This profoundly interesting truth is attested by the long surviving presence of the song and other rhythmic activities in many forms of associated labour, as well as in the dancing which in primitive societies was an almost invariable accompaniment of all important enterprises, war, hunting and harvesting, and which still survives among us in the Harvest home.Though in slave industries this lighter element doubtless dwindled very low, it seldom died out entirely, as the song of the galley-rowers, or of the Southern negroes in the cotton-fields, testifies.Where the handicrafts throve among free men in Europe, everywhere the motives of play, personal pride and prowess, find liberal expression in industry.
§4.This slight and necessarily speculative sketch of the origin of industry is designed to enforce two facts.In the first place, we can trace in every rudimentary industry the promptings of vital utility, laying the foundations of an economy of efforts and satisfactions which furthers the organic development of the individual and the race.In the second place, we everywhere find what we call distinctively economic motives and activities almost inextricably intertwined, or even fused, with other motives and activities, sportive, artistic, religious, social and political.To trace the history of the process by which in modern civilisation economic or industrial activities have separated themselves from other activities, assuming more and more dominance, until the industrial System and the Business Man have become the most potent facts of life, would lie beyond our scope.
Nor is it at all necessary.What is important for us to realise, however, is that this process of industrialisation, through which the civilised peoples have been passing, is beyond all question the most powerful instrument of education.It appears to have done more to rationalise and to socialise men than all the higher and more spiritual institutions of man, so far as such comparisons are possible.It has rationalised man chiefly by compelling him to exercise foresight and forethought, to subdue his will and train his active faculties to the performance of long and intrinsically disagreeable tasks, in order to realise some more and more distant object of desire, and by obliging him to recognise the rigorous laws of causation in his calculations.It has socialised him by weaving an ever more elaborate tissue of common interests between him and a growing number of his fellow men, and by compelling him to engage in closer co-operation with them for the attainment of his ends.Though this socialisation is far more advanced in objective fact than in thought and feeling, it remains true that the direct and indirect association of larger and more various bodies or men in modern industry and commerce is the first condition and the strongest stimulus to the expansion and intensification of the social will.
It is this orderly rational system of industry, employing, as it does, the organic powers of man for the satisfaction of his organic needs, that we seek to submit to valuation.
The immense variety and complexity of the arts and crafts of which such a system of human industry consists, the long interval of time which often intervenes between acts of production and of consumption, the differences of personality between those who perform the efforts of production and those who utilise or enjoy the fruits of those efforts in consumption, immensely remote as they appear from the simple organic economy of primitive man, do not escape an ultimate dependence upon organic laws and conditions.
A human valuation, therefore, must insist upon expressing them in terms of organic welfare, individual and social.As human activities and enjoyments ascend in the process we term civilisation, we shall expect to find this organic life becoming more psychical, in the sense that their modes are more 'reasonable' and the emotions that attach to them are more spiritual, i.e., less directly driven by animal instincts.So too we shall expect industrial progress to contribute to a growing adjustment between the individual and the social economy, restoring under the form of reasonable social service to the more highly individualised members of a modern society an increasing measure of that subservience to the organic welfare of mankind which instinct was able to secure upon a lower plane of conscious life.
NOTES:
1.'Ein wenig besser würd er leben Hättst du ihm nicht den Schein des Himmels Licht gegeben Er nennt's Vernunft und braucht's allein Nur thierischer als jedes Thier zu sein.'
2.Industrial Evolution (Bell & Co.).
