THE COLLECTED WORKS OF THORSTEIN VEBLEN: Business Theories, Economic Articles & Essays. Thorstein Veblen
hybrid forms it is possible to construct a composite type that will breed true in respect of the characters upon which the selection is directed, and that such a “pure line” may be maintained indefinitely, in spite of its hybrid origin, so long as it is not crossed back on one or other of the parent stocks, or on a hybrid stock that is not pure-bred in respect of the selected characters.
So, if the conditions of life in any community consistently favour a given type of hybrid, whether the favouring conditions are of a cultural or of a material nature, something of a selective trend will take effect in such a community and set toward a hybrid type which shall meet these conditions.
The result will be the establishment of a composite pure line showing the advantageous traits of physique and temperament, combined with a varying complement of other characters that have no such selective value.
Traits that have no selective value in the given case will occur with fortuitous freedom, combining in unconstrained diversity with the selectively decisive traits, and so will mark the hybrid derivation of this provisionally established composite pure line. With continued intercrossing within itself any given population of such hybrid origin as the European peoples, would tend cumulatively to breed true to such a selectively favourable hybrid type, rather than to any one of the ultimate racial types represented by the parent stocks out of which the hybrid population is ultimately made up. So would emerge a national or local type, which would show the selectively decisive traits with a great degree of consistency but would vary indefinitely in respect of the selectively idle traits comprised in the composite heredity of the population. Such a composite pure line would be provisionally stable only; it should break down when crossed back on either of the parent stocks. This “provisionally stable composite pure line” should disappear when crossed on pure-bred individuals of one or other of the parent stocks from which it is drawn, - pure-bred in respect of the allelomorphic characters which give the hybrid type its typical traits.
But whatever the degree of stability possessed by these hybrid national or local types, the outcome for the present purpose is much the same; the hybrid populations afford a greater scope and range of variation in their human nature than could be had within the limits of any pure-bred race.
Yet, for all the multifarious diversity of racial and national types, early and late, and for all the wide divergence of hybrid variants, there is no difficulty about recognising a generical human type of spiritual endowment, just as the 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 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-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 solicitude for the welfare of the race at large is to be credited to the parental bent, but it is beyond question that this instinctive disposition has a large part in the sentimental concern entertained by nearly all persons for the life and comfort of the community at large, and particularly for the community’s future welfare. Doubtless this parental bent in its wider bearing greatly reënforces that sentimental approval of economy and efficiency for the common good and disapproval of wasteful and useless living that prevails so generally throughout both the highest and the lowest cultures, unless it should rather be said that this animus for economy and efficiency is a simple expression of the parental disposition itself. It might on the other hand be maintained that such an animus of economy is an essential function of the instinct of workmanship, which would then be held to be strongly sustained at this point by a parental solicitude for the common good.
In making use of the expression, “instinct of workmanship” or “sense of workmanship,” it is not here intended to assume or to argue that the proclivity so designated is in the psychological respect a simple or irreducible element; still less, of course, is there any intention to allege that it is to be traced back in the physiological respect to some one isolable tropismatic sensibility or some single enzymotic or visceral stimulus. All that is matter for the attention of those whom it may concern. The expression may as well be taken to signify a concurrence of several instinctive aptitudes, each of which might or might not prove simple or irreducible when subjected to psychological or physiological analysis. For the present inquiry it is enough to note that in human behaviour this disposition is effective in such consistent, ubiquitous and resilient fashion that students of human culture will have to count with it as one of the integral hereditary traits of mankind.12 As has already appeared, neither this nor any other instinctive