[142] On the other hand the aphorism often cited, that “Necessity is the Mother of Invention,” appears to be nothing better than a fragment of uncritical rationalism. It offers a rationalised, ex post facto account of changes that take place, and reflects that ancient preconception by help of which the spokesmen of edification were enabled to interpret all change as an improvement due to the achievement of some definitely foreknown end. It appears also to be consistently untrue, except so far as “invention” is to be taken as a euphemistic synonym for “prevarication.” Doubtless, the felt need of ways and means has brought on many changes in technology, but doubtless also the ulterior consequences of any one of the greater mechanical inventions have in the main been neither foreseen nor intended in the designing of them. The more serious consequences, especially such as have an institutional bearing, have been enforced by the inventions rather than designed by the inventors.
[144] Cf., however, what has been said above (pp. 21–23) of the variability and adaptability of a hybrid population and the possible selective establishment of a hybrid type more suitable to current conditions of life than any one of the racial stocks out of which the hybrid population is made up.
[145] So, e. g., the modern technology has, directly and indirectly, brought on the growth of large cities and industrial towns, as well as an increasing density of population at large. This modern state of the industrial arts is a creation of the European community of nations, with the blond-hybrid populations leading. The population of these countries is drifting into these machine-made cities and towns, and this drift affects the blond-hybrids in a more pronounced degree than any other similarly distinguishable element in the population. At the same time the birth-rate is lower and the death-rate higher in these modern urban communities than in the open country, in spite of the fact that more attention is given to preventive sanitation in the urban than in the rural communities, and it is in the urban communities that medical attendance is most available at the same time that its most efficient practitioners congregate there. This accelerated death-rate strikes the blond-hybrids of the towns in an eminent degree; and infant mortality in the towns, particularly, runs at such a figure as to be viewed with the liveliest apprehension. In its summary effects on the viability of the modern peoples this modern technology appears to be as untoward as would their removal to an unsuitable climate. Indeed the hygienic measures that are taken or advocated as a remedy for these machine-made conditions of urban life are of much the same character and require much the same degree of meticulous attention to details that are required to preserve the life of Europeans under the precarious climatic conditions of the low latitudes. So that, for these Europeans at least, the hygienic situation created by their own technology has much of that character of a comprehensive clinic that attaches to the British occupation of India or the later European occupation of West Africa or the Philippines.
[146] The statisticians of a hundred years ago, e. g., were content to work in round percentages where their latterday successors are doubtfully content with three-place decimals.
[147] An eminently illustrative instance of the mechanistic bias in the moral sciences is afforded by the hedonistic conceptions of the early nineteenth century; and the deistic theology of that period and earlier is no less characteristic a symptom of the same animus.
Cf. also, for a view running to a conclusion opposed to that spoken for above, H. Bergson, Creative Evolution (translation by Arthur Mitchell, New York, 1911), ch. i, especially pp. 16–23; where the mechanistic conception is construed as an instinctive metaphysical norm and contrasted with the deliverances of reason and experience, which are then held to inculcate an anthropomorphic interpretation of the same facts.
[148] “Pragmatism” is the term that has been elected to cover this metaphysical postulate of efficiency conceived as the bench mark of actuality.
[149] Of all these latterday revulsionary schemes of surcease from the void and irritation of the mechanistic conception, that spoken for by M. H. Bergson is doubtless the most felicitous, at the same time that it is, in its elements, the most engagingly naïve. Apart from, and without prejudice to, the (doubtless very substantial) merits of this system of speculative tenets, the vogue which it has achieved appears to be due in good part to its consonance with this archaic bent of civilised human nature, already spoken of. The immanent, or rather intrinsically dominant, creative bent inherent in matter and not objectively distinguishable from it, is sufficiently suggestive of that praeter-mechanical efficacy that seems so easy of comprehension to many of the peoples on the lower levels of culture, and that affords the substantial ground of magical practices and finds untroubled expression in the more naïve of their theoretical speculations. It would be a work of extreme difficulty, e. g., to set up a consistently tenable distinction between M. Bergson’s élan de la vie, on the one hand, and the mana of the Melanesians (Cf. Codrington, The Melanesians, esp. ch. vii and xii), the wakonda of the Sioux (Cf. A. C. Fletcher and F. la Flesche, “The Omaha Tribe,” Bureau of Ethnology, Report xxvii (1905–1906), esp. pp. 597–599), or even the hamingia of Scandinavian paganism, on the other hand.
In fact, the point of departure and support for M. Bergson’s speculations appears to be nothing else than a projection, into objective reality, of the same human trait that has here been spoken of as the instinct of workmanship; this norm of initiative and efficiency which so is imposed on objective facts being then worked out with great subtlety and sympathetic insight, to make a comprehensive, cosmological scheme. The like projection of workmanlike initiative and efficiency, and its imputation to objective reality, both at large—as with M. Bergson—and in concrete detail, with more or less of personalisation, is one of the main, though frequently misunderstood, factors in the cosmologies that do duty as a body of science and philosophy among savages and the lower barbarians.