THE INSTINCT OF WORKMANSHIP & THE STATE OF THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS. Thorstein Veblen

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.

Chapter I.
Introductory

Table of Contents

For mankind as for the other higher animals, the life of the species is conditioned by the complement of instinctive proclivities and tropismatic aptitudes with which the species is typically endowed. Not only is the continued life of the race dependent on the adequacy of its instinctive proclivities in this way, but the routine and details of its life are also, in the last resort, determined by these instincts. These are the prime movers in human behaviour, as in the behaviour of all those animals that show self-direction or discretion. Human activity, in so far as it can be spoken of as conduct, can never exceed the scope of these instinctive dispositions, by initiative of which man takes action. Nothing falls within the human scheme of things desirable to be done except what answers to these native proclivities of man. These native proclivities alone make anything worth while, and out of their working emerge not only the purpose and efficiency of life, but its substantial pleasures and pains as well.

Latterly the words “instinct” and “instinctive” are no longer well seen among students of those biological sciences where they once had a great vogue. Students who occupy themselves with the psychology of animal behaviour are cautiously avoiding these expressions, and in this caution they are doubtless well advised. For such use the word appears no longer to be serviceable as a technical term. It has lost the requisite sharp definition and consistency of connotation, apparently through disintegration under a more searching analysis than the phenomena comprised under this concept had previously been subjected to. In these biological sciences interest is centering not on the question of what activities may be set down to innate propensity or predisposition at large, but rather on the determination of the irreducible psychological - and, indeed, physiological - elements that go to make up animal behaviour. For this purpose “instinct” is a concept of too lax and shifty a definition to meet the demands of exact biological science.

For the sciences that deal with the psychology of human conduct a similarly searching analysis of the elementary facts of behaviour is doubtless similarly desirable; and under such closer scrutiny of these facts it will doubtless appear that here, too, the broad term “instinct” is of too unprecise a character to serve the needs of an exhaustive psychological analysis. But the needs of an inquiry into the nature and causes of the growth of institutions are not precisely the same as those of such an exhaustive psychological analysis. A genetic inquiry into institutions will address itself to the growth of habits and conventions, as conditioned by the material environment and by the innate and persistent propensities of human nature; and for these propensities, as they take effect in the give and take of cultural growth, no better designation than the timeworn “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 everyday 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

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