THE COLLECTED WORKS OF THORSTEIN VEBLEN: Business Theories, Economic Articles & Essays. Thorstein Veblen
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 means of a sign-language systematised into ritual, and by a symbolism of amity reënforced with gifts and professions of goodwill. Hence a growth of occult meanings and ceremonial procedure, to which the argument win have to return presently.46
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 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 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 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.47 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 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.48 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.49 The legends of fire have commonly become legends of a fire-bringer, etc.,50 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.
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.51 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