THE COLLECTED WORKS OF THORSTEIN VEBLEN: Business Theories, Economic Articles & Essays. Thorstein Veblen
such reactions as are doubtfully to be distinguished from simple reflex action on the one hand, to such as are doubtfully recognised as instinctive because of the extent to which reflection and deliberation enter into their execution on the other hand. By insensible gradation the lower (less complex and deliberate) instinctive activities merge into the class of unmistakable tropismatic sensibilities, without its being practicable to determine by any secure test where the one category should be declared to end and the other to begin.3 Such quasi-tropismatic activities may be rated as purposeful by an observer, in the sense that they are seen to further the life of the individual agent or of the species, while there is no consciousness of purpose on the part of the agent under observation; whereas “instinct,” in the narrower and special sense to which it seems desirable to restrict the term for present use, denotes the conscious pursuit of an objective end which the instinct in question makes worth while.
The ends of life, then, the purposes to be achieved, are assigned by man’s instinctive proclivities; but the ways and means of accomplishing those things which the instinctive proclivities so make worth while are a matter of intelligence. It is a distinctive mark of mankind that the working-out of the instinctive proclivities of the race is guided by intelligence to a degree not approached by the other animals. But the dependence of the race on its endowment of instincts is no less absolute for this intervention of intelligence; since it is only by the prompting of instinct that reflection and deliberation come to be so employed, and since instinct also governs the scope and method of intelligence in all this employment of it. Men take thought, but the human spirit, that is to say the racial endowment of instinctive proclivities, decides what they shall take thought of, and how and to what effect.
Yet the dependence of the scheme of life on the complement of instinctive proclivities hereby becomes less immediate, since a more or less extended logic of ways and means comes to intervene between the instinctively given end and its realisation; and the lines of relation between any given instinctive proclivity and any particular feature of human conduct are by so much the more devious and roundabout and the more difficult to trace.
The higher the degree of intelligence and the larger the available body of knowledge current in any given community, the more extensive and elaborate will be the logic of ways and means interposed between these impulses and their realisation, and the more multifarious and complicated will be the apparatus of expedients and resources employed to compass those ends that are instinctively worth while.
This apparatus of ways and means available for the pursuit of whatever may be worth seeking is, substantially all, a matter of tradition out of the past, a legacy of habits of thought accumulated through the experience of past generations. So that the manner, and in a great degree the measure, in which the instinctive ends of life are worked out under any given cultural situation is somewhat closely conditioned by these elements of habit, which so fall into shape as an accepted scheme of life. The instinctive proclivities are essentially simple and look directly to the attainment of some concrete objective end; but in detail the ends so sought are many and diverse, and the ways and means by which they may be sought are similarly diverse and various, involving endless recourse to expedients, adaptations, and concessive adjustment between several proclivities that are all sufficiently urgent.
Under the discipline of habituation this logic and apparatus of ways and means falls into conventional lines, acquires the consistency of custom and prescription, and so takes on an institutional character and force. The accustomed ways of doing and thinking not only become an habitual matter of course, easy and obvious, but they come likewise to be sanctioned by social convention, and so become right and proper and give rise to principles of conduct. By use and wont they are incorporated into the current scheme of common sense. 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 own ulterior purpose into the background and often let it be lost sight of; as may happen, for instance, in the acquisition and use of money. It follows that in much of human conduct these proximate ends alone are present in consciousness as the object of interest and the goal of endeavour, and certain conventionally accepted ways and means come to be set up as definitive principles of what is right and good; while the ulterior purpose of it all is only called to mind occasionally, if at all, as an afterthought, by an effort of reflection.4 Among psychologists who have busied themselves with these questions there has hitherto been no large measure of agreement as to the number of specific instinctive proclivities that so are native to man; nor is there any agreement as to the precise functional range and content ascribed to each. In a loose way it is apparently taken for granted that these instincts are to be conceived as discrete and specific elements in human nature, each working out its own determinate functional content without greatly blending with or being diverted by the working of its neighbours in that spiritual complex into which they all enter as constituent elements.5 For the purposes of an exhaustive psychological analysis it is doubtless expedient to make the most of such discreteness as is observable among the instinctive proclivities. But for an inquiry into the scope and method of their working-out in the growth of institutions it is perhaps even more to the purpose to take note of how and with what effect the several instinctive proclivities cross, blend, overlap, neutralise or reënforce one another.
The most convincing genetic view of these phenomena throws the instinctive proclivities into close relation with the tropismatic sensibilities and brings them, in the physiological respect, into the same general class with the latter.6 If taken uncritically and in general terms this view would seem to carry the implication that the instincts should be discrete and discontinuous among themselves somewhat after the same fashion as the tropismatic sensibilities with which they are in great measure bound up; but on closer scrutiny such a genetic theory of the instincts does not appear to enforce the view that they are to be conceived as effectually discontinuous or mutually exclusive, though it may also not involve the contrary, - that they make a continuous or ambiguously segmented body of spiritual elements. The recognised tropisms stand out, to all appearance, as sharply defined physiological traits, transmissible by inheritance intact and unmodified, separable and unblended, in a manner suggestively like the “unit characters” spoken of in latter day theories of heredity.7
While the instinctive sensibilities may not be explained as derivatives of the tropisms, there is enough of similarity in the working of the two to suggest that the two classes of phenomena must both be accounted for on somewhat similar physiological grounds. The simple and more narrowly defined instinctive dispositions, which have much of the appearance of immediate reflex nervous action and automatically defined response, lend themselves passably to such an interpretation, - as, for example, the gregarious instinct, or the instinct of repulsion with its accompanying emotion of disgust. Such as these are shared by mankind with the other higher animals on a fairly even footing; and these are relatively simple, immediate, and not easily sophisticated or offset by habit. These seem patently to be of much the same nature as the tropismatic sensibilities; though even in these simpler instinctive dispositions the characteristic quasi-tropismatic sensibility distinctive of each appears to be complicated with obscure stimulations of the nerve centres arising out of the functioning of one or another of the viscera. And what is true of the simpler instincts in this respect should apply to the vaguer and more complex instincts also, but with a larger allowance for a more extensive complication of visceral and organic stimuli.
Whether these subconscious stimulations of the nerve centres through the functioning of the viscera are to be conceived in terms of tropismatic reaction is a difficult question which has had little attention hitherto.
But in any case, whatever the expert students of these phenomena may have to say of this matter, the visceral or or-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.
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