Thorstein Veblen:
THE INSTINCT OF WORKMANSHIP AND THE STATE OF THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS.

(New York, N.Y.: Macmillan, March 1914; New edition: New York, N.Y.: B. W. 
Huebsch, July 1918.)
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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  - 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

[1]
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 [2] 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, [3] 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, [4] 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 [5] 
"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 [6] 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 round-about 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 [7] 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. As 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 [8] 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 [9] 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*)
[10] 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 or-[11]ganic 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 con-[12]taminate, 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 [13] 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 [14] 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, [15] both physical and spiritual. The diversity is particularly 
marked among the civilised peoples, and perhaps m 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 [16] 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 any 
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 cul-
[17]tural 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 instill 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 [18] 
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.
[19] 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, [20] 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, [21] 
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 [22] 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 [23] 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 [24] for all the wide divergence of hybrid variants, there is 
no difficulty about recognising a generical human type of spiritual 
endowment, just as the zoologists 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 [25] 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 characterisa-[26]tion 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 [27] 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 [28] 
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.
[29] 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.
[30] 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 [31] 
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 [32] 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 prompt-[33]ings 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 succor 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 [34] 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 con-[35]cerned 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 [36] 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 [37] 
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.
NOTES:
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.

[38]
CHAPTER II
CONTAMINATION OF INSTINCTS IN PRIMITIVE TECHNOLOGY

All instinctive behaviour is subject to development and hence to 
modification by habit.(1*) 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 habitu-[39]ation 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 prac-[40]tice 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 [41] 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 [42] 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.(2*) When this 
rule of seniority is elaborated into such set forms as the men's (secret) 
societies, with exacting initiatory ceremonies and class tabus,(3*) 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 
naive and early developments of authority, and perhaps especially in those 
cultures where the control takes this inchoate form of a customary 
"gerontocracy,"(4*) 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 sub-[43]stantially 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.(5*) 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 
naive 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 [44] 
Malay peninsula,(6*) the Eskimo of the Arctic seaboard,(7*) the Mincopies 
of the Andamans,(8*) or, on a somewhat higher level, the Pueblo Indians of 
the American Southwest.(9*) Illustrative instances of such an inchoate 
organisation of authority are very widely distributed, but the communities 
that follow such a naive 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 
naive 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 [45] 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 pre-[46]cedents 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(10*) and the filial generation 
is given the [47] 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 [48] naive 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 a 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 [49] 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 [50] driving force of 
the several instincts native to man, - will commonly run at cross purposes 
with serviceability and the sense of workmanship.(11*)
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 [51] 
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 [52] 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 naive imputa-
[53]tion 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 [54] 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 charac-[55]teristic 
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 
naive 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 latter-day 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, - [56] 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 day 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.(12*) 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.(13*) [57] 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 [58] 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 [59] 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(14*) of things comes presently to supplement, and in part 
supplant, the more naive 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,(15*) and on 
the other hand it has preserved the life of God the Father unto this day. 
It is as the creative workman, the [60] 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 [61] 
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 [62] 
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;(16*) and [63] 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 
palaeolithic 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;(17*) 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.(18*)
[64] The series of stone implements recovered from palaeolithic deposits 
show the utmost reach of palaeolithic 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 [65] on a 
scant groundwork of the primary mechanical resources.(19*)
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 
palaeolithic 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 palaeolithic 
times as regards the native character of this population is true in a more 
pronounced degree for later prehistoric times.(20*)
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 accom-[66]plished 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 [67] 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 [68] 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 [69] 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.(21*) 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 [70] 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.(22*) In 
[71] 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 palaeolithic 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.(23*) 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 man-[72]dioca squeezer and the metate; and great things 
were done in the way of irrigation and road building.(24*) 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,(25*) 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 [73] 
elsewhere.(26*) 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 [74] 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 [75] 
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.(27*)
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.(28*) 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.(29*) 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 scien-[76]tist'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 watchword 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 [77] 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 
approach-[78]ing 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 [79] 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 win have to return 
presently.(30*)
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 [80] 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 [81] 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 [82] 
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.(31*) 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 [83] 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.(32*) 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.(33*) The legends 
of fire have commonly become legends of a fire-bringer, etc.,(34*) 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.
[84] 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.(35*)

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 them-[85]selves, 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,(36*) and 
the like penchant comes in evidence among the lower animals, as appears in 
many investigations of animal behaviour.(37*) 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 predisposi-[86]tions 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. 
[87] 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.(38*) 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 [88] 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 [89] 
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.(39*)

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 [90] 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(40*) 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 substannntially 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 [91] 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 [92] 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 [93] 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 [94] 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 anthropo-[95]morphic 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.(41*)
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 [96] 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 agri-[97]cultural 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.(42*) 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 [98] 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;(43*) 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 
stand 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 [99] 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.(44*) 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 archaeological 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 [100] 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 [101] contemporary 
lower cultures bears only equivocally on the point of first interest here, 
- viz., the antecedents of the Western cccivilisation. 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 [102] 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.
NOTES:
1) 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.
2) Cf., e. g., Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia; 
Seligmann, The Veddas.
3) Hutton Webster, Primitive Secret Societies, especially ch. iii and iv.
4) J. G. Frazer, Early History of the Kingship, ch. iv, p. 107.
5) E. g., some native tribes of Australia; cf. Spencer and Gillen, The 
Native Tribes of Central Australia, especially ch. i.
6) Skeat and Blagden, Pagan Races of the Malay Peninsula.
7) Murdoch, "The Point Barrow Eskimo," Report of the Bureau of American 
Ethnology, 1887-1888; F. Boas, "The Central Eskimo," Ibid, 1884-1885.
8) E. H. Man, "On the Aboriginal Inhabitants of the Andaman Islands," J. A. 
I., vol. xii.
9) Reports, Bureau of American Ethnology, numerous papers by different 
writers, perhaps especially Mrs. Stevenson, "The Sia," 11th Report (1880-
1890).
10) 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 [47] 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.
11) 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.
12) Cf., e. g., F. H. Cushing, "A Study of Pueblo Pottery as illustrative 
of Zuni 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).
13) The restrictions in this respect are mainly those which devote the 
[57] "sacred" vessels, distinguished by peculiar shapes and decorations, 
to particular ceremonial uses.
14) Cf. E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, especially ch. xvii.
15) Cf. "The Evolution of the Scientific Point of View," University of 
California Chronicle, Oct., 1908.
16) So, e. g., the proficiency of Bushmen, Veddas, Australians, American [63] 
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.
17) 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.
18) Cf. Sophus Müller, L'Europe Préhistorique.
19) 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."
20) What is assumed here is what is commonly held, viz. that the racial 
stocks that made up the late palaeolithic 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 francaise, 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.
21) 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.
22) The late neolithic, or "aeneolithic," 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.
23) 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.
24) Cf. E. J. Payne, as above.
25) Cf., e. g., Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico, vol. i, ch. vi.
26) 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 
Zuni Creation Myths," ibid, 1891-1892; J. O. Dorsey, "A Study of Siouan 
Cults," ibid, 1889-1890.
27) 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."
28) Cf. Presidential Address by Francis Darwin at the Dublin meeting of the 
British Association for the Advancement of Science; cf. also H. Bergson, 
Evolution créatrice, and particularly passages that deal with the élan de 
la vie.
29) Cf. G. J. Romanes, Animal Intelligence, especially the Introduction.
30) 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.
31) Cf., e. g., Skeat, Malay Magic, perhaps especially ch. v, section on 
the cultivation of rice.
32) Hence animism, which applies its conceptions to inanimate rather than 
animate objects.
33) 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 daemon 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.
34) 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.
35) 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.
36) Cf., e.g., W. James, Principles of Psychology, ch. xxiv; McDougall 
Social Psychology, ch. iii.
37) Cf. e.g., M. F. Washburn, The Animal Mind, ch. xii, xiii.
38) For illustrations see Dudley Kidd, The Essential Kafir, especially ch. 
ii, on "Native Beliefs."
39) 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.
40) Cf. Theory of the Leisure Class, ch. iv, v.
41) 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.
42) Cf. J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 
especially ch. iv; J. G. Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, bk. i, ch. iii.
43) 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 Zuni Indians," Report Bureau of American Ethnology, 1901-1902, section 
on "Mythology;" The same, ibid, 1889-1890, "The Sia;" Frank H. Cushing, 
ibid, 1891-1892, "Zuni Creation Myths."
44) Cf., e. g., Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, bk. ii, ch. iii, bk. iii, 
ch. vi and xi.

[103]
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 com-
[104]munity 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 [105] 
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;(1*) 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 during 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 [106] 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 [107] 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 [108] 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 dose 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.(2*) 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 [109] 
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.(3*)
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 [110] in their 
technological knowledge and workmanship.(4*) 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 [111] 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.(5*) 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.(6*)
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 varia-
[112]tion 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 [113] 
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 makeup 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 [114] latter part 
of the stone age. The three great racial stocks(7*) 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 makeup.
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 [115] 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 doubt-
[116] less 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 [117] 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;(8*) and it is at least highly [118] 
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, [119] 
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.

[120] 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.(9*) Any racial type of [121] 
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.(10*)
What is known of the conditions of life in early neolithic times(11*) 
indicates that the first requisite of competitive survival was a more or 
less close attention to the [122] 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.(12*)
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.(13*) So that [123] 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 conven-[124]tional 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;(14*) 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.(15*) 
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.(16*)
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 [125] 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.(17*) 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,(18*) 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 Aegean, finds no appreciable support 
in the archaeological 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 [126] 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.(19*) 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 aid utensils of stone-age cultures are, notoriously, made of 
wood or similar perishable materials.(20*) So that the finds [127] 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 Aegean, 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.(21*) But this archaeological 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 [128] 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.(22*) 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 archaeological 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,(23*) 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 [129] 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.(24*)

Even if it were a possible undertaking it would not be much to the present 
purpose to trace out in detail the [130] 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 archaeologists; 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,(25*) and carrying along a good many [131] 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. 
Palaeolithic 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 [132] 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,(26*) 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.(27*) 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 appre-[133]ciable 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 preeminent, 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 [134] 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 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.(28*)
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 archaeologists find it exceptionally difficult 
to trace the borrowed elements to specific [135] 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.(29*)
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 [136] 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 mag-[137]ical 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.
NOTES:
1) 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.
2) Cf. for instance, Codrington, The Melanesians; Seligmann, The 
Melanesians of British New Guinea.
3) 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.
4) 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.
5) 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.
6) 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.
7) 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.
8) 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 may 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.
9) 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 [121] 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.
10) These considerations apparently apply with peculiar force to the blond 
race, in that the evidence of early times goes to argue that this 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.
11) Cf., e.g., Sophus Müller, Vor Oldtid, "Stenalderen."
12) 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.
13) 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 [123] 
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.
14) As, e. g., the inhabitants of many Polynesian islands at the time of 
their discovery. See, also, Codrington, The Melanesians.
15) Not an unusual state of things among the Melanesians and Micronesians, 
and in a degree among the Australians.
16) See note, p. 120.
17) E.g., some Australian natives and some of the lower Malay cultures.
18) E.g., the Pueblo and the Eskimo.
19) Indeed, such as very suggestively to recall the ritual objects and 
observances of the Pueblo Indians.
20) 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 [127] 
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.
21) Cf. Pumpelly, Explorations in Turkestan.
22) 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.
23) Seen, e. g., in the observance and sanction of tabu in many of the 
lower cultures.
24) 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 [130] 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.
25) 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 [131] 
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.
26) Sophus Müller, Vor Oldtid, "Stenalderen," sec. iii, "Tidsforhold i den 
seldre Stenalder;" O. Montelius, Les temps préhistoriques en Sučde, ch. i, 
p. 20.
27) 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.
28) Sophus Müller, Vor Oldtid, "Bronzealderen," secs. xiii, xiv; Montelius, 
Les temps préhistoriques en Sučde, ch. ii.
29) Cf., e. g., C. A. Haddon, Evolution in Art, section on "Magic and 
Religion."

[138]
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 [139] 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,(1*) 
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 actor 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 [140] 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 [141] 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.(2*)
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 [142] 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.(3*)
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 
[143] 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.(4*) 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 [144] 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.(5*) 
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 goodwill.
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 [145] 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.(6*) 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.(7*)
[146] 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 dis-[147]appearance 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 by 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, [148] 
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 [149] 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 bbbut 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 palaeolithic 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.(8*) 
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 techno-[150]logical 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 palaeolithic 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 [151] 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 [152] 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 
palaeolithic 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 palaeolithic times - a period of 
not less than ten [153] thousand years.(9*) 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 through out the Pueblo region, both on the technological 
and on [154] 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 riot 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 [155] 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.(10*)
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.(11*) As the 
industrial efficiency of the community increases with the technological 
gain, and an increasing disposable output is at hand, it should [156] 
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 [157] 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.(12*) 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 [158] 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 
demarkation 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.(13*)
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 [159] 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,(14*) - 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 [160] 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 [161] 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 [162] 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 [163] 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.(15*)
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.(16*)
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 [164] 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,(17*) 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 mul-[165]tiplying 
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 [166] 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 [167] 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 Phoenicians, 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 [168] significance to human culture 
than those which have singularly 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 [169] 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 [170] 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 Aegean 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 [171] Empire, the barbarian invasions, the feudal 
system, the Catholic church, the Era of state-making, 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-Chaldaean 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 preda-[172]tory 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(18*) and an increasingly 
wasteful consumption of goods. The diligence so fostered by emulative self-
interest is directed to the acquisition of property, in [173] 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 naive 
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.(19*) 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 [174] 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 [is] 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.(20*)
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 [175] 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 [176] 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 [177] 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 haaas 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, [178] 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 [179] 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 
naive 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 [180] 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 develops 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 
un-[181]broken, 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.
[182] 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 [183] 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 [184] 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 [185] 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 naively 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 [186] 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 [permissively and] as regards the immediate incidence of its 
discipline.
NOTES:
1) Except for species that habitually breed by parthenogenesis.
2) 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.
3) 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."
4) Cf. Basil Thomson, The Diversions of a Prime Minister, and The Figians.
5) 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.
6) 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.
7) 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, inequity, 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.
8) See Sophus Müller, Vor Oldtid, "Stenalderen," and Aarböger for nordisk 
Oldkyndighed, 1906.
9) Cf. W. G. Sollas, Ancient Hunters.
10) See, e. g., Basil Thomson, The Figians, especially ch. iv, xiv, xxviii, 
xxxi.
11) 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.
12) 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.
13) 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.
14) 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.
15) Witness the alleged dealings of Jahve with his chosen people and the 
laudation bestowed on Him by His priests for "conduct unbecoming a 
gentleman."
16) As witness Pharaonic Egypt, Ancient Peru, Babylon, Assyria, Israel 
under Solomon and his nearer successors.
17) See F. B. Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religion, ch. x.
18) Cf., e.g., Basil Thomson, The Figians, ch. iv.
19) 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.
20) 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.
[187]
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.(1*) 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 [188] 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 
[189] 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, [190] 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 [191] 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.(2*)
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 [192] 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 [193] 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.(3*) 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 [194] 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 [195] 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 [196] 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 
naively 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 [197] 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 naiveté 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 anthropo-[198]morphic 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, genus 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 
[199] 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.(4*) 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 [200] 
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 
naiveté, 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 cere-[201]monious, 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 [202] 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,(5*) 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, [203] be broken off without having reached a 
consummation.
Within the region of the Western Civilisation, both in north Europe and 
repeatedly in the Aegean, 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.
[204] 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.
NOTES:
1) 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."
2) 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.
3) Cf., e. g., Harrington Emerson, Efficiency as a Basis for Operation and 
Wages, ch. i, iv.
4) 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."
5) 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.

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 typic-[205]ally 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. [206] 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 to-day 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 [207] 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 [208] 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;"(1*) 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 [209] gain.(2*) 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.
[210] 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 [211] 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 
regu-[212]late 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 
[213] 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 [214] 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 [215] 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.(3*) 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 de-[216]velopments 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, [217] 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.(4*)
[218] 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 [219] 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 - it 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 [220] 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 [221] 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 [222] 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 [223] 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.(5*)
[224] 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 [225] 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, [226] 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 [227] 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 naive 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 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 [228] 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.(6*) 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 
[229] 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.(7*) So it 
fell to these owners of the material means and of the products [230] 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.
NOTES:
1) Cf. Frederic Barnard Hawley, Enterprise and the Productive Process, for 
an extreme, mature and consistent development of this tenet.
2) 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).
3) Cf., e. g., Ehrenberg, Das Zeitalter der Fugger; Sombart, Der Moderne 
Kapitalismus, bk. i.
4) Cf. The Theory of the Leisure Class, ch. iv, v, vi.
5) Cf. Harrington Emerson, Efficiency as a Basis for Operation and Wages.
6) 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.
7) 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.

[231]
CHAPTER VI
THE ERA OF HANDICRAFT (1*)

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 [232] 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.(2*) 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 [233] 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 [234] 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 
[235] 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 naive 
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 [236] 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 [237] 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.(3*)
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 
[238] 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.
[239] 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.(4*) The next serious [240] 
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 [241] 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 [242] 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 naive 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, win be the rate of advance in the technological mastery of 
mechanical facts.
But much else goes to the makeup 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.
[243] 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 native 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 [244] 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.(5*)
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 [245] 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.
[246] 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 medićval 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,(6*) 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 [247] 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 state-making 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 [248] 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, [249] 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 [250] 
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 medićval 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.(7*) In effect, after the 
handicraft era [251] 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 [252] 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 
[253] 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 pertinence 
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 tradi-[254]tional 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 
naive form which the sense of workmanship gives to anthropomorphic 
interpretation among more primitive peoples.(8*) 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 
[255] 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 medićval 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, [256] 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 medićval 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 dose 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 [257] 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 acre, 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 [258] 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 [259] 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(9*) 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 [260] 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 [261] 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 [262] postulate 
touching a putative fact - is the distinguishing characteristic of modern 
science as contrasted with any other scheme of systematised knowledge.(10*)
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 [263] 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 naive 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 [264] 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, coordinated 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 [265] 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 [266] 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 medićval 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 
[267] 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 visibily 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 hand-
[268]icraft 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.(11*)

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 state-making. 
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 [269] 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 dose. 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 coordination 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, 
[270] 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 [271] 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 [272] 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 [273] 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 [274] 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.(12*) In its earliest, impecunious beginnings, handicraft as known 
in medićval 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 [275] feudal protector or religious corporation that 
found some advantage in this novel arrangement.(13*)
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 [276] 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, 
[277] 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 [278] 
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 co-operation, 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 [279] 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 [280] 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 
bad 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 indus-[281]try, 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 [282] 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.(14*)
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 
[283] 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 state-
making; and the discipline of life does not run to [284] 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 state-making 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 [285] 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.(15*)
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 [286] 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.
[287] 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 [288] 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.(16*)
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 [289] 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 Eng-[290]land, 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 [291] 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 capitu-[292]laries 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.
[293] 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 [294] 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 medićval 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 medićval 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 medićval scheme, should logic-[295]ally 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 [296] urgent call for 
its use by other members of the group.(17*)
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.
[297] 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 of 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 
[298] 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.
NOTES:
1) "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.
2) Cf. Sombart, Der Moderne Kapitalismus, bk. i; W. J. Ashley, English 
Economic History and Theory, bk. i, especially ch. W; Karl Bücher, Die 
Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft, ch. iv, v.
3) 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.
4) 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 do-[240]main 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.
5) Cf. Sombart, Moderne Kapitalismus, bk. i, Exkurs zu Kapitel 7, bk. ii, 
ch. xv.
6) Outside of the Orient, where something similar is to be seen back in the 
Arabic and earlier cultural eras. [Note: This footnote was first added in 
the 1964 edition (Kelley), due to Veblen’s remarks in a copy of a friend.]
7) 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.
8) See ch. ii and iii, above.
9) 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 medićval cult on the other hand is striking 
enough. In point of sentimental content this conception of Nature is more 
nearly in touch with the medićval Mother of God than with the Heavenly 
King.
10) 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 Leibniz and of Berkeley 
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.
11) 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.
12) See chapter v, above.
13) Cf. Ashley, English Economic History and Theory, bk. i, ch. i; Karl 
Bücher, Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft, ch. iii.
14) Cf. R. Ehrenberg, Das Zeitalter der Fugger.
15) 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.
16) 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 iii 
his own person; this nobody has a right to but himself. The labour of his 
body and the work of his bands we may say are properly his. Whatsoever, 
then, be 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."
17) 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.
[299]
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.(1*)
Such a precise date is scarcely serviceable for any other [300] 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 [301] 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 dose 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 [302] 
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 [303] 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 
latter-day 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 [304] 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 [305] 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 re-[306]pining, 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.(2*) [307] 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 
minutić 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 [308] 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 [309] 
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.(3*)
[310] 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 
[311] 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.(4*) 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 [312] 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 [313] 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 timeworn 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 work-man 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 [314] 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 
improve-[315]ments. 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 waste 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 manoeuvres 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 con-
[316]trivance 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.(5*)
[317] 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 [318] 
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 [319] 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 [320] of thought, can be "natural" to the common run of 
civilised mankind.
According to accepted theories of heredity,(6*) 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.(7*) 
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.(8*) All of which goes to 
show, what is the [321] 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 [322] 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 
[323] 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.(9*) 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 
[324] 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.(10*)
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 
circum-[325]stances 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. [326] 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 twen-[327]tieth 
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 dear 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 dear 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 [328] 
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 [329] 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 [330] 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 con-[331]tent 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 inexorably efficient ways of the machine 
process, the fact that it works is conclusive of its truth.(11*) 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 disci-[332]pline 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 [333] 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 naive 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 [334] 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.(12*)
[335] 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 [336] 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 formulć 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. [337] 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 [338] 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 [339] 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 Con-[340]servation of Energy by appeal to experiments and reasoning 
that proceeded with absolute naiveté 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 [341] 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.(13*)
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 [342] 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.
[343] 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.(14*)
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 [344] 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 [345] 
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 
[346] 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 
under-[347]take "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 manoeuvres 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 [348] financial side of business. The state of the industrial arts 
requires that these several factors should cooperate 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) [349] 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 [350] 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;(15*) 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 [351] 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 [352] are in great part subject to the 
discretion of the larger.(16*)
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.(17*) 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 native 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 [353] 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 work-day 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 
[354] 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 magni-[355]tude 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.
NOTES:
1) 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.
2) In a general way, the relation in which the skilled workman in the [307] 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.
3) 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.
4) Cf., e. g., Adam Smith's reflections on the uses of an accurate watch. 
Theory of the Moral Sentiments, part iv, ch. 2.
5) 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 "prevarica-[317]tion." 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.
6) See pp. 18-21, above.
7) 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.
8) 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 
[321] 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.
9) 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.
10) 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.
11) "Pragmatism" is the term that has been elected to cover this 
metaphysical postulate of efficiency conceived as the bench-mark of 
actuality.
12) 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 naive. 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 naive 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.
[335] 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 [336] 
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.
13) 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.
14) Unless the "Syndicalist" movement is to be taken as something 
sufficiently definite in its principles to make it an exception to the 
rule.
15) 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.
16) Cf. a paper "On the Nature of Capital" in the Quarterly Journal of 
Economics, November, 1908.
17) 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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