The instinct of workmanship, and the state of industrial arts

by Thorstein Veblen

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Material science of the modern sort has been drawn into the discussion as a cultural phenomenon closely bound up with the state of the industrial arts under the handicraft system. This modern science may, indeed, be taken as the freest manifestation of that habit of mind that comes to its more concrete expression in the technology of the time. To show the pertinency of such a recourse to the state of science as an outcome of the discipline exercised by the routine of life in the era of handicraft some further detail touching the state and progress of scientific inquiry during that period will be in place.

In its beginnings, the theoretical postulates and preconceptions of modern science are drawn from the scholastic speculations of the late Middle Ages; the problems which the new science undertook to handle, on the other hand, were, by and large, such concrete and material questions as the current difficulties of technology brought to the notice of the investigators. These traditional postulates, preconceptions, canons, and logical methods that stood over from the past were essentially of a theological complexion, and were the outcome of much time, attention and insight spent on the systematisation of knowledge in a cultural situation whose substantial core was the relation of master and servant, and under the guidance of a theological bias worked out on the same ground. The postulates of this speculative body of knowledge and the preconceptions with which the scholastic speculators went to their work of systematisation, accordingly, are of a highly anthropomorphic character; but it is not the anthropomorphism of workmanship, at least not in the naïve form which the sense of workmanship gives to anthropomorphic interpretation among more primitive peoples.[128] It may be taken as a matter of course that the sense of workmanship is present in its native, direct presentment throughout the intellectual life of the middle ages, as it necessarily is under all the permutations of human culture; but it is equally a matter of course that the promptings of an unsophisticated sense of workmanship do not afford the final test of what is right and good in a cultural situation drawn on rigid lines of mastery and submission.

During the middle ages the faith had taken on an extremely authoritative and coercive character, to answer to the similar principles of organisation and control that ruled in secular affairs; so that at the transition to modern times the religious cult of Christendom was substantially a cult of fearsome subjection and arbitrary authority. Much else, of a more genial character, was of course comprised in the principles of the faith of that time, but when all is said the fact remains that even in its genial traits it was a cult of irresponsible authority and abject submission,—a cult of the pastoral-predatory type, adapted and perfected to answer the circumstances of feudal Europe, and so embodying the principles (habits of thought) that characterised the feudal system.

Notoriously, the fashions of religious faith change tardily. Such change is always of the nature of concession. And since the conceptions of the cult are of no material consequence, taken by themselves and in their direct incidence, they are subject, as such, to no direct or deliberate control or correction in behalf of the community’s material interests or its technological requirements. It is almost if not altogether by force of their consonance or dissonance with the prevailing habits of thought inculcated by the routine of life that any given run of religious verities find acceptance, command general adherence to their teaching, or become outworn and are discarded; and such lack of consonance must become very pronounced before a radical change of the kind in question will take effect. Barring conversion to a new faith, it is commonly by insensible shifts of adaptation and reconstruction that any wide-reaching change is worked out in these fundamental conceptions. Such was the character of the move by which the Mediæval cult merged in the modernised theological concepts of a later age.

Gradually, by force of unremitting habituation to a new scheme of life, and marked by long-drawn theological polemics, a change passed over the spirit of theological speculation, whereby the fundamentals of the faith were infused with the spirit of the handicraft system, and the preconceptions of workmanship insensibly supplanted those of mastery and subservience in the working concepts of devout Christendom. Meantime, while the routine of the era of handicraft was slowly reconstructing the current conceptions of divinity on lines consonant with the habit of mind of workmanship, the ancient conceptions continued with gradually abating force to assert their prescriptive dominion over men’s habitual thinking. This gradually loosening hold of the ancient conceptions is best seen in the speculations of the philosophers and in the higher generalisations of scientific inquiry in early modern times.

In the mediæval speculations whether theological, philosophical or scientific, the search for truth runs back to the authentic ground of the religious verities,—largely to revealed truth; and these religious verities run back to the question, “What hath God ordained?” In the course of the era of handicraft this ultimate question of knowledge came to take the form, “What hath God wrought?” Not that the creative office of God in the divine economy was overlooked or in any degree intentionally made light of by the earlier speculators; nor that the sovereignty of God was denied or in any degree questioned by those devout inquirers who carried forward the work in later time. But in that earlier phase of faith and inquiry it is distinctly the suzerainty of God, and His ordinances, that afford the ground of finality on which all inquiry touching the economy of this world ultimately come to rest; and in the later phase, as seen at the close of the era of handicraft, it is as distinctly His creative office and the logic of His creative design that fill the place of an ultimate term in human inquiry—as that inquiry conventionally runs within the spiritual frontiers of Christendom. God had not ceased to be the Heavenly King, and had not ceased to be glorified with the traditional phrases of homage as the Most High, the Lord of Hosts etc., but somewhat incongruously He had also come to be exalted as the Great Artificer—the preternatural craftsman. The vulgar habits of thought bred in the workday populace by the routine of the workshop and the market place had stolen their way into the sanctuary and the counsels of divinity.

Similarly, in the best days of scholastic learning scientific inquiry ran back for a secure foundation to the authentic ordinances of the Heavenly King; under the discipline of the era of handicraft it learned instead to push its inquiries to the ground of efficient cause, ultimately of course, in the philosophical liquidation of accounts in that devout age, to the creative efficiency of the First Cause. In the scientific inquiries of the earlier age the test of truth was the test of authenticity, and the logic of systematisation by use of which knowledge in that time was digested and stored away was essentially a logic of subsumption under securely authentic categories that could be run back at need to the ascertained requirements of the glory of God. The canon of truth is that of the revealed word, reënforced and filled out with the quasi-divine Aristotelian scheme of things. It is a logic of hierarchical congruity in respect of potencies and qualities, suggestively resembling the devolution of powers and dignities under the finished scheme of feudalism. In the later age the good of man gradually, insensibly supplants the glory of God as the ultimate ground of systematisation. The sentimental ground of conviction comes to be the recognised serviceability of the ascertained facts for human use, rather than their conformity with the putative exigencies of a self-centred divine will. The Providential Order that means so much in the scheme of knowledge in the mature years of the era of handicraft is an order imposed by a providentially beneficent Creator who looks to the good of man; as it has been expressed, it is a scheme of “humanism.”

By the close of the era this beneficent providential order had worked out in an Order of Nature, indued with the same meliorative trend; and in the sentimental conviction of the inquiring spirits of that age it lay in the nature of this beneficent order of the universe that in the end, in the finished product of its working, it would bring about the highest practicable state of well-being for man,—very much as any skilled workman of sound sense and a good heart would turn out good and serviceable goods. And in this Order of Nature, as it runs in the matter-of-course convictions of thoughtful men at the close of the era, the person of the deity, even as a workmanlike creative Providence, had fallen into the background. The Order of Nature, with its scheme of Natural Law, is felt as the work of a consummately skilful and ingenious workmanlike agency that looks to a serviceable end to be accomplished; and the profoundly thoughtful scientific inquiry of that time harbours no doubt that this workmanlike agency of Nature at large rules the world of visible fact and will achieve its good work in good time. But this quasi-personal Nature is not reverenced for anything but its workmanlike qualities; the awe which it inspires is not the fear of God, such as that fear has played its part under the feudalistic rule of the church and sent men hunting cover from the imminent wrath to come. As he stands in the presence of this eighteenth-century Nature, man is not primarily a sinner seeking a remission of penalties at all costs, but rather a focus of workmanlike attention upon whose welfare all the forces of the visible universe beneficently converge.

How this workmanlike Nature goes about her[129] work is no more plain to the casual spectator than are the recondite processes of high-wrought handicraft to the uninstructed. But Nature after all accomplishes her ends in a workmanlike fashion, and by staying by and patiently watching the operations of Nature and construing the facts of observation by the sympathetic use of a rational common sense men may learn much of the methods of her manipulation as well as of the rules of procedure under whose guidance the works of Nature are accomplished. For it is a matter of course to that generation that Nature is essentially rational in her aims and logic as well as in the technology of her work; very much after the fashion of the master craftsman, who goes to his work with an intelligent oversight of the available means and the purpose to be wrought out, as well as with a firm and facile touch on all that passes under his trained hand. Like the perfect craftsman, “Nature never makes mistakes,” “never makes a jump,” “never does anything in vain,” “never turns out anything but perfect work.”