Sec. 1. In the logic of Instrumentalism, truth has been identified with
usefulness and the good with the satisfactory. Classifying critics have
seen in this the damaging mark of Utilitarianism, certain of them
deeming "Amerikanismus" an even shrewder and more specific diagnosis.
The association of these terms together and the aptness of either to
express what the critics have in mind are matters of small interest. It
is of more importance to discover, behind the reproach implied, the
assumptions which may have made the reproach seem pertinent. One cannot,
of course, suppose it to express a sheer general aversion to the useful
or an ascetic abhorrence of all satisfaction on principle. Puritanism,
aestheticism, and pedantry should be last resorts in any search for an
interpretative clue.
The distrust of Utilitarianism need be ascribed to none of these. It
comes instead from a conception of the true Utilitarian as a dull and
dogmatic being with no interests beyond the range of his own uninquiring
vision, no aspiration beyond the complacent survey of his own
perfections and no standards beyond the inventory of his own _bourgeois_
tastes and prejudices. The type is indeed not yet extinct in our day:
but is it plausible to charge a "new" philosophy with conspiring to
perpetuate it? Is Instrumentalism only philistinism called by a more
descriptive name? It professes at least to be a logic of hypothesis and
experiment, whereas for the perfect philistine there are no ultimate
problems and hence no logic but the logic of self-evidence. When
Instrumentalism speaks of needs and interests in its analysis of truth
and goodness does it then mean the needs and interests that define the
individual in what is sometimes invidiously termed a "biological"
sense--interests that control him before his conduct becomes in any way
a problem for himself? Quite as a matter of course, just this has been
the assumption. The satisfactoriness of prompt and cogent classification
has had a hand in the vindication of truth's supremacy over
satisfaction. In the view of instrumentalism this ready interpretation
of its meaning is nothing less than the thinking of the unthinkable and
the bodying-forth of what is not. The man who has solved a problem
simply _is_ not the man he was before--if his problem was a genuine one
and it was he who solved it. He cannot measure and judge the outcome by
his earlier demands for the very good reason that the outcome of real
deliberation empties these earlier demands of their interest and
authority for him.
Can the conception thus suggested of personal growth through exercise of
creative or constructive intelligence be in any measure verified by a
general survey of the economic side of life? Has it any important
bearings upon any parts of economic theory? These are the questions to
which this essay is addressed.
I
Sec. 2. How have the real or fancied needs of the average person of today
come to be what they are? For all sorts and conditions of men, the ways
and means of living have, during the past century or two--even during
the past decade or two--undergone revolutionary changes. It is true that
many of these changes have been relatively superficial, touching only
certain externalities and entering in no important way into life's
underlying and dominant motives. Others, no doubt, may fairly be held to
confuse and disperse the energies of men, instead of making for
wholeness, sanity and development of human interest and power. And
critics of industrial and social progress who have felt the need for
reservations of this sort fall easily into a certain mood of historic
homesickness for the supposed "simplicity" of an earlier age. But our
interest, in this discussion, is in the genesis, the actual process of
becoming, of our present "standards of living," not their value as rated
by any critical (or uncritical) standard. And accordingly we shall take
it for a fact that on the whole the average person of today is
reasonably, perhaps unreasonably, well satisfied with his telephone, his
typewriter, and his motor-car; with his swift and easy journeyings over
land and sea; with his increasingly scientific medical attendance and
public sanitation; with his virtually free supplies of literature and
information, new and old, and with his electric light or his midnight
oil (triple distilled) to aid in the perusal. More than this, he is so
well satisfied with all these modern inventions that, historical or
aesthetical or other "holidays" apart, he would never for a moment
dispense with any one of them as a matter of free choice. Grossly
material and humbly instrumental though they are, these things and their
like constitute the framework sustaining the whole system of spiritual
functions that make up the life we live today, as a society and as
individuals. And our present problem simply is the way in which they
were first received by those who were to use them, and passed into their
present common acceptance. To put the matter in general terms, how is it
that novel means of action or enjoyment, despite their novelty, are able
to command fair scrutiny and hearing and can contrive to make their way,
often very speedily, into a position of importance for industry and
life?
There is an easy and not unnatural way of thinking of this process as we
see it going on about us that may keep us long unmindful of even the
possibility of such a question. In every field of action, we habitually
look back upon accomplished changes from some present well-secured
vantage-point, and as we trace the steps by which they have come to pass
it is almost inevitable that we should first see the sequence as an
approach, direct or devious but always sure, to the stage on which we
happen to have taken our stand. It seems clear to us that what we have
attained is better than aught that has gone before--if it were not
distinctly satisfactory on its own merits we should not now be taking it
as the standpoint for a survey. But once it is so taken, our recognition
of its appreciable and satisfying superiority passes over insensibly
into metaphysics. What we now find good we find ourselves perceiving to
have been all the while predestined in the eternal scheme of things! We
pause in retrospect like the wayfarer who has reached the turning of a
mountain road or the man of middle age who for the first time feels that
his professional position is assured. This, we say, justifies the effort
it has cost, _this_ at last is really living! And the next step in
retrospective reconstruction follows easily; this was my true goal from
the first, the dim and inexpressible hope of which would not let me
pause and kept me until now dissatisfied. The end was present in the
beginning, provoking the first groping efforts and affording
progressively the test and measure by which their results were found
ever wanting.
This retrospective logic may explain the presence and perennial charm of
those panoramic pages in our encyclopaedias purporting to show forth the
gradual perfecting of great instrumentalities upon which our modern life
depends. We survey the "evolution" of printing, for example, from the
wooden blocks of the Chinese or of Laurens Coster down to the Hoe press,
the stereotype plate, and the linotype machine. Or we see the forms of
written record from pictured papyrus, cuneiform brick, and manuscript
scroll down to the printed book and the typewritten page; the means of
carriage by land from the ox-cart of the patriarchs to the stage-coach,
the Cannonball Limited, the motor-truck, and the twelve-cylinder
touring-car. And as one contemplates these cheerfully colored exhibits
there is in each case an almost irresistible suggestion of a constant
and compelling need of "universal man" seeking in more and more
marvellously ingenious ways an adequate expression and satisfaction.
This need seems never to have lapsed or changed its nature. All along
both driving power and direction, it has been the one fixed factor in a
long process in which all else has been fluctuating, contingent, and
imperfect--all else except the nature of the materials and the
principles of mechanics, which, too, are seen in the end to have been
mutely conspiring toward the result. Essential human nature, it seems
clear, does not and happily cannot change. Spiritual progress, in this
ultimate optimism, means simply clearer vision, completer knowledge, and
a less petulant and self-assertive habit of insistence upon the details
of particular purposes as individual "impulse" and "idiosyncrasy" define
them. We fortunate beings of today have available, in the various
departments of our life, certain instrumentalities, and to these our
interests attach. These interests of ours in their proportional strength
(so the argument runs) express our native and generic constitution in so
far as this constitution has been able as yet to achieve outward
expression and embodiment. And accordingly, in interpreting the long
history of technological evolution, we take what we conceive ourselves
now to be as normative and essential. We project back into the lives of
primitive man, of our own racial ancestors, or of our grandfathers, the
habits and requirements which we acknowledge in ourselves today and we
conceive the men of the past to have been driven forward on the ways of
progress by the identical discontent that would presumably beset
ourselves if we were to be suddenly carried back to their scale and
manner of existence.
Sec. 3. Whatever else may be thought of it, there is at least this to be
said for the cult of historic homesickness to which reference has just
been made: it happens to be at one with modern ethnology and history in
suggesting that earlier cultures were on the whole not less content and
self-satisfied in their condition than our own. It is primitive man, not
the modern, who is slow to move and is satisfied, as a matter of course,
with the manner of life in which he fancies his people to have lived
from time immemorial. Change in early social groups is tragic when it is
not insensible. It comes through conquest and enslavement by outsiders
or through stress of the dread of these, or by gradual adaptation of
custom to failing environmental resources or to increasing wealth.
Assent to change is in general grudging or tacit at best and is commonly
veiled by some more or less transparent fiction.
And our suspicion of fallacy lurking somewhere in the type of
retrospective Idealism we have been considering is strengthened when we
come to look a little closely to details. To take a commonplace
example--can it be held that the difference between using a typewriter
and "writing by hand" is purely and simply a matter of degree--that the
machine serves the same purpose and accomplishes the same _kind_ of
result as the pen, but simply does the work more easily, rapidly, and
neatly? Undoubtedly some such impression may easily be gathered from an
external survey of the ways that men have used at different times for
putting their ideas on record. But it ignores important aspects of the
case. For one thing, the modern invention effects a saving of the
writer's time which can be used in further investigation or in more
careful revision or in some way wholly unrelated to literary work, and
if the machine makes any part of the writer's task less irksome, or the
task as a whole less engrossing, the whole matter of literary effort
becomes less forbidding and its place and influence as a social or a
personal function may for better or for worse be altered. The difference
brought to pass transcends mere technical facility--it ramifies into a
manifold of differences affecting the entire qualitative character and
meaning of the literary function. And only by an arbitrary
sophistication of the facts can this complexity of new outcome be
thought of as implicit and dynamic in the earlier stage.
In the same way precisely, the motor-car, as every one knows, has
"vanquished distance" and has "revolutionized suburban life." In England
it is said to have made acute the issue of plural voting. In America it
is hailed by the optimistic as the solution of the vexed problem of
urban concentration and the decline of agriculture. Even as a means of
recreation it is said by the initiated to transform the whole meaning of
one's physical environment, exploiting new values in sky and air and the
green earth, which pass the utmost possibilities of family "carry-all"
or coach and four. Or consider the ocean steamship and its influence:
today we travel freely over the world, for all manner of reasons,
sufficient or otherwise. A hundred years ago distant journeyings by sea
or land were arduous and full of peril, undertaken only by the most
adventurous or the most curious or for urgent need. Now commodities of
every sort can be transported to virtually every quarter of the
globe--rails and locomotives, cement and structural steel, machinery of
all kinds from the motor and the dynamo to the printing press and the
cinematograph, in a word whatever is necessary to recreate the waste
places of the earth and to make life in these regions humanly liveable.
The sheer scale and magnitude of such operations lifts them above the
level of the international trade of five hundred or even a hundred years
ago. And their far-reaching results of every sort in the lives of
nations and of individuals the world over can in no intelligible sense
be understood as mere homogeneous multiples of what trade meant before
our age of steam, iron, and electricity. Finally, we may think of modern
developments in printing as compared, for example, with the state of the
craft in the days when the New England Primer served to induct juvenile
America into the pleasant paths of "art and literature." And it is clear
that the mechanical art that makes books and reading both widely
inviting and easily possible of enjoyment today is not merely a more
perfect substitute for the quill and ink-horn of the mediaeval scribe or
even for the printing press of Caxton or of Benjamin Franklin. The
enormously and variously heightened "efficiency" of the mechanical
instrumentalities nowadays available has for good and for evil carried
forward the whole function of printing and publication into relations
and effects which are qualitatively new and beyond the possible
conception of the earlier inventors and readers.
Sec. 4. The real evolution in such cases of the coming of a new commodity
or a new instrument into common and established use is an evolution of a
more radical, more distinctly epigenetic type than the pictured stories
of the encyclopaedia-maker serve to suggest. At each forward step the
novelty makes possible not merely satisfactions more adequate as
measured by existing requirements or more economical in terms of cost,
but new satisfactions also for which no demand or desire before existed
or could possibly exist--satisfactions which, once become habitual, make
the contentment of former times in the lack of them hard to understand
or credit. And indeed the story is perhaps never quite one-sided; the
gain we reckon is perhaps never absolutely unmixed. There may be,
perhaps must in principle be, not only gain but loss. The books we read
have lost something of the charm of the illuminated manuscript; our
compositors and linotypers, it may be, have forgotten something of the
piety and devotion of the mediaeval scribe and copyist. So everywhere in
industry the machine depreciates and pushes out the skilled artisan and
craftsman, summoning into his place the hired operative whose business
is to feed and serve instead of to conceive and execute. For cheapness
and abundance, for convenience of repair and replacement we everywhere
sacrifice something of artistic quality in the instrumentalities of life
and action and something of freedom and self-expression in the
processes of manufacture. Thus again, to change the venue, there are
those who miss in democratic government or in an ethical type of
religion the poignant and exalting spiritual quality of devotion to a
personal sovereign or a personal God. Whatever one's judgment may be in
particular cases, there can be no reason for disputing that in
epigenetic or creative evolution there is, in a sense, loss as well as
gain. There is no more reason for supposing that all that was wholesome
or ennobling or beautiful in an earlier function _must_ somehow have its
specific compensation in kind infallibly present in the new than for
supposing that all that is desirable in the new must surely have been
present discernibly or indiscernibly in the old.
If we are on the whole satisfied with the new on its intrinsic merits as
a present complex fact, we have therein sufficient ground for saying
that it marks a stage in progress. This, in fact, is what such a
proposition means. And the old then appears more or less widely
discontinuous with the new--not merely that it shows, in units of
measure, less of the acceptable quality or qualities which the _new_
fact or situation is found to possess, but that it belongs for us to a
qualitatively different level and order of existence. How, we wonder,
could our ancestors have found life tolerable in their undrained and
imperfectly heated dwellings, without the telephone, the morning's news
of the world by cable, and the phonograph? How, again, could feudal
homage and fealty have ever been the foundation of social order in
countries where today every elector is wont to think and to act in his
public relations no longer as a subject but as a citizen. And how, in
still a different sphere, could the father or the mother of a happy
family of children ever have found the freedom and irresponsibility of
bachelorhood endurable? Shall we say that in changes like these we have
to do simply with the quantitative increase of some quality, present in
small measure in the earlier stages and in larger measure in the later?
Or shall we evade the issue with the general admission that _of course_,
as every schoolboy knows, there are in this world many differences of
degree that somehow "amount to differences of kind"? As a matter of fact
what has happened in every case like these is an actual change of
standard, a new construction in the growing system of one's norms of
value and behavior. Provisionally, though hopefully, a step has been
taken--a real event in personal and in social history has been given
place and date. From some source beyond the scope and nature of the
earlier function a suggestion or an impulsion has come by which the
agent has endeavored to move forward. The change wrought is a
transcendence of the earlier level of experience and valuation, not a
widening and clarification of vision on that level. And the standards
which govern on the new level serve not so much to condemn the old as to
seal its consignment to disuse and oblivion. Least of all can a judgment
or appraisal of the old from the standpoint of the new be taken for a
transcript of the motives which led to the transition.
We must confine ourselves more closely, however, to the sphere of
material goods and their uses. And in this sphere objection to the view
proposed will run in some such terms as the following: Take our
ancestors, for example, and their household arrangements to which
invidious reference has been made: why should we suppose that their
seeming contentment was anything more (or less) than a dignified
composure in which we might well imitate them--an attitude in no way
precluding a definite sense of specific discomforts and embarrassments
and a distinct determination to be rid of them as soon as might be? And,
in fact, if they were satisfied with what they had why did they receive
the new when it was offered? If, on the other hand, they were not
satisfied, how is the fact intelligible except upon the assumption that
they had distinct and definite wants not yet supplied, and were wishing
(but patiently) for conveniences and comforts of a sort not yet
existent. And this latter hypothesis, it will be urged, is precisely
what the foregoing argument has sought to discredit as an account of the
moving springs in the evolution of consumption.
Sec. 5. Any adequate discussion of the central issue thus presented would
fall into two parts. In the first place, before a consumption good can
come into general acceptance and currency it must have been in some way
discovered, suggested or invented, and the psychology of invention is
undoubtedly a matter of very great complexity and difficulty. But for
the purposes of the present inquiry all this may be passed over. The
other branch of a full discussion of our problem has to do with the
reception of the newly invented commodity or process into wider and
wider use--and this again is a social phenomenon not less complex than
the other. It is this phenomenon of increasing extension and vogue, of
widening propagation from person to person, that is directly of present
concern for us--and in particular the individual person's attitude
toward the new thing and the nature of the interest he takes in it.
It has recently been argued by a learned and acute investigator of
economic origins that "invention is the mother of necessity," and not
the child.[45] Such a complete reversal of all our ordinary thought
about the matter seems at first sheer paradox. What, one may ask, can
ever suggest an invention and what can give it welcome and currency but
an existing need--which, if it happens to be for the time being latent
and unconscious, needs only the presentation of its appropriate means of
satisfaction to "arouse" and "awaken" it fully into action? But this
paradox as to invention is at all events not more paradoxical than the
view as to the reception of new commodities and the rise of new desires
that has been above suggested. What it appears to imply is in principle
identical with what has seemed, from our consideration of the other
aspect of the general situation, to be the simple empirical fact;
neither the existence of the new commodity nor our interest in it when
it is presented admits of explanation as an effect on each particular
occasion of a preexisting unsatisfied desire for it. What both sides of
the problem bring to view is a certain original bent or constitutive
character of human nature--a predisposition, an _elan vital_ perhaps,
which we must recognize as nothing less than perfectly general and
comprehensive--finding expression in inventive effort and likewise in
the readiness with which the individual meets a new commodity halfway
and gives it opportunity to become for him, if it can, a new necessity
and the source of a new type of satisfaction.
From the point of view of "logic," as William James might have said,
such a version of psychological fact may seem essentially
self-contradictory. Unless, it may be argued, a novelty when presented
excites some manner of desire for itself in the beholder, the beholder
will make no effort towards it and thus take no step away from his
existing system of life to a new system in which a new desire and a new
commodity shall have a place. So much would seem clear enough but the
question immediately follows: How can a thing that is new arouse desire?
In so far as it is new it must _ex vi termini_ be unknown and wanting
definition in terms of remembered past experiences; and how can a thing
unknown make that connection with the present character of the
individual which must be deemed necessary to the arousal of desire in
him? A new thing would seem, then, from this point of view, to be able
to arouse desire only in so far as it is able to conceal or subordinate
its aspects of novelty and appear as known and well-accredited--either
this or there must be in the individual some definite instinctive
mechanism ready to be set in action by the thing's presentment. And on
neither of these suppositions can having to do with the new thing
effect any fundamental or radical difference in the individual--it can
serve at most only to "bring out" what was already "there" in him in a
"latent" or "implicit" status. Whatever new developments of power or
desire may be attained and organized into the individual's character
through his commerce with the novelty must be new in only a superficial
sense--they will be new only as occurrences, only as the striking of the
hour by the clock and the resulting abrasion of the bell and hammer are
new events. But the clock was made to strike; it is the nature of metal
to wear away and likewise these changes in the individual are in deeper
truth not new at all but only a disclosure of the agent's character, a
further fulfilment along preestablished and unalterable lines which all
along was making headway in the agent's earlier quests and efforts and
attainments.
There is a sense, no doubt, in which some such version of the facts as
this is unanswerable, but controversial advantage is paid for, here as
elsewhere in the logic of absolute idealism, at the cost of tangible
meaning and practical importance. Just what does the contention come to?
Let us say, for example, that one has learned to use a typewriter. What
has happened is like an illiterate person's learning to read and write.
Correspondence with one's friends begins to take on new meaning and to
acquire new value; one begins to find a new pleasure and stimulation
taking the place of the ineffectual drivings of an uneasy conscience.
All this, let us say, has come from the moderate outlay for a superior
mechanical instrument. And now let it be granted that it would not have
come if the fortunate individual had not been "what he was." If it has
come it is because the individual and the rest of the world were "of
such a sort" that the revival and new growth of interest _could_ take
its rise with the provision of the new instrumentality. But what,
precisely, does such a statement mean? What sort of verification does it
admit of? What fruitful insight into the concrete facts of the case does
it convey? Of _what_ sort, prior to the event, does it show the
individual to have been?
The truth is, of course, that he was of _no_ sort, then and there and
with reference to the purchase--he was of no sort decisively. He was
neither purchaser nor rejector. He was neither a convinced "typist" nor
piously confirmed in his predilection for writing "by hand." He was
neither wholly weary of his correspondence nor fully cognizant of the
importance of intercourse with his friends for his soul's good. He may
have been dissatisfied and rebellious or he may have been comfortably
persuaded that letter-writing, though an irksome labor, was even at that
sufficiently worth while. The most that can be said is simply that he
must have been willing and desirous to try the experiment for the sake
of any good, imaginable or beyond present imagination, that might come
of it. But being of "such a sort" as this could not prejudge the
issue--although, undoubtedly, in willingness to raise an issue there
lies always the possibility of change. All the plausibility of the dogma
we are here considering comes from its hasty inclusion of this general
attitude of constructively experimental inquiry and effort, this
essential character of creative intelligence, as _one among_ the
concrete interests which constitute and define our particular problems
in their inception. To say _ex post facto_ that the individual must have
been "of such a sort" as to do what he has in fact done is a purely
verbal comment which, whatever may be its uses, can assuredly be of no
use whatever in suggesting either solution or method for the next
situation to arise. It may be comfortably reassuring afterwards, but it
is an empty oracle beforehand.
Sec. 6. If then "logic" is unable to express the nature of our forward
looking interest in the unexperienced and unpredictable, perhaps the
empirical fact will speak for itself. We call things new; we recognize
their novelty and their novelty excites our interest. But just as we are
sometimes told that we can only _know_ the new in terms of its
resemblances to what we have known before, so it may be held that in the
end we can _desire_ it only on the like condition. Are we, then, to
conclude that the seeming novelty of things new is an illusion, or shall
we hold, on the contrary, that novelty need not be explained away and
that a spontaneous constructive interest stands more or less constantly
ready in us to go out to meet it and possess it?
Unquestionably, let us say the latter. Any new commodity will, of
course, resemble in part or in a general way some old one. It is said
that bath-tubs are sometimes used in "model tenements" as coal-bins. Old
uses persist unchanged in the presence of new possibilities. But in
general new possibilities invite interest and effort because our
experimental and constructive bent contrives on the whole to make head
against habituation and routine. We recognize the new as new. And if it
be contended that novelty in its own right cannot be a ground of
interest, that novelty must first get restatement as the old with
certain "accidents" externally adhering, the answer is that the
"accidents" interest us nevertheless. They may prove their right to
stand as the very essence of some new "kind" that one may wish to let
take form and character for him. Instead of the chips and shavings, they
are in fact the raw material of the logical process. For if we can know
the new _as new_, if we can know the "accident" _as accidental_ in a
commodity before us, the fact betrays an incipient interest in the
quality or aspect that its novelty or contingency at least does not
thwart. And is this quite all? Will it be disputed that a _relation_ of
a quality or feature to ourselves which we can know, name, and
recognize--like "novelty"--must be known, as anything else is known,
through an interest of which it is the appropriate terminus?[46]
And there is no difficulty in pointing to instances in which the
character of novelty seems fundamental. Consider, for example, the
interest one feels in spending a day with a friend or in making a new
acquaintance or, say, in entering on the cares of parenthood. Or again,
take the impulse toward research, artistic creation, or artistic study
and appreciation. Or again, take the interest in topography and
exploration. That there is in such phenomena as these a certain
essentially and irreducibly forward look, a certain residual freedom of
our interest and effort from dependence on the detail of prior
experience down to date, probably few persons without ulterior
philosophical prepossessions will dispute. If we call these phenomena
instinctive we are using the term in a far more loose and general sense
than it seems to have in the best usage of animal psychology. If we call
them attitudes or dispositions, such a term has at least the negative
merit of setting them apart from the class of instinctive acts, but it
may carry with it a connotation of fixity and unconsciousness that
after all surrenders the essential distinction. It will suffice to look
at a single one of these instances.
In friendship, for example, there is undoubtedly strongly operative a
desire for the mere recurrence, in our further friendly intercourse, of
certain values that have become habitual and familiar. We may have long
known and become attached to a friend's tones of voice, peculiarities of
manner and external appearance, turns of speech and thought and the
like, which we miss in absence and which give us pleasure when we meet
the friend again. But if the friendship is not one of "pleasure" or
"utility" simply, but of "virtue"[47] as well, there is also present on
both sides a constructive or progressive or creative interest. And this
interest, stated on its self-regarding and introspective side, is more
than a desire for the mere grateful recurrence of the old looks and
words "recoined at the old mint." It is an interest looking into the
"undone vast," an interest in an indefinite prolongation, an infinite
series, of joint experiences the end of which cannot and need not be
foreseen and the nature of which neither can nor need be forecasted. And
there is the same characteristic in all the other instances mentioned in
this connection. It is not a desire for recurrent satisfactions of a
determinate type, but an interest in the active development of
unexperienced and indeterminate possibilities. If finally the question
be pressed, how there can be an interest of this seemingly
self-contradictory type in human nature, the answer can only be that we
must take the facts as we find them. Is such a conception inherently
more difficult than the view that all ramifications and developments of
human interest are concretely predetermined and implicit _a priori_? To
ignore or deny palpable fact because it eludes the reach of a current
type of conceptual analysis is to part company with both science and
philosophy. We are in fact here dealing with the essential mark and
trait of what is called self-conscious process. If there are ultimates
and indefinables in this world of ours, self-consciousness may as fairly
claim the dignity or avow the discredit as any other of the list.
Sec. 7. Does our interest in economic goods on occasion exhibit the trait
of which we are here speaking? Precisely this is our present contention.
And yet it seems not too much to say that virtually all economic theory,
whether the classical or the present dominant type that has drawn its
terminology and working concepts from the ostensible psychology of the
Austrian School, is founded upon the contradictory assumption. The
economic interest, our desire and esteem for solid and matter-of-fact
things like market commodities and standardized market services, has
been conceived as nothing visionary and speculative, as no peering into
the infinite or outreaching of an inexpressible discontent, but an
intelligent, clear-eyed grasping and holding of known satisfactions for
measured and acknowledged desires. Art and religion, friendship and
love, sport and adventure, morality and legislation, these all may be
fields for the free play and constructive experimentation of human
faculty, but in our economic efforts and relations we are supposed to
tread the solid ground of fact. Business is business. Waste not, want
not. First a living, then (perhaps) a "good life."[48] And we are
assured one need not recoil from the hard logic of such maxims, for they
do not dispute the existence of spacious (and well-shaded) suburban
regions fringing the busy areas of industry and commerce.
Such is the assumption. We have said that it precludes the admission of
speculation as an economic factor. Speculation for economic theory is a
purely commercial phenomenon, a hazarding of capital on the supposition
that desires will be found ready and waiting for the commodity
produced--with a sufficient offering of purchasing power to afford a
profit. And the "creation of demand," where this is part of the program
of speculative enterprise, means the arousal of a "dormant" or implicit
desire, in the sense above discussed--there is nothing, at all events,
in other parts of current theory to indicate a different conception. The
economist will probably contend that what the process of the creation of
demand may _be_ is not his but the psychologist's affair; that his
professional concern is only whether or not the economic demand, as an
objective market fact, be actually forthcoming. But what we here contend
for as a fact of economic experience is a speculation that is in the
nature of personal adventure and not simply an "adventuring of stock."
Sec. 8. For what is the nature of the economic "experience" or situation,
considered as a certain type of juncture in the life of an individual?
It may be shortly described as the process of determining how much of
one's time, strength, or external resources of any sort shall be
expended for whatever one is thinking of doing or acquiring. Two general
motives enter here to govern the estimate and each may show the routine
or the innovative phase. In any work there is possible, first, more or
less of the workman's interest--an interest not merely in a conventional
standard of excellence in the finished result but also in betterment of
the standard and in a corresponding heightened excellence of technique
and spirit in the execution.[49] These interests, without reference to
the useful result and "for their own sake" (i.e., for the workman's
sake, in ways not specifiable in advance), may command a share of one's
available time, strength, and resources. In the second place, any work
or effort or offer to give in exchange has a nameable result of some
kind in view--a crop of wheat, a coat, a musical rendition, or the
education of a child. Why are such things "produced" or sought for?
Verbally and platitudinously one may answer: For the sake of the
"satisfactions" they are expected to afford. But such an answer ignores
the contrast of attitudes that both workmanship and productive or
acquisitive effort in the ordinary sense display. As the workman may
conform to his standard or may be ambitious to surpass it, so the
intending consumer may be counting on known satisfactions or hoping for
satisfactions of a kind that he has never known before. Both sorts of
effort may be of either the routine or the innovative type. In neither
workmanship nor acquisition can one fix upon routine as the "normal"
type, hoping to derive or to explain away the inevitable residue of
"outstanding cases." For as a matter of fact the outstanding cases prove
to be our only clue to a knowledge of how routine is made.[50]
The above formula will apply, with the appropriate changes of emphasis,
to buyers and sellers in an organized market, as well as to the parties
to a simple transaction of barter. Two main empirical characteristics of
the economic situation are suggested in putting the statement in just
these terms. In the first place, the primary problem in such a situation
is that of "exchange valuation," the fixation of a "subjective" (or
better, a "personal") price ratio between what the agent wishes to
acquire and whatever it is that he offers in exchange. The agent thus is
engaged in determining what shall be the relative importance for himself
of _two_ commodities or exchangeable goods. And in the second place
these goods get their values determined together and in relation to each
other, never singly and with a view to _subsequent_ comparison. These
values when they have been determined will be measured in terms of
marginal utility in accordance with familiar principles, but the
marginal utilities that are to express the attained and accepted ratio
at which exchange eventually takes place are not known quantities at all
in the inception of the process of comparison. If these dogmatic
statements seem to issue in hopeless paradox or worse, then let us not
fear to face the paradox and fix its lines with all possible
distinctness. Can a man decide to offer so much of one commodity for so
much of another unless he _first_ has settled what each is worth to him
in some intelligible terms or other? And is not this latter in point of
fact the real decision--at all events clearly more than half the battle?
Does not the exchange ratio to which one can agree "leap to the eyes,"
in fact, as soon as the absolute values in the case have been once
isolated and given numerical expression?
In a single word we here join issue. For the comparison in such a case
is _constructive comparison_, not a mechanical measuring of fixed
magnitudes, as the above objection tacitly assumes. And constructive
comparison is essentially a transitive or inductive operation whereby
the agent moves from one level to another, altering his standard of
living in some more or less important way, embarking upon a new
interest, entering upon the formation of a new habit or upon a new
accession of power or effectiveness--making or seeking to make, in
short, some transformation in his environment and in himself that shall
give his life as an entire system a changed tenor and perspective. The
term "constructive comparison" is thus intended, among other things, to
suggest that the process is in the nature of adventure, not calculation,
and, on the other hand, that though adventurous it is not sheer hazard
uncontrolled. And the motive dominant throughout the process--the
economic motive in its constructive phase--is neither more nor less than
a supposition, on the agent's part, that there may be forthcoming for
him in the given case in hand just such an "epigenetic" development of
new significance and value as we have found actual history to disclose
as a normal result of economic innovation. It is the gist of hedonism,
in economic theory as in its other expressions, that inevitably the
agent's interests and motives are restricted in every case to the
precise range and scope of his existing tendencies and desires; he can
be provoked to act only by the hope of just those particular future
pleasures or means of pleasure which the present constitution of his
nature enables him to enjoy. Idealism assumes that the emergent new
interest of the present was wrapped up or "implied," in some sense, in
the interests of the remote and immediate past--interests of which the
agent at the time could of course be but "imperfectly" aware. Such
differences as one can discern between the two interpretations seem
small indeed--like many others to which idealism has been wont to point
in disparagement of the hedonistic world view. For in both philosophies
the agent is without initiative and effect; he is in principle but the
convergence of impersonal motive powers which it is, in the one view,
absurdly futile, in the other misguidedly presumptuous, to try to alter
or control.
Sec. 9. A commodity sought or encountered may then be of interest to us for
reasons of the following three general sorts. In the first place it may
simply be the normal and appropriate object of some established desire
of ours. We may be seeking the commodity because this desire has first
become active, or encountering the commodity in the market may have
suddenly awakened the desire. Illustration seems superfluous; tobacco
for the habitual smoker, clothing of most sorts for the ordinary person,
regular supplies of the household staples--these will suffice. This is
the province within which a hedonistic account of the economic motive
holds good with a cogency that anti-hedonistic criticism has not been
able to dissolve. Our outlays for such things as these may as a rule be
held in their due and proper relation to each other--at all events in
their established or "normal" relation--simply by recalling at critical
times our relative marginal likes and dislikes for them. That these
likes and dislikes are not self-explanatory, that they are concrete
expectations and not abstract affective elements, does not seem greatly
to matter where the issue lies between maintaining or renouncing an
existing schedule of consumption. And in this same classification belong
also industrial and commercial expenditures of a similarly routine sort.
Even where the scale of operations is being enlarged, expenditures for
machines, fuel, raw materials, and labor may have been so carefully
planned in advance with reference to the desired increase of output or
pecuniary profit that no special problem of motivation attaches
directly to them. And these outlays are so important in industry and
commerce that the impression comes easily to prevail that all business
undertaking, and then all consumption of finished goods, fall under the
simple hedonistic type.
But if we keep to the plane of final consumption, there appears a second
sort of situation. Our interest in the commodity before us may be due to
a suggestion of some sort that prompts us to take a step beyond the
limits that our present formed desires mark out. The suggestion may be
given by adroit advertising, by fashion, by the habits of another class
to which one may aspire or by a person to whom one may look as guide,
philosopher, and friend. An authority of one sort or another invites or
constrains us to take the merits of the article on trust. Actual trial
and use may show, not so much that it can minister to a latent desire as
that we have been able through its use to form a habit that constitutes
a settled need.
And, finally, in the third place, there is a more spontaneous and
intrinsically personal type of interest which is very largely
independent of suggestion or authority. A thing of beauty, a new author,
a new acquaintance, a new sport or game, a new convenience or mechanical
device may challenge one's curiosity and powers of appreciation, may
seem to offer a new facility in action or some unimagined release from
labor or restriction. The adventure of marriage and parenthood, the
intimate attraction of great music, the mystery of an unknown language
or a forbidden country, the disdainful aloofness of a mountain peak
dominating a landscape are conspicuous instances inviting a more
spontaneous type of constructive interest that finds abundant expression
also in the more commonplace situations and emergencies of everyday
life. It is sheer play upon words to speak in such cases of a pleasure
of adventurousness, a pleasure of discovery, a pleasure of conquest and
mastery, assigning this as the motive in order to bring these interests
to the type that fits addiction to one's particular old coat or
easy-chair. The specific "pleasure" alleged could not exist were the
tendency not active beforehand. While the same is true in a sense for
habitual concrete pleasures in relation to their corresponding habits,
the irreducible difference in constructive interest as a type lies in
the _transition_ which this type of interest purposes and effects from
one level of concrete or substantive desire and pleasure to another.
Here one consciously looks to a result that he cannot foresee or
foretell; in the other type his interest as interest goes straight to
its mark, sustained by a confident forecast.[51]
Sec. 10. But constructive interests, whether provoked by suggestion or of
the more freely imaginative type, may, as has been said, be held to lie
outside the scope of economic theory. How a desire for a certain thing
has come to get expression may seem quite immaterial--economically
speaking. Economics has no concern with human folly as such or human
imitativeness, or human aspiration high or low or any other of the
multitude of motives that have to do with secular changes in the
"standard of living" and in the ideals of life at large. It has no
concern with anything that lies behind the fact that I am in the market
with my mind made up to buy or sell a thing at a certain price. And the
answer to this contention must be that it first reverses and then
distorts the true perspective of our economic experience. Let it be
admitted freely--indeed, let it be insisted on--that the definition of a
science must be determined by the pragmatic test. If an economist elects
to concern himself with the problems of what has been called the "loose
mechanics of trade" there can be no question of his right to do so or of
the importance of the services he may render thereby, both to theory and
to practice. But on the other hand economic theory cannot be therefore,
once and for all, made a matter of accounting--to the effacement of all
problems and aspects of problems of which the accountant has no
professional cognizance. Just this, apparently, is what it means to
level down all types of interest to the hedonistic, leaving aside as
"extra-economic" those that too palpably resist the operation. It is
acknowledged that freshly suggested modes of consumption and ends of
effort require expenditure and sacrifice no less than the habitual, that
the exploration of Tibet or of the Polar Seas affects the market for
supplies not less certainly than the scheduled voyages of oceanic
liners. Moreover, behind these scheduled voyages there are all the
varied motives that induce people to travel and the desires that lead to
the shipment of goods. Shall it be said that all of these motives and
desires must be traceable back to settled habits of behavior and
consumption? And if this cannot be maintained is it not hazardous to
assume that such general problems of economic theory as the
determination of market values or of the shares in distribution require
no recognition of the other empirical types of interest? These types, if
they are genuine, are surely important; they may well prove to be, in
many ways, fundamentally important. For a commodity that has become
habitual must once have been new and untried.
Sec. 11. The economic demands which make up the budget of a particular
person at a particular time are clearly interdependent. A man's income
or the greater part of it is usually distributed among various channels
of expenditure in a certain fairly constant way. In proportion to the
definiteness of this distribution and the resoluteness with which it is
maintained does the impression gain strength that the man is carrying
out a consistent plan of some sort. Such a regular plan of expenditure
may be drawn out into a schedule, setting forth the amounts required at
a certain price for the unit of each kind. And such a schedule is an
expression in detail, in terms of ways and means, of the type of life
one has elected to lead. For virtually any income above the level of
bare physical subsistence, there will be an indefinite number of
alternative budgets possible. A little less may be spent for household
conveniences and adornments and a little more for food. Some recreations
may be sacrificed for an occasional book or magazine. One may build a
house or purchase a motor-car instead of going abroad. And whichever
choice is made, related expenditures must be made in consequence for
which, on the assumption of a definite amount of income, compensation
must be made by curtailment of outlay at other points. What seems clear
in general is that one's total budget is relative to the general plan
and manner of life one deems for him the best possible and that this
plan, more or less definitely formulated, more or less steadily
operative, is what really determines how far expenditure shall go in
this direction and in that. The budget as a whole will define for the
individual an equilibrium among his various recognized wants; if the
work of calculating it has been carefully done there will be for the
time being no tendency to change in any item.
If, then, we choose to say in such a case that the individual carries
his expenditure along each line to the precise point at which the last
or marginal utility enjoyed is precisely equal to the marginal utility
on every other line, it seems not difficult to grasp what such a
statement means. Quite harmlessly, all that it can mean is that the
individual has planned precisely what he has planned and is not sorry
for it, and for the time being does not think he can improve upon it. As
there is one earth drawing toward its center each billiard ball of the
dozen in equilibrium in a bowl, so there is behind the budget of the
individual one complex personal conception of a way of life that fixes
more or less certainly and clearly the kinds and intensities of his
wants and assigns to each its share of purchasing power. That the units
or elements in equilibrium hold their positions with reference to each
other for reasons capable of separate statement for each unit seems a
supposition no less impossible in the one case than in the other. To
think of each kind of want in the individual's nature as holding
separately in fee simple and clamoring for full and separate
"satisfaction" in its separate kind, is the characteristic illusion of a
purely formal type of analysis. The permanence of a budget and its
carrying out no doubt require the due and precise realization of each
plotted marginal utility--to go further than this along any one line
would inevitably mean getting not so far along certain others, and thus
a distorted and disappointing total attainment in the end. But to say
that one actually plans and controls his expenditures along various
lines by the ultimate aim of attaining equivalent terminal utilities on
each is quite another story. It is much like saying that the square
inches of canvas assigned in a picture to sky and sea and crannied wall
are arranged upon the principle of identical and equal effects for
artist or beholder from the last inches painted of each kind. The
formula of the equality of marginal effects is no constructive
principle; it is only a concise if indeed somewhat grotesque way of
phrasing the essential fact that no change of the qualitative whole is
going to be made, because no imperfection in it as a whole is felt.[52]
Sec. 12. We come, then, to the problem of the individual's encounter with a
new commodity. In general, a purchase in such a case must amount to more
or less of a departure from the scheme of life in force and a transition
over to a different one. And a new commodity (in the sense in which the
term has been used above) is apt to be initially more tempting than an
addition along some line of expenditure already represented in the
budget. The latter, supposing there has been no change of price and no
increase of income, is usually a mere irregularity, an insurgent
departure from some one specification of a total plan without
preliminary compensating adjustment or appropriate change at other
points. The erratic outlay, if considerable, will result in sheer
disorder and extravagance--indefensible and self-condemned on the
principles of the individual's own economy. But with a new commodity the
case stands differently. It is more interesting to consider a really new
proposal than to reopen a case once closed when no evidence distinctly
new is offered. A sheer "temptation" or an isolated impulse toward new
outlay along a line already measured in one's scheme has the force of
habit and a presumption of un-wisdom to overcome. If the case is one not
of temptation but of "being urged" one is apt to answer, "No, I can make
no use of any more of _that_." But a new commodity has the charm of its
novelty, a charm consisting in the promise, in positive fashion, of new
qualitative values about which a new entire schedule will have to be
organized. Partly its strength of appeal lies in its radicalism; it
gains ready attention not only by its promise but by its boldness.
"Preparedness" gains a more ready acclaim than better schools or the
extirpation of disease. The automobile and the "moving picture" probably
have a vogue today far surpassing any use of earlier "equivalents" that
a mere general augmentation of incomes could have brought about. Indeed,
the economic danger of the middle classes in present-day society lies
not in mere occasional excess at certain points but in heedless
commitment to a showy and thinned-out scheme of life in which the
elements are ill-chosen and ill-proportioned and from which, as a whole,
abiding satisfaction cannot be drawn. It is where real and thoroughgoing
change in the manner of life is hopeless that irregular intemperance of
various sorts appears to bulk relatively largest as an economic evil.
Shall we not say, however, that the superior attraction of the new in
competition with established lines of expenditure only indicates the
greater "satiation" of the wants the latter represent and the
comparative freshness of the wants the novelty will satisfy? On the
contrary the latter wants are in the full sense not yet existent, the
new satisfactions are untried and unmeasured; the older wants have the
advantage of position, and if satiated today, will reassert themselves
with a predictable strength tomorrow. The new wants, it is true, if they
are acquired, will be part of a new system, but the present fact remains
that their full meaning cannot be known in advance of trial and the
further outlines of the new scheme of uses and values cannot be drawn up
until this meaning has been learned. If, then, the new commodity is
taken, it is not because the promised satisfaction and the sum of known
utilities to be sacrificed are found equal, nor again because the new
commodity will fit neatly into a place in the existing schedule that can
be vacated for it. This latter is the case of substitution. Such an
interpretation of the facts is retrospective only; it is a formal
declaration that the exchange has been deemed on the whole worth while,
but the reasons for this outcome such a formula is powerless to suggest.
In general the new commodity and the habits it engenders could not
remain without effect upon a system into which they might be
mechanically introduced. Certain items in the schedule, associated in
use with those dispensed with for the new, must be rendered obsolete by
the change. The new interests called into play will draw to themselves
and to their further development attention which may be in large measure
diverted from the interests of older standing. And in the new system all
interests remaining over from the old will accordingly stand in a new
light and their objects will be valued, will be held important, for
reasons that will need fresh statement.[53]
In similar fashion it might be argued that the commodities or uses which
one sacrifices for the sake of a new venture are inevitably more than a
simple deduction that curtails one's schedule in a certain kind and
amount. Such a deduction or excision must leave the remaining lines of
the original complex hanging at loose ends. The catching-up of these
and their cooerdination with the new interest must in any event amount,
as has been contended, to a thoroughgoing reorganization. What must
really happen then, in the event of action, is in principle nothing less
than the disappearance of the whole from which the sacrificed uses are
dissevered. These latter, therefore, stand in the process of decision as
a symbol for the existing personal economy as a whole. The old order and
the new confront each other as an accepted view of fact and a plausible
hypothesis everywhere confront each other and the issue for the
individual is the practical issue of making the transition to a new
working level. To declare that the salient elements of the confronting
complexes are quantitatively equivalent is only to announce in symbolic
terms that the transition has been effected, the die cast.[54]
Sec. 13. The statement thus given has been purposely made, for many
transactions of the sort referred to, something of an over-statement. If
I contemplate purchasing a typewriter or a book on an unfamiliar but
inviting subject it may well seem somewhat extravagant to describe the
situation as an opposition between two schemes of life. Is the issue so
momentous; is the act so revolutionary? But the purpose of our
over-statement was simply to make clear the type of situation without
regard to the magnitudes involved. No novelty that carries one in any
respect beyond the range of existing habits can be wholly without its
collateral effects nor can its proximate and proper significance be
measured in advance. This is in principle as true of a relatively slight
innovation as of a considerable one. And our present conscious
exaggeration departs less widely from the truth than the alternative
usual preoccupation of economic theory with the logic of routine desire
and demand. For the phenomena of routine and habit are thereby made a
standard by which all others, if indeed recognized as real at all, must
be judged "exceptional." And, as we shall see, to do this introduces
difficulty into certain parts of substantive economic theory.
Again, objection may attach to the view that equivalence of the "salient
members" of the opposing systems is only another name for the
comprehensive fact of the novelty's acceptance. For if we hesitate in
such a case, is this not because we judge the price too high? What can
this signify but that the service or satisfaction we expect from the
novelty falls short of sufficing to convince us? And unless we are
dealing with measured quantities, how can we come to this conclusion?
Moreover, if the novel commodity is divided into units we may take a
smaller quantity when the price demanded is "high" than if the price
were lower. And does this not suggest predetermined value-magnitudes as
data? But if one takes thus a smaller amount, as the argument contends,
it is because there is a presumption of being able to make some
important total use of it and there is no general reason apparent for
supposing that this will be merely a fractional part of a larger but
like significance that might be hoped for from a larger quantity. And on
the other hand, the prospect simply may not tempt at all; the smaller
quantity may be deemed an improbable support for a really promising
total program and the present program will hold its ground, not
seriously shaken. The total demand of a market for a given commodity is
no doubt in some sort a mathematical function of the price. The lower
the price the greater in some ratio will be the number of persons who
will buy and in general the greater the number of units taken by those
who are already buyers. But that such a proposition admits of
statistical proof from the observation of a series of price changes in a
market affords no presumption concerning the nature of the reasons that
move any individual person to his action. The theoretical temptation is
strong, here as elsewhere, in passing from the study of markets to the
personal economy of the individual forthwith to find this also a
trafficking in unit-quantities and marginal satisfactions to which the
concepts and notation of market analysis will readily apply.
It remains to consider certain implications of this view of economic
desire and demand.