth which
will make raiding worth while. No doubt, many savage and barbarian
peoples live in a state of conventional feud or habitual, even if
intermittent, war and predation, without substantial inducement in
the way of booty. But such communities commonly are either so placed
that an easy livelihood affords them a material basis for following
after these higher things out of mere fancy;[74] or they are peoples
living precariously hand-to-mouth and fighting for their lives, in
great part from a fancied impossibility of coming to terms with their
alien and unnaturally cruel neighbours.[75] Communities of the latter
class are often living in a state of squalor and discomfort, with a
population far short of what their environment would best support even
with their inefficient industrial organisation and equipment, and their
technology is usually ill-suited to a settled life and unpromising for
any possible advance to a higher culture. There is no urgent reason
for assuming that the races which have made their way to a greater
technological efficiency, with settled life and a large population,
must have come up from this particular phase of civilisation as their
starting point, or that such a culture should have been favourable to
the survival and increase of the leading racial stocks of Europe, since
it does not appear to be especially favourable to the success of the
communities known to be now living after that fashion.[76]
The preconception that early culture must have been warlike has not
yet disappeared even among students of these phenomena, though it is
losing their respect; but a derivative of it still has much currency,
to the effect that all savage peoples, as also the peoples of the
lower barbarism, live in a state of universal and unremitting fear,
particularly fear of the unknown. This chronic fear is presumed to
show itself chiefly in religion and other superstitious practices,
where it is held to explain many things that are otherwise obscure.
There is not a little evidence from extant savage communities looking
in this direction, and more from the lower barbarian cultures
that are characteristically warlike.[77] Wherever this animus is
found its effect is to waste effort and divert it to religious and
magical practices and so to hinder the free unfolding of workmanship
by enjoining a cumbersome routine of ritual and by warning the
technologist off forbidden ground. But it is doubtless a hasty
generalisation to carry all this over uncritically and make it apply
to all peoples of the lower culture, past and present. It is known not
to be true of many existing communities,[78] and the evidence of it in
some ancient cultures is very dubious. Such a characterisation of the
neolithic culture of Europe, whether north-European or Ægean, finds no
appreciable support in the archæological evidence. These two regions
are the most significant for the neolithic period in Europe, and the
material from both is relatively very poor in weapons, as contrasted
with tools, on the one hand, and there is at the same time little or
nothing to indicate the prevalence of superstitious practices based
on fear. Indeed, the material is surprisingly poor in elements of any
kind that can safely be set down to the account of religion or magic,
whether as inspired by fear or by more genial sentiments. It is one of
the puzzles that beset any student who insists on finding everywhere a
certain normal course of cultural sequence, which should in the early
times include, among other things, a fearsome religion, a wide fabric
of magical practices, and an irrepressible craving for manslaughter.
And when, presently, something of a symbolism and apparatus of
superstition comes into view, in the late neolithic and bronze ages,
the common run of it is by no means suggestive of superstitious fear
and religious atrocities. The most common and characteristic objects
of this class are certain figurines and certain symbolical elements
suggestive of fecundity, such as might be looked for in a peaceable,
sedentary, agricultural culture on a small scale.[79] A culture
virtually without weapons, whose gods are mothers and whose religious
observances are a ritual of fecundity, can scarcely be a culture of
dread and of derring-do. With the fighting barbarians, on the other
hand, male deities commonly take the first rank, and their ritual
symbolises the mastery of the god and the servitude of the worshipper.
It is true, of course, that both of weapons and of cult objects far
the greater number that were once in use will have disappeared,
since most of the implements and utensils of stone-age cultures are,
notoriously, made of wood or similar perishable materials.[80] So that
the finds give no complete series of the appliances in use in their
time; whole series of objects that were of first-rate importance in
that culture having probably disappeared without leaving a trace. But
what is true in this respect of weapons and cult objects should be
equally true of tools, or nearly so. So that the inference to be drawn
from the available material would be that the early neolithic culture
of north Europe, the Ægean, and other explored localities presumed
to belong in the same racial and cultural complex, must have been of
a prevailingly peaceable complexion. With the advance in technology
and in the elaboration and abundance of objects that comes into sight
progressively through the later neolithic period, down to its close,
this disproportion between tools and weapons (and cult objects) grows
more impressive and more surprising. Hitherto this disproportion has
been more in evidence in the Scandinavian finds than in the other
related fields of stone-age culture, unless an exception should be made
in favour of the late neolithic sites explored at Anau.[81] But this
archæological outcome, setting off the Baltic stone age as peculiarly
scant of weapons and peculiarly rich in tools, may be provisional only,
and may be due to the more exhaustive exploration of the Scandinavian
countries and the uncommonly abundant material from that region. In
the later (mainly Scandinavian) neolithic material, where the weapons
are to be counted by dozens the tools are to be counted by hundreds,
according to a scheme of classification in which everything that can be
construed as a weapon is so classed, and there are many more hundreds
of the one class than there are dozens of the other.[82] As near as
can be made out, cult objects are similarly infrequent among these
materials even after some appreciable work in pottery comes in evidence.
What has just been said is after all of a negative character. It says
that nothing like a warlike, predatory, or fearsome origin can be
proven from the archæological material for the neolithic culture of
those racial stocks that have counted for most in the early periods of
Europe. The presumption raised by this evidence, however, is fairly
strong. And considerations of the material circumstances in which
this early culture was placed, as well as of the spiritual traits
characteristically required by these circumstances and shown by the
races in question, point to a similar conclusion. The proclivity to
unreasoning fear that is visible in the superstitious practices of so
many savage communities and counts for so much in the routine of their
daily life,[83] is to all appearance not so considerable an element in
the make-up of the chief European stocks. Perhaps it enters in a less
degree in the spiritual nature of the European blond than in that of
any other race; that race--or its hybrid offspring--has at any rate
proved less amenable to religious control than any other, and has also
shown less hesitation in the face of unknown contingencies. And the
circumstances of the presumed initial phase of the life-history of this
race would appear not to have favoured a spiritual (instinctive) type
largely biassed by an alert and powerful sentiment of unreasoning fear.
So also an aggressive humanitarian sentiment is as well at home in the
habits of thought of the north-European peoples as in any other, such
as sorts ill with a native predatory animus. If it be assumed, as seems
probable, that the situation which selectively tested the fitness of
this stock to survive was that of the early post-glacial time, when
its habitat in Europe was slowly being cleared of the ice-sheet, it
would appear antecedently probable that the new (mutant) type, which
made good its survival in following up the retreating fringe of the
ice-sheet and populating the land so made available, will not have been
a people peculiarly given to fear or to predation. A great facility of
this kind, with its concomitants of caution, conservatism, suspicion
and cruelty, would not be serviceable for a race so placed.[84]
* * * * *
Even if it were a possible undertaking it would not be much to the
present purpose to trace out in detail the many slow and fumbling
moves by which any given race or people, in Europe or elsewhere,
have worked out the technological particulars that have led from the
beginnings down through the primitive and later growth of culture.
Such a work belongs to the ethnologists and archæologists; and it is
summed up in the proposition that men have applied common sense, more
or less hesitatingly and with more or less refractory limitations, to
the facts with which they have had to deal; that they have accumulated
a knowledge of technological expedients and processes from generation
to generation, always going on what had already been achieved in ways
and means, and gradually discarding or losing such elements of the
growing technological scheme as seemed no longer to be worth while,[85]
and carrying along a good many elements that were of no material
effect but were imposed by the logic of the scheme or of its underlying
principles (habits of thought).
* * * * *
Of the early technological development in Europe, so far as it is
genetically connected with the later Western civilisation, the culture
of the Baltic region affords as good and illustrative an object
lesson as may be had; its course is relatively well known, simple and
unbroken. Palæolithic times do not count in this development, as the
neolithic culture begins with a new break in Europe.
It is known, then, that by early neolithic times on the narrow
Scandinavian waters men had learned to make and use certain rude
stone and bone implements found in the kitchen-middens (refuse heaps,
shell-mounds of Denmark), that they had ways and appliances (the
nature of which is not known) for collecting certain shellfish and for
catching such game and fish as their habitat afforded, and that they
presently, if not from the outset, had acquired the use of certain
crop plants and had learned to make pottery of a crude kind. From
this as a point of departure in the period of the kitchen-middens the
stone implements were presently improved and multiplied, the methods
of working the material (flint) and of using the products of the flint
industry were gradually improved and extended, until in the long
course of time the utmost that has anywhere been achieved in that
class of industry was reached. Domestic animals began to be added to
the equipment relatively early,[86] though at a long interval from
the neolithic beginnings as counted in absolute time. Improvement and
extension in all lines of stone-working and wood-working industry
went forward: except that stone-dressing and masonry are typically
absent, owing, no doubt, to the extensive use of woodwork instead.[87]
Along with this advance in the mechanic arts goes a growing density
of population and a wide extension of tillage; until, at the coming
of bronze, the evidence shows that these communities were populous,
prosperous, and highly skilled in those industrial arts that lay within
their technological range.
Apart from the pottery, which may have some merit as an art product,
there is very little left to show what may have been their proficiency
in the decorative arts, or what was their social organisation or their
religious life. The evidences of warlike enterprise and religious
practices are surprisingly scanty, being chiefly the doubtful evidence
of many and somewhat elaborate tombs. From the tombs (mounds and
barrows) and their distribution something may be inferred as to the
social organisation; and the evidence on this head seems to indicate
a widespread agricultural population, living (probably) in small
communities, without much centralised or authoritative control, but
with some appreciable class differences in the distribution of wealth
in the later phases of the period.
With interruptions, more or less serious, from time to time, and with
increasing evidence of a penchant for warlike or predatory enterprise
on the one hand and of class distinctions on the other hand, much the
same story runs on through the ages of bronze and early iron. Evidences
of borrowing from outside, mainly the borrowing of decorative technique
and technological elements, are scattered through the course of this
development from very early times, showing that there was always some
intercourse, perhaps constant intercourse, with other peoples more or
less distant. So that in time, by the beginning of the bronze age,
there is evidence of settled trade relations with peoples as remote as
the Mediterranean seaboard.
In many of its details this prehistoric culture shows something of
the same facility in the use of mechanical expedients as has come so
notably forward again in the late development of the industrial arts of
western Europe. It is in its mechanical efficiency that the technology
of the latterday Western culture stands out preëminent, and it is
similarly its easy command of the mechanical factors with which it
deals that chiefly distinguishes the prehistoric technology of North
Europe. In other respects the prehistoric material from this region
does not argue a high level of civilisation. There are no ornate or
stupendous structures; what there is of the kind is mounds and barrows
of moderately great size and using only undressed stone where any
is used, but making a mechanically effective use of this. There is,
indeed, nothing from the stone age in the way of edifices, fabrics or
decorative work that is to be classed, in point of excellence in design
or execution, with the polished-flint woodworking axe or chisel of that
time. From the bronze age at its best there is much excellent bronze
work of great merit both in workmanship and in decorative effect; but
the artistic merit of this work (from the middle and early half of the
bronze age) lies almost wholly in its workmanlike execution and in
the freedom and adequacy with which very simple mechanical elements
of decoration are employed. It is an art which appeals to the sense
of beauty chiefly through the sense of workmanship, shown both in the
choice of materials and decorative elements and in the use made of
them. When this art aspires to more ambitious decorative effects or to
representation of life forms, or indeed to any representation that has
not been conventionalised almost past recognition, as it does in the
later periods of the bronze age, the result is that it can be commended
for its workmanship alone, and so far as regards artistic effect it is
mainly misspent workmanship.[88]
The same workmanlike insight and facility comes in evidence in the
matter of borrowing, already spoken of. Borrowing goes on throughout
this prehistoric culture, and the borrowed elements are assimilated
with such despatch and effect as to make them seem home-bred almost
from the start. It is a borrowing of technological elements, which are
rarely employed except in full and competent adaptation to the uses
to which they are turned; so much so that the archæologists find it
exceptionally difficult to trace the borrowed elements to specific
sources, in spite of the great volume and frequency of this borrowing.
There is a further and obscurer aspect to this facile borrowing. In
the cultures where the technological and decorative elements are
first invented, or acquired at first-hand by slow habituation, there
will in the nature of the case come in with them into the scheme of
technology or of art more or less, but presumably a good deal, of
extraneous or extrinsic by-products of their acquirement, in the way
of magical or symbolic efficacy imputed and adhering to them in the
habits of thought of their makers and users. Something of this kind has
already been set out in some detail as regards the domestication and
early use of the crop plants and animals; and the like is currently
held to be true, perhaps in a higher degree, for the beginnings of
art, both representative and decorative, by the latterday students of
that subject; the beginnings of art being held to have been magical
and symbolic in the main, so far as regards the prime motives to its
inception and its initial principles.[89]
In the origination and indigenous working-out of any given
technological factor, e. g., such as the use of the crop plants or the
domestic animals, elements of imputed anthropomorphism are likely to be
comprised in the habitual apprehension of the nature of these factors,
and so find lodgment in the technological routine that has to do with
them; the result being, chiefly, a limitation on their uses and on the
ways and means by which they are utilised, together with a margin of
lost motion in the way of magical and religious observances presumed
to be intrinsic to the due working of such factors. The ritual
connected with tillage and cattle-breeding shows this magical side of a
home-bred technology perhaps as felicitously as anything; but similar
phenomena are by no means infrequent in the mechanic arts, and in the
fine arts these principles of symbolism and the like are commonly
present in such force as to afford ground for distinguishing one school
or epoch of art from another.
Now, when any given technological or decorative element crosses the
frontier between one culture and another, in the course of borrowing,
it is likely to happen that it will come into the new culture stripped
of most or all of its anthropomorphic or spiritual virtues and
limitations, more particularly, of course, if the cultural frontier in
question is at the same time a linguistic frontier; since the borrowing
is likely to be made from motives of workmanlike expediency, and the
putative spiritual attributes of the facts involved are not obvious
to men who have not been trained to impute them. The chief exception
to such a rule would be any borrowing that takes effect on religious
grounds, in which case, of course, the magical or symbolic efficacy
of the borrowed elements are the substance that is sought in the
borrowing. Herein, presumably, lies much of the distinctive character
of the north-European prehistoric culture, which was in an eminent
degree built up out of borrowed elements, so far as concerns both its
technology and its art. And to this free and voluminous borrowing may
likewise be due the apparent poverty of this early culture in religious
or magical elements.
A further effect follows. The borrowing being (relatively) unencumbered
with ritual restrictions and magical exactions attached to their
employment, they would fall into the scheme of things as mere
matter-of-fact, to be handled with the same freedom and unhindered
sagacity with which a workman makes use of his own hands, and could,
without reservation, be turned to any use for which they were
mechanically suited. Something of symbolism and superstition might,
of course, be carried over in the borrowing, and something more would
unavoidably be bred into the borrowed elements in the course of their
use; but the free start would always count for something in the
outcome, both as regards the rate of progress made in the exploitation
of the expedients acquired by borrowing and in the character of the
technological system at large into which they had been introduced.
Both the relative freedom from magical restraint and the growth of
home-made anthropomorphic imputations may easily be detected in the
course of this northern culture and in its outcome in modern times.
Cattle, for instance, are a borrowed technological fact in the Baltic
and North-Sea region, but superstitious practices seem never to have
attached to cattle-breeding in that region in such volume and rigorous
exaction as may be found nearer the original home of the domesticated
species; and yet the volume of folk-lore, mostly of a genial and
relatively unobstructive character, that has in later times grown up
about the care of cattle in the Scandinavian countries is by no means
inconsiderable.
CHAPTER IV
THE TECHNOLOGY OF THE PREDATORY CULTURE
The scheme of technological insight and proficiency current in any
given culture is manifestly a product of group life and is held as a
common stock, and as manifestly the individual workman is helpless
without access to it. It is none too broad to say that he is a workman
only because and so far as he effectually shares in this common stock
of technological equipment. He may be gifted in a special degree
with workmanlike aptitudes, may by nature be stout or dextrous or
keen-sighted or quick-witted or sagacious or industrious beyond his
fellows; but with all these gifts, so long as he has assimilated
none of this common stock of workmanlike knowledge he remains simply
an admirable parcel of human raw material; he is of no effect in
industry. With such special gifts or with special training based on
this common stock an individual may stand out among his fellows as a
workman of exceptional merit and value, and without the common run of
workmanlike aptitudes he may come to nothing worth while as a workman
even with the largest opportunities and most sedulous training. It is
the two together that make the working force of the community; and in
both respects, both in his inherited and in his acquired traits, the
individual is a product of group life.
Using the term in a sufficiently free sense, pedigree is no less and
no more requisite to the workman’s effectual equipment than the common
stock of technological mastery which the community offers him. But
his pedigree is a group pedigree, just as his technology is a group
technology. As is sometimes said to the same effect, the individual is
a creature of heredity and circumstances. And heredity is always group
heredity,[90] perhaps peculiarly so in the human species.
The promptings of invidious self-respect commonly lead men to evade
or deny something of the breadth of their inheritance in respect of
human nature. “I am not as the publican yonder,” whether I have the
grace to thank God for this invidious distinction or more simply charge
it to the account of my reputable ancestors in the male line. With a
change of venue by which the cause is taken out of the jurisdiction of
interested parties, its complexion changes. So evident is the fact of
group heredity in the lower animals, for instance, that biologists have
no inclination to deny its pervading force, apart from any conceivably
parthenogenetic lines of descent,--and, to the inconvenience of the
eugenic pharisee, parthenogenetic descent never runs in the male line,
besides being of extremely rare occurrence in the human species. As a
matter of course the Darwinian biologists have the habit of appealing
to group heredity as the main factor in the stability of species, and
they are very curious about the special circumstances of any given
case in which it may appear not to be fully operative: and they have,
on the other hand, even looked hopefully to fortuitous isolation of
particular lines of descent as a possible factor in the differentiation
and fixation of specific types, being at a loss to account for such
differentiation or fixation so long as no insuperable mechanical
obstacle stands in the way of persistent crossing. The like force of
group heredity is visible in the characteristic differences of race.
The heredity of any given race of mankind is always sufficiently
homogeneous to allow all its individuals to be classed under the race.
And when an individual comes to light in a fairly pure-bred community
who shows physical traits that vary obviously from the common racial
type of the community, the question which suggests itself to the
anthropologists is not, How does this individual differ from others of
the same breed? but, What is the alien strain, and how has it come in?
And what is true of the physical characters of the race in this respect
is only less obviously true of its spiritual traits.
In a culture where all individuals are hybrids, in point of pedigree,
as is the case with all the leading peoples of Christendom, the ways
of this group heredity are particularly devious, and the fortunes of
the individual in this respect are in a peculiar degree exposed to the
caprice of Mendelian contingencies; so that his make-up, physical and
spiritual, is, humanly speaking, in the main a chapter of accidents.
Where each individual draws for his hereditary traits on a wide
ancestry of unstable hybrids, as all civilised men do, his chances are
always those of the common lot, with some slight antecedent probability
of his resembling the nearer ones among his variegated ancestry. But he
has also and everywhere in this hybrid panmixis an excellent chance of
being allotted something more accentuated, for good or ill, in the way
of hereditary traits than anything shown by his varied assortment of
ancestors. It commonly happens in such a hybrid community that in the
new crossing of hybrids that takes place at every marriage, some new
idiosyncracy, slight or considerable, comes to light in the offspring,
beyond anything visible in the parents or the remoter pedigree;
for in the crossing of what may be called multiple-hybrid parents,
complementary characters that may have been dormant or recessive in the
parents will come in from both sides, combine, re-enforce one another,
and cumulatively give an unlooked-for result. So that in a hybrid
community the fortunes of all individuals are somewhat precarious in
respect of heredity.
Such are the conditions which have prevailed among the peoples of
Europe since the first beginnings of that culture that has led up to
the Western civilisation as known to history. In these circumstances
any individual, therefore, owes to the group not only his share of
that certain typical complement of traits that characterise the
common run, but usually something more than is coming to him in the
way of individual qualities and infirmities if he is in any way
distinguishable from the common run, as well as a blind chance of
transmitting almost any traits that he is not possessed of.[91]
In the lower cultures, where the division of labour is slight and the
diversity of occupations is mainly such as marks the changes of the
seasons, the common stock of technological knowledge and proficiency is
not so extensive or so recondite but that the common man may compass
it in some fashion, and in its essentials it is accessible to all
members of the community by common notoriety, and the training required
by the state of the industrial arts comes to everyone as a matter of
course in the routine of daily life. The necessary material equipment
of tools and appliances is slight and the acquisition of it is a simple
matter that also arranges itself as an incident in the routine of daily
life. Given the common run of aptitude for the industrial pursuits
incumbent on the members of such a community, the material equipment
needful to find a livelihood or to put forth the ordinary productive
effort and turn out the ordinary industrial output can be compassed
without strain by any individual in the course of his work as he goes
along. The material equipment, the tools, implements, contrivances
necessary and conducive to productive industry, is incidental to the
day’s work; in much the same way but in a more unqualified degree than
the like is true as to the technological knowledge and skill required
to make use of this equipment.[92]
As determined by the state of the industrial arts in such a culture,
the members of the community co-operate in much of their work, to the
common gain and to no one’s detriment, since there is substantially no
individual, or private, gain to be sought. There is substantially no
bartering or hiring, though there is a recognised obligation in all
members to lend a hand; and there is of course no price, as there is no
property and no ownership, for the sufficient reason that the habits of
life under these circumstances do not provoke such a habit of thought.
Doubtless, it is a matter of course that articles of use and adornment
pertain to their makers or users in an intimate and personal way; which
will come to be construed into ownership when in the experience of
the community an occasion for such a concept as ownership arises and
persists in sufficient force to shape the current habits of thought
to that effect. There is also more or less of reciprocal service
and assistance, with a sufficient sense of mutuality to establish a
customary scheme of claims and obligations in that respect. So also
it is true that such a community holds certain lands and customary
usufructs and that any trespass on these customary holdings is
resented. But it would be a vicious misapprehension to read ideas and
rights of ownership into these practices, although where civilised men
have come to deal with instances of the kind they have commonly been
unable to put any other construction on the customs governing the case;
for the reason that civilised men’s relations with these peoples of
the lower culture have been of a pecuniary kind and for a pecuniary
purpose, and they have brought no other than pecuniary conceptions from
home.[93] There being little in hand worth owning and little purpose
to be served by its ownership, the habits of thought which go to make
the institution of ownership and property rights have not taken shape.
The slight facts which would lend themselves to ownership are not of
sufficient magnitude or urgency to call the institution into effect and
are better handled under customs which do not yet take cognisance of
property rights. Naturally, in such a cultural situation there is no
appreciable accumulation of wealth and no inducement to it; the nearest
approach being an accumulation of trinkets and personal belongings,
among which should, at least in some cases, be included certain weapons
and perhaps tools.[94] These things belong to their owner or bearer
in much the same sense as his name, which was not held on tenure of
ownership or as a pecuniary asset before the use of trade-marks and
merchantable good-will.
The workman--more typically perhaps the workwoman--in such a culture,
as indeed in any other, is a “productive agent” in the manner and
degree determined by the state of the industrial arts. What is obvious
in this respect here holds only less visibly for any other, more
complicated and technologically full-charged cultural situation,
such as has come on with the growth of population and wealth among
the more advanced peoples. He or she, or rather they--for there is
substantially no industry carried on in strict severalty in these
communities--are productive factors or industrial agents, in the sense
that they will on occasion turn out a surplus above their necessary
current consumption, only because and so far as the state of the
industrial arts enables them to do so. As workman, labourer, producer,
breadwinner, the individual is a creature of the technological scheme;
which in turn is a creation of the group life of the community. Apart
from the common stock of knowledge and training the individual members
of the community have no industrial effect. Indeed, except by grace
of this common technological equipment no individual and no family
group in any of the known communities of mankind could support their
own life; for in the long course of mankind’s life-history, since the
human plane was first reached, the early mutants which were fit to
survive in a ferine state without tools and without technology have
selectively disappeared, as being unfit to survive under the conditions
of domesticity imposed by so highly developed a state of the industrial
arts as any of the savage cultures now extant.[95] The _Homo Javensis_
and his like are gone, because there is technologically no place for
them between the anthropoids to the one side and the extant types of
man on the other. And never since the brave days when _Homo Javensis_
took up the “white man’s burden” for the better regulation of his
anthropoid neighbours has the technological scheme admitted of any
individual’s carrying on his life in severalty. So that industrial
efficiency, whether of an individual workman or of the community at
large, is a function of the state of the industrial arts.[96]
The simple and obvious industrial system of this archaic plan leaves
the individuals, or rather the domestic groups, that make up the
community, economically independent of one another and of the community
at large, except that they depend on the common technological stock
for the immaterial equipment by means of which to get their living.
This is of course not felt by them as a relation of dependence; though
there seems commonly to be some sense of indebtedness on part of the
young, and of responsibility on part of the older generation, for
the proper transmission of the recognised elements of technological
proficiency. It is impossible to say just at what point in the growth
and complication of technology this simple industrial scheme will
begin to give way to new exigencies and give occasion to a new scheme
of institutions governing the economic relations of men; such that
the men’s powers and functions in the industrial community come to
be decided on other grounds than workmanlike aptitude and special
training. In the nature of things there can be no hard and fast limit
to this phase of industrial organisation. Its disappearance or
supersession in any culture appears always to have been brought on by
the growth of property, but the institution of property need by no
means come in abruptly at any determinate juncture in the sequence of
technological development. So that this archaic phase of culture in
which industry is organised on the ground of workmanship alone may come
very extensively to overlap and blend with the succeeding phase in
which property relations chiefly decide the details of the industrial
organisation,--as is shown in varying detail by the known lower
cultures.
The forces which may bring about such a transition are often complex
and recondite, and they are seldom just the same in any given two
instances. Neither the material situation nor the human raw material
involved are precisely the same in all or several instances, and there
is no coercively normal course of things that will constrain the
growth of institutions to take a particular typical form or to follow
a particular typical sequence in all cases. Yet, in a general way such
a supersession of free workmanship by a pecuniary control of industry
appears to have been necessarily involved in any considerable growth of
culture. Indeed, at least in the economic respect, it appears to have
been the most universal and most radical mutation which human culture
has undergone in its advance from savagery to civilisation; and the
causes of it should be of a similarly universal and intrinsic character.
It may be taken as a generalisation grounded in the instinctive
endowment of mankind that the human sense of workmanship will
unavoidably go on turning to account what there is in hand of
technological knowledge, and so will in the course of time, by
insensible gains perhaps, gradually change the technological scheme,
and therefore also the scheme of customary canons of conduct answering
to it; and in the absence of overmastering circumstances this
sequence of change must, in a general way, set in the direction of
great technological mastery. Something in the way of an “advance” in
workmanlike mastery is to be looked for, in the absence of inexorable
limitations of environment. The limitations may be set by the material
circumstances or by circumstances of the institutional situation,
but on the lower levels of culture the insurmountable obstacles to
such an advance appear to have been those imposed by the material
circumstances; although institutional factors have doubtless greatly
retarded the advance in most cases, and may well have defeated it
in many. In some of the known lower cultures such an impassable
conjuncture in the affairs of technology has apparently been reached
now and again, resulting in a “stationary state” of the industrial arts
and of social arrangements, economic and otherwise. Such an instance
of “arrested development” is afforded by the Eskimo, who have to all
appearance reached the bounds of technological mastery possible in
the material circumstances in which they have been placed and with
the technological antecedents which they have had to go on. At the
other extreme of the American continent the Fuegians and Patagonians
may similarly have reached at least a provisional limit of the same
nature; though such a statement is less secure in their case, owing
to the scant and fragmentary character of the available evidence. So
also the Bushmen, the Ainu, various representative communities of the
Negrito and perhaps of the Dravidian stocks, appear to have reached a
provisional limit--barring intervention from without. In these latter
instances the decisive obstacles, if they are to be accepted as such,
seem to lie in the human-nature of the case rather than in the material
circumstances. In these latter instances the sense of workmanship,
though visibly alert and active, appears to have been inadequate to
carry out the technological scheme into further new ramifications for
want of the requisite intellectual aptitudes,--a failure of aptitudes
not in degree but in kind.
The manner in which increasing technological mastery has led over from
the savage plan of free workmanship to the barbarian system of industry
under pecuniary control is perhaps a hazardous topic of speculation;
but the known facts of primitive culture appear to admit at least a
few general propositions of a broad and provisional character. It
seems reasonably safe to say that the archaic savage plan of free
workmanship will commonly have persisted through the palæolithic
period of technology, and indeed somewhat beyond the transition to
the neolithic. This is fairly borne out by the contemporary evidence
from savage cultures. In the prehistory of the north-European culture
there is also reason to assume that the beginnings of a pecuniary
control fall in the early half of the neolithic period.[97] There
seems to be no sharply definable point in the technological advance
that can be said of itself to bring on this revolutionary change in
the institutions governing economic life. It appears to be loosely
correlated with technological improvement, so that it sets in when a
sufficient ground for it is afforded by the state of the industrial
arts, but what constitutes a sufficient ground can apparently not
be stated in terms of the industrial arts alone. Among the early
consequences of an advance in technology beyond the state of the
industrial arts schematically indicated above, and coinciding roughly
with the palæolithic stage, is on the one hand an appreciable resort to
“indirect methods of production”, involving a systematic cultivation
of the soil, domestication of plants and animals; or an appreciable
equipment of industrial appliances, such as will in either case require
a deliberate expenditure of labour and will give the holders of the
equipment something more than a momentary advantage in the quest of
a livelihood. On the other hand it leads also to an accumulation of
wealth beyond the current necessaries of subsistence and beyond that
slight parcel of personal effects that have no value to anyone but
their savage bearer.
Hereby the technological basis for a pecuniary control of industry is
given, in that the “roundabout process of production” yields an income
above the subsistence of the workmen engaged in it, and the material
equipment of appliances (crops, fruit-trees, live stock, mechanical
contrivances) binds this roundabout process of industry to a more
or less determinate place and routine, such as to make surveillance
and control possible. So far as the workman under the new phase of
technology is dependent for his living on the apparatus and the orderly
sequence of the “roundabout process” his work may be controlled and the
surplus yielded by his industry may be turned to account; it becomes
worth while to own the material means of industry, and ownership of
the material means in such a situation carries with it the usufruct of
the community’s immaterial equipment of technological proficiency.
The substantial fact upon which the strategy of ownership converges
is this usufruct of the industrial arts, and the tangible items
of property to which the claims of ownership come to attach will
accordingly vary from time to time, according as the state of the
industrial arts will best afford an effectual exploitation of this
usufruct through the tenure of one or another of the material items
requisite to the pursuit of industry. The chief subject of ownership
may accordingly be the cultivated trees, as in some of the South Sea
islands; or the tillable land, as happens in many of the agricultural
communities; or fish weirs and their location, as on some of the
salmon streams of the American north-west coast; or domestic animals,
as is typical of the pastoral culture; or it may be the persons of
the workmen, as happens under divers circumstances both in pastoral
and in agricultural communities; or, with an advance in technology
of such a nature as to place the mechanical appliances of industry
in a peculiarly advantageous position for engrossing the roundabout
processes of production, as in the latterday machine industry, these
mechanical appliances may become the typical category of industrial
wealth and so come to be accounted “productive goods” in some eminent
sense.
The institutional change by which a pecuniary regulation of industry
comes into effect may take one form or another, but its outcome has
commonly been some form of ownership of tangible goods. Particularly
has that been the outcome in the course of development that has led
on to those great pecuniary cultures of which Occidental civilisation
is the most perfect example. But just in what form the move will be
made, if at all, from free workmanship to pecuniary industry and
ownership, is in good part a question of what the material situation
of the community will permit. In some instances the circumstances
have apparently not permitted the move to be made at all. The Eskimo
culture is perhaps an extreme case of this kind. The state of the
industrial arts among them has apparently gone appreciably beyond
the technological juncture indicated above as critical in this
respect. It involves a considerable specialisation and accumulation of
appliances, such as boats, sleds, dogs, harness, various special forms
of nets, harpoons and spears, and an elaborate line of minor apparatus
necessary to the day’s work and embodying a minutely standardised
technique. At the same time these articles of use, together with
their household and personal effects, represent something appreciable
in the way of portable wealth. Yet in their economic (pecuniary and
industrial), domestic, social, or religious institutions the Eskimo
have substantially not gone beyond the point of customary regulation
commonly associated with the simpler, hand-to-mouth state of the
industrial arts typical of the palæolithic savage culture. And this
archaic Eskimo culture, with its highly elaborated technology, is
apparently of untold antiquity; it is even believed by competent
students of antiquity to have stood over without serious advance or
decline since European palæolithic times--a period of not less than
ten thousand years.[98] The causes conditioning this “backward” type
of culture among the Eskimo, coupled with a relatively advanced and
extremely complete technological system, are presumed to lie in their
material surroundings; which on the one hand do not permit a congestion
of people within a small area or enable the organisation and control of
a compact community of any considerable size; while on the other hand
they exact a large degree of co-operation and common interest, on pain
of extreme hardship if not of extinction.
More perplexing at first sight is the case of such sedentary
agricultural communities as the Pueblo Indians, who have also not
advanced very materially beyond the simpler cultural scheme of savage
life, and have not taken seriously to a system of property and a
pecuniary control of industry, in spite of their having achieved a
very considerable advance in the industrial arts, particularly in
agriculture, such as would appear to entitle them to something “higher”
than that state of peaceable, non-coercive social organisation, in
which they were found on their first contact with civilised men, with
maternal descent and mother-goddesses, and without much property
rights, accumulated wealth or pecuniary distinction of classes. Again
an explanation is probably to be sought in special circumstances
of environment, perhaps re-enforced by peculiarities of the racial
endowment; though the latter point seems doubtful, since both
linguistically and anthropometrically the Pueblos are found to belong
to two or three distinct stocks, at the same time that their culture is
notably uniform throughout the Pueblo region, both on the technological
and on the institutional side. The peculiar material circumstances
that appear to have conditioned the Pueblo culture are (_a_) a habitat
which favours agricultural settlement only at isolated and widely
separated spots, (_b_) sites for habitation (on detached mesas or on
other difficult hills or in isolated valleys or canyons) easily secured
against aggression from without and not affording notable differential
advantages or admitting segregation of the population within the
pueblo, (_c_) the absence of beasts of burden, such as have enabled the
inhabitants of analogous regions of the old world effectually to cover
long distances and make raiding a lucrative, or at least an attractive
enterprise.
These, and other peculiar instances of what may perhaps be called
cultural retardation, indicate by way of exception what may have been
the ruling causes that have governed in the advance to a higher culture
under more ordinary circumstances,--by “ordinary” being intended such
circumstances as have apparently led to a different and, it would be
held, a more normal result in the old world, and particularly in the
region of the Western civilisation.
In the ordinary course, it should seem, such an advance in the
industrial arts as will result in an accumulation of wealth, a
considerable and efficient industrial equipment, or in a systematic
and permanent cultivation of the soil or an extensive breeding of
herds or flocks, will also bring on ownership and property rights
bearing on these valuable goods, or on the workmen, or on the land
employed in their production. What has seemed the most natural
and obvious beginnings of property rights, in the view of those
economists who have taken an interest in the matter, is the storing
up of valuables by such of the ancient workmen as were enabled, by
efficiency, diligence or fortuitous gains, to produce somewhat more
than their current consumption. There are difficulties, though perhaps
not insuperable, in the way of such a genesis of property rights and
pecuniary differentiation within any given community. The temper of
the people bred in the ways of the simpler plan of hand-to-mouth and
common interest does not readily bend itself to such an institutional
innovation, even though the self-regarding impulses of particular
members of the community may set in such a direction as would give the
alleged result.[99]
There are other and more natural ways of reaching the same results,
ways more consonant with that archaic scheme of usages on which the new
institution of property is to be grafted. (_a_) In the known cultures
of this simpler plan there are usually, or at least frequently, present
a class of magicians (shamans, medicine men, angekut), an inchoate
priestly class, who get their living in part “by their wits,” half
parasitically, by some sort of tithe levied on their fellow members
for supernatural ministrations and exploits of faith that are worth
as much as they will bring.[100] As the industrial efficiency of the
community increases with the technological gain, and an increasing
disposable output is at hand, it should naturally follow, human nature
being what it is, that the services of the priests or magicians should
suffer an advance in value and so enable the priests to lay something
by, to acquire a special claim to certain parcels of land or cultivated
trees or crops or first-fruits or labour to be performed by their
parishioners. There is no limit to the value of such ministrations
except the limit of tolerance, “what the traffic will bear.” And much
may be done in this way, which is in close touch with the accustomed
ways of life among known savages and lower barbarians. To the extent to
which such a move is successful it will alter the economic situation
of the community by making the lay members, in so far, subject to the
priestly class, and will gather wealth and power in the hands of the
priests; so introducing a relation of master and servant, together
with class differences in wealth, the practice of exclusive ownership,
and pecuniary obligations. (_b_) With an accumulation of wealth,
whether in portable form or in the form of plantations and tillage,
there comes the inducement to aggression, predation, by whatever name
it may be known. Such aggression is an easy matter in the common run
of lower cultures, since relations are habitually strained between
these savage and barbarian communities. There is commonly a state of
estrangement between them amounting to constructive feud, though the
feud is apt to lie dormant under a _modus vivendi_ so long as there
is no adequate inducement to open hostilities, in the way of booty.
Given a sufficiently wealthy enemy who is sufficiently ill prepared
for hostilities to afford a fighting chance of taking over this wealth
by way of booty or tribute, with no obvious chance of due reprisals,
and the opening of hostilities will commonly arrange itself. The
communities mutually concerned so pass from the more or less precarious
peaceful customs and animus common to the indigent lower cultures, to a
more or less habitual attitude of predatory exploit. With the advent of
warfare comes the war chief, into whose hands authority and pecuniary
emoluments gather somewhat in proportion as warlike exploits and ideals
become habitual in the community.[101] More or less of loot falls into
the hands of the victors in any raid. The loot may be goods, cattle
if any, or men, women and children; any or all of which may become
(private) property and be accumulated in sufficient mass to make a
difference between rich and poor. Captives may fall into some form of
servitude, and in an agricultural community may easily become the chief
item of wealth. At the same time an entire community may be reduced
to servitude, so falling into the possession of an absentee owner
(master), or under resident masters coming in from the victorious enemy.
In any or all of these ways the institution of ownership is likely
to arise so soon as there is provocation for it, and in all cases it
is a consequence of an appreciable advance in the industrial arts.
Yet in a number of recorded cases a sufficient advance in technology
does not appear to have been followed by so prompt an introduction of
ownership, at least not in the fully developed form, as the surface
facts would seem to have called for. Custom in the lower cultures is
extremely tenacious, and what might seem an excessive allowance of
time appears to be needed for so radical an innovation in the habitual
scheme of things as is involved in the installation of rights of
ownership. There are cases of a fairly advanced barbarian culture, with
sufficiently coercive government control, an authoritative priesthood,
and well-marked class distinctions which hold good both in economic
and social relations, and yet where the line of demarcation between
ownership and mastery is not drawn in any unambiguous fashion--where
it is perhaps as accurate a statement as the case permits, to say that
this distinction has not yet been made, and so would, if applied, mark
a difference that does not yet exist.[102]
So long as overt predatory conditions continue to rule the
case,--e. g., so long as the community in question continues, in a
sense, under martial law, “in a state of seige,” where the holders of
the economic advantage hold it on a tenure of prowess or by way of
delegated power and prerogative from a superior of warlike antecedents
and dynastic right,--so long the rights of ownership are not likely
to be well differentiated from those of mastery. Much the same
characterisation of such a state of things is conveyed in the current
phrase that “the rights of person and property are not secure.” The
very wide prevalence in the barbarian cultures of some such state of
things argues that the genesis of property rights is likely to have
been something of this kind in the common run, though it does not in
other cases preclude a different and more peaceable development out of
workmanlike or priestly economies.
But even if it should be found, when the matter has been sifted, that
the genesis of ownership is of the latter kind, it would also in all
probability be found that among the peoples whose institutional growth
has a serious genetic bearing on the Western culture the holding of
property has, late or early, passed through a phase of predatory tenure
in which the distinction between ownership and mastery has so far
fallen into abeyance as to have had but a slight effect on the further
development. Where, as appears frequently to have been the case both in
Europe and elsewhere, the kingship and temporal power has arisen out of
the priestly office and spiritual power--or perhaps better where the
inchoate kingship was in its origins chiefly of a priestly complexion,
with a gradual shifting of kingly power and prerogative to a temporal
basis,[103]--there the transition from a creation of property and
mastery rights by priestly economies (fraud?) to a tenure of wealth
and authority by royal prerogative (force?) will have so blended
the two methods of genesis as to leave the attempt at a hard fast
discrimination between them somewhat idle.
But whatever may be conceived to have been the genesis of ownership,
the institution is commonly found, in the barbarian culture, to be
tempered with a large infusion of predatory concepts, of status,
prerogative, differential respect of persons and economic classes, and
a corresponding differential respect of occupations. Whether property
provokes to predation or predation initiates ownership, the situation
that results in early phases of the pecuniary culture is much the same;
and the causal relation in which this situation stands to the advance
in workmanship is also much the same. This relation between workmanship
and the pecuniary culture brought on with the advent of ownership is
a twofold one, or, perhaps better, it is a relation of mutual give
and take. The increase in industrial efficiency due to a sufficient
advance in the industrial arts gives rise to the ownership of property
and to pecuniary appreciations of men and things, occupations and
products, habits, customs, usages, observances, services and goods.
At the same time, since predation and warlike exploit are intimately
associated with the facts of ownership through its early history
(perhaps throughout its history), there results a marked accentuation
of the self-regarding sentiments; with the economically important
consequence that self-interest displaces the common good in men’s
ideals and aspirations. The animus entailed by predatory exploit is
one of self-interest, a seeking of one’s own advantage at the cost of
the enemy, which frequently, in the poetically ideal case, takes such
an extreme form as to prefer the enemy’s loss to one’s own gain. And
in the emulation which the predatory life and its distinctions of
wealth introduce into the community, the end of endeavour is likely
to become the differential advantage of the individual as against his
neighbours rather than the undifferentiated advantage of the group as
a whole, in contrast with alien or hostile groups. The members of the
community come to work each for his own interest in severalty, rather
than for an undivided interest in the common lot. Such sentiment of
group solidarity as there may remain falls also into the invidious
and emulative form; whereby the fighting patriot becomes the type
and exemplar of the public spirited citizen, whose ideal then is to
follow his leader and humble the pride of those whom the chances
of contention have thrown in with the other side of the game. The
sentiment of common interest, itself in good part a diffuse working-out
of the parental instinct, comes at the best to converge on the glory
of the flag instead of the fulness of life of the community at large,
or more commonly it comes to be centred in loyalty, that is to say in
subservience, to the common war-chief and his dynastic successors.
In the shifting of activities, ideals and aims so brought in with
the advent of wealth and ownership, the part of the priests and
their divinities is not to be overlooked, for herein lies one of the
greater cultural gains brought on by the technological advance at this
juncture. The margin of service and produce available for consumption
in the cult increases, and by easy consequence the spiritual prestige
and the temporal power and prerogatives of the priesthood grow greater.
The jurisdiction of the gods of the victors is extended; through the
vicarious power of the priests, over the subject peoples, and as the
temporal dominion is enlarged and an increasing measure of coercion is
employed in controlling these dominions, so also in the affairs of the
gods and their priests there is an accession of power and dignity. It
commonly happens where predatory enterprise comes to be habitual and
successful that the temporal power tends to centre in an autocratic
and arbitrary ruler; and in this as in so much else, spiritual affairs
are likely to take their complexion from the temporal, resulting in a
strong drift toward an autocratic monotheism, which in the finished
case comes to a climax in an omnipotent, omniscient deity of very
exalted dignity and very exacting temper. For the habits of thought
enforced in the affairs of daily life are carried over into men’s
sense of what is right and good in the life of the gods as well. If
there is any choice among the gods under whose auspices a people has
successfully entered on a career of predation, so that some of the gods
have more of a reputation for rapacity and inhumanity than others,
the most atrocious among them is likely, other things being equal, to
become the war-god of the conquering host, and so eventually to be
exalted to the suzerainty among the gods, and even in time to become
the one and only incumbent of the divine czardom.
Should it happen that a relatively humane, tolerant and tractable deity
comes in for exaltation to the divine suzerainty, as well may be if
such a one has already a good prior claim standing over from the more
peaceable past, he will readily acquire the due princely arrogance and
irresponsibility that vests the typical heavenly king. It may be added
that as a matter of course no degree of imputed inhumanity in the most
high God will stand in the way of a god-fearing and astute priesthood
volubly ascribing to him all the good qualities that should grace an
elderly patriarchal gentleman of the old school; so that even his most
infamous atrocities become ineffably meritorious and are dispensed of
his mercy.[104]
With the terrors of a jealous and almighty God behind them, and with
faith in their own mission and sagacity in its administration, the
priesthood are in a position to make the affairs of the heavenly king
count for much in the affairs of men; more particularly since this
spiritual power enters into working arrangements with the temporal
power; so that in the outcome these institutions which in their origins
have grown out of a precarious margin of product above subsistence come
to possess themselves of the output at large and leave a precarious
margin of subsistence to the community at large.[105]
These further matters of “natural law in the spiritual world” are not
in themselves of direct interest to the present inquiry, and they are
also matters of somewhat tedious commonplace. Yet this run of things
has grave consequences in the further working-out of the technological
situation as well as in the course of material welfare for the
community on whom it is incumbent to turn the technological knowledge
to account, to conserve or improve and transmit it, and for this reason
it has seemed necessary summarily to recall those general features of
the cultural scheme that are inherently associated with the earlier
pecuniary culture,--the full-blown barbarian culture. And it seems
pertinent also to add something further in the same connection before
leaving this aspect of the case.
It is necessary to hark back to what was said in an earlier chapter,
of the relations of tillage and cattle-breeding to the instinct
of workmanship and the course of technological advance. Both the
technological and the institutional bearing of cattle-breeding is
particularly notable in this connection. As already spoken of in what
has gone before, cattle-breeding has the technological peculiarity
that it may be successfully entered on and carried forward with a
larger admixture of anthropomorphic concepts than the mechanic arts,
or even than the domestication and care of the crop plants. It is
perhaps not to be admitted that the penchant of early man to take
an anthropomorphic view of the lower animals and impute to them
the common traits of human nature has directly conduced to their
successful domestication, but it should be within the mark to say that
this penchant may have been primarily responsible for the course of
conduct that led to the domestication of animals,[106] and that it has
apparently never been a serious drawback to any pastoral culture. Now,
wealth in flocks and herds is peculiar not only in being eminently
portable, even to the extent that in the usual course of this industry
it is necessary for a pastoral community to migrate, or to go over
an extended itinerary with the changing seasons, but it has also the
peculiar quality of multiplying spontaneously, given only a degree of
surveillance and a sufficient range of pasture lands. It follows that
cattle are easy and tempting to acquire by predation, will accumulate
through natural increase without notable exertion on the part of their
owners, and will multiply beyond the bearing capacity of any disposable
range. Hence a pastoral people, or a people given in great part to
pastoral pursuits, will somewhat readily take to a predatory life;
will have to be organised for defence (and offence) against raids or
encroachments from its neighbours engaged in the same pursuits; will
find itself short of range lands through the natural increase of its
flocks or herds, and so will even involuntarily be brought into feud
with neighbouring herdsmen through mutual trespass. Further, the
work of herding, on the scale imposed by the open continental cattle
and sheep ranges, is man’s work, as is also the incidental fighting,
raiding, and cattle-lifting.
The effects of these technological conditions on the general culture of
a pastoral people are such as are set forth in their most favourable
light in the early historical books of the Old Testament, or such
conditions as may be found today on the great cattle ranges of west and
north-central Asia. The community falls necessarily into a patriarchal
régime; with considerable concentration of wealth in individual hands;
great disparity in wealth and social standing, commonly involving
both chattel slavery and serfdom; a fighting organisation under
patriarchal-despotic leadership, which serves both for civil, political
and religious purposes; domestic institutions of the same cast,
involving a degree of subjection of women and children and commonly
polygamy for the patriarchal upper or ruling class; a religious
system of a monotheistic or monarchical complexion and drawn on lines
of patriarchal despotism; with the priestly office vested in the
patriarchal head of the community (the eldest male of the eldest male
line) if the group is small enough to admit the administration of both
the temporal and spiritual power at the hands of one man--as Israel at
the time of the earlier sojourn in Canaan--or vested in a specialised
priesthood if the group is of great size--as Israel on their return to
Palestine.
Such a culture is manifestly fit to succeed both in avowedly predatory
enterprise and in pecuniary enterprise of a more peaceable sort, so
long as range lands are at its disposal or so long as it can find a
sufficiently large and compact agricultural community to reduce to
servitude, or so long as it can find ways and means of commercial
enterprise while still occupying a position defensible against all
comers. Its population is organised for offence and defence and trained
in the habits of subordination necessary to any successful war, and the
patriarchal authority and pecuniary ideals inbred in them give them
facility in co-operation against aliens, as well as the due temper for
successful bargaining. Such a culture has the elements of national
strength and solidarity, given only some adequate means of subsistence
while still retaining its militant patriarchal organisation. Not
least among its elements of national strength is its religion, which
fosters the national pride of a people chosen by the Most High, at the
same time that it trains the population in habits of subordination
and loyalty, as well as in patient submission to exactions. But it is
essentially a parasitic culture, despotic, and, with due training,
highly superstitious or religious. What a people of these antecedents
is capable of is shown by the Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes, Persians,
the Hindu invaders of India, the Hyksos invaders of Egypt, and in
another line by Israel and the Phœnicians, and in a lesser degree by
the Huns, Mongols, Tatars, Arabs and Turks.
It is from peoples of this culture that the great religions of the
old world have come, near or remote, but it is not easy to find
any substantial contribution to human culture drawn indubitably
from this source apart from religious creed, cult and poetry. The
domestication of animals, for instance, is not due to them; with the
possible exception of the horse and the dog, that work had to be done
in peaceable, sedentary communities, from whom the pastoral nomads
will have taken over the stock and the industry and carried it out
on a scale and with cultural consequences which do not follow from
cattle-breeding under sedentary conditions. Their religion, on the
other hand, seems in no case to have been carried up to the consummate
stage of despotic monotheism during the nomadic-pastoral phase of their
experience, but to have been worked out to a finished product presently
after they had engaged on a career of conquest and had some protracted
experience of warfare and despotism on a relatively large scale. The
history of these great civilisations with pastoral antecedents appears
to run somewhat uniformly to the effect that they collapsed as soon as
they had eaten their host into a collapse. The incidents along the way
between their beginning in conquest and their collapse in exhaustion
are commonly no more edifying and of no more lasting significance
to human culture than those which have similarly marked the course
of the Turk. These great monarchies were organised by and for an
intrusive dynasty and ruling class, of pastoral antecedents, and they
drew their subsistence and their means of oppression from a subjugated
agricultural population. In the course of this further elaboration of
a predatory civilisation, the institutions proper to a large scale and
to a powerful despotism and nobility resting on a servile people, were
developed into a finished system; in which the final arbiter is always
irresponsible force and in which the all-pervading social relation is
personal subservience and personal authority. The mechanic arts make
little if any progress under such a discipline of personalities, even
the arts of war, and there is little if any evidence of sensible gain
in any branch of husbandry. There were great palaces and cities built
by slave labour and corvée, embodying untold misery in conspicuously
wasteful and tasteless show, and great monarchs whose boast it was that
they were each and several the best friend or nearest relative of some
irresponsible and supreme god, and whose dearest claim to pre-eminence
was that they “walked on the faces of the black-head race.” Seen
in perspective and rated in any terms that have a workmanlike
significance, these stupendous dynastic fabrics are as insignificant as
they are large, and none of them is worth the least of the fussy little
communities that came in time to make up the Hellenic world and its
petty squabbles.
In their general traits these various civilisations founded (in
conquest) by the pastoral peoples are of the same character as is the
pecuniary culture as found elsewhere, but they have certain special
features which set them off somewhat in a class by themselves. They
are predatory in a peculiarly overt and accentuated degree, so that
their institutions foster the invidious sentiments, the self-regarding
animus of servility and of arrogance, beyond what commonly happens
in the pecuniary culture at large; and they carry a large content
of peculiarly high-wrought religious superstitions and fear of the
supernatural, which likewise works out from and into an animus of
servility and arrogance. In these cultures it is true, even beyond
the great significance which the proposition has in the barbarian
culture elsewhere, that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.
The discipline of life in such a culture, therefore, is consistently
unfavourable to any technological gain; the instinct of workmanship is
constantly dominated by prevalent habits of thought that are worse than
useless for any technological purpose.
Much the same, of course, is true for any civilisation founded on
personal government of the coercive kind, whatever may be the remoter
antecedents of the dynastic and ruling classes; but these other
cultures have not the same secure and ancient patriarchal foundation,
ready to hand, and so they are constrained to build their institutions
of coercion, domestic, civil, political and military, more slowly
and with a more doubtful outcome; nor does their religious system
so readily work out in a monarchical theology with an omnipotent
sovereign and in all-pervading fear of God. A home-bred despotism in
an agricultural community that has set out with maternal descent, a
matriarchal clan system, and mother goddesses, is hampered both on
the temporal and the spiritual side by ancient and inbred usage and
preconceptions that can be effectually overcome only in the long course
of time. The civilisations of Asia-Minor and the Ægean region, and even
of Egypt and Rome, however much of pastoral and patriarchal elements
may have been infused into them in the course of time, show their
shortcomings in this respect to the last; perhaps in their religions
more than in any other one cultural trait, since religion is after all
an epigenetic feature and follows rather than leads in the unfolding of
the cultural scheme.
* * * * *
But these great civilisations dominated by pastoral antecedents have
no grave significance for the modern culture, except as drawbacks,
and none at all for modern technology or for that matter-of-fact
knowledge on which modern technology runs. The Western peoples, whose
cultural past is of more immediate interest, have also had their
warlike experience, late and early, but it seems never to have reached
the consummate outcome to be seen in the East. Neither as regards
the scale on which dynastic organisation has been carried out nor
as regards the thoroughness with which their institutions have been
permeated by predatory preconceptions have the Western peoples in their
earlier history approached the standard of the oriental despotisms.
Even now, it may be remarked, advocates of war and armaments commonly
speak (doubtless disingenuously) for the predatory régime as being a
necessity of defence rather than something to be desired on its own
merits. Not that the predatory régime has not been a sufficiently
grave fact in the history of occidental civilisation; to take such
a view of history one would have to overlook the Roman Empire, the
barbarian invasions, the feudal system, the Catholic church, the Era
of statemaking, and the existing armed neutrality of the powers; but
these have, all but the last, proved to be episodes on a grand scale
rather than such an historical finality as any one of the successive
monarchies in the Mesopotamian-Chaldæan country,--the test being that
occidental civilisation has not died of any one of these maladies,
though it has come through more than one critical period.
Western civilisation has gone through these eras of accentuated
predation and has at all times shown an appreciable admixture of
predatory conceptions in its scheme of institutions and ideals, in its
domestic institutions and its public affairs, in its art and religion,
but it is after all within the mark to say that, at least since the
close of the Dark Ages, a distinctive characteristic that sets off
this civilisation in contradistinction from any definitively predatory
phase of the pecuniary culture, has been a pertinacious pursuit of
the arts of peace, to which those peoples that have led in this
civilisation have ever returned at every respite. For an appreciation
of the relations subsisting between the sense of workmanship and
the discipline of habituation in the modern culture, therefore, the
phenomena of peaceful ownership are of greater, or at least of more
vivid interest than those of the predatory phase of the pecuniary
culture.
Modern civilisation, and indeed all history for that matter, lies
within the pecuniary culture as a whole; but the Western culture of
modern times belongs, perhaps somewhat precariously, to the secondary
or peaceable phase of this pecuniary culture, rather than to that
predatory phase with which the pecuniary scheme of life began
somewhere in the lower barbarism, and that has repeatedly closed its
life cycle in the collapse of one and another of the great dynastic
empires of the old world.
As in the predatory phase, so also in the peaceable pecuniary culture,
the dominant note is given by the self-regarding impulses; and the
sense of workmanship is therefore characteristically hedged about and
guided by the institutional exigencies and preconceptions incident to
life under the circumstances imposed by ownership,--in a situation
where the economic interest, the interest in those material means of
life with which workmanship has to deal, converges on property rights.
Ownership is self-regarding, of course, and the rights of ownership are
of a personal, invidious, differential, emulative nature; although in
the peaceable phase of the civilisation of ownership, force and fraud
are, in theory, barred out of the game of acquisition,--wherein this
differs from the predatory phase proper.
An obvious consequence following immediately on the emergence of
ownership in any community is an increased application to work. This
has been taken as a matter of course in theoretical speculations and
is borne out by the observation of peoples among whom trade relations
have been introduced in recent times. An immediate result is greater
diligence, accompanied apparently in all cases, if the reports of
observers are to be accepted, by an increase in contention, distrust
and chicanery[107] and an increasingly wasteful consumption of goods.
The diligence so fostered by emulative self-interest is directed to
the acquisition of property, in great part to the acquisition of more
than is possessed by those others with whom the invidious comparison
in ownership is made; and under the spur of ownership simply, it is
only secondarily, as a means to the emulative end of acquisition, that
productive work, and therefore workmanship in its naïve sense, comes
into the case at all. Ownership conduces to diligence in acquisition
and therefore indirectly to diligence in work, if no more expeditious
means of acquiring wealth can be devised. In its first incidence the
incentive to diligence afforded by ownership is a proposition in
business not in workmanship. Its effects on workmanship, industry
and technology, therefore, are necessarily somewhat uncertain and
uneven. Apparently from the start there is some appreciable resort
to fraudulent thrift, to the production of spurious or inferior
goods.[108] This of course very presently is corrected in the increased
astuteness and vigilance exercised in men’s dealings with one another,
whereby an appreciable portion of energy goes to defeat these artifices
of disingenuous worldly wisdom.
It should be added that the pecuniary incentive to work takes the
direction of making the most of the means at hand, considered as
means of pecuniary gain rather than as means of serviceability, and
that it conduces therefore to the fullest (pecuniary) exploitation of
the standard accepted ways and means of industry rather than to the
improvement of these ways and means beyond the conjuncture at hand.
Further, though this is also somewhat of a tedious commonplace, since
the only authentic end of work under the pecuniary dispensation is the
acquisition of wealth; since the possession of wealth in so far exempts
its possessor from productive work; and since such exemption is a mark
of wealth and therefore of superiority over those who have nothing
and therefore must work; it follows that addiction to work becomes a
mark of inferiority and therefore discreditable. Whereby work becomes
distasteful to all men instructed in the proprieties of the pecuniary
culture; and it has even become so irksome to men trained in the
punctilios of the servile, predatory, phase of this culture that it was
once credibly proclaimed by a shrewd priesthood as the most calamitous
curse laid on mankind by a vindictive God. Also, since wealth affords
means for a free consumption of goods, the conspicuous consumption
of goods becomes a mark of pecuniary excellence, and so it becomes
an element of respectability in any pecuniary culture, and presently
becomes a meritorious act and even a requirement of pecuniary decency.
The outcome is conspicuous wastefulness of consumption, the limits of
which, if any, have apparently not been approached hitherto.[109]
The bearings of this pecuniary culture on workmanship and technology
are wide and diverse. Most immediate and perhaps most notable is the
conventional disesteem of labour spoken of above, which seems to follow
as a necessary consequence from the institution of ownership in all
cases where distinctions of wealth are at all considerable or where
property rights are associated with facts of mastery and prestige. The
pecuniary disrepute of labour acts to discourage industry, but this
may be offset, at least in part, by the incentive given to emulation
by the good repute attaching to acquisition. The wasteful expenditure
of goods and services enjoined by the pecuniary canons of conspicuous
consumption gives an economically untoward direction to industry, at
the same time that it greatly increases the hardships and curtails the
amenities of life. So also, estrangement and distrust between persons,
classes and nations necessarily pervades this cultural era, due to
the incessant gnawing of incompatible pecuniary interests; and this
state of affairs appreciably lowers the aggregate efficiency of human
industry and sets up bootless obstacles to be overcome and irrelevant
asperities to be put up with.
These and the like consequences of pecuniary emulation are simple,
direct and obvious; but the discipline of the pecuniary culture bears
on workmanship also in a more subtle way, indirect and less evident
at first sight. The discipline of daily life imparts its own bent to
the sense of workmanship through habituation of the workman to that
scheme and logic of things that rules this pecuniary culture. The
outcome as concerns industry is somewhat equivocal; the discipline of
self-seeking at some points favours workmanship and at others not. At
one period or phase of the pecuniary culture, generally speaking an
early or crude phase, the bent so given to workmanship and technology
seems necessarily to be conducive to inefficiency; at another (later or
maturer) phase the contrary is likely to be true.
The pecuniary discipline of invidious emulation takes effect on the
state of the industrial arts chiefly and most pervasively through the
bias which it gives to the knowledge on which workmanship proceeds.
It may be called to mind that the body of knowledge (facts) turned to
account in workmanship, the facts made use of in devising technological
processes and appliances, are of the nature of habits of thought.
This is particularly applicable to those (tactical) principles under
whose control the information in hand is construed and connected up
into a system of uses, agencies and instrumentalities. These habits of
thought, elements of knowledge, items of information, accepted facts,
principles of reality, in part represent the mechanical behaviour of
objects, the brute nature of brute matter, and in part they stand for
qualities, aptitudes and proclivities imputed to external objects and
their behaviour and so infused into the facts and the generalisations
based on them. The sense of workmanship has much to do with this
imputation of traits to the phenomena of observation, perhaps more than
any other of the proclivities native to man. The traits so imputed to
the facts are in the main such as will be consonant with the sense
of workmanship and will lend themselves to a concatenation in its
terms. But this infusion of traits into the facts of observation,
whether it takes effect at the instance of the sense of workmanship,
or conceivably on impulse not to be identified with this instinct, is
a logical process and is carried out by an intelligence whose logical
processes have in all cases been profoundly biassed by habituation.
So that the habits of life of the individual, and therefore of
the community made up of such individuals, will pervasively and
unremittingly bend this work of imputation with the set of their own
current, and will accordingly involve incoming elements of knowledge
in a putative system of relations consistent with these habits
of life. This comprehensive scheme of habitual apprehensions and
appreciations is what is called the “genius,” spirit, or character
of any given culture. In all this range of habitual preconceptions
touching the nature of things there prevails a degree of solidarity,
of mutual support and re-enforcement among the several lines of
habitual activity comprised in the current scheme of life; so that a
certain characteristic tone or bias runs through the whole,--in so
far as the cultural situation has attained that degree of maturity or
assimilation that will allow it to be spoken of as a distinctive whole,
standing out as a determinate and coherent phase in the life-history
of the race. To this bias of scope and method in the current scheme of
life, intellectual and sentimental, any new element or item must be
assimilated if it is not to be rejected as alien and unreal or to fall
through by neglect.
All this bears on the scope and method of knowledge, and therefore
on the facts made use of in the industrial arts, just as it bears on
any other feature of human life that is of the nature of habit. And
the immediate question is as to the bias or drift of the pecuniary
culture as it affects the apprehension of facts serviceable for
technological ends. This pecuniary bias or bent may be described as
invidious, personal, emulative, looking to differential values in
respect of personal force or competitive success, looking to gradations
in respect of comparative potency, validity, authenticity, propriety,
reputability, decency. The canons of pecuniary repute preclude the
well-to-do, who have leisure for such things, from inquiring narrowly
into the facts of technology, since these things are beneath their
dignity, conventionally distasteful; familiarity with such matters
can not with propriety be avowed, nor can they without offence and
humiliation be canvassed at all intimately among the better class. At
the same time pecuniary competition, when carried to its ideal pitch,
works the lower industrial classes to exhaustion and allows them no
appreciable leisure or energy for indulging any possible curiosity of
this kind on their part. The habitual (ideal) frame of mind is that
of invidious self-interest on the one hand, due to the imperative and
ubiquitous need of gain in wealth or in rank, and on the other hand
class discrimination due to the ubiquitous prevalence of distinctions
in prerogatives and authentic standing. The discipline of the pecuniary
religions, or of the religious tenets and observances proper to the
pecuniary culture, runs to a similar effect; more decisively so in the
earlier, or distinctively predatory, phases of this culture than in the
peaceable or commercial phase. The vulgar facts of industry are beneath
the dignity of a feudalistic deity or of his priesthood; at the same
time that the overmastering need of standing well in the graces of an
all-powerful, exacting and irresponsible God throws a deeper shadow of
ignobility over the material side of life, and makes any workmanlike
preoccupation with industrial efficiency presumptively sinful as well
as indecorous.
The pecuniary culture is not singular in this matter. Always and
everywhere the acquirement of knowledge is a matter of observation
guided and filled out by the imputation of qualities, relations and
aptitudes to the observed phenomena. Without this putative content
of active presence and potency the phenomena would lack reality; they
could not be assimilated in the scheme of things human. It is only a
commonplace of the logic of apperception that the substantial traits
of objective facts are a figment of the brain. Under the discipline of
this pecuniary phase of culture the requisite imputation of character
to facts runs, as ever, in anthropomorphic terms; but it is an
anthropomorphism which by habit conforms to the predatory-pecuniary
scheme of preconceptions, such as the routine of life has made ready
and convincing to men living under the discipline of emulation,
invidious distinctions and authentic pecuniary decorum. Under these
circumstances it is not in the anthropomorphism of naïve workmanship
that the putative reality of facts is to be sought, but in their
conformity to the conventionally definitive preconceptions of invidious
merit, authentic excellence, force of character, mastery, complaisance,
congruity with the run of the established institutional values and the
ordinances of the Most High. The canons of reality, under which sense
impressions are reduced to objective fact and so become available for
use, and under which, again, facts are put in practice and turned to
technological account, are the same canons of invidious distinction
that rule in the world of property and among men occupied with
predatory and pecuniary precedence. In effect men and things come
to be rated in terms of what they (putatively) are--their intrinsic
character--rather than in terms of what they (empirically) will do.
Without pursuing the question farther at this point, it should be
evident that the bias of the pecuniary culture must on the whole act
with pervasive force so to bend men’s knowledge of the things with
which they have to do as to lessen its serviceability for technological
ends. The result is a deflection from matter-of-fact to matter of
imputation, and the imputation is of the personal character here
spoken of. The dominant note appears to be a differential rating in
respect of aggressive self-assertion, whether in human or non-human
agents. Theological preconceptions are commonly strong in the pecuniary
culture, and under their rule this differential rating developes into
a scheme of graded powers and efficacies vested in the phenomena of
external nature by delegation from an overruling personal authority.
Such a bent is necessarily prejudicial to workmanship, and it may
seem that the ubiquitous repressive force of this metaphysics of
authority and authenticity should serve the same disserviceable end
for workmanship as the more genial and diffuse anthropomorphism of the
lower cultures, but with more decisive effect since it runs in a more
competently organised, compact and prescriptive fashion.
Where the pecuniary culture has been carried through consistently on
the predatory plan, without being diverted to that commercial phase
current in the latterday Western civilisation, the conclusion of the
matter has been decay of the industrial arts and effectual dissipation
of that system of matter-of-fact knowledge on which technological
efficiency rests. In the West, where the predatory phase proper has
eventually given place to a commercial phase of the same pecuniary
culture, the general run of events in this bearing has been a decline
of knowledge, technology and workmanship, running on so long as the
predatory (coercive) rule prevailed unbroken, but followed presently
by a slow recovery and advance in technological efficiency and
scientific insight; somewhat in proportion as the commercialisation
of this culture has gained ground, and therefore correlated also in a
general way with the decline of religious fear.
This run of events may tempt to the inference that while the
predatory phase proper of this pecuniary civilisation is inimical to
matter-of-fact knowledge and to technological insight, the rule of
commercial ideas and ideals characteristic of its subsequent peaceable
phase acts to propagate these material elements of culture. But what
has already appeared in the course of the inquiry into that still
earlier cultural phase that went before the coercive and invidious
régime of predation suggests that the case is not so simple nor so
flattering to our latterday self-complacency. The self-regarding
sentiments of arrogance and abasement, out of whose free habitual
exercise the pecuniary culture, with its institutions of prerogative
and differential advantage, has been built up, are not the spiritual
source from which such an outcome is to be looked for. These sentiments
and the instinctive proclivities of which these sentiments are the
emotional expression are presumed to have remained unchanged in force
and character through that long course of cumulative habituation that
has given them their ascendency in the institutions of the pecuniary
culture, and of their own motion they will yield now results of the
same kind as ever. But the like is true also for those other instincts
out of whose working came the earlier gains made in knowledge and
workmanship under the savage culture, before the self-regarding
sentiments underlying the pecuniary culture took the upper hand.
The parental bent and the instincts of workmanship and of curiosity
will have been overborne by cumulative habituation to the rule of the
self-regarding proclivities that triumphed in the culture of predation,
and whose dominion has subsequently suffered some impairment in the
later substitution of property rights for tenure by prowess, but these
instincts that make for workmanship remain as intrinsic to human nature
as the others. What is to be said for the current commercial scheme of
life, therefore, appears to be that it is only less inimical to the
functioning of those instinctive propensities that serve the common
interest. Hence, gradually, these instincts and the non-invidious
interests which they engender have been coming effectually into
bearing again as fast as the stern repression of them exercised by the
full-charged predatory scheme of life has weakened into a less and less
effectual inhibition, under the discipline of compromise and mitigated
self-aggrandisement embodied in the rights of property.
That authentication of ownership out of which the sacred rights of
property have apparently grown may well have arisen as a sort of mutual
insurance among owners as against the disaffection of the dispossessed;
which would presently give rise to a sentiment of solidarity within
the class of owners, would acquire prescriptive force through habitual
enforcement, become a matter of customary right to be consistently
respected under the institutional forms of property, and eventuate in
that highly moralised expression of self-aggrandisement which it is
today. But with the putting-away of fancy-free predation, as being a
conventionally disallowed means of self-aggrandisement, sentiments
of equity and solidarity would presently come in--perhaps at the
outset by way of disingenuous make-believe--and so the way would be
made easier under the shelter of this range of conceptions for a
rehabilitation of the primordial parental instinct and its penchant for
the common good. And when ownership has once been institutionalised
in this impersonal and quasi-dispassionate form it will lend but a
decreasingly urgent bias to the cultural scheme in the direction of
differential respect of persons and a differential rating of natural
phenomena in respect of the occult potencies and efficacies imputed to
them.
As the institutional ground has shifted from free-swung predation
to a progressively more covert régime of self-aggrandisement and
differential gain, the instinct of workmanship has progressively found
freer range and readier access to its raw material. The differential
good repute of wealth and rank has of course continued to be of much
the same nature in the later (commercial) stages of the pecuniary
culture as in the earlier (predatory) stages. An aristocratic (or
servile) scheme of life must necessarily run in invidious terms, since
that is the whole meaning of the phenomenon; and resting as any such
scheme does on pecuniary distinctions, whether direct or through the
intermediary term of predatory exploit, it will necessarily involve the
corollary that wealth and exemption from work (_otium cum dignitate_)
is honourable and that poverty and work is dishonourable. But with the
progressive commercialisation of gain and ownership it also comes to
pass that peaceable application to the business in hand may have much
to do with the acquirement of a reputable standing; and so long as
work is of a visibly pecuniary kind and is sagaciously and visibly
directed to the acquisition of wealth, the disrepute intrinsically
attaching to it is greatly offset by its meritorious purpose. So much
so, indeed, that there has even grown up something of a class feeling,
among the class who have come by their wealth through industry and
shrewd dealing, to the effect that peaceable diligence and thrift are
meritorious traits.
This is “middle-class” sentiment of course. The aristocratic contempt
for the tradesman and all his works has not suffered serious mitigation
through all this growth of new methods of reputability. The three
conventionally recognised classes, upper, middle, and lower, are all
and several pecuniary categories; the upper being typically that
(aristocratic) class which is possessed of wealth without having worked
or bargained for it; while the middle class have come by their holdings
through some form of commercial (business) traffic; and the lower class
gets what it has by workmanship. It is a gradation of (_a_) predation,
(_b_) business, (_c_) industry; the former being disserviceable and
gainful, the second gainful, and the third serviceable. And no modern
civilised man is so innocent of the canons of reputability as not to
recognise off-hand that the first category is meritorious and the last
discreditable, whatever his individual prejudices may lead him to
think of the second. Aristocracy without unearned wealth, or without
predatory antecedents, is a misnomer. When an aristocratic class loses
its pecuniary advantage it becomes questionable. A poverty-stricken
aristocrat is a “decayed gentleman;” and “the nobility of labour” is a
disingenuous figure of speech.
The transition from the original predatory phase of the pecuniary
culture to the succeeding commercial phase signifies the emergence
of a middle class in such force as presently to recast the working
arrangements of the cultural scheme and make peaceable business
(gainful traffic) the ruling interest of the community. With the same
movement emerges a situation which is progressively more favourable
to the intellectual animus required for workmanship and an advance in
technology. The state of the industrial arts advances, and with its
advance the accumulation of wealth is accelerated, the gainfulness
of business traffic increases, and the middle (business) class grows
along with it. It is in the conscious interest of this class to further
the gainfulness of industry, and as this end is correlated with the
productiveness of industry it is also, though less directly, correlated
with improvements in technology.
With the transition from a naïvely predatory scheme to a commercial
one, the “competitive system” takes the place of the coercive methods
previously employed, and pecuniary gain becomes the incentive to
industry. At least superficially, or ephemerally, the workman’s income
under this pecuniary régime is in some proportion to his product. Hence
there results a voluntary application to steady work and an inclination
to find and to employ improvements in the methods and appliances of
industry. At the same time commercial conceptions come progressively
to supplant conceptions of status and personal consequence as the
primary and most familiar among the habits of thought entailed by the
routine of daily life. This will be true especially for the common
man, as contrasted with the aristocratic classes, although it is not
to be overlooked that the standards of propriety imposed on the
community by the better classes will have a considerably corrective
effect on the frame of mind of the common man in this respect as in
others, and so will act to maintain an effective currency of predatory
ideals and preconceptions after the economic situation at large has
taken on a good deal of a commercial complexion. The accountancy of
price and ownership throws personal prestige and consequence notably
less into the foreground than does the rating in terms of prowess and
gentle birth that characterises the predatory scheme of life. And
in proportion as such pecuniary accountancy comes to pervade men’s
relations, correspondingly impersonal terms of rating and appreciation
will make their way also throughout men’s habitual apprehension of
external facts, giving the whole an increasingly impersonal complexion.
So far as this effect is had, the facts of observation will lend
themselves with correspondingly increased facility and effect to the
purposes of technology. So that the commercial phase of culture should
be favourable to advance in the industrial arts, at least as regards
the immediate incidence of its discipline.
CHAPTER V
OWNERSHIP AND THE COMPETITIVE SYSTEM
_I. Peaceable Ownership_
The pecuniary system of social organisation that so results has grave
and lasting consequences for the welfare of society. It brings class
divergence of material interests, class prerogative and differential
hardship, and an accentuated class disparity in the consumption of
goods, involving a very extensive resort to the conspicuous waste of
goods and services as an evidence of wealth. These consequences of
the pecuniary economy may be interesting enough in themselves, even
to the theoretician, but they need not be pursued here except in so
far as they have an appreciable bearing on the community’s workmanlike
efficiency and the further development of technology.[110] But the
more direct and immediate technological consequences of this move from
a predatory to a peaceable or quasi-peaceable economic system are
also sufficiently grave--partly favourable to workmanship and partly
otherwise--and these it is necessary for the purposes of this inquiry
to follow up in some detail.
The interest and attention of the two typical pecuniary classes
between whom the affairs of industry now come to lie, presently
part company and enter on a course of progressive differentiation
along two divergent lines. The workmen, labourers, operatives,
technologists,--whatever term may best designate that general category
of human material through which the community’s technological
proficiency functions directly to an industrial effect,--these have
to do with the work, whereby they get their livelihood, and their
interest as well as the discipline of their workday life converges,
in effect on a technologically competent apprehension of material
facts. In this respect the free workmen under this peaceable régime of
property are very differently placed from the servile workman of the
predatory régime of mastery and servitude. The latter has little if
any interest in the efficiency of the industrial processes in which he
is engaged, less so the more widely his status differs from that of
the free workman. His case is analogous to that of the tenant at will,
who has nothing to gain from permanent improvement of the land which
he cultivates. Whereas the free workman is, at least immediately and
transiently, and particularly in his own current apprehension of the
matter, quite intimately dependent on his own technological proficiency
and vitally interested in any available technological expedient that
promises to heighten his efficiency. Such is particularly the case
during the earlier phases of the régime of peaceable ownership, so
long as the free workman is in the typical case working at his own
discretion and disposes of his own product in a limited market. And
such continues to be the case, on the whole, under the wage system so
long as the large-scale production and investment have not put an end
to the employer’s intimate supervision of his employés. Indeed, under
the driving exigencies of the competitive wage system the workmen are
somewhat strenuously held to such a workmanlike apprehension of things,
even though they may no longer have the same intimate concern in their
own current efficiency as in the earlier days of handicraft. The severe
pressure of competitive wages and large organisation, it might well be
thought, should logically offset the slighter attraction which work
as such has for the hired workman as contrasted with the man occupied
with his own work. The effect of this régime of free labour should
logically be, as it apparently has in great part been, a close and
progressively searching recourse to the logic of matter-of-fact in all
the workmen’s habitual thinking, and in all their outlook on matters of
interest, whether in industry or in the other concerns of life that may
conceivably be of more capital interest.
On the other hand the owners under this régime of peaceable ownership
have to do with the pecuniary management, the gainful manipulation of
property. In the transitional beginnings of this system of peaceable
ownership and free workmen the owners are in the typical case owners
of land or similar natural resources; but in due course of time there
arises a class of owners holding property in the material equipment of
industry and deriving their gains and livelihood from a businesslike
management of this property, at the same time that the landlords also
fall into more businesslike relations with their tenants on the one
hand and with the industrial community that supplies their wants on the
other hand. These owners, investors, masters, employers, undertakers,
businessmen, have to do with the negotiation of advantageous bargains;
it is by bargaining that their discretionary control of property takes
effect, and in one way or another their attention centres on the quest
of profits. The training afforded by these occupations and requisite
to their effectual pursuit runs in terms of pecuniary management
and insight, pecuniary gain, price, price-cost, price-profit and
price-loss; and these men are held to an ever more exacting recourse to
the logic of the price system, and so are trained to the apprehension
of men and things in terms which count toward a gainful margin on
investments and business undertakings; that is to say in terms of the
self-regarding propensities and sentiments comprised in human nature,
and perhaps especially in terms of human infirmity.
This last point in the characterisation may seem unwarranted, and may
even strike unreflecting persons as derogatory. It is, of course,
not so intended; and any degree of reflection will bring out its
simple bearing on the facts of business. As is well and obviously
known, the sole end of business as such is pecuniary gain, gain in
terms of price. It need not be held, as has sometimes been argued,
that one businessman’s gain is necessarily another’s loss; although
that principle was once taken for granted, as the foundation of the
Mercantilist policies of Europe, and is still acted on uncritically by
the generality of statesmen. But it is at any rate true, because it is
contained in the terms employed, that a successful business negotiation
is more successful in proportion as the party of the second part is
less competent to take care of his own pecuniary interest, whether
through native or acquired incapacity for pecuniary discretion or from
pecuniary inability to stand out for such terms as he otherwise might
conceivably exact. A shrewd businessman can, notoriously, negotiate
advantageous terms with an inexperienced minor or a necessitous
customer or employé. Pecuniary gain is a differential gain and business
is a negotiation of such differential gains; not necessarily a
differential of one businessman as against or at the cost of another;
but more commonly, and more typical of the competitive system, it is a
differential as between the businessman’s outlay and his returns,--that
is to say, as between the businessman and the unbusinesslike generality
of persons with whom directly or indirectly he deals as customers,
employés, and the like. For the purposes of such a negotiation of
differentials the weakness of one party (in the pecuniary respect)
is as much to the point as the strength of the other,--the two being
substantially the same fact. The discipline of the business occupations
should accordingly run to the habitual rating of men, things and
affairs in terms of emulative human nature and of precautionary
wisdom in respect of pecuniary expediency. Instead of workmanlike or
technological insight, this discipline conduces to worldly wisdom.[111]
But the disparity between the discipline of the business occupations
and that of industry is by no means so sheer as this contrast in their
main characteristics would imply, nor do the men engaged in these two
divergent lines of work differ so widely in their habitual outlook on
affairs or their insight into facts. Such is particularly the case in
the earlier and simpler phases of the régime, before the specialisation
of occupations had gone so far as to divide the working community in
any consistent fashion into the two contrasted classes of businessmen
on the one side and workmen on the other. As this modern régime of
peaceable ownership and pecuniary organisation has advanced and its
peculiar features of organisation and workmanship have reached a
sharper definition, the division between the two contrasted kinds of
endeavour--business and workmanship--has grown wider and the disparity
in the distinctive range of habits engendered by each has grown more
marked. So that something of a marked and pervading contrast should
logically be found between the habitual attitude taken by members
of the business community on the one hand and that of the body of
workmen on the other hand; and this contrast should, logically, go
on increasing with each successive move in advance along this line
of specialisation of occupations and “division of labour.” Some such
result has apparently followed; but neither has the specialisation
been complete and consistent, nor has the resulting differentiation
in respect of their intellectual and spiritual attitude set the two
contrasted classes of persons apart in so definitive a fashion as a
first and elementary consideration of the causes at work might lead one
to infer.
Businessmen have to do with industry; more or less remotely perhaps,
but often at near hand, for it is out of industry that their business
gains come; and they are also subject to the routine of living imposed
by the use of the particular range of industrial appliances and
processes available for that use. The workmen on the other hand have
also to do with pecuniary matters, for they are forever in contact
with the market in one way and another, and it is in pecuniary terms
that the livelihood comes to them for which they are set to work. And
both businessmen and workmen enter on their two divergent lines of
training with much the same endowment of propensities and aptitudes.
Yet it appears that the training in pecuniary wisdom that makes up
the career of the typical businessman is after all of little avail
in the way of technological insight or efficiency, as witness the
ubiquitous mismanagement of industry at the hands of businessmen who
are, presumably, doing their best to enhance the efficiency of the
industries under their control with a view to the largest net gain from
the output.[112] If the “efficiency engineers” are to be credited, it
is probably within the mark to say that the net aggregate gains from
industry fall short of what they might be by some fifty per cent, owing
to the trained inability of the businessmen in control to appreciate
and give effect to the visible technological requirements of the
industries from which they draw their gains. To appreciate the kind
and degree of this commonplace mismanagement of industry it is only
necessary to contrast the facility, circumspection, shrewd strategy
and close economy shown by these same businessmen in the organisation
and management of their pecuniary, fiscal and monetary operations, as
against the waste of time, labour and materials that abounds in the
industries under their control. But for the workmen likewise, their
daily work and their insight into its requirements and possibilities
are, by more than half, a “business proposition,” a proposition in the
pecuniary calculus of how to get the most in price for the least return
in weight and tale.
These various considerations, taken crudely in their first incidence,
would seem to preclude any technological advance under this
quasi-peaceable régime of business. Business principles and pecuniary
distinctions rule the familiar routine of life, and even the common
welfare is conceived in terms of price, and so of differential
advantage; and under such a system there should apparently be little
chance of the dispassionate pursuit of such a non-invidious interest as
that of workmanship. The prime mover in this cultural scheme appears
to be invidious self-aggrandisement, without fear or favour; and
its goal appears to be the conspicuous waste of goods and services.
Yet in point of fact the technological advance under these modern
conditions has been larger and more rapid than in any other cultural
situation. Therefore the circumstances under which these modern
gains in technology have been made will merit somewhat more detailed
attention; as also the cultural consequences that have followed from
this technological advance or been conditioned by it. And at the risk
of some tedious repetition it seems pertinent summarily to recall these
peculiar circumstances that have conditioned the modern culture and
have presumably shaped its technological output.
By and large this modern technological era runs its course within the
frontiers of Occidental civilisation, and in the period subsequent
to the feudal age. Roughly, its centre of diffusion is the region of
the North Sea, and its placement in point of time is in that period
of comparative peace spoken of as “modern times.” Such of the peoples
comprised within this Western culture as have continued to be actively
occupied with fighting during this modern period have had no creative
share in this technological era, and indeed they have had little share
of any kind. The broad centre of diffusion of this technology coincides
in a curious way with that of the singularly competent and singularly
matter-of-fact neolithic culture of northern Europe; and the racial
elements that have been engaged in this modern technological advance
are still substantially the same, and mixed in substantially the same
proportions, as during that prehistoric technological era of the lower
barbarism or the higher savagery. This implies, of course, that the
spiritual (instinctive) endowment of the peoples that have made the
modern technological era is still substantially the same as was that of
their forebears of the Danish stone age.
The peoples that have taken the lead in this cultural growth, and more
particularly in the technological advance, have never lived under a
full grown and consistently worked out patriarchal system, nor have
they, therefore, ever fully assimilated that peculiarly personal and
arbitrarily authoritative scheme of anthropomorphic beliefs that
commonly goes with the patriarchal system. In the earlier phases of
their cultural experience, and until recently, they have lived in
small communities, under more or less of local self-government, and
have in great part shown some degree of religious scepticism and
insubordination. They have had some experience of the sea and of that
impersonal run of phenomena which the sea offers; which call on
those who have to do with the sea for patient observation of how such
impersonal forces work, and which constrain them to learn by trial
and error how these forces may be turned to account. Latterly, in the
days of their most pronounced technological advance, these peoples
have had experience of an economic and industrial system organised on
an unexampled scale, such as to constitute a very wide and inclusive
industrial community within which intercourse has been increasingly
easy and effective.
These circumstances have determined the range of their habituation
in its larger features; and these peoples have come under the
discipline of this situation with a spiritual endowment apparently
differing in some degree from what any other group of peoples has
ever brought to a similar task. How much of the outcome, cultural and
technological, is to be set down naïvely and directly to a peculiar
temperamental bent in this human raw material would be hazardous to
conjecture. Something seems fairly to be credited to that score. The
particular mixture of hybrids that goes to make up these peoples,
and in which the dolicho-blond enters more or less ubiquitously,
appears to lack a certain degree of subtlety, such as seems native
to many other peoples that have created civilisations of a different
complexion,--a subtlety that shows itself in a readiness for intrigue
and farsighted appreciation of the springs of human nature, and which
often shows itself also in high-wrought and stupendous constructions
of anthropomorphic myth and theology, religion and magic, as well as
in such large and fertile systems of creative art as will commonly
accompany these anthropomorphic creations. Those peoples that are
infused with an appreciable blond admixture have on the other hand,
not commonly excelled in the farther reaches of the spiritual life,
particularly not in the refinements of a sustained and finished
anthropomorphism. Their best efficiency has rather run to those
bull-headed deeds of force and those mechanic arts that touch closely
on the domain of the inorganic forces.
Of such a character is also this modern technological era. It is in
the mechanic arts dealing with brute matter that the modern technology
holds over all else, in matter-of-fact insight, in the naïveté of the
questions with which its adepts search the facts of observation, and in
the crudity (anthropomorphically speaking) of the answers with which
they are content to go back to their work. Outside of the mechanic arts
this technology must be rated lower than second best. In subtlety of
craftsmanlike insight and contrivance or in delicacy of manipulation
and adroit use of man’s physical aptitudes the peoples of this Western
culture are not now and never have been equal to the best.
Such a characterisation of the modern technology may seem too broad
and too schematic,--that it overlooks features of the case that are
sufficiently large and distinctive to call for their recognition
even in the most general characterisation. So, e. g., in the light
of what has been noted above in speaking of the domestication of the
crop plants and animals, the question may well suggest itself: Is not
the patent success of these modern industrial peoples in the use and
improvement of crops and cattle to be accepted as evidence of a genial
anthropomorphic bent, of the same kind and degree as took effect in
the original domestication of plants and animals? For some two hundred
years past, it is true, very substantial advances have been made in
tillage and breeding, and this is at the same time the peculiar domain
in which the anthropomorphic savages of the stone age once achieved
those things which have made civilisation physically possible; but the
modern gains made in these lines have, in the main if not altogether,
been technologically of the same mechanistic character as the rest
of the modern advance in the industrial arts, with little help or
hindrance due to any such anthropomorphic bias as guided the savage
ancients. It is rather by virtue of their having come competently to
apprehend these facts of animate nature in substantially inanimate
terms, mechanistic and chemical terms, that the modern technological
adepts in tillage and cattle-breeding have successfully carried this
line of workmanship forward at a rate and with an effect not approached
before. The livestock expert is soberly learning by trial and error
what to attempt and how to go about it in his breeding experiments, and
he deals as callously as any mechanical engineer with the chemistry
of stock foods and the use and abuse of ferments, germs and enzymes.
The soil specialist talks, thinks and acts in terms of salts, acids,
alkalies, stratifications, 200-mesh siftings, and nitrogen-fixing
organisms. The crop-plant expert looks to handmade cross-fertilisation
and to the Mendelian calculus of hybridisation, with no more imputation
of anthropomorphic traits than the metallurgist who analyses fuels and
fluxes, mixes ores, and with goggled eye scrutinises the shifting tints
of the incandescent gases in the open hearth. It is from such facts so
construed that modern technology is made up, and it is by such channels
that the sense of workmanship has gone to the making of it.
So the question recurs, How has it come about that this pecuniary
culture--with its institutions drawn in terms of differential advantage
and moved by sentiments that converge on emulative gain and the
invidiously conspicuous waste of goods--has yet furthered the growth
of such a technology, even permissively? In its direct incidence, the
discipline of this pecuniary culture is doubtless inimical to any
advance in workmanlike insight or any matter-of-fact apprehension and
use of objective phenomena. It is a civilisation whose substantial
core is of a subjective kind, in the narrowly subjective, personal,
individualistic sense given by the self-regarding sentiments of
emulous rivalry.[113] But when all is said it is after all a peaceable
culture, on the whole; and indeed the rules of the business game of
profit and loss, forfeit and sequestration, require it to be so. It has
at least that much, and perhaps much else, in common with the great
technological era of the north-European neolithic age. The discipline
to which its peoples are subject may be exacting enough, and its
exactions may run to worldly wisdom rather than to matter-of-fact;
but its invidious distinctions run in terms of price, that is to say
in terms of an objective, impersonal money unit, in the last resort a
metallic weight; and the traffic of daily life under this price system
affords an unremitting exercise in the exact science of making change,
large and small. Even the daydreams of the pecuniary day-dreamer take
shape as a calculus of profit and loss computed in standard units of
an impersonal magnitude, even though the magnitude of these standard
units may on analysis prove to be of a largely putative character. The
imputation under the price system is of an impersonal kind. In the
current apprehension of the pecuniary devotee these magnitudes are
wholly objective, so that in effect the training that comes of busying
himself with them is after all a training in the accurate appreciation
of brute fact.
At the same time, the instinct of workmanship, being not an acquired
trait, has not been got rid of by disuse; and when the occasion
offers, under the relatively tranquil conditions of this peaceable or
quasi-peaceable pecuniary régime, the ancient proclivity asserts itself
in its ancient force, uneager and asthenic perhaps, but pervasive and
resilient. And when this instinct works out through the Bœotic genius
of the north-European hybrid there is a good chance that the outcome of
such observation and reflection will fall into terms of matter-of-fact,
of such close-shorn naïveté, indeed, as to afford very passable
material for the material sciences and the machine technology.
So also, the ancient and time-worn civil institutions of the
north-European peoples have apparently not been of the high-wrought
invidious character that comes of long and strenuous training in
the practices and ideals of the patriarchal system; nor are their
prevailing religious conceits extremely drastic, theatrical or
ceremonious, as compared with what is to be found in the cults of the
great dynastic civilisations of the East. On the whole, it is only
through the Middle Ages that these peoples have been subject to the
rigorous servile discipline that characterises a dynastic despotism,
secular or religious; and much of the ancient, pagan and prehistoric
preconceptions on civil and religious matters appear to have stood
over in the habits of thought of the common people even through that
interval of submergence under aristocratic and patriarchal rule. In the
same connection it may be remarked that the blond-hybrid peoples of
Christendom were the last to accept the patriarchal mythology of the
Semites and have also been the first and readiest to shuffle out of it
in the sequel; which suggests the inference that they have never fully
assimilated its spirit; perhaps for lack of a sufficiently strict and
protracted discipline in its ways and ideals, perhaps for lack of a
suitable temperamental ground.
There is, indeed, a curiously pervasive concomitance, in point of time,
place, and race, between the modern machine technology, the material
sciences, religious scepticism, and that spirit of insubordination that
makes the substance of what are called free or popular institutions. On
none of these heads is the concomitance so close or consistent as to
warrant the conclusion that race and topography alone have made this
modern cultural outcome. The exceptions and side issues are too broad
and too numerous for that; but it is after all a concomitance of such
breadth and scope that it can also not be overlooked.
* * * * *
The course of mutations that has brought on this modern technological
episode may be conceived to have run somewhat in the following manner.
For lack of sufficient training in predatory habits of thought (as
shown, e. g., in the incomplete patriarchalism of the north-Europeans)
the predatory culture failed to reach what may be called a normal
maturity in the feudal system of Europe, particularly in the North
and West, where the blond admixture is stronger; by “normal” being
here intended that sequence of growth, institutionalisation, and decay
shown typically by the great dynastic civilisations erected by Semitic
invaders in the East. In the full-charged predatory culture, in its
earlier phases, there appear typically to be present two somewhat
divergent economic principles (habits of thought) both of which have
something of an institutional force: (_a_) The warrant of seizure by
prowess,[114] which commonly comes to vest in the dynastic head in case
a despotic state is established; and (_b_) the prescriptive tenure
of whatever one has acquired. These two institutional factors are at
variance, and according as one or the other of the two finally takes
precedence and rules out or masters its rival postulate, the predatory
culture continues on lines of coercive exploitation, as in these
Asiatic monarchies; or it passes into the quasi-peaceable phase marked
by secure prescriptive tenure of property and a settled nobility, and
presently into a commercialised industrial situation. Either line of
development may, of course, be broken off without having reached a
consummation.
Within the region of the Western Civilisation, both in north Europe
and repeatedly in the Ægean, the course of events has fallen out in
the line of the latter alternative; the growth of institutions has
shifted from the footing of prowess to that of prescriptive ownership.
So soon as this shift has securely been made, the development of trade,
industry and a technological system has come into the foreground, and
these habitual interests have then reacted on the character of the
institutions in force, thereby accelerating the growth of conditions
favourable to their own further advance. There is, of course, no marked
point of conjuncture in the cultural sequence at which this transition
may definitely be said to have been effected, but in a general way
it may be held that the point of transition has been passed so soon
as the current political and economic speculations uncritically give
precedence to the “commonweal” as against the fiscal interests of
the crown or the “state,” whereby the crown and its officers come,
in theory and public pronouncement, to be rated as guardians of the
community’s material welfare rather than autocratic exploiters of the
community’s productive capacity. Roughly from the same period there
will duly set in something of an acceleration in rate of improvement
in the state of the mechanic arts. This movement seems plainly to come
on the initiative of the lower or industrial classes and to be carried
by their genius, rather than by that of the ruling classes, whether
secular or spiritual. It shows itself, typically, in a growth of
handicraft and petty trade.
So the sense of workmanship and its associated sentiments again come,
by insensible degrees, to take the first place among the factors
that determine the run of habituation and therefore the character of
the resulting culture,--so making the transition from barbarism to
civilisation, in the narrower sense of the term; which is accordingly
to be characterised, in contrast with the predatory barbarian culture,
as a qualified or mitigated (sophisticated) return to the spirit
of savagery, or at least as a spiritual reversion looking in that
direction, though by no means abruptly reaching the savage plane. The
new phase has this in common with the typical savage culture that
workmanship rather than prowess again becomes the chief or primary norm
of habituation, and therefore of the growth of institutions; and that
there results, therefore, a peaceable bent in the ideals and endeavours
of the community. But it is workmanship combined and compounded with
ownership; that is to say workmanship coupled with an invidious
emulation and consequently with a system of institutions embodying a
range of prescriptive differential benefits.
_II. The Competitive System_
Dominated by the tradition handed down from the beginning of the
nineteenth century, current economic theory has habitually made
much of accumulated goods as the prime requisite of industry. In
industrial enterprise as it was then carried on the prevailing unit of
organisation was the private firm, with partnership concerns making up
a secondary and less commonplace element in the business community.
Ordinarily and typically these private firms and partnerships
owned a certain material equipment employed in industry, and they
took the initiative in industrial enterprise on the ground of this
ownership; hiring the workmen, buying materials and supplies, and
selling the products of the establishment. Credit relations, such as
go to the creation and conduct of a modern corporation, were still
of secondary consequence, being resorted to rather as an expedient
in emergencies than as the initial move and the substantial ground
of business organisation; the measure of the concern’s magnitude and
consequence was still (typically) its unencumbered ownership of the
material equipment, the size of the plant and the numbers of its hired
workmen. It follows by easy consequence that in the practical business
conceptions of that time the equipment of material means, which
embodies the concern’s assets and affords the ground of its initiative
and its rating in the business community, should commonly be rated as
the prime mover in industry and the chief productive factor. So, also,
the theoretical speculation that drew on that business traffic for its
working concepts came unavoidably to accept these tangible assets, the
community’s material equipment,--implements, livestock, raw materials,
means of subsistence,--as the prime agency in the community’s economic
life. As is true for the working conceptions and principles of
industrial business, so also in the theoretical formulations of the
economists, the community’s immaterial equipment of technological
proficiency is taken for granted as a circumstance of the environment
conditioning the community’s economic life,--the state of the
industrial arts and the current workmanlike aptitudes and efficiency.
As the phrase runs, “given the state of the industrial arts.”
This is good, homely, traditional common sense; it reflects the
habitual practical run of affairs in the industrial community of that
recent past. Such was the attitude of practical men toward industrial
matters at the time when the current economic situation took its rise.
But such a conception is no longer so true to the practical exigencies
of the immediate present, nor do the men of affairs today habitually
see these matters in just this light; although the principles of the
law that govern industrial enterprise still continue to embody these
time-worn conceptions, to which the economists also continue to yield
allegiance. Like other elements of habitual knowledge this conception
of things is drawn from past experience--chiefly from a past not too
remote for ready comprehension--and it carries over the frame of mind
out of which it arose.
In the earlier days of the machine industry, then,--say, in the closing
quarter of the eighteenth century,--the conduct of industrial affairs
was in the hands of business men who owned the material equipment
and who directed the use of this equipment and turned it to account
for their own gain, on the prescriptive ground of such ownership.
Discretion and initiative vested in the capitalist-employer, who at
that time, (typically) combined ownership of the plant with a somewhat
immediate supervision and control of the industrial processes. The
directive control of industry, covering both the volume and the
character of the processes and output, was in the typical case directly
bound up with the ownership of the material equipment as such,--as
tangible assets, not as corporation stock-holdings. Since then changes
have come over the business situation, particularly through an
extensive recourse to credit, such that this time-worn conception will
no longer answer the run of current business practice, particularly
not as touches that large-scale enterprise that now rules industrial
affairs and that is currently accepted as the type of modern business
enterprise.
Among the assumptions of a hundred years ago was the premise,
self-evident to that generation of thoughtful men, that the phase of
commercialised economic life then prevailing was the immutably normal
order of things. And the assumptions surrounding that preconception
were good and competent for a formulation of economic theory that
takes such an institutional situation for granted and assumes it to
be unchanging, or to be a _terminus ad quem_. But for anything like
a genetic account of economic life, early or late, capitalistic or
otherwise, such assumptions and the theoretical propositions and
analyses that follow from them are defective in that they take for
granted what requires to be accounted for. Theoretical speculation
that presupposes the (somewhat old-fashioned) institutions formerly
governing ownership and business traffic, and assumes them to have the
immutable character and indefeasible force _de facto_ which is assigned
them _de jure_, and that likewise assumes as immutable a passing
phase in the “state of the industrial arts,” may serve passably for
a theory of how business affairs should properly arrange themselves
to fit the conditions so assumed; and such, indeed, has commonly
been the character of theoretical formulations touching industry and
business. And as should fairly be expected, in the speculations of
the economists, these theoretical formulations have also commonly been
accompanied by a parallel line of remedial advice designed to show what
preventive measures should be applied to prevent the run of business
practice from doing violence to these assumed conditions that are held
to be immutably normal and indefeasibly right.
Now, since in the received theories the accumulated “productive goods”
are conceived to be the most consequential factor in industry, and
therefore in the community’s material welfare and in the fortunes of
individuals, it logically follows that the discretionary ownership of
them has come to be accounted the most important relation in which
men may stand to the production of wealth and to the community’s
livelihood; and the pecuniary transactions whereby this ownership is
arranged, manipulated and redistributed are held to be industrially
the most productive of all human activities. It is only during the
nineteenth century that this doctrine of pecuniary productivity has
been worked out into finished shape and has found secure lodgment in
the systematic structure of economic theory--in the current theory of
“the Function of the Entrepreneur;”[115] but it is also only during
this period that business enterprise (pecuniary management) has come
to dominate the economic situation in a substantially unmitigated
degree, so that the material fortunes of the community have come to
depend on these pecuniary negotiations into which its “captains of
industry” enter for their own gain.[116] In the sense that no other
line of activity stands in anything like an equally decisive relation
of initiative or discretion to the industrial process, or bears with a
like weight on the material welfare of the community, these business
negotiations in ownership are unquestionably the prime factor in modern
industry. But that such is the case is due to the peculiar institutions
of modern times and to the peculiar current state of the industrial
arts; and the former of these peculiar circumstances is conditioned by
the latter.
* * * * *
It is not practicable to assign a hard and fast date from which this
modern era began, with its peculiar scheme of economic life and the
economic conceptions that characterise it. The date will vary from
one country to another, and even from one industrial class to another
within the same country. But it can be said that historically the
modern era begins with the rise of handicraft; it is along the line
of growth marked out by the development of handicraft that the modern
technology has emerged, together with that industrial organisation and
those pecuniary conceptions of economic efficiency and serviceability
that have gradually come to their current state of maturity on the
ground afforded by this technology. What historically lies back of the
era of handicraft is not of a piece with the economic situation of
modern times; nor is it characteristic of the Western civilisation,
as contrasted with the agricultural and predatory civilisations of
antiquity.
As indicated in an earlier chapter, in speaking of the decay of
the predatory (feudalistic) régime and its servile agricultural
organisation of industry, when peace and order supervene the instinct
of workmanship by insensible degrees and in an uncertain measure
supplants the invidious self-regarding sentiments that actuate the
life of prowess and servility characteristic of that culture; so that
workmanship comes again into the foreground among the instinctive
propensities that shape the community’s habitual interest and so bend
the course of its institutional growth and determine the bias of its
common sense.
The habitual outlook and the bias given by the handicraft system are of
a twofold character--technological and pecuniary. The craftsman was an
artificer engaged in mechanical operations, working with tools of which
he had the mastery, and employing mechanical processes the mysteries
of which were familiar to his everyday habits of thought; but from the
beginning of the era of handicraft and throughout his industrial life
he was also more or less of a trader. He stood in close relation with
some form of market, and his proficiency as a craftsman was brought
to a daily practical test in the sale of his wares or services, no
less than in the workmanlike fashioning of them. Also, the price as
well as the workmanlike quality of the goods presently became subject
of regulation under the rules of the crafts; and the petty trade
which grew up as an occupation accessory to the handicraft industry
was itself organised on lines analogous to the crafts proper and was
regulated by similar principles; the trader’s work being accounted
serviceable, or productive, in the same general sense as that of any
other craftsman and being recognised as equitably entitling those who
pursued it to a fair livelihood.
The handicraft system was an organised and regulated system of
workmanship and self-help; and under the conditions imposed by its
technology proficiency in the latter respect was no less indispensable
and no less to the purpose than in the former. Both counted equally
and in combination toward the successful working of the system, which
is a practicable plan of economic life only so long as the craftsmen
combine both of these capacities in good force and only so long as the
technological exigencies admit the exercise of both in conjunction. The
system broke down so soon as the state of the industrial arts no longer
enabled the workmen to acquire the necessary technological proficiency
and do the required work at the same time that they each and several
were able to oversee and pursue their individual pecuniary interests.
With the coming on of a wider and more extensively differentiated
technological scheme, and with wider and remoter market relations, due
in the main to increased facilities of transportation, these necessary
conditions of a practicable handicraft economy gradually failed, and
the practice of industrial investments and the larger commerce then
gradually supplanted it.
The discipline of everyday life under the handicraft economy was a
discipline in pecuniary self-help as well as in workmanship. In the
popular ideal as well as in point of practical fact the complete
craftsman stood shrewdly on his individual proficiency in maintaining
his own pecuniary advantage, as well as on his trained workmanship;
and the gilds were organised to maintain the craft’s advantages in the
market, as well as to regulate the quality of the output. The craft
rules governing the quality of the output of goods were in the main
enforced with a view to the maintenance of price, and so with a view
to securing an adequate livelihood for the craftsmen. Efficiency in
the crafts came in this way presently to be counted very much as the
modern “efficiency engineers” would count it,--proximately in terms
of mechanical performance, ultimately in terms of price, and more
particularly in terms of net gain. So that the habits of life ingrained
in the gildsman, and in the community at large where the gild system
prevailed, comprised as a main fact a meticulous regard for details of
ownership and for pecuniary claims and obligations. It is out of this
insistent, pervasive, and minutely concrete discipline in the practice
and logic of pecuniary detail that there have arisen those “natural
rights” of property and those “business principles” that have been
taken over by the later era of the machine industry and capitalistic
investment.
The rules of the gild, as well as the larger legislative provisions
that had to do with gild regulations, were avowedly drawn with a view
to securing the gildsman in a fair customary livelihood, and the
measures logically adopted to this end were designed to secure him in
the enjoyment and disposal of the returns of his work as well as in his
right to pursue his trade within the rules laid down for the collective
welfare by the gild. With due training in this logic of the handicraft
system it became a plain matter of common sense that the craftsman
should equitably be entitled to whatever he can get for his work under
the conventionally settled rules of the trade, and should be free to
make the most of his capacities in all that pertains to his pursuit of
a livelihood; and the like principles (habits of thought) apply to the
traffic of the petty trade; which, being presently interpreted in terms
of contract and investment, has come to mean the right to do business
and to enjoy and dispose of the returns from all bargains made in due
form.
Presently, as the technological situation gradually changed its
character through extensions and specialisation in appliances and
processes--perhaps especially through changes in the means of
communication and in the density of population--the handicraft system
with its petty trade outgrew itself and broke down in a new phase of
the pecuniary culture. The increasingly wide differentiation between
workmanship and salesmanship grew into a “division of labour” between
industry and business, between industrial and pecuniary occupations,--a
disjunction of ownership and its peculiar cares, privileges and
proficiency from workmanship. By this division of labour, or divergence
of function, a fraction of the community came to specialise in
ownership and pecuniary traffic, and so came to constitute a business
community occupied with pecuniary affairs, running along beside the
industrial community proper, with a development of practices and usages
peculiar to its own needs and bearing only indirectly on the further
development of the industrial system or on the state of the industrial
arts.
Master-workmen with means would employ other workmen without means,
and might or might not themselves continue to work at the trade. Petty
traders or hucksters, nominally members of some craft gild, would
grow wealthy with the increasing volume of traffic and would organise
a more and more extensive household (sweatshop) industry to meet the
increasing demands of their market; or they might become jobbers, carry
on more far-reaching trade operations over a longer term, withdraw
more distantly from the actual work of the craft, and in the course of
a generation or two (as, e. g., the Fuggers) would grow into merchant
princes and financiers who maintained but a remote and impersonal
relation to the crafts. Or, again, the associated merchants (as, e. g.,
those of the Hansa) would establish depots and agents, “factories,”
that would gradually assemble something of a working force of craftsmen
to sort, warehouse and finish the products which they handled, at the
same time that they would exercise an increasingly close and extensive
oversight of the industries from which these products were derived;
until these depots, under the management of the factors, in some cases
grew into factories in somewhat the modern acceptance of the term. In
one way and another this trading or huckstering traffic, which had
been intimately associated with the handicraft industry and gild life,
branched off in the course of time as the industries advanced to a
larger scale and a more extensive specialisation; and this increasing
“division of labour” between workmanship and salesmanship led presently
to such a segregation of the traders out of the body of craftsmen as to
give rise to a business community devoted to pecuniary management alone.
But the principles on which the new and larger business was conducted
were the same as those on which the earlier petty trade had been
carried on, and therefore the same in point of derivation and tenor
as had been worked out by long experience within the handicraft system
proper. Business traffic was an outgrowth of the handicraft system, and
it was in as secure a position in respect of legitimacy and legal and
customary guaranty as the industrial system from which its principles
were derived and from which its gains were drawn.
The source from which the new line of businessmen drew the
accumulations of wealth by force of which they were enabled to do
business is somewhat in dispute; but however interesting a question
that may be in its own right, it does not particularly concern the
present inquiry, and the like is true for the still more interesting
and spectacular phenomena that marked the growth and decline of that
early business era that ran its course within the life-history of
the handicraft system.[117] Throughout that great period of business
activity on the continent of Europe that gathered head in the sixteenth
century and that closed in decay and collapse in the seventeenth,
the principles (habits of thought) which underlay, authenticated and
animated the business community and its pecuniary traffic continued to
be much the same as animated the body of craftsmen in their pecuniary
relations from the beginning of the era of handicraft to its close.
Such, in its turn, was also the case with the later business era that
set in with the great industrial advance of England in the Eighteenth
Century, and such continued to be the case through the greater part
of its life-history in the Nineteenth Century. Of the latterday and
latest developments in business practice and principles the like
cannot unhesitatingly be said, but this too is a matter that does not
immediately concern the inquiry at this point. But the principles of
the new and larger business were the same as had been slowly worked
out under the system of petty trade. These business principles have
proved to be very tenacious and stable, even in the face of apparently
adverse technological circumstances, coming as they do out of a long
and rigorous habituation of very wide sweep and having acquired the
authenticity due to formal recognition in legal decisions and to the
painstaking definition given them in the course of a protracted and
exacting struggle against the institutional remnants of the feudal
system. These circumstances attending the genesis and growth of
modern business principles have led to their being formulated in a
well-defined conceptual scheme of customary right and also to their
embodiment in statutory form. To this, perhaps, they owe much of
their tenacious resistance to latterday exigencies that have tended
to modify or abrogate them. In their elements, of course, these
business principles are even older than the era of handicraft, being
substantially of the same nature as that sentimental impulse to
self-aggrandisement that lies at the root of the predatory culture and
so makes the substantial core of all pecuniary civilisations.
The distinguishing mark of any business era, as contrasted with the
handicraft economy, is the supreme dominance of pecuniary principles,
both as standards of efficiency and as canons of conduct. In such
a businesslike community efficiency is rated in terms of pecuniary
gain; and in so far as business principles rule, efficiency in any
other direction than business traffic can claim recognition only in
the measure in which it may be reduced to terms of pecuniary gain.
Workmanship, therefore, comes to be rated in terms of salesmanship. And
the canons of workmanship, and even of technological efficiency, fall
more and more into pecuniary lines and allow pecuniary tests to decide
on points of serviceability.
The instinct of workmanship is accordingly contaminated with ideals
of self-aggrandisement and the canons of invidious emulation, so that
even the serviceability of any given action or policy for the common
good comes to be rated in terms of the pecuniary gain which such
conduct will bring to its author. Any pecuniary strategist--“captain
of industry”--who manages to engross appreciably more than an even
share of the community’s wealth is therefore likely to be rated as a
benefactor of the community at large and an exemplar of the social
virtues; whereas the man who works and does not manage to divert
something more from the aggregate product to his own use than what one
man’s work may contribute to it is visited not only with dispraise
for having fallen short of a decent measure of efficiency but also
with moral reprobation for shiftlessness and wasted opportunities. So
also, to the current common sense in a community trained to pecuniary
rather than to workmanlike discrimination between articles of use,
those articles which serve their material use in a conspicuously
wasteful manner commend themselves as more serviceable, nobler and more
beautiful than such goods as do not embody such a margin of waste.[118]
Under this system of business principles, in one way and another,
the sense of workmanship is contaminated in all its ramifications by
preconceptions of pecuniary merit and invidious distinction. But what
is here immediately in question is its deflection into the channels
of gainful business, together with the more obvious consequences that
follow directly from the substitution of differential gain in the
place of material serviceability as the end to which the instinctive
propensity of workmanship so comes to drive men’s ideals and efforts
under the discipline of the pecuniary culture.
* * * * *
For the purposes of a genetic inquiry into this modern business
situation and its bearing on the sense of workmanship and on the
technological phenomena in which that instinct comes to an expression,
it is necessary summarily to recall certain current facts pertinent
to the case: (_a_) It is a competitive system; that is to say it is a
system of pecuniary rivalry and contention which proceeds on stable
institutions of property and contract, under conditions of peace and
order. (_b_) It is a price system, i. e., the competition runs in terms
of money, and the money unit is the standard measure of efficiency and
achievement; hence competition and efficiency are subject to a rigorous
accountancy in terms of a (putatively) stable money unit, which is in
all business traffic assumed to be invariable. (_c_) Technologically
this situation is dominated by the mechanical industries; so much
so that even the arts of husbandry have latterly taken on much of
the character of the mechanic arts. Hence a somewhat thoroughgoing
standardisation of processes and products in mechanical terms; which
for business purposes has with a fair degree of success been made
convertible into terms of price, and so made subject to accountancy
in terms of price. (_d_) Hence consumption is also standardised,
proximately in mechanical terms of consumable products but finally,
through the mechanism of the market, in terms of price, and like other
price phenomena consumption also is competitively subject to and
enforced by the like accountancy in terms of the money unit. (_e_)
The typical industries, which set the pace for productive work, for
competitive gains, and through the standard rates of gain ultimately
also for competitive consumption, are industries carried on on a large
scale; that is to say they are such as to require a large material
equipment, a wide recourse to technological insight and proficiency,
and a large draught on the material resources of the community. (_f_)
This material equipment--industrial plant and natural resources--is
held in private ownership, with negligible exceptions; the noteworthy
exceptions to this rule, as e. g., harbours, highways, and the like,
serving chiefly as accessory means of industry and so come in chiefly
as a gratuitous supplement to the industrial equipment held in private
ownership and used for competitive gain. (_g_) Technological knowledge
and proficiency is in the main held and transmitted pervasively by
the community at large, but it is also held in part--more obviously
because exceptionally--by specially trained classes and individual
workmen. Relatively little, in effect a negligible proportion, of
this technological knowledge and skill is in any special sense held
by the owners of the industrial equipment, more particularly not by
the owners of the typical large-scale industries. That is to say,
the technologically proficient workmen do not in the typical case
own or control any appreciable proportion of the material equipment
or of the natural resources to which this technological knowledge
and skill applies and in the use of which it takes effect. (_h_) It
results that the owners of this large material equipment, including the
natural resources, have a discretionary control of the technological
proficiency of the community at large, as well as of those special
lines of insight and skill that are vested in these specially trained
expert men in whom a specialised proficiency is added to the general
proficiency that is diffused through the community at large. (_i_) In
effect, therefore, the owners of the necessary material equipment own
also the working capacity of the community and the usufruct of the
state of the industrial arts. Except for their effective ownership
of these elements of productive efficiency their ownership of the
material equipment of industry would be of no effect. But the usufruct
of this productive capacity of the community and its trained workmen
vests in the owners of the material equipment only with the contingent
qualification that if the community does this work it must be allowed
a livelihood, whereby the gross returns that go in the first instance
to these owners suffer abatement by that much. This required livelihood
is adjusted to a conventional standard of living which, under the
current circumstances of pecuniary emulation, is in great part--perhaps
chiefly--a standardised schedule of conspicuous waste.
In what has just been said above, the view is implied that the
owners of the material means, who are in great part also the
employers of workmen and are sentimentally spoken of as “captains
of industry,” have, in effect and commonly, but a relatively loose
grasp of the technological facts, possibilities, and requirements
of modern industry, and that by virtue of their business training
they are able to make but a scant and uncertain use of such loose
ideas as they have on these heads. To anyone imbued with the
commonplaces of current economic theory it may seem that exception
should dutifully be taken to this view, as being an understatement
of the businessmen’s technological merits. In current theoretical
formulations the businessman is discussed under the caption of
“entrepreneur,” “undertaker,” etc., and his gains are spoken of as
“wages of superintendence,” “wages of management,” and the like. He
is conceived as an expert workman in charge of the works, a superior
foreman of the shop, and his gains are accounted a remuneration for his
creative contribution to the process of production, due to his superior
insight and initiative in technological matters. This conception of
the businessman and his relation to industry has stood over from an
earlier period, the period of the small-scale industry of handicraft
and petty trade, when it still was true that the owner-employer, in the
typical case, kept a personal oversight of his workmen and their work,
and so filled the place of master-workman as well as that of buyer and
seller of materials and finished goods. And such a characterisation
of the businessman and his work will still hold true in the modern
situation in so far as he still is occupied with industry conducted
on the same small scale and continues to fill the place of a foreman
of the shop. But under current conditions--the conditions of the past
half century--and more particularly under the conditions of that
large-scale industry that is currently accounted the type of modern
industry, the businessman has ceased to be foreman of the shop, and
his surveillance of industry has ceased effectually to comprise a
technological management of its details; and in corresponding measure
this traditional theoretical conception of the businessman has ceased
to apply.
The view here spoken for, that the modern businessman is necessarily
out of effectual touch with the affairs of technology as such and
incompetent to exercise an effectual surveillance of the processes
of industry, is not a matter of bias or of vague opinion; it has in
fact become a matter of statistical demonstration. Even a cursory
survey of the current achievements of these great modern industries
as managed by businessmen, taken in contrast with the opportunities
offered them, should convince anyone of the technological unfitness of
this business management of industry. Indeed, the captains of industry
have themselves latterly begun to recognise their own inefficiency in
this respect, and even to appreciate that a businessman’s management
of industrial processes is not good even for the business purpose--the
net pecuniary gain. And it is all the more ineffectual for the
purposes of workmanship as distinct from the businessmen’s gains.
So, a professional class of “efficiency engineers” is coming into
action, whose duty it is to take invoice of the preventable wastes
and inefficiencies due to the business management of industry and
to present the case in such concrete and obvious terms of price and
percentage as the businessmen in charge will be able to comprehend.
These men, in a way, take over the functions assigned in economic
theory to the “entrepreneur;” in that they are men of general
technological training and insight, who go into their inquiry on the
ground of workmanship, take their data in terms of workmanship and
convert them into terms of business expediency, somewhat to the same
purpose as the like work of conversion was done by the owner-employers
under that small-scale system of industrial enterprise from which the
current theoretical concept of the “entrepreneur” was derived. It is
then the duty of these efficiency engineers to present the results so
obtained, for the conviction and guidance of the businessmen in charge,
who thereupon, if their business training has left them enough of a
sense of workmanship, will give permissive instructions to the expert
workmen in direct charge of the industrial processes to put these
statistically indicated changes into effect. It is the testimony of
these efficiency engineers that relatively few pecuniary captains in
command of industrial enterprises have a sufficient comprehension of
the technological facts to understand and accept the findings of the
technological experts who so argue for the elimination of preventable
wastes, even when the issue is presented statistically in terms of
price. These men go about their work of ascertaining the efficiency,
actual and potential, of any given plant, process, working force,
or parcel of material resources, by the methods of precise physical
measurement familiar to mechanical engineers, and as an outcome they
have no hesitation in speaking of preventable wastes amounting to ten,
twenty, fifty, or even ninety per-cent, in the common run of American
industries.[119]
The work of the efficiency engineers being always done in the service
of business and with a view to business expediency, their findings
bear directly on the business exigencies of the case alone, and give
definitive results only in terms of price and profits. How much
greater the ascertained discrepancies in the case would appear if
these findings could be reduced to terms of serviceability to the
community at large, there is no means of forming a secure conjecture.
That the discrepancy would in such case prove to be appreciably greater
than that shown by the price rating is not doubtful. Under such an
appraisal, where the given industrial enterprises would be brought to
the test of net serviceability to the community instead of the net
gain of the interested businessmen, many industrial enterprises would
doubtless show a waste of appreciably more than one hundred per cent of
their current output, being rather disserviceable to the community’s
material welfare than otherwise.
That the business community is so permeated with incapacity and lack
of insight in technological matters is doubtless due proximately to
the fact that their attention is habitually directed to the pecuniary
issue of industrial enterprise; but more fundamentally and unavoidably
it is due to the large volume and intricate complications of the
current technological scheme, which will not permit any man to become a
competent specialist in an alien and exacting field of endeavour, such
as business enterprise, and still acquire and maintain an effectual
working acquaintance with the state of the industrial arts. The current
technological scheme cannot be mastered as a matter of commonplace
information or a by-occupation incidental to another pursuit. The
same advance to a large and exhaustive technological system, in the
machine industry, that has thrown the direction of industrial affairs
into the hands of men primarily occupied with pecuniary management has
also made it impossible for men so circumstanced at all adequately to
exercise the oversight and direction of industry thereby required at
their hands. And the ancient principles of self-help and pecuniary
gain by virtue of which these men are held to their work of business
enterprise make it also impossible for them adequately to surrender the
discretionary care of the industrial processes to other hands or to
permit the management of industry to proceed on other than these same
business principles.
This technological infirmity of the businessmen assuredly does not
arise from a lack of interest in industry, since it is only out of
the net product of industry that the business community’s gains are
drawn--except so far as they are substantially gains of accountancy
merely, due to an inflation of values. Perhaps no class of men have
ever been more keenly alert in their interest in industrial matters
than the modern businessmen; and this interest extends not only to
the industrial ventures in which they may for the time be pecuniarily
“interested,” but also and necessarily to other lines of industry
that are more or less closely correlated with the one in which the
given businessman’s fortunes are embarked; for under modern market
conditions any given line of industrial enterprise is bound in endless
relations of give and take with all the rest. But this unremitting
attention of businessmen to the affairs of industry is a business
attention, and, so far as may be, it touches nothing but the pecuniary
phenomena connected with the ownership of industry; so that it comes
rather to a training in the art of keeping in touch with the pecuniary
run of business affairs while avoiding all undue intimacy with the
technological facts of industry,--undue in the sense of being in excess
of what may serve the needs of a comprehensive short-term outlook over
market relations, and which would therefore divert attention from this
main interest and befog the pecuniary logic by which businessmen are
governed.
Probably, also, no class of men have ever bent more unremittingly to
their work than the modern business community. Within the business
community there is properly speaking no leisure class, or at least
no idle class. In this respect there is a notable contrast between
the business community and the landed interest. What there is to be
found in this modern culture in the way of an idle class, considered
as an institution, runs back for its origins and its specific
traits to a more archaic cultural scheme; it is a survival from an
earlier (predatory) phase of the pecuniary culture. In the nature
of things an idle life of fashion is an affair of the nobility
(gentry), of predatory antecedents and, under current conditions, of
predatory-parasitic habits; and as regards those modern rich men who
withdraw from the business community and fall into a state of _otium
cum dignitate_, it is commonly their fortune to be assimilated by a
more or less ceremonial induction into the body of this quasi-predatory
gentry or nobility and so assume an imitative colouring of archaism.
The business community is hard at work, and there is no place in it
for anyone who is unable or unwilling to work at the high tension of
the average; and since this close application to pecuniary work is of
a competitive nature it leaves no chance for any of the competitors
to apply himself at all effectually to other than pecuniary work.
This high tension of work is felt to be very meritorious in all
modern communities, somewhat in proportion as they are modern; as is
necessarily the case in any work that is substantially of an emulative
character. It spends itself on salesmanship, not on workmanship in the
naïve sense; although the all-pervading preoccupation with pecuniary
matters in modern times has led to its being accounted the type of
workmanlike endeavour. It concerns itself ultimately with the pecuniary
manipulation of the material equipment of industry, though there is
much of it that does not bear immediately on that point. The exceptions
under this broad proposition are more apparent than real, although
there doubtless are exceptions actual as well as apparent. In such a
case the business transactions in question are likely to bear on the
ownership of certain specific elements of the immaterial technological
equipment, as e. g., habits of thought covered by parent-right or
mechanical expedients covered by franchise. Beyond these there are
elements of “good-will” that are subject of traffic and that consist
in preferential advantages in respect of purely pecuniary transactions
having to do not with the material equipment but with the right to
deal with it and its management, as e. g., in banking, underwriting,
insurance, and the phenomena of the money market at large.
* * * * *
But the mature business situation as it runs today is a complex
affair, large and intricate, wherein the effective relations in
which business traffic stands to workmanship and to the community’s
immaterial equipment of technological knowledge at large are
greatly obscured by their own convolutions and by the institutional
arrangements and convictions to which this traffic has given rise. So
that the matter is best approached by way of a genetic exposition that
shall take as its point of departure that simpler business enterprise
of early modern times out of which the larger development of the
present has grown by insensible accretions and displacements.
Business enterprise came in the course of time to take over the affairs
of industry and so to withdraw these affairs from the tutelage of the
gilds. This shifting of the effectual discretion in the management
of industrial affairs came on gradually and in varying fashion and
degree over a considerable interval of time. But the decisive general
circumstance that enforced this move into the modern way of doing was
an advance in the scope and method of workmanship.[120] What threw the
fortunes of the industrial community into the hands of the owners of
accumulated wealth was essentially a technological change, or rather a
complex of technological changes, which so enlarged the requirements
in respect of material equipment that the impecunious workmen could
no longer carry on their trade except by a working arrangement with
the owners of this equipment; whereby the discretionary control of
industry was shifted from the craftsmen’s technological mastery of
the ways of industry to the owner’s pecuniary mastery of the material
means. In the change that so took place to a larger technological scale
much was doubtless due to the extension of trade, itself in great part
an outcome of technological changes, directly and indirectly. For the
craftsmen and their work the outcome was that recourse must be had to
the material equipment owned by those who owned it, and on such terms
as would content the owners; whereby the usufruct of the workmen’s
proficiency and of the state of the industrial arts fell to the owners
of the material equipment, on such terms as might be had.[121] So it
fell to these owners of the material means and of the products of
industry to turn this technological situation to account for their
own gain, with as little abatement as might be, and at the same time
it became incumbent on them each and several competitively to divert
as large a share of the community’s productive efficiency to his own
profit as the circumstances would permit.
CHAPTER VI
THE ERA OF HANDICRAFT[122]
Owing, probably, to the peculiar topography of Europe, small-scale and
broken, the pastoral-predatory culture has never been fully developed
or naturalised in this region; nor has a monarchy of the great type
characteristic of western Asia ever run its course in Europe. The
nearest approach to such a despotic state would be the Roman Empire;
which was after all essentially Mediterranean, largely Levantine,
rather than peculiarly European. And owing probably to the same
conditioning limitations of topography the subsequent sequence of
institutional phenomena have also been characteristically different in
this European region from that in the large and fertile lands of the
near East. It is necessarily this run of events in the Western culture
that is of chief interest to the present inquiry; which will therefore
most conveniently follow the historical outlines of this culture in its
later phases, in so far as these outlines are to be drawn in economic
terms of a large generality.
* * * * *
In a passably successful fashion the peoples of Christendom made the
transition from a frankly predatory and servile establishment, in the
Dark Ages, to a settled, quasi-peaceable situation resting on fairly
secure property rights, chiefly in land, by the close of the Middle
Ages. This transition was accompanied by a growth of handicraft,
itinerant merchandising and industrial towns, so massive as to outlive
and displace the feudal system under whose tutelage it took its rise,
and of so marked a technological character as to have passed into
history as the “era of handicraft.” Technologically, this era is
marked by an ever advancing growth of craftsmanship; until it passes
over into the régime of the machine industry when its technology had
finally outgrown those limitations of handicraft and petty trade that
gave it its character as a distinct phase of economic history. In its
beginning the handicraft system was made up of impecunious craftsmen,
working in severalty and working for a livelihood, and the rules of the
craft-gilds that presently took shape and exercised control were drawn
on that principle.[123] The petty trade which characteristically runs
along with the development of handicraft was carried on after the same
detail fashion and was presently organised on lines afforded by the
same principle of work for a livelihood.
Presently, however, in early modern times, larger holdings of property
came to be employed in the itinerant trade, and investment for a profit
found its way into this trade as also into the handicraft system
proper. The processes of industry grew more extensive and roundabout,
the specialisation of occupations (“division of labour”) increased,
the scale of organisation grew larger, and the practice of employing
impecunious workmen in organised bodies under the direction of
wealthier masters came to be the prevailing form taken by the industry
of the time.
From near the beginnings of the handicraft system, and throughout the
period of its flourishing, the output of the industry was habitually
sold at a price, in terms of money. In the earlier days the price
was regulated on the basis of labour cost, on the principle that a
competent craftsman must be allowed a fair livelihood, and much thought
and management was spent on the determination and maintenance of
such a “just price.” But in the course of generations, with further
development of trade and markets, this conception of price by degrees
gave way to or passed over into the modern presumption that any article
of value is worth what it will bring; until, when the era of handicraft
and petty trade merges in the late-modern régime of investment and
machine industry, it has become the central principle of pecuniary
relations that price is a matter to be arranged freely between buyer
and seller on the basis of bargain and sale.
The characteristic traits of this era are the handicraft industry and
the petty trade which handled the output of that industry, with the
trade gradually coming into a position of discretionary management,
and even dominating the industry of the craftsmen to such an extent
that by the date when the technology of handicraft begins to give way
to the factory organisation and the machine industry the workmen are
already somewhat fully under the control of the businessmen. Visibly,
the ruling cause of this change in the relations between the craftsmen
on the one hand and the traders and master-employers on the other hand
was the increasing magnitude of the material means necessary to the
pursuit of industry, due to such a growth of technology as required an
ever larger, more finished and more costly complement of appliances.
So that in the course of the era of handicraft the ancient relation
between owners and workmen gradually re-established itself within the
framework of the new technology; with the difference that the owners in
whose hands the discretion now lay, and to whose gain the net output of
industry now inured, were the businessmen, investors, the owners of the
industrial plant and of the apparatus of trade, instead of as formerly
the owners of the soil.
* * * * *
Under the handicraft system, and to the extent to which that system
shaped the situation, the instinct of workmanship again came into a
dominant position among the factors that made up the discipline of
daily life and so gave their characteristic bent to men’s habits of
thought. In the technology of handicraft the central fact is always the
individual workman, whether in the crafts proper or in the petty trade.
In that era industry is conceived in terms of the skill, initiative
and application of the trained individual, and human relations outside
of the workshop tend also by force of habit to be conceived in similar
terms of self-sufficient individuals, each working out his own ends in
severalty.
The position of the craftsman in the economy of that time is peculiarly
suited to induce a conception of the individual workman as a creative
agent standing on his own bottom, and as an ultimate, irreducible
factor in the community’s make-up. He draws on the resources of his
own person alone; neither his ancestry nor the favour of his neighbours
have visibly yielded him anything beyond an equivalent for work done;
he owes nothing to inherited wealth or prerogative, and he is bound
in no relation of landlord or tenant to the soil. With his slight
outfit of tools he is ready and competent of his own motion to do the
work that lies before him, and he asks nothing but an even chance to
do what he is fit to do. Even the training which has given him his
finished skill he has come by through no special favour or advantage,
having given an equivalent for it all in the work done during his
apprenticeship and so having to all appearance acquired it by his
own force and diligence. The common stock of technological knowledge
underlying all special training was at that time still a sufficiently
simple and obvious matter, so that it was readily acquired in the
routine of work, without formal application to the learning of it; and
any indebtedness to the community at large or to past generations for
such common stock of information would therefore not be sufficiently
apparent to admit of its disturbing the craftsman’s naïve appraisal of
his productive capacity in the simple and complacent terms of his own
person.
The man who does things, who is creatively occupied with fashioning
things for use, is the central fact in the scheme of things under
the handicraft system, and the range of concepts by use of which
the technological problems of that era are worked out is limited by
the habit of mind so induced in those who have the work in hand and
in those who see it done. The discipline of the crafts inculcates
the apprehension of mechanical facts and processes in terms of
workmanlike endeavour and achievement; so that questions as to what
forces are available for use, and of how to turn them to account,
present themselves in terms of muscular force and manual dexterity.
Mechanical appliances for use in industry are designed and worked out
as contrivances to facilitate or to abridge manual labour, and it is in
terms of labour that the whole industrial system is conceived and its
incidence, value and output rated.
Such a fashion of conceiving the operations and appliances of industry
seems at the same time to fall in closely with men’s natural bent
as given by the native instinct of workmanship; and fostered by the
consistent drift of daily routine under the handicraft system this
attitude grew into matter of course, and has continued to direct
men’s thinking on industrial matters even long after the era of
handicraft has passed and given place to the factory system and the
large machine industry. So much so that throughout the nineteenth
century, in economic speculations as well as in popular speech, the
mechanical plant employed in industry has habitually been spoken of as
“labour saving devices;” even such palpable departures from the manual
workmanship of handicraft as the power loom, the smelting furnace,
artificial waterways and highways, the steam engine and telegraphic
apparatus, have been so classed.
There need be no question but that these phenomena of the machine era
will bear such an interpretation; the point of interest here is that
such an interpretation should have been resorted to and should have
commended itself as adequate and satisfactory when applied to these
mechanical facts whose effective place in technology and in its
bearing on the economy of human life has turned out to be so widely
different from that range of manual operations with which it is so
sought to assimilate them.[124]
The discipline of the handicraft industry enforces an habitual
apprehension of mechanical forces and processes in terms of manual
workmanship,--muscular force and craftsmanlike manipulation. This
discipline touches first, and most intimately and coercively, the
classes engaged in the manual work of industry, but it also necessarily
pervades the community at large and gathers in its net all individuals
and classes who have to do with the facts of industry, near or remote.
It gives its specific character to the habits of life of the community
that lives under its dispensation and by its means, and so it acts as
an overruling formative guide in shaping the current habits of thought.
The consequences of this habitual attitude, for the technology of the
machine era that presently follows, are worth noting. The mechanical
inventions and expedients that lead over from the era of handicraft,
through what has been called the industrial revolution, to the
later system of large industry, bear the marks of their handicraft
origin. The early devices of the machine industry are uniformly
contrivances for performing by mechanical means the same motions which
the craftsmen in the given industries performed by hand and by man
power; in great part, indeed, they set out with being contrivances to
enable the workmen to perform the same manual operation in duplicate
or multiple--(as in the early spinning and weaving machinery) or to
perform a given operation with larger effect than was possible to the
unaided muscular work (as in the beginnings of steam power). In their
beginnings the new mechanical appliances are conceived as improved
tools, which extend the reach and power of the workman or which
facilitate or lighten the manual operations in which he spends himself.
They are, as they aim to be, labour saving devices, designed to further
the workmanlike efficiency of the men in whose hands they are placed.
The early history of steam power shows how closely this workmanlike
conception limited the range of invention. It was first employed to
pump water out of mines. In this use the pressure of the air on a
piston, in a low-pressure cylinder, was brought to bear on a lever
so suspended as to yield formally the same motion as a like lever
previously moved by human muscle. After a long interval, sufficiently
long to make the use of this intermittent pressure and the resulting
reciprocating motion familiar and impersonal in men’s habitual
apprehension, the reciprocating motion was turned to use to produce a
rotary motion,--after the fashion suggested by the treadle of a lathe
or spinning wheel, which was already familiar enough to have been
divested of something of that fog of personality that had doubtless
surrounded it at its first invention.[125] The next serious move in
the development of the steam engine is the invention of the automatic
valves, for admission and escape of steam from the cylinder. According
to the ancient myth, a boy whose work it was to shift the valves by
hand, contrived to connect them by cords with the moving parts of
the machine in such a way as to lift them at the proper moment by
the motion of the machine itself; so making the machine perform what
had in the original concept of the valve mechanism been a manual
operation. Later still, after the due interval for externalisation
and assimilation of this mechanical valve movement as an impersonal
fact of the machine process, further improvement and elaboration of
the elements so gained has worked out in the highly finished mechanism
familiar to later times.
Detail scrutiny of any one of the greater mechanical inventions, or
series of inventions, will bring out something of the same character as
is seen in the sequence of successive gains that make up the history
of the steam engine. It is to be noted in this connection that time
appears to be of the essence of the process of mechanical invention
in any field; so much so, indeed, that it will commonly be found that
any single inventor contributes but one radical innovation in any one
particular connection; which may then presently be taken up again as a
securely objective element by a later inventor and pushed forward by
a new move as radical as that to which this original invention owed
its origin. This time interval which plays such a part in mechanical
inventions appears necessary only as an interval of habituation, for
the due externalisation of the element, to relieve it, by neglect, of
the personal equation with which it is contaminated as it first comes
into use, and so to leave it such an objective concept as may be turned
to account as mere technological raw material.
It appears, then, that the accumulation of technological experience is
not of itself sufficient to bring out a consecutive improvement of the
industrial arts, particularly not such an advance in the industrial
arts as is embodied in the machine technology of late-modern times.
In this modern machine technology the ruling norm is the highly
impersonal, not to say brutal, concept of mechanical process, blind
and irresponsible. The logic of this technology, accordingly, is the
logic of the machine process,--a logic of masses, velocities, strains
and thrusts, not of personal dexterity, tact, training, and routine.
In the degree in which the information that comes to hand comes
encumbered with a teleological bias, a connotation of personal bent, it
is unavailable or refractory under this logic. But all new information
is infused with such an anthropomorphic colouring of personality;
which may presently decay and give place to a more objective habitual
apprehension of the facts in case use and wont play up the mechanical
character and bearing of these facts in subsequent experience of them;
or which may on the other hand end by giving its definitive character
and value to the acquired information in case it should happen that
the facts of experience are by use and wont bent to an habitual
anthropomorphic rating and employment. To serve the needs of this
machine technology, therefore, the information which accumulates must
in some measure be divested of its naïve personal colouring by use
and wont; and the degree in which this effect is had is a measure of
the degree of availability of the resulting facts for the uses of the
machine technology. The larger the available body of information of
this character, and the more comprehensive and unremitting the share
taken by the discipline of the machine process in the routine of daily
life, therefore, the greater, other things equal, will be the rate of
advance in the technological mastery of mechanical facts.
But much else goes to the make-up of use and wont besides the routine
of industry and the utilisation of those mechanical processes and
that output of goods which the modern machine industry places at
men’s disposal. To put the same thing in terms already employed in
another connection, the sense of workmanship is still subject to
contamination with other impulsive elements of human nature working
under the constraining limitations imposed by divers conventional
canons and principles of conduct; besides being constantly subject to
self-contamination in the way of an anthropomorphic interpretation that
construes the facts of experience in terms of a craftsmanlike bent.
As bearing on the effectual reach of this self-contamination of the
sense of workmanship it is pertinent to recall that craftsmanship ran
within a class, and so had the benefit of that accentuated sentiment of
self-complacency that comes of class consciousness. From its beginnings
down to the period of its dissolution the handicraft industry is an
affair of the lower classes; and, as is well known, class feeling
runs strong throughout the era, particularly through the centuries
of its best development. Whether their conceit is wholly a naïve
self-complacency or partly a product of affectation, the sentiment is
well in evidence and marks the attitude of the handicraft community
with a characteristic bias. The craftsmen habitually rate themselves as
serviceable members of the community and contrast themselves in this
respect with the other orders of society who are not occupied with
the production of things serviceable for human use. To the creative
workman who makes things with his hands belongs an efficiency and a
merit of a peculiarly substantial and definitive kind, he is the type
and embodiment of efficiency and serviceability. The other orders of
society and other employments of time and effort may of course be well
enough in their way, but they lack that substantial ground of finality
which the craftsman in his genial conceit arrogates to himself and his
work. And so good a case does the craftsman make out on this head,
and so convincingly evident is the efficiency of the skilled workman,
and so patent is his primacy in the industrial community, that by the
close of the era much the same view has been accepted by all orders of
society.
Such a bias pervading the industrial community must greatly fortify
the native bent to construe all facts of observation in anthropomorphic
terms. But the training given by the petty trade of the handicraft
era, on the other hand, is not altogether of this character. The
itinerant merchant’s huckstering, as well as the buying and selling
in which all members of the community were concerned, would doubtless
throw the personal strain into the foreground and would act to keep
the self-regarding sentiments alert and active and accentuate an
individualistic appreciation of men and things. But the habit of rating
things in terms of price has no such tendency, and the price concept
gains ground throughout the period. Wherever the handicraft system
reaches a fair degree of development the daily life of the community
comes to centre about the market and to take on the character given
by market relations. The volume of trade grows greater, and purchase
and sale enter more thoroughly into the details of the work to be done
and of the livelihood to be got by this work. The price system comes
into the foreground. With the increase of traffic, book-keeping comes
into use among the merchants; and as fast as the practice of habitual
recourse to the market grows general, the uncommercial classes also
become familiar with the rudimentary conceptions of book-keeping, even
if they do not make much use of formal accounts in their own daily
affairs.[126]
The logic and concepts of accountancy are wholly impersonal and
dispassionate; and whether men’s use of its logic and concepts takes
the elaborate form of a set of books or the looser fashion of an
habitual rating of gains, losses, income, and outgo in terms of price,
its effect is unavoidably in some degree to induce a statistical habit
of mind. It makes immediately for an exact quantitative apprehension
of all things and relations that have a pecuniary bearing; and
more remotely, by force of the pervasive effect of habituation, it
makes for a greater readiness to apprehend all facts in a similarly
objective and statistical fashion, in so far as the facts admit of a
quantitative rating. Accountancy is the beginning of statistics, and
the price concept is a type of the objective impersonal, quantitative
apprehension of things. Coincidently, because they do not lend
themselves to this facile rating, facts that will not admit of a
quantitative statement and statistical handling decline in men’s
esteem, considered as facts, and tend in some degree to lose the
cogency which belongs to empirical reality. They may even come to be
discounted as being of a lower order of reality, or may even be denied
factual value.
Doubtless, the price system had much to do with the rise of the machine
technology in modern times; not only in that the accountancy of price
offered a practical form and method of statistical computation, such as
is indispensable to anything that may fairly be classed as engineering,
but also and immediately and substantially in that its discipline has
greatly conduced to the apprehension of mechanical facts in terms not
coloured by an imputed anthropomorphic bent. It has probably been the
most powerful factor acting positively in early modern times to divest
mechanical facts of that imputed workmanlike bent given them by habits
of thought induced by the handicrafts.
This reduction of the facts of observation to quantitative and
objective terms is perhaps most visible not in the changes that come
over the technology of industry directly, in early modern times,
but rather in that growth of material science that runs along as
a concomitant of the expansion of the mechanical industry during
the later era of handicraft. The material sciences, particularly
those occupied with mechanical phenomena, are closely related to
the technology of the mechanical industries, both in their subject
matter and in the scope and method of the systematisation of knowledge
at which they aim; and it is in these material sciences that the
concomitance is best seen, at the same time that it is the advance
achieved in these sciences that most unequivocally marks the transition
from mediæval to modern habits of thought. This modern interest in
matter-of-fact knowledge and the consequent achievements in material
science, comes to an effectual head wherever and so soon, as the
handicraft industry has made a considerable advance, in volume and in
technological mastery, sufficient to support a fair volume of trade and
make thoughtful men passably familiar with the statistical conceptions
of the price system.
It is accordingly in the commercial republics of Italy that the modern
growth of material science takes its first start, about the point of
time when industry and commerce had reached their most flourishing
state on the Mediterranean seaboard and when the attention of these
communities was already swinging off from these material interests
to high-handed politics and religious reaction. The higher interests
of church and state came to the front, and science, industry, and
presently commerce dwindled and decayed in the land that had promised
so handsomely to lead Western civilisation out of the underbrush of
piety and princely intrigue.
Next followed the Low Countries, with the south German industrial
centres, where again industry of the handicraft order grew great,
gave rise to trade on a rapidly increasing scale, and presently to
an era of business enterprise of unprecedented spirit and scope. But
the age of the Fuggers closed in bankruptcy and industrial collapse
when the princely wrangles of the era of statemaking had used up the
resources of the industrial community and exhausted the credit of that
generation of captains of industry. Here too religious contention
came in for its share in the set-back of industry and commerce. In
their economic outlines the two cases are very much of the same kind.
Central Europe ran through much the same cycle of industrial growth,
commercial enterprise, princely ambitions, dynastic wars, religious
fanaticism, exhaustion and insecurity, and industrial collapse and
decay,--substantially repeating, on an enlarged scale and with
much added detail, the sequence that had brought South Europe into
arrears. Meantime the material sciences had come forward again in
the West, and flourished at the hands of the Netherlanders, South
Germans and French scholars, who under the favouring discipline of
this new advance in industry and commerce had slowly come abreast
of the same matter-of-fact conceptions that had once made Italy the
home of modern science. And here again, as before, princely politics,
with the attendant war, exactions and insecurity, followed presently
by religious controversies and persecutions, not only put an end to
the advance of industry and business but also checked the attendant
development of science nearly to a standstill.
So that when a further move of the kind is presently made it is
the British community that takes the lead. Great Britain had been
in arrears in all those respects that make up civilisation of the
Occidental kind, and not least in the material respect; until the
time when the peoples of the Continent by their own act fell into
the rear in respect of those material interests--technology and
business enterprise--which afford the material ground out of which
the Occidental type of civilisation has grown. In Great Britain the
sequence of these cultural phenomena has not been substantially
different, taken by and large, from that which had previously been run
through by the Continental communities; except that the same outcome
was not reached, apparently because the sequence was not interrupted by
collapse at the same critical point in the development.
The run of events under the handicraft system in England differs
in certain consequential features from that among the Continental
peoples,--consequential for the purposes of this inquiry, whether
of similarly grave consequence from the point of view given by any
other and larger interest. These peculiar traits of the British era
of handicraft yield a side light on the methods and reach of the
handicraft discipline as a factor in civilisation at large, at the
same time that a consideration of them should go to show how slender
an initial difference may come to be decisive of the outcome in case
circumstances give this initial difference a cumulative effect.
As regards the ultimately substantial grounds of the British situation,
in the way of racial make-up, natural resources, and cultural
antecedents, the British community has no singular advantage or
disadvantage as against its Continental competitors. What is true of
England in respect of peculiarly favourable natural resources later
on, about and after the close of the era of handicraft, does not hold
for the beginnings or the best days of that era. Racially there is no
appreciable difference between the English population of that time and
the population of the Low Countries, of the Scandinavian peninsulas,
or even of the nearer lying German territories; and no markedly
characteristic national type of temperament had at that time been
developed in Great Britain, as against the temperamental make-up of its
Continental neighbours,--whatever may be conceived to have become the
case in the nearer past.
The characteristic, and apparently decisive, peculiarities of the
British situation may all confidently be traced to the insular position
of the country. Owing to the isolation so given to the Island the
British community was notably in arrears in early modern times, as
contrasted with the more cultured, populous and wealthier peoples of
the Continent; and this backward state of England in the earlier period
of the era of handicraft is no less marked in respect of technology
than in any other. As is well known, England borrowed extensively and
persistently from its Continental neighbours throughout the era, and
it was only by help of these borrowed elements that the English were
able to overtake and finally to take the lead of their competitors.
Similarly, the British commercial development also comes on late
as compared with the Continent; so much so that the British had
substantially no share in the great expansion of business enterprise
that has been called the Age of the Fuggers. This late start of the
English, coupled with their peculiar advantage in being able to borrow
what their neighbours had worked out, conduced to a more rapid rate and
shorter run of industrial advance and expansion in the Island, and so,
among other consequences, hindered the rounded system of handicraft,
industrial towns, and gild organisation from attaining the same degree
of finality, and ultimately of obstructive inertia, that resulted in
many of the Continental countries.
Again, owing to the same geographic isolation that long held England
culturally in arrears, the English community lay, in great measure,
outside of that political “concert of nations” that worked out the
exhaustion and collapse of industry and business on the Continent.
Not that the English took no interest in the grand whirl of politics
and princely war that occupied the main body of Christendom in that
time. The English crown, or to use a foreign expression, the English
State, was deeply enough implicated in the political intrigues of late
mediæval and early modern Europe; but as modern time has advanced
the English community has visibly hung back with an ever growing
reluctance. And whatever may be conceived to be the share of the
English crown in the political complications of the Continent, it
remains true that the English community at large, during the mature
and concluding phases of the era of handicraft, stood mainly and
habitually outside of these princely concerns.[127] In effect, after
the handicraft era was well under way, England is never for long or
primarily engaged in international war, nor, except for the civil war
of the Commonwealth period, in destructive war of any kind. Hence the
era runs to a different outcome in England from what it does elsewhere.
It ends not in the exhaustion of politics, but in the industrial
revolution. The close of the handicraft system in England comes by way
of a technological revolution, not by collapse.
To this attempted explanation of the English case, as due to its
geographic isolation, the objection may well suggest itself that
other cases which parallel the British in this respect do not show
like results. So, for instance, the Scandinavian countries enjoyed an
isolation nearly if not quite as effective as that of Great Britain
during this period of history; whereas the outcome in these countries
is notoriously not the same. The Scandinavian case, however, differs
in at least one essential respect, which seems decisive even apart
from secondary circumstances. These countries were too small to make
up a self-supporting community under the conditions required by the
system of handicraft. They had neither the population nor the natural
resources on such a scale as a passably full development of the
handicraft system required. At any advanced stage of its growth the
system can work out into a self-balanced technological organisation,
with full specialisation of labour and local differentiation of
industry, only in a community of a certain (considerable) size.
This condition was not met by the Scandinavian countries. Hence
they remained in a relatively backward state, on the whole, through
the handicraft era, and never reached anything like an independent
position in the industrial world of that time, either technologically
or in point of commercial development; hence also they failed to
achieve or maintain that degree of independence, or isolation, in their
political relations that left England free to pursue a self-directed
course of material development.
At an earlier period, as, for instance, from neolithic times down to
the close of paganism, under the slighter, less differentiated, less
complex technological conditions of a more primitive state of the
industrial arts, the Scandinavian countries had, each and several,
proved large enough for a very efficient industrial organisation;
and, again, during the early historical period they had also proved
to be of a sufficient and suitable size to make up national units
of a thoroughly competent sort, autonomous politically as well as
industrially and working out their own fortunes in severalty,--very
much as the British community does later on, in the days of the later
handicraft era and the early growth of the machine industry. But
during the era of handicraft, and indeed somewhat in a progressive
fashion as the technology of that era grew to a fuller development and
required larger territorial dimensions, the Scandinavian countries
lost ground, relatively to the larger communities of Great Britain
and the Continent; in a degree they progressively lost autonomy both
in the political and the industrial respect, and much the same is to
be said for their position in point of general culture. This falling
into arrears and dependence is least marked in the case of Sweden, the
largest and still passably isolated community among them; and it is
most marked in the case of Norway and Iceland, the most isolated but
at the same time the least sizable units of the Scandinavian group.
In material sciences, that most characteristic trait of the Western
culture, the case of these peoples is much the same as in the matter of
technology and cultural autonomy at large; the largest of them has the
most to show.
Great Britain, on the other hand, fulfilled the conditions of size and
isolation demanded in order to a free development of the industrial
arts during this era, when the traffic in dynastic politics stood ready
to absorb all accessible resources of industry and sentiment. And
England accordingly takes the lead when the era of handicraft goes out
and that of the new technology comes in.
* * * * *
Material science of the modern sort has been drawn into the discussion
as a cultural phenomenon closely bound up with the state of the
industrial arts under the handicraft system. This modern science may,
indeed, be taken as the freest manifestation of that habit of mind that
comes to its more concrete expression in the technology of the time. To
show the pertinency of such a recourse to the state of science as an
outcome of the discipline exercised by the routine of life in the era
of handicraft some further detail touching the state and progress of
scientific inquiry during that period will be in place.
In its beginnings, the theoretical postulates and preconceptions of
modern science are drawn from the scholastic speculations of the
late Middle Ages; the problems which the new science undertook to
handle, on the other hand, were, by and large, such concrete and
material questions as the current difficulties of technology brought
to the notice of the investigators. These traditional postulates,
preconceptions, canons, and logical methods that stood over from the
past were essentially of a theological complexion, and were the outcome
of much time, attention and insight spent on the systematisation of
knowledge in a cultural situation whose substantial core was the
relation of master and servant, and under the guidance of a theological
bias worked out on the same ground. The postulates of this speculative
body of knowledge and the preconceptions with which the scholastic
speculators went to their work of systematisation, accordingly, are of
a highly anthropomorphic character; but it is not the anthropomorphism
of workmanship, at least not in the naïve form which the sense of
workmanship gives to anthropomorphic interpretation among more
primitive peoples.[128] It may be taken as a matter of course that
the sense of workmanship is present in its native, direct presentment
throughout the intellectual life of the middle ages, as it necessarily
is under all the permutations of human culture; but it is equally a
matter of course that the promptings of an unsophisticated sense of
workmanship do not afford the final test of what is right and good in a
cultural situation drawn on rigid lines of mastery and submission.
During the middle ages the faith had taken on an extremely
authoritative and coercive character, to answer to the similar
principles of organisation and control that ruled in secular affairs;
so that at the transition to modern times the religious cult of
Christendom was substantially a cult of fearsome subjection and
arbitrary authority. Much else, of a more genial character, was of
course comprised in the principles of the faith of that time, but
when all is said the fact remains that even in its genial traits it
was a cult of irresponsible authority and abject submission,--a cult
of the pastoral-predatory type, adapted and perfected to answer the
circumstances of feudal Europe, and so embodying the principles (habits
of thought) that characterised the feudal system.
Notoriously, the fashions of religious faith change tardily. Such
change is always of the nature of concession. And since the conceptions
of the cult are of no material consequence, taken by themselves and
in their direct incidence, they are subject, as such, to no direct
or deliberate control or correction in behalf of the community’s
material interests or its technological requirements. It is almost if
not altogether by force of their consonance or dissonance with the
prevailing habits of thought inculcated by the routine of life that
any given run of religious verities find acceptance, command general
adherence to their teaching, or become outworn and are discarded; and
such lack of consonance must become very pronounced before a radical
change of the kind in question will take effect. Barring conversion
to a new faith, it is commonly by insensible shifts of adaptation and
reconstruction that any wide-reaching change is worked out in these
fundamental conceptions. Such was the character of the move by which
the Mediæval cult merged in the modernised theological concepts of a
later age.
Gradually, by force of unremitting habituation to a new scheme of
life, and marked by long-drawn theological polemics, a change passed
over the spirit of theological speculation, whereby the fundamentals
of the faith were infused with the spirit of the handicraft system,
and the preconceptions of workmanship insensibly supplanted those of
mastery and subservience in the working concepts of devout Christendom.
Meantime, while the routine of the era of handicraft was slowly
reconstructing the current conceptions of divinity on lines consonant
with the habit of mind of workmanship, the ancient conceptions
continued with gradually abating force to assert their prescriptive
dominion over men’s habitual thinking. This gradually loosening hold
of the ancient conceptions is best seen in the speculations of the
philosophers and in the higher generalisations of scientific inquiry in
early modern times.
In the mediæval speculations whether theological, philosophical or
scientific, the search for truth runs back to the authentic ground of
the religious verities,--largely to revealed truth; and these religious
verities run back to the question, “What hath God ordained?” In the
course of the era of handicraft this ultimate question of knowledge
came to take the form, “What hath God wrought?” Not that the creative
office of God in the divine economy was overlooked or in any degree
intentionally made light of by the earlier speculators; nor that the
sovereignty of God was denied or in any degree questioned by those
devout inquirers who carried forward the work in later time. But in
that earlier phase of faith and inquiry it is distinctly the suzerainty
of God, and His ordinances, that afford the ground of finality on which
all inquiry touching the economy of this world ultimately come to rest;
and in the later phase, as seen at the close of the era of handicraft,
it is as distinctly His creative office and the logic of His creative
design that fill the place of an ultimate term in human inquiry--as
that inquiry conventionally runs within the spiritual frontiers of
Christendom. God had not ceased to be the Heavenly King, and had not
ceased to be glorified with the traditional phrases of homage as the
Most High, the Lord of Hosts etc., but somewhat incongruously He had
also come to be exalted as the Great Artificer--the preternatural
craftsman. The vulgar habits of thought bred in the workday populace by
the routine of the workshop and the market place had stolen their way
into the sanctuary and the counsels of divinity.
Similarly, in the best days of scholastic learning scientific inquiry
ran back for a secure foundation to the authentic ordinances of the
Heavenly King; under the discipline of the era of handicraft it learned
instead to push its inquiries to the ground of efficient cause,
ultimately of course, in the philosophical liquidation of accounts in
that devout age, to the creative efficiency of the First Cause. In
the scientific inquiries of the earlier age the test of truth was the
test of authenticity, and the logic of systematisation by use of which
knowledge in that time was digested and stored away was essentially a
logic of subsumption under securely authentic categories that could
be run back at need to the ascertained requirements of the glory of
God. The canon of truth is that of the revealed word, reënforced and
filled out with the quasi-divine Aristotelian scheme of things. It is a
logic of hierarchical congruity in respect of potencies and qualities,
suggestively resembling the devolution of powers and dignities under
the finished scheme of feudalism. In the later age the good of man
gradually, insensibly supplants the glory of God as the ultimate ground
of systematisation. The sentimental ground of conviction comes to
be the recognised serviceability of the ascertained facts for human
use, rather than their conformity with the putative exigencies of a
self-centred divine will. The Providential Order that means so much in
the scheme of knowledge in the mature years of the era of handicraft is
an order imposed by a providentially beneficent Creator who looks to
the good of man; as it has been expressed, it is a scheme of “humanism.”
By the close of the era this beneficent providential order had worked
out in an Order of Nature, indued with the same meliorative trend; and
in the sentimental conviction of the inquiring spirits of that age it
lay in the nature of this beneficent order of the universe that in the
end, in the finished product of its working, it would bring about the
highest practicable state of well-being for man,--very much as any
skilled workman of sound sense and a good heart would turn out good
and serviceable goods. And in this Order of Nature, as it runs in the
matter-of-course convictions of thoughtful men at the close of the era,
the person of the deity, even as a workmanlike creative Providence,
had fallen into the background. The Order of Nature, with its scheme
of Natural Law, is felt as the work of a consummately skilful and
ingenious workmanlike agency that looks to a serviceable end to be
accomplished; and the profoundly thoughtful scientific inquiry of that
time harbours no doubt that this workmanlike agency of Nature at large
rules the world of visible fact and will achieve its good work in good
time. But this quasi-personal Nature is not reverenced for anything but
its workmanlike qualities; the awe which it inspires is not the fear of
God, such as that fear has played its part under the feudalistic rule
of the church and sent men hunting cover from the imminent wrath to
come. As he stands in the presence of this eighteenth-century Nature,
man is not primarily a sinner seeking a remission of penalties at all
costs, but rather a focus of workmanlike attention upon whose welfare
all the forces of the visible universe beneficently converge.
How this workmanlike Nature goes about her[129] work is no more
plain to the casual spectator than are the recondite processes of
high-wrought handicraft to the uninstructed. But Nature after all
accomplishes her ends in a workmanlike fashion, and by staying by and
patiently watching the operations of Nature and construing the facts of
observation by the sympathetic use of a rational common sense men may
learn much of the methods of her manipulation as well as of the rules
of procedure under whose guidance the works of Nature are accomplished.
For it is a matter of course to that generation that Nature is
essentially rational in her aims and logic as well as in the technology
of her work; very much after the fashion of the master craftsman, who
goes to his work with an intelligent oversight of the available means
and the purpose to be wrought out, as well as with a firm and facile
touch on all that passes under his trained hand. Like the perfect
craftsman, “Nature never makes mistakes,” “never makes a jump,” “never
does anything in vain,” “never turns out anything but perfect work.”
The means whereby this work of Nature is brought to its consummate
issue are forces of Nature working under her Laws by the method
of cause and effect. The principle, or “law,” of causation is a
metaphysical postulate; in the sense that such a fact as causation is
unproved and unprovable. No man has ever observed a case of causation,
as is a commonplace with the latterday psychologists. But such a doubt
does not present itself seriously in the days of handicraft; it would
be out of touch with the spirit of the time and the discipline of
that craftsmanship out of which the spirit of the time arises. To the
inquiring minds of that era it is a matter of course and of common
sense that the forces of Nature are seen to work out the effects which
emerge before their eyes. What they see in fact may be, as the modern
psychologists would perhaps say, a certain concomitance and sequence
in the observed phenomena; but what those observers see in effect is
always a certain cause working out a certain effect. The imputation of
causal efficiency to the observed phenomena is so thoroughly a matter
of course that there is no sense of imputation in the observer’s mind.
Observation simply, without imputation of anthropomorphic qualities
and efficacies, should yield nothing more to the purpose than idle
concomitance and sequence of phenomena, but there is, in effect, none
of this early scientific work done in terms of simple concomitance
or sequence alone; nor for that matter, has any of the effective
(theoretical) work of modern science been carried to an issue by the
use of such objective terms of concomitance and sequence alone, whether
in that or in a later age, without the help of a putative causal nexus.
Through the early modern scientific period there runs an increasingly
free and frequent recourse to statistical argument,--in the material
sciences a recourse to punctilious measurement, enumeration and
instruments of precision; but it is of the essence of the case that the
phenomenal facts which so are subjected to measurement and statistical
computation are facts selected for the purpose on the strength of their
(putatively) known causal implication in the problem whose solution
is sought, and that the facts which emerge from these measurements,
computations, and instruments of precision, are turned to account in
an argument of cause and effect; they have served their purpose only
when and in so far as they enable the inquirer to determine the course
of efficient transition from a putative cause to a putative effect, or
conversely.
The relation of cause and effect, as commonly conceived by the vulgar
and as commonly employed by the scientist, is a putative relation
between phenomena which can not be said to stand in any observed
relation of efficiency to one another. Efficiency, as understood in
this connection, is not a fact of observation, but of imputation;
and efficiency, performance of work, is the substance of the causal
relation as that concept is universally employed in modern science.
It may well be said that this recourse to the concept of efficient
cause--a metaphysical postulate touching a putative fact--is the
distinguishing characteristic of modern science as contrasted with any
other scheme of systematised knowledge.[130]
Not only does the development of modern science rest on this postulate
of causality, but the concept of causation which so characterises the
modern sciences is of a particular and restricted kind. At least on
the face of things it seems unquestionable that the peculiar temper
and limitations of this modern European concept of causation are to
be credited to the habits wrought out by a life under the handicraft
system. It has been noted already that the ubiquitous prevalence
of trade and of the price system in modern times has given to the
modern apprehension of facts a certain objectivity, a degree of
impersonality, which is at least a characteristic of modern knowledge,
whether scientific or commonplace, even if it cannot be said to be
a unique distinction of modern science as contrasted with other
deliberate systems of knowledge. But it is the unique distinction
of modern science, particularly as it comes into view in its early
phases, that its concept of causality is drawn not simply in terms
of workmanship but specifically in terms of craftsmanship. There
need probably be no argument spent on the thesis that the sense of
causality is, by and large, a particular manifestation of the sense
of workmanship. But the sense of workmanship in its native scope
apparently covers something more than the manual efficiency of the
skilled workman simply. And in other times and under other cultural
(technological) circumstances the sense of workmanship has apparently
given rise to concepts of causation of a wider, or at least of a
looser, scope. In the naïve rating of savage peoples workmanship
appears to cover, perhaps uncertainly, notions of generation, nurture,
tendance, and the like, without any sharp line being drawn between
these various lines of effective endeavour on the one side and manual
efficiency on the other. And so, on the other hand, in the cosmological
knowledge (or quasi-knowledge) current among these peoples explanation
in terms of generation and growth are accepted as final along with
explanations in terms of what the modern man would conceive to be the
stricter sense of cause and effect. Even in the speculations of the
sages of classical antiquity, and again in the cosmologies and natural
history of the far-Oriental peoples, many questions of cause and effect
are found to be sufficiently disposed of when worked out in the like
terms of generation, growth and quasi-physiological mutation.
To modern inquiry explanations in these terms, other than those of
physically effective work, are provisional at the best, and are held
to only as awaiting a final solution in a materially, mechanistically
competent way. And what is alone materially competent in the modern
scientific apprehension is such an explanation as will make things
plain in terms of matter and motion, working a change in the
constitution of things by displacement through contact and pressure.
Causation is conceived as manual work,--to use a French term, it is
a _remaniement_ of raw materials at hand. Physiological or chemical
explanations must finally be recast in terms of physics, to satisfy
the modern scientist’s sense of finality, and physics must be made to
run in terms of impact, pressure, displacement in space, regrouping of
material particles, coördinated movements and a shifting of equilibrium.
Through all this runs the concomitant requirement of quantivalence,
statable in statistical form. The scientist’s results are not finally
merchantable, on the scientific exchange, until they have been reduced
to such terms of accountancy as would be comprehensible to the man
trained in the merchandising traffic of the petty trade, for whose
conviction things must be punctiliously rated in exchange value. But,
as has been noted above, it is only as an expedient of scientific
accountancy that the facts under inquiry are kept account of in an
itemised bill of values. This meticulous statistical accountancy is
necessary to safeguard the accuracy of the work done and its conformity
with the facts in hand; but the work so done handles these facts as
active factors which go efficiently to the production of the results
observed. The cause is conceived to produce the effect, somewhat after
the fashion in which a skilled workman produces a finished article
of trade. But when the scientist has set forth the operations and
working conditions that have brought forth the effects which he is
engaged in explaining, he must also, in order to the conviction of his
fellow craftsmen, show a statistically itemised statement of receipts
and expenditures covering the facts engaged,--in quantitative values
he must show that the costs are balanced by the values that emerge
in the finished product of that workmanlike process of causation
whose recondite nature and course he has so laid bare to the light of
understanding.
This attempted characterisation of modern scientific inquiry and its
working concepts applies immediately to the earlier phases and down
to a date well past the advent of the machine industry,--so far past
that date as to allow time and experience to work the new habits of
thought peculiar to the machine technology into the texture of men’s
preconceptions. In time, but tardily, as is the case with the pervasive
effects of any new line of habituation, the discipline of the machine
has wrought a further, though, hitherto less profound and decisive,
change in the aims and methods of science; a discussion of which
is deferred until it comes up again in its connection with the new
technology. Less cogently and with qualifications, however, the above
characterisation will apply to the later phases of modern science, as
well as to that initial stage that marks the era of handicraft.
* * * * *
Something further is due to be said of the cultural consequences of
this discipline in workmanship during the era of handicraft, besides
its guidance in the growth of technology and the related field of
material science. As has been intimated above, habituation to the
working conceptions of handicraft had much to do with that revision
of the religious cult and its theological tenets that has shaped the
spiritual life of modern times in contrast with the medieval life of
faith. But it is an ungrateful, perhaps ungraceful, office to turn the
dry light of matter-of-fact on the sacred verities, and a degree of
parsimony will best be observed in any layman’s discussion of these
intimate movements of the spirit. Yet it seems necessary to call to
mind at least one point of singular concomitance between the state of
the industrial arts and fortunes of the Christian faith.
Characteristic of modern times has been the Protestant rehabilitation
of the cult and its tenets. In this rehabilitation, which has not been
without effect even within the Catholic church, much of the ancient
spirit of subjection has been lost, replaced in part with a certain
attitude of self-help and autonomy on the part of the laity. There
is a degree of democratic initiative and a gild-like spirit of lay
discretion in spiritual affairs. As already noted above, the tenets
of the faith have also in some degree been revised and reconstructed
in terms consonant with the workmanlike conceptions of the handicraft
system. Such a protestant or quasi-protestant reconstruction of the
cult and its tenets set in, as is well known, successively in the
several leading countries of Europe, somewhat in the same order as
these several countries successively advanced to a high level of
technological and commercial enterprise. As noted above, in the
south in the so-called Latin countries, this era of industrial and
commercial enterprise was presently checked; the like being true in a
less pronounced fashion for the peoples of Central Europe. Wherever the
advance was seriously checked, so that the era of handicraft closed in
collapse or reaction on its secular side, there the reconstruction of
the religious cult also came to an incomplete issue at the most. So
that by the definitive close of the era of handicraft those peoples of
Christendom that had maintained the advance achieved in this secular
respect were also the ones that had accepted and continued to hold the
revised form of the faith. Where this era of industrial and business
enterprise closed in exhaustion and collapse, there the ancient form
of the faith also triumphed over the heretics. It is, indeed, to be
remarked as a sufficiently striking coincidence that even now the
centre of diffusion of the modern industry is at the same time the
centre of diffusion of religious protestantism and heresy. And the
antique forms and fervour of the faith are found in better preservation
progressively outward from this centre of diffusion; and even in
somewhat minute detail it appears to hold true not only that the more
advanced industrial peoples are the less amenable to religious control
and less given to superstitious observances of the archaic sort, but
also that within these industrial countries the industrial centres in
the narrower sense of the word are less devout, or devout in a less
archaic fashion, than the non-industrial population at large. Something
of the kind, indeed, has been visibly true ever since a relatively
early phase of the handicraft system; though nothing like undevoutness
can be alleged of the industrial town population during the handicraft
era proper. The handicraft population was devout, but not consistently
orthodox; and the industrial towns of that time were devout enough in
their way, but it was in a way obnoxious to the received dogmas of the
church. They were centres of devout heresy. It is only in late modern
times that the malady has progressed so far that it may fairly be
called a degree of apostacy. This concomitance between technological
mastery and religious dissent is doubtless susceptible of a good and
serviceable explanation at the hands of the religious experts; it is
here cited without prejudice as having at least a negative bearing on
the question of how the discipline of the handicraft industry may be
conceived to affect men’s spiritual attitude in a field so remote as
that of the life of faith.[131]
* * * * *
What is known to economic history as the era of handicraft is for
the purposes of the political historian spoken of as the era of
statemaking. The two designations may not cover precisely the same
interval, but they coincide in a general way in point of dates, and the
phenomena which have given rise to the two designations have much more
than an accidental connection. It is not simply that the development
of handicraft happens to fall in the same general period of history
that is characterised by the dynastic wars that went to the making
of the larger states. The growth of handicraft had much to do with
making the large states practicable and with supplying the material
means of large-scale warfare; while the traffic of dynastic politics
in that time had in its turn very much to do with bringing that era of
industrial and commercial enterprise to an inglorious close. The new
industry supplied the sinews of war, and the wars ate up the substance
of the industrial community.
The new industry gave rise to a growth of industrial towns and
commercial centres, primarily occupied by the traffic of the itinerant
traders. One of the immediate consequences of this extension of
merchandising enterprise was the improvement of means of communication,
both in the way of an extension and improvement of shipping--itself a
technological fact--and in the way of improved routes of communication.
A secondary consequence was a growth of population, coupled with its
concentration in urban centres, together with a growth of wealth, in
good part drawn together in the same centres. These changes enabled the
powers in control to extend an effectual coercion over larger distances
and over larger aggregations of population and wealth; it became
practicable, mechanically, to swing a larger political aggregation and
to hold it together in closer coördination than before. The physical
conditions requisite to the formation and enduring maintenance of large
political organisations were in this way supplied by the new industrial
era as an incidental result of its technological efficiency.
More direct and obvious, though of no graver importance, is the
contribution made by the new technology to the means of coercion placed
at the disposal of the warlords, in the way of improved weapons and
armour, defences and warlike appliances. The improvements worked out
in the means of warfare during the early half of the era of handicraft
exceed in material effect and in boldness of conception all the
traceable improvements wrought in that line by all the warlike peoples
of classical antiquity and all the fighting aggregations of Asia and
Africa, from the beginning of the bronze age down to modern times.
The craftsmen spent their best endeavours and their most brilliant
ingenuity on this production of arms and munitions, with the result
that these articles still lie over in the modern collections as the
most finished productions of workmanship which that era has to show.
The (unintended) result at large was that these improved appliances
enabled the warlords and their fighting men to control the industrial
classes for their own ends and to levy exactions on trade and industry
up to the limit of what the traffic would bear, or perhaps more
commonly somewhat over that limit. It was, in this way, their own
technological mastery that furnished the means of their own undoing,
directly (mechanically speaking) and indirectly (in the resulting
growth of warlike sentiment).
That the craftsmen went so diligently into this production of ways
and means for their own discomfort and abiding defeat is due not to
any innately perverse bent of the sense of workmanship as it comes
to expression in the spirit of the handicraft community, but rather
to the exigencies created by the price system, with its principles
of self-help,--a secondary, conventional product of the handicraft
industry. As has been noted already, with perhaps tedious iteration,
there runs through the handicraft community a high-wrought spirit of
individual self-sufficiency. So soon as the petty trade has grown to
effective dimensions the individual workman comes into somewhat direct
relations with the market, and except for the collective interest
and action embodied in the gild organisations the craftsmen stand in
little else than a pecuniary relation to one another and bear little
else than a pecuniary responsibility to their fellow craftsmen or to
the community. It is the place of each to gain a livelihood by honest
work through his own individual skill and enterprise. Notoriously,
the craftsmen were in effect lacking in that sense of solidarity that
makes an efficient organisation for defence or offence; concerted
action, outside the regulative activity of the gild, was to be had only
with extreme difficulty on any other basis than individual pecuniary
advantage. Each worked for himself, with an eye steadily to the main
chance. And the main chance, from an early date in this era, meant gain
in terms of price. So the craftsman worked for such customers as would
pay his price, and he spent his skill and ingenuity on such goods as
were in demand. The trade in arms and weapons was good at that time.
These appliances were a means of livelihood to the men at arms and
a means of income and prestige to their princely employers. So the
traffic went busily on, and the individual craftsmen put forth their
best efforts toward enhancing the efficiency of the ruling and fighting
classes, whose endeavours, without much collusion but by the inevitable
drift of circumstance, converged on the subjection of the community of
craftsmen at large and on the exhaustion of the community’s resources.
Through its side issue in the commercial enterprise which it fostered
the handicraft industry brought to the hands of the politicians a
further means of trouble. The trade brought on the price system, and
so made it possible for ambitious princes to buy what they needed in
their warlike negotiations; with funds in hand stores and munitions
could be bought where they were needed, so enabling warlike operations
to be carried on with greater facility at a greater distance than
was feasible under the earlier rule of contributions in kind. The
price system also enabled the warlords to hire mercenaries, and so
to organise and maintain a standing force of skilled fighting men,
mobile and irresponsible. But to hold one’s own in the competitive use
of this new arm the prince must have funds; which led incontinently
to all available manner of exactions on trade and commerce, since it
was from these sources almost solely that funds could be had. But it
led also and equally to an increasing traffic between the princes and
the captains of industry, for the use of funds. Funds had become the
sinews of war, since the handicraft industry had come to turn out
goods for sale and the merchandising trade had made funds accessible
in sufficient volume to be worth while. So the princes dealt with the
captains of industry, selling what they could and hypothecating what
they could not sell, in a competitive struggle to outdo one another
at war and diplomacy. The game was then as always an emulative one,
in which any advantage was a differential advantage only. Hence the
princes engaged, each and several, needed all the funds they could
get the use of, and their need was ever present, not to be deferred.
Hence they borrowed what they could and where they could, their
borrowings being floated by the help of all manner of expedients.
Some of these fiscal expedients brought monopolistic advantage to the
captains of industry, and so contributed to their further gain and to
the concentration of wealth in fewer hands. Meantime, the princely
chancelries, being in debt as far as possible, extorted further loans
from the captains by seizure and by threats of bankruptcy; and whatever
was borrowed was expeditiously used up in the destruction of property,
population, industrial plant and international commerce. So, when all
available resources of revenue and credit, present and prospective,
had been exhausted, and all the accessible material had been consumed,
the princely fisc went into bankruptcy, followed by its creditors, the
captains of industry, followed by the business community at large with
whose funds they had operated and by the industrial community, whose
stock of goods and appliances was exhausted, whose trade connections
were broken and whose working population had been debauched, scattered
and reduced to poverty and subjection by the wars, revenue collectors
and forced contributions. Meantime, too, habituation to the sentiments,
ideals, standards and manner of life suitable to a state of predation
had swamped the handicraft spirit and put abnegation and dependence
on arbitrary power in the place of that initiative and pertinacious
self-reliance that had made the era of handicraft. It was from this
eventuality that England in great measure escaped by favour of her
insular position and the inability of her princes to draw a reluctant
industrial community into the traffic of dynastic intrigue that filled
the Continent.
It will have been remarked that one of the essential moves in this
sequence of events, from the beginnings of handicraft in impecunious
and self-reliant workmanship to its eventual collapse in exhaustion,
is the gradual accumulation of commercial and industrial wealth in
relatively few hands. This accumulation of wealth, or rather its
segregation in few hands, appears, as already indicated, to have
entered as a potent factor in the course of things that lead the system
of handicraft through maturity to collapse, as on the Continent, or to
decay, as in England. It will accordingly be in place to go somewhat
more narrowly into the circumstances of its beginnings and growth
and the manner in which it plays its part in the organisation of the
handicraft industry.
It appears that this uneven distribution of wealth arises out of the
technological exigencies of handicraft and of the petty trade which
characteristically runs along with the handicraft industry in its early
stages.[132] In its earliest, impecunious beginnings, handicraft as
known in mediæval Europe was like its congener, the manual arts of
the savage and lower barbarian peoples, in that the whole material
equipment requisite to its pursuit consisted of a skilled workman
and an extremely slender kit of tools. The tradition countenanced by
historical students says that the beginnings of the handicraft system,
with its specialised industry and trained workmanship, is due to such
workmen, possessed of substantially nothing but their own persons, who
escaped in one way and another from the bonds of the manorial system,
or its equivalent, and found shelter on sufferance near some feudal
protector or religious corporation that found some advantage in this
novel arrangement.[133]
On looking into this inchoate working arrangement between these
masterless workmen and their patrons, and generalising the run of facts
as may be permitted an inquiry that aims at theoretical presentation
rather than historical description, the probable causal relation
running through these obscure events will appear somewhat as follows.
It happened in Europe, as it has happened now and again elsewhere,
that the ownership of the soil in advanced feudal times took shape as
a Landed Interest living at peace and under settled relations with the
community from which they drew their livelihood and their means of
controlling the community. Under these circumstances there grew up an
ever-widening industrial system, under manorial auspices, in which the
foremost place is taken by the mechanic arts, in the way of specialised
crafts and mechanical processes and appliances. The tranquil conditions
that prevail under such a settled, pacific or sub-predatory scheme
of control bring out an increased volume of consumable products,
particularly since these same settled conditions admit a larger and
more economical use of all industrial appliances. The immediate
consequence is that an increased net product accrues to the propertied
class; which calls them to an intensified consumption of goods; which
requires increased elaboration and diversity of products; which calls
for an increasing diversity and volume of appliances and more prolonged
and elaborate technological processes. The needs of the propertied
class, particularly in the way of superfluities, reach such a degree
of diversity that it is no longer practicable to supply these needs by
specialised work within the industrial framework of the manor or its
equivalent. The itinerant trade comes in to help out in this difficult
passage by bringing exotic luxuries, curious articles of great price;
but that is not sufficient to cover the requirements of the case, since
there is much needed work of elaboration that cannot be taken care of
by way of an importation of finished goods.
Here comes the opportunity of the skilled masterless workman. The
growth of wealth has provided a place for him in the economy of the
time, and having once got a foothold he and his followers congregate in
industrial towns and find a living by the work of their hands.
The point should be kept in mind in any consideration of the era of
handicraft that its beginnings are made by these “masterless men,” who
broke away (or were broken out) from the bonds of that organisation
in which the arbitrary power of the landed interest held dominion. By
tenacious assertion of the personal rights which they so arrogated to
themselves, and at great cost and risk, they made good in time their
claim to stand as a class apart, a class of ungraded free men among
whom self-help and individual workmanlike efficiency were the accepted
grounds of repute and of livelihood. This tradition never dies out
among the organised craftsmen until the industrial system which had
so been inaugurated went under in the turmoil of politics and finance
or was supplanted by the machine era that grew out of it. With this
class-tradition of initiative and democratic autonomy is associated, as
an integral fact in the system, the concomitant tradition that work is
a means of livelihood.
In these early phases of the system the individual workman is
(typically) competent to work out his livelihood with the use of such
a slight equipment of tools as could readily be acquired in the course
of his employment. In great part, indeed, the craftsman of the early
days made his tools and appliances as he went along. But it follows
necessarily that further training in the skilled manipulations of the
crafts led to the use of improved and specialised tools as well as to
the use of larger appliances useful in the technological processes
employed, such as could scarcely be called tools in the simpler sense
of the word but would rather be classed as industrial plant. With
the advance of technology the material equipment so requisite to
the pursuit of industry in the crafts increases in volume, cost and
elaboration, and the processes of industry grow extensive and complex;
until it presently becomes a matter of serious difficulty for any
workman single-handed to supply the complement of tools, appliances and
materials with which his work is to be done. It then also becomes a
matter of some moment to own such wealth.
As under any earlier and simpler industrial régime, so in this
early-advanced phase of the handicraft system the workman must also
have command of that immaterial equipment of technological information
at large that is current in the community, in so far as it affects his
particular occupation; and he must in addition acquire the special
trained skill necessary in his own branch of craft. The former he will,
at that stage of technological growth, still come by without particular
deliberate application, in the ordinary routine of life; it is made
up of general information and familiarity with current ways of doing,
simply, and on the level of general information which then prevailed
no special training or schooling seems to have been needed to place
the young man abreast of his time. In other words, the common stock of
technological knowledge had not by that time grown so unwieldy as to
require special pains to assimilate it. As for the latter, the special
skill which would make him a craftsman, that was also accessible at the
cost of some application; but under the rules of handicraft the early
apprentice gained this trained skill at no cost beyond application to
the work in hand. But the like does not continue to hold true of the
material equipment; which presently was no longer to be compassed as
a matter of course and of routine application to the work in hand. It
was becoming increasingly important and increasingly difficult to be
provided with these means with which to go to work, and the ownership
of such means gave an increasingly decisive advantage to their owner.
What adds further force to this position of affair is the fact that
in many of the crafts the work could no longer be carried on to full
advantage in strict severalty; the best approved processes required a
gang or corps of workmen in coöperation, and required also something
in the way of a “plant” suitable for the employment of such a corps
rather than of a single individual. Such a condition, of course, came
on earlier and more urgently in some crafts, as, e. g., in tanning,
or brewing, or some of the metal-working trades, than in others, as,
e. g., the building trades, locksmithing, cobbling, etc. But an
advance of this kind, and the exigencies which such an advance brings,
came on gradually and with such a measure of general prevalence through
the crafts that the general statement made above may fairly stand as a
free characterisation of the state of the industrial arts in the crafts
at large at the period in question. The growing resort to working
methods requiring organised groups of workmen together with something
in the way of collective industrial plant would greatly hasten the
concentration of the ownership of the material equipment. Ownership in
all ages is individual ownership; and then as ever any single item of
property, such as a workshop and its appliances, would presently fall
into the possession of an individual owner. The owners of the plant
became employers of their impecunious fellow craftsmen and so came into
a position to dispose of their working capacity and their product.
When and in so far as the advanced state of the industrial arts,
therefore, made it impracticable for the individual craftsman readily
to acquire the material means for work in his craft, any proficiency
in the craft would be of no effect except by arrangement with some one
who could supply these material means. The possession of the material
equipment, therefore, placed in the discretion of its owners the
utilisation of such technological knowledge and skill as the members
of the given crafts might possess. The usufruct of the handicraft
community’s technological proficiency in this way came to vest in the
owners of the plant, in the same measure as this plant was necessary to
the pursuit of industry under the technological scheme then in force.
This effect would be had so soon and in such measure as it became a
matter of appreciable difficulty to acquire and maintain the material
equipment requisite to the workmanlike pursuit of industry; and it
would become generally decisive of the relation between master and
workman so soon as the outfit of material means required for effective
work had grown larger than the common run of workmen could acquire in
the course of such training as would fit them to do the work in the
particular branch of industry in which they engaged.
The change brought on in this way by the growth of technology was
neither abrupt nor sharply defined. Like other changes in the
technological scheme it was an outgrowth of the knowledge and methods
already previously current, and it took effect in detail and in a very
concrete way, leading on through fluctuating usage to a gradually
settled general practice which came at length to differ substantially
from the situation out of which it had grown. By insensible gradations
it came into such general prevalence and everyday recognition, and
established such stable methods of procedure, as presently left it
standing as an established institutional fact. It grew into the
prevalent habits of thought without a visible break, and made its way
more or less thoroughly in the several branches of industry which
it touched, until it came to be accepted as the type of handicraft
organisation to which other, outlying branches of industry would
then also tend to conform, even when there was no direct provocation
for these outlying members of the industrial system to take on the
typical form so given. But given the tranquil conditions necessary to
the accumulation of such industrial appliances and to the invention
and employment of long and roundabout processes in industry, and
the resulting change that sets in will be of a cumulative character,
affecting an ever increasing proportion of the industrial arts, and
permeating the industrial system at large in a progressive fashion.
Under these circumstances, and in proportion as these technological
exigencies take effect in one branch of industry and another, the
usufruct of the industrial community’s current productive efficiency
comes to vest effectually in those who own the material means of
industry. Their effectual exploitation of the community’s industrial
efficiency will extend to such industries, and with such a degree of
thoroughness and security, as the state of the industrial arts may
decide. This effectual engrossing of the technological heritage by the
owners will extend to any branch of the industrial arts in which so
considerable a material equipment is required, in appliances and raw
materials, that the workmen who go into this given line of employment
cannot practically create or acquire it as they go along. In an
uncertain measure, therefore, and varying in degree somewhat from one
industry to another, the owner of the plant becomes in effect the owner
of the community’s technological knowledge and workmanlike skill, and
thereby the owner of the workman’s productive capacity.
In the small beginnings of the handicraft industry the craftsman
typically passed by a simple routine from the status of apprentice
to that of master, picking up the slight necessary outfit as he went
along; in the closing phases of the era handicraft methods had reached
a high degree of specialisation and made use of extensive processes
and appliances, and it was then only by exception that any craftsman
could pass from apprenticeship through the intervening stages to the
position of a working master, without the help of inherited means
or special favour. Toward the close of the era the masters were,
typically, employers of skilled labour and foremen in their own shop,
except in the frequent case where they altogether ceased to work at
the trade and gave their whole attention to the business side of the
industry. Many of these nominal master craftsmen were in fact mere
traders, captains of industry, businessmen, who never came in manual
contact with the work.[134]
So capitalism emerged from the working of the handicraft system,
through the increasing scale and efficiency of technology. And on the
ground afforded by this capitalistic phase of the system arose that era
of business enterprise that ruled the economic fortunes of Europe in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, with its captains of industry
and great financial houses. Whether the large means with which these
captains of industry operated were primarily drawn from the gains of
the petty trade that had gone before, or were drawn into this field
of business from outside, is a debated question which need not detain
the present inquiry. The fact remains that, by whatever means, this
development of the situation comes out of that growth of handicraft
whereby the ownership and control of the industrial plant passed out of
the hands of the body of working craftsmen.
When this business situation collapsed, therefore, as already spoken
of above, the handicraft industry at its best was organised on
capitalistic lines and managed for capitalistic ends,--with a view to
profits on investment, not primarily with a view to the livelihood
of the working craftsmen. The new situation which then presented
itself, as a consequence of the collapse of the business community,
was industrially and commercially better suited to the simpler and
ruder methods of handicraft that had succeeded in the early days of
the system; but the current preconceptions and trade relations that
actually ruled at the time were of a capitalistic kind, and the current
state of the industrial arts, even where industry had fallen into a
fragmentary state, was such as technologically required the large-scale
organisation in order to its due working. Between the impossibility
of going forward on the accustomed lines and the impracticability of
an effectual rehabilitation of more primitive methods, there resulted
a period of poverty and confusion, helped out by the continued
mismanagement of the dynastic politicians; so that the industrial
situation of the Continent never recovered until it was overtaken by
the new era of the machine industry inaugurated by the English.
* * * * *
The circumstances of life for the common man underwent more than one
substantial change during the era of handicraft, and these changes were
not all in the same sense. The dominant note changes from workmanship
in the earlier phases of the era to pecuniary competition and political
anxiety toward the close, particularly as regards the industrial
communities of the Continent. The era is a long period of history,
all told, running over some five or six centuries, from an advanced
stage of the feudal age to the eighteenth century, or to various
earlier dates in those countries where the handicraft system came to
a provisional close in the era of statemaking; and the discipline of
life does not run to the same effect in the earlier of these phases
of the development as in the later. Not that handicraft ceased to be
the prevailing method in the mechanical industries of these countries
when the reaction overtook them, but the technological advance had
been seriously checked, and such handicraft industry as still went on
had ceased to dominate the economic situation and no longer held the
primacy among the factors that shaped the life of the communities in
question. Its place as a dominant force was taken by the new political
interests and by such commercial enterprise as still went on.
But through the centuries of its earlier growth the handicraft
industry, simply as a routine of workmanship, shaped the conditions of
life for the common people more pervasively and consistently than any
other one factor. Its discipline, therefore, was of protracted duration
and touched the current habits of thought in an intimate and enduring
fashion; so as to leave a large and enduring effect on the institutions
of the peoples among whom it prevailed. The English-speaking community
shows these effects in a larger measure and a more evident manner than
any other,--visible only in a less degree in the Low Countries, and
more equivocally in the Scandinavian countries. These peoples had not
been subjected to the handicraft discipline for a longer time or in a
more exacting fashion than their Continental neighbours, but they had
on the other hand escaped the full measure of the political activity of
the era of statemaking that did so much to neutralise the effects of
the handicraft system in the larger Continental countries.
* * * * *
Something has been said above of the way in which the discipline of
life under the rule of handicraft shaped and coloured men’s thinking
in those materialistic sciences whose early growth runs parallel with
the technological advance in modern times. It has also been evident
that this training in the manner of conceiving things for the purposes
of technology wrought certain broad changes in the theological and
philosophical conceptions that guided the inquiring spirits of the
same and subsequent generations. This effect wrought by the routine
of life under the handicraft system on scientific and philosophical
conceptions is of a very pervasive character, being of the nature of
an habitual bent, an attitude or frame of mind, whose characteristic
mark is the acceptance of creative workmanship as a finality. It became
an element of common sense in the apprehension of thoughtful men whose
frame of mind was formed under the traditions of that era that creative
workmanship is an ultimate, irreducible factor in the constitution of
things, accepted as a matter of course and used unsparingly and with
ever-growing conviction as a _terminus a quo_ and _ad quem_.[135]
Creative workmanship, fortified in ever-growing measure by the
conception of serviceability to human use, works its way gradually into
the central place in the theoretical speculations of the time, so that
by the close of the era it dominates all intellectual enterprise in
the thoughtful portions of Christendom. Hence it becomes not only the
instrument of inquiry in the sciences, but a major premise in all work
of innovation and reconstruction of the scheme of institutions. In that
extensive revision of the institutional framework that characterises
modern times it is the life of the common people, their rights and
obligations, that is forever in view, and their life is conceived in
terms of craftsmanlike industry and the petty trade. By and large, the
outcome of this revision of civil and legal matters under handicraft
auspices is the system of Natural Rights, including the concept of
Natural Liberty. The whole scheme so worked out is manifestly of the
same piece with that Order of Nature and Natural Law that dominated the
inquiries of the scientists and the speculations of the philosophers.
It lies in the nature of the case that the English-speaking community
should take the lead in the final advance in all these matters and
should work out the most finished, secure and enduring results within
these premises, both in the field of scientific inquiry and in that of
the theory of institutions. It lies in the nature of the case because
the English-speaking community had the benefit of the technological
gains made before their time, because they had a long and passably
uneventful experience of the handicraft routine in industry and in the
workday life to whose wants the handicraft industry ministered, and
because the discipline of the handicraft era was not in their case
neutralised in its closing phase by the turmoil, insecurity and civic
debaucheries of an epoch of war and political intrigue. And here again
the neighbouring peoples come into the case as copartners in this work
with England in much the same measure in which their experience through
this period was of the same general nature.
The scheme of Natural Rights, and of Natural Liberty, which so emerges
is of a pronounced individualistic tenor, as it should be to answer
to the scheme of experience embodied in the system of handicraft. In
the crafts, particularly during the protracted early phases of the
system, it is the individual workman, working for a livelihood by use
of his own personal force, dexterity and diligence, that stands out as
the main fact; so much so, indeed, that he appears to have stood, in
the apprehension of his time, as the sole substantial factor in the
industrial organisation. Similarly under the canon of Natural Liberty
the individual is thrown on his own devices for his life, liberty and
pursuit of happiness. The craftsman by immemorial custom traditionally
disposed of his work and its product as he chose, under the rules of
his gild. He was by prescription in full possession of what he made,
subject only to the gild regulations imposed for the good of his
neighbours who were similarly placed. The most sacred right included
in the scheme of Natural Rights is that of property in whatever wealth
has been honestly acquired, subject only to the qualification that
it must not be turned to the detriment of one’s fellows. In the days
of the typical handicraft system the petty trade runs along with the
handicraft industry, in such a way that every master craftsman is more
or less of a trader, disposing of his goods or services in plenary
discretion, and even the apprentices and journeymen similarly bargain
for their terms of work and at times for the disposal of their product;
while the professional itinerant trader is a member of this industrial
community on much the same footing as the craftsmen proper. So it is
a secure item in the scheme of Natural Rights that all persons not
under tutelage have an indefeasible right to dispose by purchase and
sale not only of products of their own hands but of whatever items they
have come by through alienation by its producer or lawful owner. And
ownership is in natural-rights theory always to be traced back to the
creative workmanship of its first possessor.[136]
In the sequel this natural right freely to dispose of one’s person and
work, when it had found lodgment among the principles of civil rights
in the eighteenth century, contributed substantially to the dissolution
of that organ of surveillance and control that the craftsmen of an
earlier generation had instituted in the gild system. The case is
but an instance of what is continually happening and bound to happen
in the field of institutional growth. Institutional principles, such
as this item of civil rights, emerge from use and wont, resulting
as a settled line of convention from usage and custom that grow out
of the exigencies of life at the time. But use and wont is a matter
of time. It takes time for habituation to attain that secure degree
of conventional recognition and authenticity that will enable it to
stand as an indefeasible principle of conduct, and by the time this
consummation is achieved it commonly happens that the exigencies which
enforced the given line of use and wont have ceased to be operative,
or at least to be so imperative as in their earlier incidence. The
control which the gilds were initially designed to exercise was a
control that should leave the gildsmen free in the pursuit of their
work, subject only to a salutary surveillance and standardisation of
the output, such as would maintain the prestige of their workmanship
and facilitate the disposal of the goods produced. The initial purpose
seems, in modern phrase, to have been a creation of intangible assets
for the benefits of the body of gildmen. Under the new conditions that
came to prevail when capitalistic management took over the direction
of industry these gild regulations no longer served their purpose,
but they seem on the contrary to have become an obstacle to the free
employment of skilled workmen.
A similar fortune was about the same time beginning to overtake this
principle of Natural Liberty itself, and that even in the particular
bearing which seems at the outset to have been its primary and most
substantial aim. Initially, it seems, the point of interest, and
indeed of contention, was the freedom of the masterless workman to
dispose of his person and workmanship as he saw fit and as he best
could and would,--to take care of his life, liberty and pursuit of
happiness without let or hindrance from persons vested with authority
or prerogative. With the passage of time, use and wont erected this
conventional rule into an inalienable right. But included with it,
as an integral extension of the powers which this inalienable right
safeguarded, was the right of purchase and sale, touching both work
and its product, the right freely to hold and dispose of property.
Presently, toward the close of the handicraft era, or more specifically
in the late eighteenth century in England, industry fell under
capitalistic management. When this change had taken passably full
effect the workman was already secure in his civil (natural) right to
dispose of his workmanship as he thought best, but the circumstances
of employment under capitalistic management made it impossible for
him in fact to dispose of his work except to these employers, and
very much on their terms, or to dispose of his person except where
the exigencies of their business might require him. And the similarly
inalienable right of ownership, which had similarly emerged from use
and wont under the handicraft system, but which now in effect secured
the capitalist-employer in his control of the material means of
industry,--this sacred right of property now barred out any move that
might be designed to reinstate the workman in his effective freedom to
work as he chose or to dispose of his person and product as he saw fit.
The connection so shown between the growth of handicraft and the
system of Natural Rights does not purport to be a complete account
of the rise of that system, even in outline. The more usual account
traces this system to the concept of _jus naturale_, of the late Roman
jurists. There is assuredly no call here to question or disparage
the work of those jurists and scholars who have busied themselves
with authenticating the system of Natural Rights by showing it to
be founded in the _jus gentium_ and the _jus naturale_ of the Latin
Codes. Their work is doubtless historically exact and competent. But
as is commonly the case with such work at the hands of jurists and
scholars, especially in that past age, it contents itself with tracing
an authentic pedigree, rather than go into questions of the causes that
led to the vogue of these concepts at the time of their acceptance
or the circumstances which gave these Natural Rights that particular
scope and content which they have assumed in modern theory of law and
civil relations. The thesis which is here offered is to the effect that
the habituation of use and wont under the handicraft system installed
these rights, in an inchoate fashion, in the current preconceptions
of the community, and that this habituation is traceable, causally
rather than by process of ratiocination, to the sense of workmanship
as it took form and went into action under the particular conventional
circumstances of the early era of handicraft; that the preconceptions
that so went into effect determined the current attitude of thoughtful
men toward questions of civil rights and legal principle; and that the
jurists who had occasion to take notice of these current preconceptions
touching human rights found themselves constrained to deal with them as
elementary facts in the situation as it lay before them, and therefore
to find a ground for them in the accepted canons, such as would satisfy
the legal mind of their authenticity by ancient prescription, or such
as should determine the scope of their application in conformity with
legal principles having a prior claim and authoritative sanction.
The thesis, therefore, is not that the jurists founded these modern
principles of legal theory on the popular prejudices current in their
time and due in point of habituation to the routine of handicraft,
nor that they stretched the ancient principles of _jus naturale_ to
meet the demands of popular prejudice, but that on prompting of legal
exigencies to which the practical acceptance of these principles had
given rise, the jurists found in the capitularies of the code what
was necessary to authenticate these principles of legal theory and
give them the sanction of authority,--a work of reasoning all the more
congenial and convincing to the jurists since they in common with the
rest of their generation were by habit and tradition imbued with the
penchant to find these principles right and good, and consequently to
find none other in the codes that might fatally traverse those whose
authentication was due. But these are matters of pedigree, and this
work of the great jurists and philosophers is in great part of the
nature of accessory after the fact, so far as bears on that sweeping
acceptance of these principles and that incontestable efficiency that
marks the course of their life-history in modern times. The jurists and
philosophers have sought and shown the sufficient reason for accepting
this scheme of principles, as well as for the particular fashion in
which they have been formulated; but the insensible growth of habits
of thought induced by the conditions of life in (early) modern times
must be allowed to stand as the efficient cause of their dominant
control over modern practice, speculation, and sentiment touching all
those relations that have been standardised in their terms. By use and
wont the range of conventional elements included in the scheme had
become eternal and indubitable principles of right reason, ingrained
in the intellectual texture of the jurists as well as in their lay
contemporaries; and the task of the jurists therefore was to work out
their authentication in terms of sufficient reason; it was not for them
to trouble with any question of the causes to which these principles
owed their eternal fitness in the scheme of Nature at that particular
time.
The Natural Rights which so found authentication at the hands of the
jurists were of the individualistic kind which the discipline of the
handicraft system had inculcated, and the authentication found in the
_jus naturale_ does not range much beyond the individualistic bounds so
prescribed, nor are other lines of ancient prescription, at variance
with these rights, brought at all prominently into the light by the
legal inquiries of the jurists. Whereas it is no matter of serious
question that the chief bearing of the ancient findings embodied in the
code is not of this individualistic character. The causes which brought
on the modern acceptance of this scheme of Natural Rights are a matter
of use and wont, quite distinct from that line of argument by which the
jurists established them on grounds of sufficient reason resting on
ancient prescription.
The extreme tenacity of life shown by the system of Natural Rights
may raise a reasonable doubt as to the adequacy of any account that
assigns their derivation to the discipline of use and wont peculiar
to any particular cultural era, even when the era in question is of
so consistent a character and such protracted duration as the era
of handicraft. What adds force to such a question is the fact that
something like these preconceptions of natural right is not uncommon in
the lower cultures. So that on the face of the returns there appears
to be good ground in the nature of things for designating these
conventional rights “natural.” Something of the kind is current in an
obvious fashion among the peaceable communities on the lower levels
of culture, among whom the scheme of accepted rights and obligations
bears more than a distant resemblance to the Natural Rights of the
eighteenth century. But something of the kind will also be found
among peoples on a higher level, both peaceable and predatory; though
departing more notably in point of contents from the eighteenth-century
system. The point of similarity, or of identity, among all these
systems of conventionally fundamental and eternal human rights is to be
found in their intrinsic sanction--they are all and several right and
good as a matter of course and of common sense; the point of divergence
or dissimilarity is to be found in the contents of the code, which are
not nearly the same in all cases. In the mediæval natural common-sense
scheme of rights, prerogative, personal and class exemption, is of the
essence of the canon; but the scheme is none the less intrinsically
mandatory on those who had been bred into a matter-of-course acceptance
of it by the routine of life in that age. Differential rights, duties
and privilege give the point of departure in this mediæval system of
civil relations; whereas in the system worked out under the auspices of
the handicraft industry the denial of differential advantage, whether
class or individual, is the beginning of wisdom and the substance of
common sense as applied to civil relations. The one of these schemes
comes out of an economic situation drawn on lines of predation,
ancient, prescriptive and settled, and its first principle is that
of master and servant; the other comes of a situation grounded in
workmanlike efficiency, and its first principle is that of an equitable
livelihood for work done.
That some of the working systems of civil rights in customary force
among the peaceable communities of the lower culture have more in
common with modern Natural Rights than this mediæval scheme, should
logically be due to a similarity in the conditions of life out of
which they have arisen. In these savage or lower barbarian communities,
too, the principle of organization is work for a livelihood, and the
conventional ground of economic relations is that of workmanship, as
it is under the early handicraft system; but with the difference that
whereas the technology of handicraft throws the skilled workman into
perspective as a self-sufficient individual, and so throws self-help
into the foreground as the principle of economic equity, among these
savages and lower barbarians living by means of a technology of a less
highly specialised character, with a material situation not admitting
of the same degree of severalty in work or livelihood, the prime
requisite in the relations governing the rights and duties of the
members of the group is not the individual livelihood of the skilled
workman but that of the group at large. The individual’s personal
claims come in only as secondary and subservient to the needs of the
group at large; rights of ownership are loose and vague, and they
lack that tenacity of life that characterises the like rights under
the handicraft system. It is true, the product of industry belongs
primarily to the producer of it, it is his in some sense that might
pass into ownership if the technological situation admitted of work for
a livelihood in strict and consistent severalty; but in the actual case
as found on these lower levels the product commonly escapes somewhat
easily from his individual possession and comes to inure to the use of
the group. Except for such articles as continue to pertain to him by
virtue of intimate and daily use, the producer’s possessive control of
his product is likely at the best to be transient and dubious, readily
giving way before any urgent call for its use by other members of the
group.[137]
A fact of some incisive effect in this connection is doubtless the
characteristic trait of handicraft that, in its early phases wholly and
obviously and in its later development also somewhat evidently, it was
the affair of a class; whereas in the savage communities with which it
is here compared, the technology and the livelihood in question are
those of the community at large, not of a class that stands in contrast
and in some degree of competition with the community at large. The
craftsmen were a fraction of the community by work for whose needs
they got their livelihood, even though, in the course of time, they
became the dominant element within the local community (municipality)
whose fortunes they shared. And as between this fraction of the
population and outside classes with whom they carried on their traffic,
particularly the well-to-do and land-holding classes, there could be
no constraining sense of a solidarity of interest. The ancient bond
of master and servant had been broken by something like an overt act
of class secession on the part of the craftsmen, and nothing like a
bond of fellowship had taken its place. The fellowship ran within the
lines of craftsmanship, while the traffic of each craftsman typically
ran across the line that divided the craftsman from the old order and
population outside of this industrial system.
That the eighteenth-century system of Natural Rights shows such a
degree of approximation to the scheme of rights and obligations
observed among many primitive peoples need flutter no one’s sense
of cultural consistency. Return to Nature was more or less of a
password in the closing period of the era of handicraft and after,
and in respect of this system of civil relations it appears that the
popular attitude of that time was in effect something of a reversion
to primitive habits of thought; though it was at best a partial return
to a “state of nature” in the sense of a state of peace and industry
rather than a return to the unsophisticated beginnings of society.
That such a partial reversion takes effect in the habits of thought of
the time appears to be due to a similarly partial return to somewhat
analogous habits of life. The correspondence in the habits of thought
is no greater than that in the habits of life out of which these habits
of thought emerged. The primitive peoples that show this suggestive
resemblance to the system of Natural Rights typically are living under
a routine of workmanship and in a state of habitual peace,--in these
respects being placed somewhat similarly to the handicraft community.
The handicraft system comes true to the same characterisation in so
far that it was dominated by a routine of workmanship and so far as,
in effect, its life-history falls in an era of prevailingly peaceable
conditions; and such a characterisation holds true of the industrial
community proper through the period during which handicraft is the
ruling factor in the community’s habitual range of interest. It is
not that the era of handicraft was an era of reversion to savagery,
but only that the tone-giving factor in the community of that time
reverted, by force of the state of the industrial arts, to habits of
peace and industry, in which direct and detailed manual work takes a
leading place. There is also the further point of economic contact
with the savage state that in the handicraft community distinctions
of wealth are neither large nor of decisive consequence during the
long period of habituation that brought the preconceptions of that era
into the settled shape that gave them the character of a finished and
balanced system of principles.
It may be added, at the risk of tedious repetition, that the habits of
life characteristic of the era, as well as the frame of mind suited
to this characteristic routine of life, seem peculiarly suited to the
native endowment of the European peoples,--perhaps in an especial
degree suited to the native bent of those sections of the population
in which there is an appreciable admixture of the dolicho-blond
stock. That such may be the case is at least strongly suggested by
the tenacious hold which this system of Rights apparently still has
on the sentimental allegiance of these Western peoples, after the
conditions to which these Rights owe their rise, and to which they are
suited, have in the main ceased to exist; as well as by the somewhat
blind fervour with which these peoples, and more especially the
English-speaking section of them, go about the idyllic enterprise of
rehabilitating that obsolescent “competitive system” that embodied the
system of Natural Rights, and that came up with the era of handicraft
and went under in its dissolution.
CHAPTER VII
THE MACHINE INDUSTRY
The era of the machine industry has been designated variously, to
answer to the varying point of view from which it has been considered
by divers writers. As an historical era it shows divers traits, more or
less characteristic, and it has been designated by one or another of
these traits according to the particular line of interest that may have
directed the attention of those who have had occasion to name it. It is
spoken of as the era of the factory system, of large-scale industry,
as the age of Capitalism or of free competition, or again as an era of
the credit economy. But as seen from the point of view of technology,
and more specifically from that of workmanship as it underlies the
technological system, it is best characterised as the era of the
machine industry, or of the machine process. As a technological period
it is commonly conceived to take its rise in the British industrial
community about the third quarter of the eighteenth century, the
conventional date of the Industrial Revolution,--those who have a taste
for precise dates assigning it more specifically to the sixties of that
century, to coincide with the earliest practical use of certain large
mechanical inventions of that age.[138]
Such a precise date is scarcely serviceable for any other than a
mnemonic purpose. If the matter is taken in historical perspective
the era of the machine process will be seen to have been coming on in
England through the earlier years of the century, and even from before
that time; whereas notable mechanical inventions, and engineering
exploits of the like general bearing in technology, had begun to affect
the industrial situation in some of the Continental countries at an
appreciably earlier period. So, _e. g._, practical improvements had
gone into effect in water-wheels, pumps and wind mills, in the use of
sails and the designs of shipping, in wheeled vehicles (though the
early modern improvements in this particular may easily be over-rated)
and in such appliances as chimneys; and, again, there is the peculiar
but highly instructive field of applied mechanics represented by the
invention and improvement of firearms. Such engineering enterprises as
the drainage systems of Holland also belong here and are to be counted
among the notable achievements in applied mechanics.
Even the most casual review of the technological situation in Europe,
say in the seventeenth century, will bring out characteristic features
that cannot be denied honourable mention as applications of mechanical
science, although the reserve caution is immediately to be entered
that these early mechanical expedients and their employment stand out
as sporadic facts of mechanical contrivance in an age of manual work,
rather than as characteristic traits of the industrial system in which
they are found. The beginnings of the machine industry are of this
sporadic character. They come up as an outgrowth of the handicraft
technology, particularly at conjunctures where that technology is
called on to deal with such large mechanical problems as exceed the
force of manual labour or that elude the reach of the craftsman’s tools.
So, _e. g._, in England, say from the sixteenth century onward, there
are improvements in highways and waterways and in the drainage of
agricultural lands; and, as an instance more obviously related to the
machine industry as commonly apprehended, there comes early in the
eighteenth century the “horse-hoing cultivation” on which Jethro Tull
spent his enthusiasm. Along with this obviously mechanical line of
endeavour and innovation is also to be noted the deliberate efforts to
improve the races of sheep and cattle that were in progress about the
same time. These are perhaps not to be rated as mechanical inventions
in the simple and obvious sense of the phrase, but they have this
trait in common with the inventions of the machine era that they turn
ascertained facts of brute nature to account for human use by a logic
that has much of that character of impersonal incidence that marks
the machine technology. The machine industry comes on gradually;
its initial stages are visible in the early eighteenth century, but
it is only toward the close of that century that its effects on the
industrial system become so pronounced that the era of the machine
technology may fairly be said to have set in; and it is only in Great
Britain that it can be said to prevail at that period.
Of the other features above alluded to as characteristic of this period
of history none are of so substantial a character or so distinctive
of this particular period as its technological peculiarities. Free
competition, _e. g._, belongs as much to the era of handicraft as to
that of the machine, having prevailed--more extensively in theory
than in practice--under the former régime as under the latter; and
in point of fact it gradually falls under increasing restrictions as
the machine age advances, until in the more highly developed phases
of the current situation it has largely ceased to be a practicable
line of policy in industrial business. So, also, Capitalism did not
take its rise coincident with the industrial revolution, although its
best development and largest expansion may lie within the machine age.
It had its beginnings in the prosperous days of handicraft, and one
capitalistic era had already run its course, on the Continent, before
the machine industry came in. The “credit economy,” associated with
the capitalistic management of industry, is also of older growth, so
far as regards the days of its early vigour, although the larger and
more far-reaching developments of credit come effectually into play
only in the later decades of the machine age. Much the same is true
of the so-called large-scale organisation of industry and the factory
system. Its highest development comes with the advanced stages of the
machine technology and is manifestly conditioned by the latter, but it
was already a force to be counted with at the time of the industrial
revolution. The large-scale industry contemplated, with a degree of
apprehension, by Adam Smith, e. g., was not based on the machine
technology but on handicraft with an extensive division of labour, and
on the “household industry” as that was gaining ground in his time. The
latter was, in form, what has since come to be known as the “sweatshop”
industry.
* * * * *
In this new era technology comes into close touch with science; both
the science and the technology of the new age being of a matter-of-fact
character, beyond all precedent. So much so that by contrast, the
technology of handicraft would appear to have stood in no close or
consistent relation with the avowed science of its time. Not that
anthropomorphic imputation is altogether wanting or inoperative in this
latterday scientific inquiry, or in the technological utilisation of
the facts in hand; but in the later conceptions anthropomorphism has at
the best been repressed and sterilised in an unprecedented degree. And
it holds true for the machine technology beyond any other state of the
industrial arts that the facts of observation can effectually be turned
to account only in so far as they are apprehended in a matter-of-fact
way. The logic of this technology, by which its problems are to be
worked out, is the logic of a mechanical process in which no personal
or teleological factors enter. The engineer or inventor who designs
processes, appliances and expedients within these premises is required
to apprehend and appreciate the working facts after that dispassionate,
opaque, unteleological fashion in which the phenomena of brute matter
occur; and he must learn to work out their uses by the logic of brute
matter instead of construing them by imputation and by analogy with the
manifestations of human workmanship. Less imperatively, but still in a
marked degree, the same spirit must be found in the workmen under whose
tendance these processes and appliances are to work out the designed
results.
Under the simpler technology of more primitive industrial systems
recourse to anthropomorphic imputation has also always been a hindrance
to workmanlike mastery, more particularly in the mechanic arts proper,
and only less pronounced in those industrial arts, like husbandry,
that have to do immediately with plants and animals. Knowledge of
brute facts as interpreted in terms of human nature appears never to
have been serviceable in full proportion to their content. But in
these more primitive industrial systems--as also in the better days
of handicraft--the workman is forever in instant control of his tools
and materials; the movements made use of in the work are essentially
of the nature of manipulation, in which the workman adroitly coerces
the materials into shapes and relations that will answer his purpose,
and in which also nothing (typically) takes place beyond the manual
reach of the workman as extended by the tools which his hands make use
of. Under these conditions it is a matter of relatively slight effect
whether the workman does or does not rate the objects which he uses as
tools and materials in quasi-personal terms or imputes to them a degree
of self-direction, since they are at no point allowed to escape his
manual reach and are by direct communication of his force, dexterity
and judgment coerced into the forms, motions and spatial dispositions
aimed at by him. His imputing some bias, bent, initiative or spiritual
force or infirmity to brute matter will doubtless incapacitate him by
so much for efficiently designing processes and uses for the available
material facts; his creative imagination proceeds on mistaken premises
and goes wrong in so far; and so this anthropomorphic interpretation
must always count as a material drawback to technological mastery
of the available resources and in some degree retard the possible
advance in the industrial arts. But within the premises given by the
industrial arts as they stand, he may still do effective work as a
mechanic skilled in the manual operations prescribed by the given state
of the arts. For in the mechanic industries of all these other and
more archaic industrial systems the workman does the work; it may be
by use of tools, and even by help of more or less extended processes
in which natural forces of growth, fermentation, decay, and the like,
play a material part; but the decisive fact remains that the motions
and operations of such manual industry take effect at his hands and by
way of his muscular force and manual reach. Where natural processes, as
those of growth, fermentation or combustion, are drawn into the routine
of industry, they lie, as natural processes, beyond his discretionary
control; at the most he puts them in train and lets them run, with some
hedging and shifting as they go on, to bring them to bear in such a way
as shall suit his ends; he takes his precautions with them and then he
takes the chance of their coming to the desired issue. They are not,
and as he sees the work and its conditions they need not be, within
his control in anything like the fashion in which he controls his
tools and the materials employed in his manual operations; they work
well or ill, and what comes of it is in some degree a matter of his
fortune of success or failure, such as comes to the man who has done
his best under Providence. In case of a striking outcome for good or
ill from the operation of such natural processes the devout craftsman
is inclined to rate it as the act of God; very much as does the devout
husbandman who depends on rain rather than on irrigation. It is the
part of the wise workman in such a case to take what comes, without
elation or repining, in so far as these factors of success and failure
are not comprised in his presumed workmanlike proficiency.
The matter lies differently in the machine industry. The mechanical
processes here engaged are calculable, measurable, and contain no
mysterious element of providential ambiguity. In proportion as they
work to the best effect, they are capable of theoretical statement, not
merely approachable by rule of thumb. The designing engineer takes his
measures on the basis of ascertained quantitative fact. He knows the
forces employed, and, indeed, he can employ only such as he knows and
only so far as he knows them; and he arranges for the processes that
are to do the work, with only such calculable margin of error as is due
to the ascertained average infirmity of the available materials. He
deals with forces and effects standardised in the same opaque terms. He
will be proficient in his craft in much the same degree in which he is
master of the matter-of-fact logic involved in mechanical processes of
pressure, velocity, displacement and the like; not in proportion as he
can adroitly impart to the available materials the workmanlike turn of
his own manual force and dexterity, nor in the degree in which he may
be able shrewdly to guess the run of the season or the variations of
temperature and moisture that condition the effectual serviceability of
natural processes in handicraft.
The share of the operative workman in the machine industry is
(typically) that of an attendant, an assistant, whose duty it is to
keep pace with the machine process and to help out with workmanlike
manipulation at points where the machine process engaged is
incomplete.[139] His work supplements the machine process, rather
than makes use of it. On the contrary the machine process makes use of
the workman. The ideal mechanical contrivance in this technological
system is the automatic machine. Perfection in the machine technology
is attained in the degree in which the given process can dispense
with manual labour; whereas perfection in the handicraft system means
perfection of manual workmanship. It is the part of the workman to know
the working of the mechanism with which he is associated and to adapt
his movements with mechanical accuracy to its requirement. This demands
a degree of intelligence, and much of this work calls for a good deal
of special training besides; so that it is still true that the workman
is useful somewhat in proportion as he is skilled in the occupation
to which the machine industry calls him. In the new era the stress
falls rather more decidedly on general intelligence and information,
as contrasted with detail mastery of the minutiæ of a trade; so that
familiarity with the commonplace technological knowledge of the time
is rather more imperative a requirement under the machine technology
than under that of handicraft. At the same time this common stock of
technological information is greatly larger in the current state of the
industrial arts; so much larger in volume, and at the same time so much
more exacting in point of accuracy and detail, that this commonplace
information that is requisite to any of the skilled occupations can no
longer be acquired in the mere workday routine of industry, but is to
be had only at the cost of deliberate application and with the help of
schools.
On this head, as regards the requirements of industry in the way of
general information on the part of the skilled workmen, the contrast
is sufficiently marked, _e. g._, between Elizabethan times and the
Victorian age. At the earlier period illiteracy was no obstacle to
adequate training in the skilled trades. In the seventeenth century
Thomas Mun includes among the peculiar and extraordinary acquirements
necessary to eminent success in commerce, matters that are now easily
comprised in the ordinary common-school instruction; and in so doing
he plainly shows that these acquirements were over and above what was
usual or would be thought useful for the common man. Even Adam Smith,
in the latter half of the eighteenth century, shrewd observer as he
was, does not include any degree of schooling or any similar pursuit of
general information among the requisites essential to the efficiency of
skilled labour. Even at that date it appears still to have been true
that the commonplace information and the general training necessary to
a mastery of any one of the crafts lay within so narrow a range that
what was needful could all be acquired by hearsay and as an incident
to the discipline of apprenticeship. Within a century after the first
inception of the machine industry illiteracy had come to be a serious
handicap to any skilled mechanic; the range of commonplace information
that must habitually be drawn on in the skilled trades had widened to
such an extent, and comprised so large a volume of recondite facts,
that the ability to read came to have an industrial value; the
higher proficiency in any branch of the mechanic arts presumed such
an acquaintance with fact and theory as could neither be gained nor
maintained without habitual recourse to printed matter. And this line
of requirements has been constantly increasing in volume and urgency,
as well as in the range of employments to which the demand applies,
until it has become a commonplace that no one can now hope to compete
for proficiency in the skilled occupations without such schooling as
will carry him very appreciably beyond the three R’s that made up the
complement of necessary learning for the common man half a century ago.
It follows as a consequence of these large and increasing requirements
enforced by the machine technology that the period of preliminary
training is necessarily longer, and the schooling demanded for general
preparation grows unremittingly more exacting. So that, apart from all
question of humanitarian sentiment or of popular fitness for democratic
citizenship, it has become a matter of economic expediency, simply as
a proposition in technological efficiency at large, to enforce the
exemption of children from industrial employment until a later date
and to extend their effective school age appreciably beyond what would
once have been sufficient to meet all the commonplace requirements of
skilled workmanship.[140]
The knowledge so required as a general and commonplace equipment
requisite for the pursuit of these modern skilled occupations is of
the general nature of applied mechanics, in which the essence of the
undertaking is a ready apprehension of opaque facts, in passably
exact quantitative terms. This class of knowledge presumes a certain
intellectual or spiritual attitude on the part of the workman, such an
attitude and animus as will readily apprehend and appreciate matter
of fact and will guard against the suffusion of this knowledge with
putative animistic or anthropomorphic subtleties, quasi-personal
interpretations of the observed phenomena and of their relations to one
another. The norm of systematisation is that given by the logic of the
machine process, and the scope of it is that inculcated by statistical
computation and the principle of material cause and effect.
In some degree the routine of the machine industry necessarily induces
such an animus in its employees, since such is the scope and method of
its own working; and the closer and more exacting the application to
work of this kind, the more thorough-going should be the effects of
its discipline. But this routine and its discipline extend beyond the
mechanical occupations as such, so as in great part to determine the
habits of all members of the modern community. This proposition holds
true more broadly for the current state of the industrial arts than any
similar statement would hold, _e. g._, for the handicraft system. The
ordinary routine of life is more widely and pervasively determined by
the machine industry and by machine-like industrial processes today,
and this determination is at the same time more rigorous, than any
analogous effect that was had under the handicraft system. Within the
effective bounds of modern Christendom no one can wholly escape or in
any sensible degree deflect the sweep of the machine’s routine.
Modern life goes by clockwork. So much so that no modern household
can dispense with a mechanical timepiece; which may be more or less
accurate, it is true, but which commonly marks the passage of time with
a degree of exactness that would have seemed divertingly supererogatory
to the common man of the high tide of handicraft.[141] Latterly the
time so indicated, it should be called to mind, is “standard time,”
standardised to coincide over wide areas and to vary only by large and
standard units. It brings the routine of life to a nicely uniform
schedule of hours throughout a population which exceeds by many fold
the size of those communities that once got along contentedly enough
without such an expedient under the régime of handicraft. In this
matter the demands of the machine have even brought on a revision of
the time schedule imposed by the mechanism of the heavenly bodies, so
that not only “solar time,” but even the “mean solar time” that once
was considered to be a sufficient improvement on the ways of Nature,
has been superseded by the schedule imposed by the railway system.
The discipline of the timepiece is sufficiently characteristic of
the discipline exercised by the machine process at large in modern
life, and as a cultural factor, as a factor in shaping the habits of
thought of the modern peoples, it is itself moreover a fact of the
first importance. Of the standardisation of the time schedule just
spoken of, the earlier, the adoption of “mean solar time,” was due
immediately to the exigencies of the machine process as such, which
would not tolerate the seasonal fluctuations of “apparent” solar time.
This epithet “apparent,” by the way, carries a suggestion that the
time schedule so designated is less true to the actualities of the
case than the one which superseded it. And so it is if the actualities
to which regard is had are those of the machine process; whereas the
contrary is true if the actualities that are to decide are those of
the seasons, as they were under the earlier dispensation. “Standard
time” has gone into effect primarily through the necessities of
railway communication,--itself a dominant item in the mechanical
routine of life; but it is only in a less degree a requirement of
the other activities that go to make up the traffic of modern life.
The railway is one of the larger mechanical contrivances of the
machine age, and its exigencies in this respect are typical of what
holds true at large. Communication of whatever kind, as well as the
supply of other necessaries, is standardised in terms of time, space,
quantity, frequency, and indeed in all measurable dimensions; and the
“consumer,” as the denizens of these machine-made communities are
called, is required to conform to this network of standardisations in
his demand and uses of them, on pain of “getting left.” To “get left”
is a colloquialism of the machine era and describes the commonest form
of privation under the régime of the machine process. It is already a
time-worn colloquialism, inasmuch as it is now already some time since
the ubiquitous routine of the machine process first impressed on the
common man the sinister eventuality covered by the phrase.
The relation in which the consumer, the common man, stands to the
mechanical routine of life at large is of much the same nature as that
in which the modern skilled workman stands to that detail machine
process into which he is dovetailed in the industrial system. To take
effectual advantage of what is offered as the wheels of routine go
round, in the way of work and play, livelihood and recreation, he
must know by facile habituation what is going on and how and in what
quantities and at what price and where and when, and for the best
effect he must adapt his movements with skilled exactitude and a
cool mechanical insight to the nicely balanced moving equilibrium of
the mechanical processes engaged. To live--not to say at ease--under
the exigencies of this machine-made routine requires a measure of
consistent training in the mechanical apprehension of things. The mere
mechanics of conformity to the schedule of living implies a degree of
trained insight and a facile strategy in all manner of quantitative
adjustments and adaptations, particularly at the larger centres of
population, where the routine is more comprehensive and elaborate.
And here and now, as always and everywhere, invention is the mother
of necessity. The complex of technological ways and means grows
by increments that come into the scheme by way of improvements,
innovations, expedients designed to facilitate, abridge or enhance
the work to be done. Any such innovation that fits workably into the
technological scheme, and that in any appreciable degree accelerates
the pace of that scheme at any point, will presently make its way into
general and imperative use, regardless of whether its net ulterior
effect is an increase or a diminution of material comfort or industrial
efficiency. Such is particularly the case under the current pecuniary
scheme of life if the new expedient lends itself to the service of
competitive gain or competitive spending; its general adoption then
peremptorily takes effect on pain of damage and discomfort to all
those who fail to strike the new pace. Each new expedient added to and
incorporated in the system offers not only a new means of keeping up
with the run of things at an accelerated pace, but also a new chance of
getting left out of the running. The point is well seen, e. g., in the
current competitive armaments, where equipment is subject to constant
depreciation and obsolescence, not through decline or decay, but by
virtue of new improvements. So also in the increase and acceleration
of advertising that has been going on during the past quarter of a
century, due to increased facilities and improved methods in printing,
paper-making, and the other industrial arts that contribute to the
appliances of publicity.
It is of course not hereby intended to imply that these modern
inventions meet no wants but such as they themselves create. It is
beyond dispute that such mechanical contrivances, for instance, as
the telephone, the typewriter, and the automobile are not only great
and creditable technological achievements, but they are also of
substantial service. At the same time it is at least doubtful if these
inventions have not wasted more effort and substance than they have
saved,--that they are to be credited with an appreciable net loss.
They are designed to facilitate travel and communication, and such
is doubtless their first and obvious effect. But the net result of
their introduction need by no means be the same. Their chief use is
in the service of business, not of industry, and their great further
use is in the furtherance, or rather the acceleration, of obligatory
social amenities. As contrivances for the expedition of traffic both
in business and in social intercourse their use is chiefly, almost
wholly, of a competitive nature; and in the competitive equipment and
manœuvres of business and of gentility the same broad principle will
be found to apply as applies to competitive armaments and improvements
in the technology of warfare. Any technological advantage gained by
one competitor forthwith becomes a necessity to all the rest, on
pain of defeat. The typewriter is, no doubt, a good and serviceable
contrivance for the expedition of a voluminous correspondence, but
there is also no reasonable doubt but its introduction has appreciably
more than doubled the volume of correspondence necessary to carry on
a given volume of business, or that it has quadrupled the necessary
cost of such correspondence. And the expedition of correspondence by
stenographer and typewriter has at the same time become obligatory
on all business firms, on pain of losing caste and so of losing the
confidence of their correspondents. Of the telephone much the same is
to be said, with the addition that its use involves a very appreciable
nervous strain and its ubiquitous presence conduces to an unremitting
nervous tension and unrest wherever it goes. The largest secure result
of these various modern contrivances designed to facilitate and abridge
travel and communication appears to be an increase of the volume of
traffic per unit of outcome, acceleration of the pace and heightening
of the tension at which the traffic is carried on, and a consequent
increase of nervous disorders and shortening of the effective working
life of those engaged in this traffic. But in these matters invention
is the mother of necessity, and within the scope of these contrivances
for facilitating and abridging labour there is no alternative, and life
is not offered on any other terms.[142]
Other kinds of routine, standardised and elaborate, have been or
still are in force, besides this machine-like process of living as
carried on under modern technological conditions; and one and another
of these will at times rise to a degree of exigence quite comparable
with that of the machine process. But these others are of a different
character in that their demands are not enforced by sanctions of an
unmediated mechanical kind; they do not fall on the delinquent with
a direct mechanical impact, and the penalties of non-conformity are
of a conventional nature. So, _e. g._, the punctilios of religious
observance may come to a very rigid routine, to be observed on pain
of sufficiently grave consequences; but in so far as these eventual
(eschatological) consequences are statable in terms of material
incidence (of fire, sulphur, or the like) the mechanically trained
modern consumer will incline to hold that they are of a putative
character only. So, again, in the matter of fashion and decorum the
schedule of observances may be sufficiently rigorous, but here too
failure to articulate with the sweep of a punctilious routine with all
the sure and firm touch of the expert is not checked with an immediate
disastrous impact of mechanical shock. Conformity in the technological
respect with the routine of living under other technological systems
than that of the machine process had also something of this character
of conventional prescription; and the discipline exercised by the
routine of living in these more archaic technological eras was also
something more in the nature of a training in conventional expedients.
The resulting growth of habits of thought in such a community should
then also differ in a similar way from what comes in sight in the
present.
* * * * *
Both in its incidence on the workman and on the members of the
community at large, therefore, the training given by this current state
of the industrial arts is a training in the impersonal, quantitative
apprehension and appreciation of things, and it tends strongly to
inhibit and discredit all imputation of spiritual traits to the facts
of observation. It is a training in matter-of-fact; more specifically
it is a training in the logic of the machine process. Its outcome
should obviously be an unqualified materialistic and mechanical animus
in all orders of society, most pronounced in the working classes, since
they are most immediately and consistently exposed to the discipline
of the machine process. But such an animus as best comports with
the logic of the machine process does not, it appears, for good or
ill, best comport with the native strain of human nature in those
peoples that are subject to its discipline. In all the various peoples
of Christendom there is a visible straining against the drift of
the machine’s teaching, rising at time and in given classes of the
population to the pitch of revulsion.
It is apparently among the moderately well-to-do, the half-idle
classes, that such a revulsion chiefly has its way; leading now and
again to fantastic, archaising cults and beliefs and to make-believe
credence in occult insights and powers. At the same time, and with
the like tincture of affectation and make-believe, there runs through
much of the community a feeling of maladjustment and discomfort, that
seeks a remedy in a “return to Nature” in one way or another; some sort
of a return to “the simple life,” which shall in some fashion afford
an escape from the unending “grind” of living from day to day by the
machine method and shall so put behind us for a season the burdensome
futilities by help of which alone life can be carried on under the
routine of the machine process.
All this uneasy revulsion may not be taken at its face value; there
is doubtless a variable but fairly large element of affectation that
comes to expression in all this talk about the simple life; but when
all due abatement has been allowed there remains a substantial residue
of unaffected protest. The pitch and volume of this protest against
“artificial” and “futile” ways of life is greatest in the advanced
industrial countries, and it has been growing greater concomitantly
with the advance of the machine era. What is perhaps more significant
of actualities than these well-bred professions of discomfort and
discontent is the “vacation,” being a more tangible phenomenon and
statable in quantitative terms. The custom of “taking a vacation” has
been on the increase for some time, and the avowed need of a yearly
or seasonal holiday greatly exceeds the practice of it in nearly
all callings. This growing recourse to vacations should be passably
conclusive evidence to the effect that neither the manner of life
enforced by the machine system, nor the occupations of those who are in
close contact with this technology and its due habits of thought, can
be “natural” to the common run of civilised mankind.
According to accepted theories of heredity,[143] civilised mankind
should by native endowment be best fit to live under conditions of
a moderately advanced savagery, such as the machine technology will
not permit.[144] Neither in the physical conditions which it imposes,
therefore, nor in the habitual ways of observation and reasoning which
it requires in the work to be done, is the machine age adapted to the
current native endowment of the race. And these various movements of
unrest and revulsion are evidence, for as much as they are worth, that
such is the case.
Not least convincing is the fact that a considerable proportion of
those who are held unremittingly to the service of the machine process
“break down,” fall into premature decay. Physically and spiritually
these modern peoples are better adapted to life under conditions
radically different from those imposed by this modern technology.[145]
All of which goes to show, what is the point here in question, that
however exacting and however pervasive the discipline of the machine
process may be, it can not, after all, achieve its perfect work in the
way of habituation in the population of Christendom as it stands. The
limit of tolerance native to the race, physically and spiritually,
is short of that unmitigated materialism and unremitting mechanical
routine to which the machine technology incontinently drives.
* * * * *
For anything like a comprehensive view of the effects which the machine
technology has had on the scope and method of knowledge in modern
times it is necessary to turn back to its beginnings. Historically the
machine age succeeds the era of handicraft, but the two overlap very
extensively. So much so that while the era of the machine technology
is commonly held to have set in something like a century and a half
ago it is still too early to assert that the industrial system has
cleared itself of the remnants of handicraft or that the habits of
thought suitable to the days of handicraft are no longer decisive in
the current legal and popular apprehension of industrial relations.
The discipline of the machine process has not yet had time, nor has
it had a clear field. The best that can be looked for, therefore, in
the way of habits of thought conforming to the ways and means of the
machine process should be something of a progressive approximation;
and the considerations recited in the last few paragraphs should leave
it doubtful whether anything more than an imperfect approximation to
the logic of the machine process can be achieved, through any length
of training, by the peoples among whom the greatest advance in that
direction has already been made.
The material sciences early show the bias of the machine technology, as
is fairly to be expected, since these sciences stand in a peculiarly
close relation to the technological side of industry,--almost a
relation of affiliation. At no earlier period has the correlation
between science and technology been so close. And the response in
respect of the scope and method of these sciences to any notable
advance in technology has been sufficiently striking. As has already
been indicated above, modern science at large takes to the use of
statistical methods and precise mechanical measurements, and in this
matter scientific inquiry has grown continually more confident and
more meticulous at the same time that this mechanistic procedure
is continually being applied more extensively as the technological
advance goes forward. How far this statistical-mechanistic bias of
modern inquiry is to be set down to the account of the drift of
technology toward mechanical engineering, and how far it may be due
to an ever increasing familiarity with conceptions of accountancy
enforced by the price system and the time schedule in daily life, may
be left an open question. The main fact remains, that in much the
same degree as niceties of calculation have come to dominate current
technological methods and devices the like insistence on extreme
niceties of mechanical measurement and statistical accuracy has also
become imperative in scientific inquiry; until it may fairly be said
that such meticulous scrutiny of quantitative relations as would have
seemed foolish in the early days of the machine era has become the
chief characteristic of scientific inquiry today.[146] It is of course
not overlooked that in this matter of quantitative scruple the relation
between current technology and the sciences is a relation of mutual
give and take; but this fact can scarcely be urged as an objection to
the view that these two lines of expression of the modern habit of
mind are closely bound together, since it is precisely such a bond of
continuity between the two that is here spoken for.
As shown in the foregoing chapter, in the course of the transition to
modern times and modern ways of thinking the principle of efficient
cause gradually replaced that of sufficient reason as the final
ground of certitude in conclusions of a theoretical nature. This
shifting of the metaphysical footing of knowledge from a subjective
ground to an objective one first and most unreservedly affects the
material sciences, as it should if it is at all to be construed as an
outcome of the discipline exercised by the then current technology of
handicraft. But the like effect is presently, though tardily, had in
other lines of systematic knowledge that lie farther from the immediate
incidence of technology and secular traffic. So that by the time of the
industrial revolution the like mechanistic animus had come to pervade
even the philosophical and theological speculations current in those
communities that were most intimately and unreservedly touched by the
discipline of craftsmanship and the petty trade.[147]
By this time,--the latter part of the eighteenth century,--the material
sciences (overtly) admit no principle of systematisation within their
own jurisdiction other than that of efficient cause. But at that date
the concept of causation still has much of the content given it by
the technology of handicraft. The efficient cause is still conceived
after an individualistic fashion; without grave exaggeration it might
even be said that the concept of cause as currently employed in the
scientific speculations of that time had something of a quasi-personal
complexion. The inquiry habitually looked to some one efficient cause,
engaged as creatively dominant in the case and working to its end under
conditioning circumstances that might greatly affect the outcome
but that were not felt (or avowed) to enter into the case with the
same aggressive thrust of causality that belonged to the efficient
cause proper. The “contributory circumstances” were conceived rather
extrinsically as accessory to the event; “accessory before the fact,”
perhaps, but none the less accessory. And scientific research took the
form of an inquiry into the causal nexus between an antecedent (a cause
or complex of causes) and its outcome in an event. The inquiry looked
to the beginning and end of an episode of activity, the outcome of
which would be a finished product, somewhat after the fashion in which
a finished piece of work leaves the craftsman’s hands. The craftsman
is the agency productively engaged in the case, while his tools and
materials are accessories to his force and skill, and the finished
goods leave his hands as an end achieved; and so an episode of creative
efficiency is rounded off.
From an early period in the machine era a new attitude toward questions
of causation comes in evidence in scientific inquiry. The obvious
change is perhaps the larger scale on which the sequence of cause
and effect is conceived. It is no longer predominantly a question of
episodes of causal efficiency, detached and rounded off. Such detail
episodes still continue to occupy the routine of investigation;
necessarily so, since these empirical sciences proceed step by step in
the determination of the phenomena with which they are occupied. But in
an increasing degree these detached phenomena are sought to be worked
into a theoretical structure of larger scope, and this larger structure
of theory falls into shape as a self-determining sequence of cumulative
change. The same concept of process that rules in the machine
technology invades the speculations of the scientists and results in
theories of cumulative sequence, in which the point of departure as
well as the objective end of the sequence of causation gradually come
to have less and less of a determinative significance for the course
of the inquiry and for its results. In theoretical speculations based
on the data of the empirical sciences, interest and attention come
progressively to centre on this process of cumulative causation, so
that the interest in the productive efficiency of consummation ceases
gradually to be of decisive moment in the formulations of theory; which
comes in this way to be an account of an unfolding process rather than
a checking up of individual effects against individual causes. What
once were ultimate questions have in modern science become ulterior
questions and have lost their preferential place in the inquiry.
Neither the seat of efficient initiative, that would be presumed to
give this unfolding process of cumulative change its content and
direction, nor its eventual goal, wherein it would be presumed to come
to rest when the initial impulse has spent itself and its end has been
compassed,--neither of these ultimates holds the attention or guides
the inquiry of modern science.
It is only gradually, concomitant with the gradual maturing of the
machine technology, that the systematisation of knowledge in scientific
theory has come by common consent to converge on formulations of a
genetic process of cumulative change. This science of the machine age
is “evolutionary” in a peculiarly impersonal, indeed in a mechanistic
sense of the term. In the consummate form, as it stands at the
transition to the twentieth century, this evolutionary conception of
genetic process is, at least ideally, void of all teleological elements
and of all personality--except as personality may be concessively
admitted as a by-product of the mechanistic sweep of the blind
motions of brute matter. Neither the name nor the notion of a genetic
evolution is peculiar to the machine age; but this current, impersonal,
unteleological, mechanistic conception of an evolutionary process is
peculiar to the late modern fashion of apprehending things.
It goes without saying that this mechanistic conception of process has
worked clear of personation and teleological bias only gradually, by
insensible decay and progressive elimination of those preconceptions
of personal force and teleological fitness that ruled all theoretical
knowledge in the days when the principle of sufficient reason held over
that of efficient cause; and it should likewise be a matter of course
that this shift to the mechanistic footing is by no means yet complete,
that scientific inquiry is not yet clear of all contamination with
animistic, anthropomorphic, or teleological elements; since the change
is of the nature of habit, which takes time, and since the discipline
of modern life to which the mechanistic habit of mind is traceable is
by no means wholly consistent or unqualified in its mechanistic drift.
Yet so far has the habituation to mechanistic ways of thinking taken
effect, and so comprehensive and thorough has the discipline of the
machine process been, that a mechanistic, unteleological notion of
evolution is today a commonplace preconception both with scientists
and laymen; whereas a hundred years ago such a conceit had intimately
touched the imagination of but very few, if any, among the scientific
adepts of the new era.
To what effect Lucretius and his like in classical antiquity, _e. g._,
may have speculated and tried to speak in these premises is by no
means easy to make out; nor does it concern the present inquiry,
since no vital connection or continuity of habit is traceable between
their achievements in this respect and the theoretical preconceptions
of modern science or of the machine technology. In the course of
modern times conceptions of an evolutionary sequence of creation
or of genesis come up with increasing frequency, and from an early
period in the machine age these conceptions take on more and more
of a mechanistic character, but it is not until Darwin that such a
genetic process of evolution is conceived in terms of blind mechanical
forces alone, without the help of imputed teleological bias or
personalised initiative. It may perhaps be an open question whether
the Darwinian conception of evolution is in no degree contaminated
with teleological fancies, but however that may be it remains true
that a purely mechanistic conception of a genetic process in nature
had found no lodgment in scientific theory up to the middle of the
nineteenth century. With varying success this conception has since
been assimilated by the adepts of all the material sciences, and
it may even be said to stand as a tacitly postulated commonplace
underlying all modern scientific theory, whether in the material or
the social sciences. It is accepted by common consent as a matter of
course, although doubtless much antique detail at variance with it
stands over both in the theoretical formulations of the adepts and in
popular thought, and must continue to stand over until the course of
habituation may conceivably in time enforce the sole competency of this
mechanistic conception as the definitive norm of systematic knowledge.
Whether such an eventuality is to overtake the scope and method of
knowledge in Western civilisation should apparently be a question of
how protracted, consistent, unmitigated, and how far congruous with
their native bent the discipline of the machine process may prove in
the further history of these peoples.
* * * * *
As has been shown above, in its beginnings the machine technology
took over the working concepts of handicraft, and it has gradually
shifted from the ground of manual operation so afforded to the
ground of impersonal mechanical process; but this shifting of base
in respect of the elementary technological preconceptions has not
hitherto been complete, much of the personal attitude of craftsmanship
toward mechanical forces and structures being still visible in the
work of modern technologists. In like manner, and concomitant with
the transition to the machine industry, there has gone forward a
like shifting in respect of the point of view and the elementary
preconceptions of science. This has taken effect most largely and gone
farthest in the material sciences, as should be expected from the close
connection that subsists between these sciences and the technology of
the machine industry; but here again the elimination of craftsmanlike
conceptions has hitherto not been complete. And, what is more
instructive as to the part played by technological discipline in the
growth of science, the character of this change in scientific scope,
method and preconceptions is somewhat obviously such as would be given
by habituation to the working of the machine process. Where later
scientific inquiry has departed from or overpassed the limitations
imposed by the habits of thought peculiar to craftsmanship the movement
has taken the direction enforced by the machine technology.
So, _e. g._, while the elements made use of by the machine technology,
and characteristic of its work, are conceptions of mass, velocity,
pressure, stress, vibration, displacement, and the like, these
elements are made use of only under the rule that action in any of
these bearings takes effect only by impact, by contact directly or
through a continuum. The mathematical computations and elucidations
that are one main instrumentality employed by the technologist do not
and can not include this underlying postulate of contact, since it
is an assumption extraneous to those magnitudes of quantity in terms
of which this technology does its work. How far this preconception
that action can take place only by contact is to be rated as an
elementary concept carried over from handicraft, where it is obviously
at home and fundamental in all work of manipulation, may perhaps be
an idle question. In any case the machine technology is at one with
craftsmanship on this head, even though there are many features in
modern industrial processes that do not involve action by contact in
any such obvious fashion as to suggest its necessary assumption, as,
_e. g._, in processes involving the use of light, heat or electricity.
Yet it remains true that, by and large, the technology of the machine
process is a technology of action by contact; and, apparently under
stress of this wide though not necessarily universal application of the
principle, the trained technologist does not rest content until he has
in some tenable fashion construed any apparent exception as a special
instance under the rule.
So also in modern scientific inquiry. The conceptual elements with
which the scientist is content to work are precisely those that have
commended themselves as competent in their technological use. Since
action by contact is, on the whole, the working principle in the
machine process, it is also accepted as the prime postulate in the
formulation of all exact knowledge of impersonal facts. There is,
of course, no inclination here to criticise or take exception to
this characteristic habit of thought that pervades modern scientific
inquiry. It has done good service, and to this generation, trained
in the enexorably efficient ways of the machine process, the fact
that it works is conclusive of its truth.[148] Yet the further fact
is not to be overlooked that adherence to this principle is not due
to unsophisticated observation simply. It is a principle, a habit of
thought, not a fact of simple observation. Doubtless it is a fact of
observation, direct and unambiguous, in respect of our own manual
operations; and doubtless also it is a matter of such ready inference
in respect of many external phenomena as to do duty as a fact of
observation in good faith; but doubtless also there are many of these
external phenomena that have to be somewhat painstakingly construed
to bring them under the rule. Conceivably, even if such a habit of
thought had not been handed down from the experience of handicraft
it might have been induced by the discipline of the machine process,
and might even have been ingrained in men exposed to this discipline
in sufficiently rigorous fashion to serve as a prime postulate of
scientific inquiry; the machine process doubtless bears out such a
principle in the main, and very rigorously. But in point of historical
fact it is quite unnecessary to suppose this principle of action by
contact to be a product _de novo_ of the discipline of the machine,
since it is older than the advent of the machine industry and is also
quite consonant with the habits of work enforced by the technology of
handicraft, more so indeed than with the technology of the machine
industry. It appears fairly indubitable that this principle is a legacy
taken over from the experience of life in the days of craftsmanship.
And it may even be an open question whether the machine technology
would not today be of an appreciably different complexion if it had,
as it conceivably might have, developed without the hard and fast
limitations imposed by this postulate. Doubtless, scientific inquiry,
and the theoretical formulations reached by such inquiry, would differ
somewhat notably from what they currently are if the scientists had
gone to their work without such a postulate, or holding it in a
qualified sense, as a principle of limited scope, as applying only
within a limited range of phenomena, only so far as empirical evidence
might enforce it in detail.
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_.
[63] These considerations may of course imply nothing, directly, as to
the size of the political organisation or of the national territory or
population; though national boundaries are likely both to affect and to
be affected by such changes in the industrial system. A community may
be small, relatively to the industrial system in and by which it lives,
and may yet, if conditions of peace permit it, stand in such a relation
of complement or supplement to a larger complex of industrial groups
as to make it in effect an integral part of a larger community, so far
as regards its technology. So, for instance, Switzerland and Denmark
are an integral part of the cultural and industrial community of the
Western civilisation as effectually as they might be with an area and
population equal to those of the United Kingdom or the German Empire,
and they are doubtless each a more essential part in this community
than Russia. At the same time, as things go within this Western
culture, national boundaries have a very considerable obstructive
effect in industrial affairs and in the growth of technology. It will
probably be conceded on the one hand that any appreciable decline
in the aggregate population of Christendom would result in some
curtailment or retardation of the technological advance in which
these peoples are jointly and severally engaged; and it is likewise
to be conceded on the other hand that the like effect would follow on
any marked degree of success from the efforts of those patriotic and
dynastic statesmen who are endeavouring to set these peoples asunder in
an armed estrangement and neutrality.
[64] Cf., as an extreme case, Matilda C. Stevenson, “The Sia,” _Report
Bur. Eth._, xi (1889–1890).
The like decline is known to have occurred in many parts of Europe
consequent on the decline of population due to the Black Death and the
Plague.
[65] On such native differences between the leading races of Europe,
cf., e. g., G. V. de Lapouge, _Les Sélections Sociales_; and _l’Aryen_;
O. Ammon, _Die Gesellschaftsordnung_; G. Sergi, _Arii e Italici_.
[66] For instance, the Japanese and the Ainu, the Polynesians and the
Melanesians, the Cinghalese and the Veddas. On the last named, cf.
Seligmann, _The Veddas_.
[67] Cf. W. Z. Ripley, _The Races of Europe_; G. Sergi, _The
Mediterranean Race_; V. de Lapouge, _L’Aryen_; cf. also, J. Deniker,
_Les races européennes_, and “Les six races composant la population de
l’Europe,” _Journal Anthropological Institute_, vol. 34.
[68] The available evidence indicates that the dolicho-blond race
of northern Europe probably originated in a mutation (from the
Mediterranean as its parent stock?) during the early neolithic period,
that is to say about at the beginning of the neolithic in western
Europe. There is less secure ground for conjecture as to the date
and circumstances under which any one of the other European races
originated, but the date and place of their origin seems to lie outside
of Europe and earlier than the European neolithic period. Unfortunately
there has been little direct or succinct discussion of this matter
among anthropologists hitherto.--Cf. “The Mutation Theory and the Blond
Race,” _Journal of Race Development_, April, 1913.
[69] The Melanesians may be contrasted with the Baltic peoples in
this respect, though the comparison is perhaps rather suggestive
than convincing. The Melanesians are apparently endowed with a very
respectable capacity for workmanship, as regards both insight and
application, and with a relatively high sense of economic expediency.
They are also possessed of an alert and enduring group solidarity.
But they apparently lack that reasonable degree of “humanity” and
congenital tolerance that has on the whole kept the peoples of the
Baltic region from fatal extravagances of cruelty and sustained hatred
between groups. Not that any excess of humanity has marked the course
of culture in North Europe. But it seems at least admissible to say
that mutual hatred, distrust and disparagement falls more readily into
abeyance among these peoples than among the Melanesians; particularly
when and in so far as the material interest of the several groups
visibly suffers from a continued free run of extravagant animosity.
The difference in point of native propensity may not be very marked,
but such degree of it as there is has apparently thrown the balance
in such a way that the Baltic peoples have, technologically, had the
advantage of a wide and relatively easy contact and communication;
whereas the Melanesians have during an equally protracted experience
spent themselves largely on interstitial animosities--Cf. Codrington,
_The Melanesians_; Seligmann, _The Melanesians of British New Guinea_.
[70] These considerations apparently apply with peculiar force to the
blond race, in that the evidence of early times goes to argue that
this stock never lived in isolation from other, rival stocks. It began
presumably as a small minority in a community made up chiefly of a
different racial type, its parent stock, and in an environment at large
in which at least one rival stock was present in force from near the
outset; so that race competition, that is to say competition in terms
of births and deaths, was instant and unremitting. And this competition
the given conditions enforced in terms of group subsistence.
[71] Cf., e. g., Sophus Müller, _Vor Oldtid_, “Stenalderen.”
[72] It has not commonly been noted, though it will scarcely be
questioned, that fighting capacity and the propensity to fight have
rarely, if ever, been successful in the struggle between races and
peoples when brought into competition with a diligent growing of crops
and children, if success be counted in terms of race survival.
[73] It is apparently an open question whether these spiritual traits
are properly to be ascribed to the dolicho-blond as traits of that
type taken by itself, rather than traits characteristic of the hybrid
offspring of the blond stock crossed on one or other of the racial
stocks associated with it in the populations of Europe. The evidence at
large seems rather to bear out the view that any hybrid population is
likely to be endowed with an exceptional degree of that restlessness
and discontent that go to make up what is spoken of as a “spirit of
enterprise” in the race.
[74] As, e. g., the inhabitants of many Polynesian islands at the time
of their discovery. See, also, Codrington, _The Melanesians_.
[75] Not an unusual state of things among the Melanesians and
Micronesians, and in a degree among the Australians.
[76] See note, p. 120.
[77] E. g., some Australian natives and some of the lower Malay
cultures.
[78] E. g., the Pueblo and the Eskimo.
[79] Indeed, such as very suggestively to recall the ritual objects and
observances of the Pueblo Indians.
[80] For an extreme case of this among living communities, see Skeat
and Blagden, _Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula_, vol. i, pp. 242–250,
where the generalisation is set down (p. 248) that “the rudimentary
stage of culture through which these tribes have passed, and in some
cases are still passing, may perhaps be more accurately described as a
wood and bone age than as an age of stone,” in as much as the evidence
goes to show that before they began to get metals from the Malays their
only implements of a more durable material were “the anvil and hammer
(unwrought) ..., the whetstone, chips or flakes used as knives, and
cooking stones.” From the different character of their environment this
recourse to wood and bone could scarcely have been carried to such an
extreme by the savages of the Baltic region.
[81] Cf. Pumpelly, _Explorations in Turkestan_.
[82] A casual visit to the Scandinavian museums will scarcely convey
this impression. To meet the prepossessions of the public, and perhaps
of the experts, the weapons are made much of in the showcases, as is to
be expected; but they are relatively scarce in the store-rooms, where
the tools on the other hand are rather to be estimated by the cubic
yard than counted by the piece.
[83] Seen, e. g., in the observance and sanction of tabu in many of the
lower cultures.
[84] The Eskimo are placed in circumstances that are in some respects
similar to those presumed to have conditioned the life of the blond
race and its hybrids during the early phases of its life-history, and
among the traits that have made for the survival of the Eskimo is
undoubtedly to be counted the somewhat genial good-fellowship of that
race, coupled as it is with a notable disinclination to hostilities.
So also the Indians of the North-West Coast, whose situation perhaps
parallels that of the neolithic Baltic culture more closely even than
the Eskimo, are not among the notably warlike peoples of the earth,
although they undoubtedly show more of a predatory animus than their
northern neighbours. In this case it is probably safe to say that
their technological achievements have in no degree been furthered by
such warlike enterprise as they have shown, and that their comfort and
success as a race would have been even more marked if they had been
gifted with less of the warlike spirit and had kept the peace more
consistently throughout their habitat than they have done.--Cf. Franz
Boas, “The Central Eskimo,” _Bureau of American Ethnology_, Report,
1884–1885; The same, “The Secret Societies and Social Organisation of
the Kwakiutl Indians,” _Report, National Museum_, 1895; A. P. Niblack,
“Coast Indians of Southern Alaska and Northern British Columbia,”
_ibid_, 1888.
[85] Such loss by neglect of technological elements that have
been superseded may have serious consequences in case a people of
somewhat advanced attainments suffers a material set-back either in
its industrial circumstances or in its cultural situation more at
large,--as happened, e. g., in the Dark Ages of Europe. In such case
it is likely to result that the community will be unable to fall back
on a state of the industrial arts suited to the reduced circumstances
into which it finds itself thrown, having lost the use of many of the
technological elements familiar to earlier generations that lived under
similar circumstances, and so the industrial community finds itself in
many respects driven to make a virtually new beginning, from a more
rudimentary starting point than the situation might otherwise call for.
This in turn acts to throw the people back to a more archaic phase of
technology and of institutions than the initial cultural loss sustained
by the community would of itself appear to warrant.
[86] Sophus Müller, _Vor Oldtid_, “Stenalderen,” sec. iii, “Tidsforhold
i den ældre Stenalder;” O. Montelius, _Les temps préhistoriques en
Suède_, ch. i, p. 20.
[87] Compare the case of the Indians of the North-West Coast, who
have occupied a region comparable to the neolithic Baltic area in the
distribution of land and water as well as in the abundance of good
timber.
[88] Sophus Müller, _Vor Oldtid_, “Bronzealderen,” secs. xiii, xiv;
Montelius, _Les temps préhistoriques en Suède_, ch. ii.
[89] Cf., e. g., C. A. Haddon, _Evolution in Art_, section on “Magic
and Religion.”
[90] Except for species that habitually breed by parthenogenesis.
[91] The caution is perhaps unnecessary that it is not hereby intended
to suggest a doubt of Mr. Galton’s researches or to question the
proposals of the Eugenicals, whose labours are no doubt to be taken for
all they are worth.
[92] See, e. g., Skeat and Blagden, _Pagan Races of the Malay
Peninsula_, vol. ii, part ii; _Report, Bureau of American Ethnology,
1884–1885_, F. Boas, “The Central Eskimo.”
[93] Cf. Basil Thomson, _The Diversions of a Prime Minister_, and _The
Figians_.
[94] The extent of this “quasi-personal fringe” of objects of intimate
use varies considerably from one culture to another. It may often be
inferred from the range of articles buried or destroyed with the dead
among peoples on this level of culture.
[95] A doubt may suggest itself in this connection touching such
cultures and peoples as the pagan races of the Malay peninsula, the
Mincopies of the Andaman Islands, or (possibly) the Negritos of Luzon,
but these conceivable exceptions to the rule evidently do not lessen
its force.
[96] It may be pertinent to take note of the bearing of these
considerations on certain dogmatic concepts that have played a part in
the theoretical and controversial speculations of the last century.
Much importance has been given by economists of one school and another
to the “productivity of labour,” particularly as affording a basis
for a just and equitable distribution of the product; one school of
controversialists having gone so far against the current of received
economic doctrine as to allege that labour is the sole productive
factor in industry and that the Labourer is on this ground entitled,
in equity, to “the full product of his labor.” It is of course not
conceived that the considerations here set forth will dispose of these
doctrinal contentions; but they make it at least appear that the
productivity of labor, or of any other conceivable factor in industry,
is an imputed productivity--imputed on grounds of convention afforded
by institutions that have grown up in the course of technological
development and that have consequently only such validity as attaches
to habits of thought induced by any given phase of collective life.
These habits of thought (institutions and principles) are themselves
the indirect product of the technological scheme. The controversy as
to the productivity of labor should accordingly shift its ground from
“the nature of things” to the exigencies of ingrained preconceptions,
principles and expediencies as seen in the light of current
technological requirements and the current drift of habituation.
[97] See Sophus Müller, _Vor Oldtid_, “Stenalderen,” and _Aarböger for
nordisk Oldkyndighed_, 1906.
[98] Cf. W. G. Sollas, _Ancient Hunters_.
[99] See, e. g., Basil Thomson, _The Figians_, especially ch. iv, xiv,
xxviii, xxxi.
[100] The Pueblos offer a curious exception to this common rule
of a parasitic priesthood. While they are much given to religious
observances and have an extensive priestly organisation, comprising
divers orders and sub-orders, this priesthood appears commonly to
derive no income, or even appreciable perquisites, from their office.
[101] The difference in importance and powers between the war chief
of the peaceable Pueblos on the one hand and of the predatory Aztecs
on the other hand shows how such an official’s status may change _de
facto_ without a notable change _de jure_.--Cf. also Basil Thomson,
_The Figians_, ch. iv, xxxi, on “Constitution of Society,” and “The
Tenure of Land,” where the growth of custom is shown to throw pecuniary
prerogative and control into the hands of the successful war chief.
[102] For instance, somewhat generally in the island states of
Polynesia. Something suggestively reminiscent of such a condition
of things is visible in early feudal Europe, where feudal holdings
changed hands with a change in the status of their holders in a way
that suggests that ownership was in great measure a corollary following
from the tenure of certain civil powers. So, also, in ecclesiastical
holdings of the same period and later. And, again, in the doubtful and
changing status of the servile classes of feudal Europe, where the
distinction between mastery and ownership often seems something of
a legal fiction or a distinction without a difference. Feudal Japan
affords evidence to much the same effect.
[103] Cf. J. G. Frazer, _Lectures on the Early History of the
Kingship_. The drift of evidence for the North-European cultures of
pagan antiquity appears to set strongly in this direction, though the
term “priestly,” as applied to these pagan kings, is likely to convey
too broad an implication of solemnity and vicariously divine power.
[104] Witness the alleged dealings of Jahve with his chosen people and
the laudation bestowed on Him by His priests for “conduct unbecoming a
gentleman.”
[105] As witness Pharaonic Egypt, Ancient Peru, Babylon, Assyria,
Israel under Solomon and his nearer successors.
[106] See F. B. Jevons, _Introduction to the History of Religion_, ch.
x.
[107] Cf., e. g., Basil Thomson, _The Figians_, ch. iv.
[108] As shown, for instance, by the pottery and baskets made for trade
by the American Indians where they come in trade contact with civilised
men.
[109] For a more detailed discussion of these secondary consequences
of the institution of ownership, the irksomeness of labour and the
conspicuous waste of goods, which cannot be pursued here, see _The
Theory of the Leisure Class_, ch. ii-vi.
[110] For some further analysis of the relation between ownership,
earnings and the material equipment see _Quarterly Journal of
Economics_, August, 1908, “On the Nature of Capital;” as also a paper
by H. J. Davenport in the same Journal for November, 1910, on “Social
Productivity versus Private Acquisition.”
[111] For a more detailed discussion of this disciplinary disparity
between business and industrial occupations, cf. _The Theory of
Business Enterprise_, ch. iv, viii and ix.
[112] Cf., e. g., Harrington Emerson, _Efficiency as a Basis for
Operation and Wages_, ch. i, iv.
[113] Such is tacitly assumed to be the nature of modern economic life
in the current theoretical formulations of the economists, who make the
theory of exchange value the central and controlling doctrine in their
theoretical systems, and who with easy conviction trace this value
back to an individualistic ground in the doctrines of differential
utility--“marginal utility.”
[114] Apart from scattered and progressively inconsequential
manifestations of this canon of pecuniary equity in the European
community at large, there occurs a quaint and well-defined application
of it in the practice of “_hólmgangr_” in late pagan and early
Christian times among the Scandinavian peoples. The “wager of battle”
is probably of the same derivation, at least in part.
[115] Cf. Frederic Barnard Hawley, _Enterprise and the Productive
Process_, for an extreme, mature and consistent development of this
tenet.
[116] See _The Theory of Business Enterprise_, ch. iv, vi, vii, for
a more detailed discussion of this business traffic and the working
principles which govern it. See also H. J. Davenport, _The Economics of
Enterprise_ (New York, 1913).
[117] Cf., e. g., Ehrenberg, _Das Zeitalter der Fugger_; Sombart, _Der
Moderne Kapitalismus_, bk. i.
[118] Cf. _The Theory of the Leisure Class_, ch. iv, v, vi.
[119] Cf. Harrington Emerson, _Efficiency as a Basis for Operation and
Wages_.
[120] Cf., e. g., Karl Bücher, _Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft_,
(3d ed.), ch. iv, “Die gewerblichen Betriebssysteme,” ch. v. “Der
Niedergang des Handwerks;” W. J. Ashley, _English Economic History
and Theory_, part ii, ch. i, sec. 25, ch. iii, especially sec. 44;
W. Cunningham, _The Growth of English Industry and Commerce_, vol.
ii, Introduction; Werner Sombart, _Der Moderne Kapitalismus_, bk. i,
especially ch. iv-xii.
[121] To complete the sketch at this point, even in outline, it would
be necessary to go extensively into the relations of ownership and
control (largely indirect) in which the owners of land and natural
resources, the Landed Interest, had stood to the industrial community
of craftsmen before this transition to the business era got under
way, as also into the further mutual relations subsisting between
the landed interest, the craftsmen and the business community during
this transition to a business régime. In the most summary terms the
pertinent circumstances appear to have been that from the beginning of
its technological era the handicraft community, with its workmanship
and its technological attainments, was in an uncertain measure at the
discretionary call of the landed interest, largely in an impersonal way
through channels of trade and on the whole with decreasingly exacting
effect as time went on; and the industrial community at large had by no
means emancipated themselves from this control when the era of business
enterprise set in; for the landed interest continued to draw its
livelihood from the mixed agricultural and handicraft community, and
the products of handicraft still continued to go chiefly as supplies to
the landed interest in return for the means of subsistence controlled
by the latter; and long after the businessmen had taken over the
direction of industry the claims of the landed interest still continued
paramount in the economic situation, and industry still continued to
be carried on largely with a view to meeting the requirements of the
landed interest.
[122] “Handwerk (im engeren Sinne) ist diejenige Wirtschaftsform,
die hervorwächst aus dem streben eines gewerblichen Arbeiters
seine zwischen Kunst und gewöhnlicher Handarbeit die Mitte
haltende Fertigkeit zur Herrichtung oder Bearbeitung gewerblicher
Gebrauchsgegenstände in der Weise zu vertreten, dass er sich durch
Austausch seiner Leistungen oder Erzeugnisse gegen entsprechende
Äquivalente seinen Lebensunterhalt verschafft.”--Sombart, _Moderne
Kapitalismus_, bk. i, ch. iv.
[123] Cf. Sombart, _Der Moderne Kapitalismus_, bk. i; W. J. Ashley,
_English Economic History and Theory_, bk. i, especially ch. iii; Karl
Bücher, _die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft_, ch. iv, v.
[124] A classic passage of Adam Smith shows this handicraft conception
of the mechanics of industry: “The annual labour of every nation
is the fund which originally supplies it with all the necessaries
and conveniencies of life which it annually consumes....” “But this
proportion [of the produce to the consumers] must in every nation
be regulated by two different circumstances; first, by the skill,
dexterity, and judgment with which its labour is generally applied;
and, secondly, by the proportion between the number of those who
are employed in useful labour, and that of those who are not so
employed.”--_Wealth of Nations_, Introduction, p. 1.
Adam Smith consistently speaks of industry in terms of manual
workmanship, as the traditions and the continued habitual outlook of
that generation unavoidably led him to do; and the sweeping way in
which his interpretation of economic life finds acceptance with his
contemporaries shows that in so doing he is speaking in full consonance
with the prevailing conceptions of his time. He writes during the
opening passages of the machine era, but he speaks in terms of the past
industrial era, from which his outlook on the economic situation and
his conception of normal economic relations had been derived. It may
be added that his conception of natural liberty in economic matters
is similarly derived from the traditional situation, whose discipline
during the later phases of the handicraft era inculcated freedom of
ownership as applied to the workman’s product and freedom of bargain
and sale as touches the traffic of the typical petty trader. And so
thoroughly had this manner of conceiving industry and the economic
situation been worked into the texture of men’s thinking, that the
same line of interpretation continues to satisfy economic theory for a
hundred years after Adam Smith had formulated this canon of economic
doctrine, and after the situation to which it would apply had been put
out by the machine industry and large business management.
[125] The case of the treadle applied to the production of rotary
motion is typical of what happens to a technological element of the
general class here under discussion. Such a new technological expedient
appears at the outset to be apprehended in terms of manual workmanship;
but presently it comes, through habitual use, to take its place as a
mechanical functioning of the tools in whose use it takes effect,--to
be associated in current apprehension with the mechanical appliances
employed in its production and, by so much, dissociated from the person
of the workman. In a measure, therefore, it falls into the category of
impersonal facts that are available as technological raw material with
which to go about the work in hand. With further use, and particularly
with the interjection of further mechanical expedients between the
workman and this given technological element, it will be conceived in
progressively more objective fashion, as a fact of the mechanics of
brute matter rather than an extension of the workman’s manual reach;
until it passes finally into the category of mechanical fact simply,
obvious and commonplace through routine use; in which there remains but
a vanishing residue of imputed personality, such as attaches to all
conceptions of action. The given technological element in this way may
be said to pass by degrees out of the workman’s “quasi-personal fringe”
of manual effects, into the domain of raw material available for use
in workmanship; where it will, in apprehension, be possessed of only
such imputed quasi-personal or anthropomorphic characteristics as are
necessarily imputed to external facts at large.
Concretely, the concept of the treadle seems in its beginnings to be a
variant of the same conception that leads to the use of the bow-drill.
Both inventions comprise at least two distinct forms. In each the
simpler and presumably more primitive form converts a reciprocating
longitudinal motion into a reciprocating rotary motion; and it is
apparently only after an interval of familiarity and externalisation
of this mechanical achievement that the next move takes place in the
direction of the perfected treadle, which converts a reciprocating
longitudinal into a continuous rotary motion.
[126] Cf. Sombart, _Moderne Kapitalismus_, bk. i, Exkurs zu Kapitel 7,
bk. ii, ch. xv.
[127] The adventures of Charles I and James II sufficiently illustrate
this insular temper of the industrial and commercial community as
contrasted with the crown and the court party.
[128] See ch. ii and iii, above.
[129] The imputation of the feminine in this personification of Nature
is probably nothing more than a carrying over of the Latin gender
of the word, but there is commonly involved in this quasi-personal
conception of Nature a notable imputation of kindliness and gentle
solicitude that well comports with her putative womanhood. By
extraordinarily easy gradation _Natura naturans_ passes over into
Mother Nature. The contrast in this respect, simply on its sentimental
side, between the conception of Nature, say in the eighteenth century,
on the one hand, and the patriarchal Heavenly King, remote and austere,
of the Mediæval cult on the other hand is striking enough. In point of
sentimental content this conception of Nature is more nearly in touch
with the mediæval Mother of God than with the Heavenly King.
[130] This, of course, does not overlook the fact that in the course
of scientific inquiry there has been an increasing use of statistical
methods and results, and that this recourse to statistics has been of
an increasingly objective character, both in its methods and in the
items handled. It is also to be noted that from time to time serious
and consequential attempts have been made to reduce scientific argument
at large to similarly objective terms of quantity, quantivalence and
concomitance. Karl Pearson’s _Grammar of Science_, for instance is a
shrewd and somewhat popularly known endeavour of this kind. So, again,
the philosophical views associated with the names of Leibnitz and of
Berkely are of this nature, and there is not a little of the same line
of scepticism in the speculations of Hume. But it is equally to be
noted that except on the remote plane of generality that belongs to
philosophical speculation, and except in the works of pure mathematics,
this method of handling facts has not proved available for scientific
ends. The “idle curiosity” which finds employment in scientific inquiry
is not content with the vacant relation of concomitance alone among the
facts which it seeks and systematises. In scientific theory no headway
has been made hitherto without the use of this indispensable imputation
of causality.--In this connection cf. a paper on “The Evolution of
the Scientific Point of View,” _University of California Chronicle_,
November, 1908, especially footnote, p. 396.
[131] In this connection it is worth noting, for what it may be worth,
that there is a similarly rough concomitance between the diffusion of
the blond racial stock in Europe and the modern forms of protestantism
and religious heresy. Whether this fact strengthens or weakens any
argument that may be drawn from the concomitance of heresy and industry
cited above may perhaps best be left an open question.
[132] See chapter v, above.
[133] Cf. Ashley, _English Economic History and Theory_, bk. i, ch. i;
Karl Bücher, _Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft_, ch. iii.
[134] Cf. R. Ehrenberg, _Das Zeitalter der Fugger_.
[135] Seen, as indicated above, in the matter-of-course resort of
the scientists to the conception of efficient cause as a solvent of
problems touching material phenomena, as well as in the theologians’
and philosophers’ resistless drift toward creative efficiency as the
ultimate term of their speculations.
[136] Cf. Locke, _Of Civil Government_, ch. v, “Though the earth and
all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a
property in his own person; this nobody has a right to but himself. The
labour of his body and the work of his hands we may say are properly
his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath
provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to
it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.”
[137] Illustrative instances of such a customary code of “natural”
rights and obligations are numerous in the late literature of
ethnology. Good illustrations are afforded by various papers in the
_Reports of the Am. Bureau of Ethnology_, on the culture of the
Pueblos, Eskimo, and the Indians of the North-West Coast; so also
in Skeat and Blagden, _Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula_, or in
Seligmann, _The Veddas_.
[138] Cf., e. g., C. Beard, _The Industrial Revolution_, ch. ii;
Spencer Walpole, _History of England from 1815_, vol. i; C. W. Taylor,
_The Modern Factory System_, ch. i, ii.
[139] In a general way, the relation in which the skilled workman in
the large industries stands to the machine process is analogous to that
in which the primitive herdsman, shepherd or dairymaid stand to the
domestic animals under their care, rather than to the relation of the
craftsman to his tools. It is a work of attendance, furtherance and
skilled interference rather than a forceful and dexterous use of an
implement.
[140] It follows also, among other secondary consequences, that the
effective industrial life of the skilled workman will, in order to the
best average effect, begin at an appreciably more advanced age, and
will therefore be shortened by that much. The period of preparation
becomes more protracted, more exacting and more costly, and the
effective life cycle of the workman grows shorter. Although it does
not, perhaps, belong in precisely this connection, it may not be out
of place to recall that the increasingly exacting requirements of
the machine industry, particularly in the way of accurate, alert and
facile conformity to the requirements of the machine process, interrupt
the industrial life of the skilled workman at an earlier point in
the course of senile decay. So that the industrial life-cycle of the
workman is shortened both at its beginning and at its close, at the
same time that the commonplace preparation for work grows more costly
and exacting.
Child labour, which once may, industrially speaking, have been an
economical method of consuming the available human material, is no
longer compatible with the highest industrial efficiency, even apart
from any question of hardship or deterioration incident to an excessive
or abusive recourse to child labour; it is incompatible with the
community’s material interests. Therefore the business community--the
body of businessmen at large--for whose behoof the industries of the
country are carried on, have a direct interest not only in extending
the age of exemption from industrial employment but also in procuring
an adequate schooling of the incoming generation of workmen. The
business community is evidently coming to appreciate this state of the
case, at least in some degree, as is evidenced by their inclination to
favour instruction in the “practical” branches in the public schools,
at the public expense, as well as by the wide-reaching movement that
aims to equip private and state schools that shall prepare the youth
for work in the various lines of industrial employment.
[141] _Cf._, _e. g._, Adam Smith’s reflections on the uses of an
accurate watch, _Theory of the Moral Sentiments_, part iv, ch. 2.
[142] On the other hand the aphorism often cited, that “Necessity
is the Mother of Invention,” appears to be nothing better than a
fragment of uncritical rationalism. It offers a rationalised, _ex
post facto_ account of changes that take place, and reflects that
ancient preconception by help of which the spokesmen of edification
were enabled to interpret all change as an improvement due to the
achievement of some definitely foreknown end. It appears also to be
consistently untrue, except so far as “invention” is to be taken as a
euphemistic synonym for “prevarication.” Doubtless, the felt need of
ways and means has brought on many changes in technology, but doubtless
also the ulterior consequences of any one of the greater mechanical
inventions have in the main been neither foreseen nor intended in the
designing of them. The more serious consequences, especially such as
have an institutional bearing, have been enforced by the inventions
rather than designed by the inventors.
[143] See pp. 18–21, above.
[144] Cf., however, what has been said above (pp. 21–23) of the
variability and adaptability of a hybrid population and the possible
selective establishment of a hybrid type more suitable to current
conditions of life than any one of the racial stocks out of which the
hybrid population is made up.
[145] So, _e. g._, the modern technology has, directly and indirectly,
brought on the growth of large cities and industrial towns, as well as
an increasing density of population at large. This modern state of the
industrial arts is a creation of the European community of nations,
with the blond-hybrid populations leading. The population of these
countries is drifting into these machine-made cities and towns, and
this drift affects the blond-hybrids in a more pronounced degree than
any other similarly distinguishable element in the population. At the
same time the birth-rate is lower and the death-rate higher in these
modern urban communities than in the open country, in spite of the fact
that more attention is given to preventive sanitation in the urban
than in the rural communities, and it is in the urban communities that
medical attendance is most available at the same time that its most
efficient practitioners congregate there. This accelerated death-rate
strikes the blond-hybrids of the towns in an eminent degree; and
infant mortality in the towns, particularly, runs at such a figure as
to be viewed with the liveliest apprehension. In its summary effects
on the viability of the modern peoples this modern technology appears
to be as untoward as would their removal to an unsuitable climate.
Indeed the hygienic measures that are taken or advocated as a remedy
for these machine-made conditions of urban life are of much the same
character and require much the same degree of meticulous attention
to details that are required to preserve the life of Europeans under
the precarious climatic conditions of the low latitudes. So that, for
these Europeans at least, the hygienic situation created by their own
technology has much of that character of a comprehensive clinic that
attaches to the British occupation of India or the later European
occupation of West Africa or the Philippines.
[146] The statisticians of a hundred years ago, _e. g._, were content
to work in round percentages where their latterday successors are
doubtfully content with three-place decimals.
[147] An eminently illustrative instance of the mechanistic bias in the
moral sciences is afforded by the hedonistic conceptions of the early
nineteenth century; and the deistic theology of that period and earlier
is no less characteristic a symptom of the same animus.
_Cf._ also, for a view running to a conclusion opposed to that spoken
for above, H. Bergson, _Creative Evolution_ (translation by Arthur
Mitchell, New York, 1911), ch. i, especially pp. 16–23; where the
mechanistic conception is construed as an instinctive metaphysical norm
and contrasted with the deliverances of reason and experience, which
are then held to inculcate an anthropomorphic interpretation of the
same facts.
[148] “Pragmatism” is the term that has been elected to cover this
metaphysical postulate of efficiency conceived as the bench mark of
actuality.
[149] Of all these latterday revulsionary schemes of surcease from the
void and irritation of the mechanistic conception, that spoken for
by M. H. Bergson is doubtless the most felicitous, at the same time
that it is, in its elements, the most engagingly naïve. Apart from,
and without prejudice to, the (doubtless very substantial) merits of
this system of speculative tenets, the vogue which it has achieved
appears to be due in good part to its consonance with this archaic
bent of civilised human nature, already spoken of. The immanent, or
rather intrinsically dominant, creative bent inherent in matter and not
objectively distinguishable from it, is sufficiently suggestive of that
praeter-mechanical efficacy that seems so easy of comprehension to many
of the peoples on the lower levels of culture, and that affords the
substantial ground of magical practices and finds untroubled expression
in the more naïve of their theoretical speculations. It would be a
work of extreme difficulty, e. g., to set up a consistently tenable
distinction between M. Bergson’s _élan de la vie_, on the one hand, and
the _mana_ of the Melanesians (_Cf._ Codrington, _The Melanesians_,
esp. ch. vii and xii), the _wakonda_ of the Sioux (_Cf._ A. C. Fletcher
and F. la Flesche, “The Omaha Tribe,” _Bureau of Ethnology, Report
xxvii_ (1905–1906), esp. pp. 597–599), or even the _hamingia_ of
Scandinavian paganism, on the other hand.
In fact, the point of departure and support for M. Bergson’s
speculations appears to be nothing else than a projection, into
objective reality, of the same human trait that has here been spoken of
as the instinct of workmanship; this norm of initiative and efficiency
which so is imposed on objective facts being then worked out with great
subtlety and sympathetic insight, to make a comprehensive, cosmological
scheme. The like projection of workmanlike initiative and efficiency,
and its imputation to objective reality, both at large--as with M.
Bergson--and in concrete detail, with more or less of personalisation,
is one of the main, though frequently misunderstood, factors in the
cosmologies that do duty as a body of science and philosophy among
savages and the lower barbarians.
That the roots of this speculative scheme of “creative evolution”
should reach so far into the background of human culture and draw on
sources so close to the undisciplined prime-movers of human nature is,
of course, in no degree derogatory to this system of theory; nor does
it raise any presumption of unsoundness in the tenets that so are, in
the course of elaboration, built up out of this metaphysical postulate.
In point of fact, the characterisation here offered places M. Bergson’s
thesis, and therefore his system, precisely where he has been at pains
to explain that he wishes to take his initial position in advocating
his view,--at an even break with the mechanistic conception; the merits
of which, as contrasted with his own thesis, will then be made to
appear in the course of the further argument that is to decide between
their rival claims to primacy. In point of formal and provisional
legitimation, such an imputation of workmanlike efficacy at large rests
on ground precisely even with that on which the mechanistic conception
also rests,--viz. imputation by force of metaphysical necessity, that
is to say by force of an instinctive impulse. The main theorem of
causation, as well as its several mechanistic corollaries, are, in the
last resort, putative traits of matter only, not facts of observation;
and the like is true--in M. Bergson’s argument admittedly so--of the
_élan de la vie_ as well. So far, therefore, as regards the formally
determinable antecedent probability of the two rival conceptions, the
one is as good as the other; but M. Bergson’s argument, running on
ground of circumstantial evidence in the main, makes out at least a
cogently attractive likelihood that the conception for which he speaks
is to be accepted as the more fundamental, underlying the mechanistic
conception, conditioning it and on occasion overruling its findings in
matters that lie beyond its ascertained competence. Which would come,
in a different phrasing, to saying that the imputation of creatively
workmanlike efficiency rests on instinctive ground more indefeasibly
intrinsic to human nature; presumably in virtue of its embodying
the functioning of an instinctive proclivity less sophisticated and
narrowed by special habituation, such special habituation, e. g., as
that exercised by the technology of handicraft and the machine process
in recent times.
[150] All this, of course, neither ignores nor denies the substantial
part which the _jus gentium_ and the _jus naturale_ of the Roman
jurists and their commentators have played in the formulation of the
system of Natural Rights. In point of pedigree the line of derivation
of these legal principles is doubtless substantially as set forth
authentically by the jurists who have spent their competent endeavors
on that matter. So far as regards the English-speaking communities this
pedigree runs back to Locke, and through Locke to the line of jurists
and philosophers on whom that great scholar has drawn; while for the
promulgation of the like system of principles more at large the names
of Grotius, Pufendorf, Althusius doubtless have all the significance
commonly assigned them. See pp. 290–293 above.
[151] Unless the “Syndicalist” movement is to be taken as something
sufficiently definite in its principles to make it an exception to the
rule.
[152] Cf., e. g., Anna Youngman, _The Economic Causes of Great
Fortunes_, especially ch. vi; R. Ehrenburg, _Grosse Vermögen_; Ida
Tarbell, _History of the Standard Oil Company_.
[153] Cf. a paper “On the Nature of Capital” in the _Quarterly Journal
of Economics_, November, 1908.
[154] As late as Adam Smith’s time “manufacturer” still retained its
etymological value and designated the workman who made the goods. But
from about that time, that is to say since the machine process and the
business control of industry have thoroughly taken effect, the term no
longer has a technological connotation but has taken on a pecuniary
(business) signification wholly; so that the term now designates
a businessman who stands in none but a pecuniary relation to the
processes of industry.
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_The Theory of the Leisure Class_
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EXTRACT FROM PREFACE
It is the purpose of this inquiry to discuss the place and value of
the leisure class as an economic factor in modern life, but it has
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limits so marked out. Some attention is perforce given to the origin
and the line of derivation of the institution, as well as to features
of social life that are not commonly classed as economic.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter I. Introduction.