The distrust of Utilitarianism need be ascribed to none of these. It comes instead from a conception of the true Utilitarian as a dull and dogmatic being with no interests beyond the range of his own uninquiring vision, no aspiration beyond the complacent survey of his own perfections and no standards beyond the inventory of his own bourgeois tastes and prejudices. The type is indeed not yet extinct in our day: but is it plausible to charge a "new" philosophy with conspiring to perpetuate it? Is Instrumentalism only philistinism called by a more descriptive name? It professes at least to be a logic of hypothesis and experiment, whereas for the perfect philistine there are no ultimate problems and hence no logic but the logic of self-evidence. When Instrumentalism speaks of needs and interests in its analysis of truth and goodness does it then mean the needs and interests that define the individual in what is sometimes invidiously termed a "biological" sense—interests that control him before his conduct becomes in any way a problem for himself? Quite as a matter of course, just this has been the assumption. The satisfactoriness of prompt and cogent classification has had a hand in the vindication of truth's supremacy over satisfaction. In the view of instrumentalism this ready interpretation of its meaning is nothing less than the thinking of the unthinkable and the bodying-forth of what is not. The man who has solved a problem simply is not the man he was before—if his problem was a genuine one and it was he who solved it. He cannot measure and judge the outcome by his earlier demands for the very good reason that the outcome of real deliberation empties these earlier demands of their interest and authority for him.
Can the conception thus suggested of personal growth through exercise of creative or constructive intelligence be in any measure verified by a general survey of the economic side of life? Has it any important bearings upon any parts of economic theory? These are the questions to which this essay is addressed.
I
§ 2. How have the real or fancied needs of the average person of today come to be what they are? For all sorts and conditions of men, the ways and means of living have, during the past century or two—even during the past decade or two—undergone revolutionary changes. It is true that many of these changes have been relatively superficial, touching only certain externalities and entering in no important way into life's underlying and dominant motives. Others, no doubt, may fairly be held to confuse and disperse the energies of men, instead of making for wholeness, sanity and development of human interest and power. And critics of industrial and social progress who have felt the need for reservations of this sort fall easily into a certain mood of historic homesickness for the supposed "simplicity" of an earlier age. But our interest, in this discussion, is in the genesis, the actual process of becoming, of our present "standards of living," not their value as rated by any critical (or uncritical) standard. And accordingly we shall take it for a fact that on the whole the average person of today is reasonably, perhaps unreasonably, well satisfied with his telephone, his typewriter, and his motor-car; with his swift and easy journeyings over land and sea; with his increasingly scientific medical attendance and public sanitation; with his virtually free supplies of literature and information, new and old, and with his electric light or his midnight oil (triple distilled) to aid in the perusal. More than this, he is so well satisfied with all these modern inventions that, historical or æsthetical or other "holidays" apart, he would never for a moment dispense with any one of them as a matter of free choice. Grossly material and humbly instrumental though they are, these things and their like constitute the framework sustaining the whole system of spiritual functions that make up the life we live today, as a society and as individuals. And our present problem simply is the way in which they were first received by those who were to use them, and passed into their present common acceptance. To put the matter in general terms, how is it that novel means of action or enjoyment, despite their novelty, are able to command fair scrutiny and hearing and can contrive to make their way, often very speedily, into a position of importance for industry and life?
There is an easy and not unnatural way of thinking of this process as we see it going on about us that may keep us long unmindful of even the possibility of such a question. In every field of action, we habitually look back upon accomplished changes from some present well-secured vantage-point, and as we trace the steps by which they have come to pass it is almost inevitable that we should first see the sequence as an approach, direct or devious but always sure, to the stage on which we happen to have taken our stand. It seems clear to us that what we have attained is better than aught that has gone before—if it were not distinctly satisfactory on its own merits we should not now be taking it as the standpoint for a survey. But once it is so taken, our recognition of its appreciable and satisfying superiority passes over insensibly into metaphysics. What we now find good we find ourselves perceiving to have been all the while predestined in the eternal scheme of things! We pause in retrospect like the wayfarer who has reached the turning of a mountain road or the man of middle age who for the first time feels that his professional position is assured. This, we say, justifies the effort it has cost, this at last is really living! And the next step in retrospective reconstruction follows easily; this was my true goal from the first, the dim and inexpressible hope of which would not let me pause and kept me until now dissatisfied. The end was present in the beginning, provoking the first groping efforts and affording progressively the test and measure by which their results were found ever wanting.
This retrospective logic may explain the presence and perennial charm of those panoramic pages in our encyclopædias purporting to show forth the gradual perfecting of great instrumentalities upon which our modern life depends. We survey the "evolution" of printing, for example, from the wooden blocks of the Chinese or of Laurens Coster down to the Hoe press, the stereotype plate, and the linotype machine. Or we see the forms of written record from pictured papyrus, cuneiform brick, and manuscript scroll down to the printed book and the typewritten page; the means of carriage by land from the ox-cart of the patriarchs to the stage-coach, the Cannonball Limited, the motor-truck, and the twelve-cylinder touring-car. And as one contemplates these cheerfully colored exhibits there is in each case an almost irresistible suggestion of a constant and compelling need of "universal man" seeking in more and more marvellously ingenious ways an adequate expression and satisfaction. This need seems never to have lapsed or changed its nature. All along both driving power and direction, it has been the one fixed factor in a long process in which all else has been fluctuating, contingent, and imperfect—all else except the nature of the materials and the principles of mechanics, which, too, are seen in the end to have been mutely conspiring toward the result. Essential human nature, it seems clear, does not and happily cannot change. Spiritual progress, in this ultimate optimism, means simply clearer vision, completer knowledge, and a less petulant and self-assertive habit of insistence upon the details of particular purposes as individual "impulse" and "idiosyncrasy" define them. We fortunate beings of today have available, in the various departments of our life, certain instrumentalities, and to these our interests attach. These interests of ours in their proportional strength (so the argument runs) express our native and generic constitution in so far as this constitution has been able as yet to achieve outward expression and embodiment. And accordingly, in interpreting the long history of technological evolution, we take what we conceive ourselves now to be as normative and essential. We project back into the lives of primitive man, of our own racial ancestors, or of our grandfathers, the habits and requirements which we acknowledge in ourselves today and we conceive the men of the past to have been driven forward on the ways of progress by the identical discontent that would presumably beset ourselves if we were to be suddenly carried back to their scale and manner of existence.
§ 3. Whatever else may be thought of it, there is at least this to be said for the cult of historic homesickness to which reference has just been made: it happens to be at one with modern ethnology and history in suggesting that earlier cultures were on the whole not less content and self-satisfied in their condition than our own. It is primitive man, not the modern, who is slow to move and is satisfied, as a matter of course, with the manner of life in which he fancies his people to have lived from time immemorial. Change in early social groups is tragic when it is not insensible. It comes through conquest and enslavement by outsiders or through stress of the dread of these, or by gradual adaptation of custom to failing environmental resources or to increasing wealth. Assent to change is in general grudging or tacit at best and is commonly veiled by some more or less transparent fiction.
And our suspicion of fallacy lurking somewhere in the type of retrospective Idealism we have been considering is strengthened when we come to look a little closely to details. To take a commonplace example—can it be held that the difference between using a typewriter and "writing by hand" is purely and simply a matter of degree—that the machine serves the same purpose and accomplishes the same kind of result as the pen, but simply does the work more easily, rapidly, and neatly? Undoubtedly some such impression may easily be gathered from an external survey of the ways that men have used at different times for putting their ideas on record. But it ignores important aspects of the case. For one thing, the modern invention effects a saving of the writer's time which can be used in further investigation or in more careful revision or in some way wholly unrelated to literary work, and if the machine makes any part of the writer's task less irksome, or the task as a whole less engrossing, the whole matter of literary effort becomes less forbidding and its place and influence as a social or a personal function may for better or for worse be altered. The difference brought to pass transcends mere technical facility—it ramifies into a manifold of differences affecting the entire qualitative character and meaning of the literary function. And only by an arbitrary sophistication of the facts can this complexity of new outcome be thought of as implicit and dynamic in the earlier stage.
In the same way precisely, the motor-car, as every one knows, has "vanquished distance" and has "revolutionized suburban life." In England it is said to have made acute the issue of plural voting. In America it is hailed by the optimistic as the solution of the vexed problem of urban concentration and the decline of agriculture. Even as a means of recreation it is said by the initiated to transform the whole meaning of one's physical environment, exploiting new values in sky and air and the green earth, which pass the utmost possibilities of family "carry-all" or coach and four. Or consider the ocean steamship and its influence: today we travel freely over the world, for all manner of reasons, sufficient or otherwise. A hundred years ago distant journeyings by sea or land were arduous and full of peril, undertaken only by the most adventurous or the most curious or for urgent need. Now commodities of every sort can be transported to virtually every quarter of the globe—rails and locomotives, cement and structural steel, machinery of all kinds from the motor and the dynamo to the printing press and the cinematograph, in a word whatever is necessary to recreate the waste places of the earth and to make life in these regions humanly liveable. The sheer scale and magnitude of such operations lifts them above the level of the international trade of five hundred or even a hundred years ago. And their far-reaching results of every sort in the lives of nations and of individuals the world over can in no intelligible sense be understood as mere homogeneous multiples of what trade meant before our age of steam, iron, and electricity. Finally, we may think of modern developments in printing as compared, for example, with the state of the craft in the days when the New England Primer served to induct juvenile America into the pleasant paths of "art and literature." And it is clear that the mechanical art that makes books and reading both widely inviting and easily possible of enjoyment today is not merely a more perfect substitute for the quill and ink-horn of the mediæval scribe or even for the printing press of Caxton or of Benjamin Franklin. The enormously and variously heightened "efficiency" of the mechanical instrumentalities nowadays available has for good and for evil carried forward the whole function of printing and publication into relations and effects which are qualitatively new and beyond the possible conception of the earlier inventors and readers.
§ 4. The real evolution in such cases of the coming of a new commodity or a new instrument into common and established use is an evolution of a more radical, more distinctly epigenetic type than the pictured stories of the encyclopædia-maker serve to suggest. At each forward step the novelty makes possible not merely satisfactions more adequate as measured by existing requirements or more economical in terms of cost, but new satisfactions also for which no demand or desire before existed or could possibly exist—satisfactions which, once become habitual, make the contentment of former times in the lack of them hard to understand or credit. And indeed the story is perhaps never quite one-sided; the gain we reckon is perhaps never absolutely unmixed. There may be, perhaps must in principle be, not only gain but loss. The books we read have lost something of the charm of the illuminated manuscript; our compositors and linotypers, it may be, have forgotten something of the piety and devotion of the mediæval scribe and copyist. So everywhere in industry the machine depreciates and pushes out the skilled artisan and craftsman, summoning into his place the hired operative whose business is to feed and serve instead of to conceive and execute. For cheapness and abundance, for convenience of repair and replacement we everywhere sacrifice something of artistic quality in the instrumentalities of life and action and something of freedom and self-expression in the processes of manufacture. Thus again, to change the venue, there are those who miss in democratic government or in an ethical type of religion the poignant and exalting spiritual quality of devotion to a personal sovereign or a personal God. Whatever one's judgment may be in particular cases, there can be no reason for disputing that in epigenetic or creative evolution there is, in a sense, loss as well as gain. There is no more reason for supposing that all that was wholesome or ennobling or beautiful in an earlier function must somehow have its specific compensation in kind infallibly present in the new than for supposing that all that is desirable in the new must surely have been present discernibly or indiscernibly in the old.