part company. Of the two, the socialists are more widely out of touch

with the established order. They are also more hopelessly negative
and destructive in their ideals, as seen from the standpoint of the
established order. This applies to the later socialists rather than to
the earlier, and it applies, of course, only to the lower-class, ‘‘ demo-
cratic’ socialists, not to the so-called state and Christian socialists.

Anarchism proceeds on natural-rights ground, and is accordingly
in touch with the postulates of the existing property arrangements to
that extent. It is a more unmitigated working out of the same postu-
lates, It is a system of ‘‘ natural liberty’ unqualified to the extent
even of not admitting prescriptive ownership. Its basis is a (divinely

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 339

to envy, class hatred, discontent with their own
lot by comparison with that of others, and to a
mistaken view of their own interests. This criti-
cism may be well enough as far as it goes, but
it does not touch socialism in those respects in
which it differs from other movements into which
this range of motives enters; that is to say, it
touches, not the specific traits of socialism, but
the common features of popular discontent. His-
tory shows many such movements of discontent,
pushed on by real or fancied privation and in-
iquity; and past experience recorded in history
should lead us to expect that, under the guidance

instituted) order of nature, the keynote of which is an inalienable free-
dom and equality of the individual, quite in the eighteenth-century
spirit. It is in this sense an offshoot of the Romantic school of thought.
Anarchism is a de jure scheme, which takes no account of mechanical
exigencies but rests its case altogether on anthropomorphic postulates
of natural rights. It is, from the natural-rights standpoint, substan-
tially sound, though senselessly extreme.

What may be called the normal socialism, socialism of the later,
more dangerous, and more perplexing, kind, does not build on the
received metaphysical basis of the ‘‘natural order.’’ It demands a
reconstruction of the social fabric, but it does not know on what lines
the reconstruction is to be carried out. The natural rights of the indi-
vidual are not accepted as the standard (except by certain large bodies
of neophytes, especially rural American, who are carrying under social-
ist mottoes the burden of animosities and preconceptions that once
made populism), but nothing definite is put in the place of this out-
worn standard. The socialists of the line, in so far as there is any
consensus among them, profess that the mechanical exigencies of the
industrial system must decide what the social structure is to be, but
beyond this vague generality they have little to offer. And this
mechanical standardization can manifestly afford no basis for legis-
lation on civil rights. Indeed, it is difficult to see how any scheme
of civil rights, much or little, can find a place in a socialistic reorgan-

ization.

340 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

of such motives and such reasoning as is currently
imputed to the socialists by their conservative
critics, the malcontents would demand a redistri-
bution of property, a reorganization of ownership
on such new lines as would favor the discontented
classes. But such is not the trend of socialistic
thinking. It looks to the disappearance of prop-
erty rights rather than their redistribution. The
entire range of doctrines covered by the theory of
distribution in the received economics is essen-
tially (and characteristically) neglected by the
modern socialist speculations.*

The perplexity of those who protest against a
supposedly imminent socialistic subversion of prop-
erty rights is of a twofold kind: (1) The absence
of proprietary rights is incomprehensible, and a
living together in society without defined owner-
ship of the means of living is held to be imprac-
ticable ; ownership of goods, in the apprehension of

1 The ‘‘ scientific socialism ’’ of Marx and Engels as promulgated
during the third quarter of the nineteenth century was not of this
negative character. It was a product of Hegelianism blended with the
conceptions of natural rights, its chief count being the ‘‘ claim to the
full product of labor.’? This socialism never made serious inroads
among the working classes outside of Germany — the home of Hege-
lianism. Even in that country the most vigorous growth of socialistic
sentiment came after Hegelianism had begun to yield to Darwinian
methods of thought, and this later growth has been progressively less
Marxian and less positive. Marxism is now little more than a pro
forma confession of faith. Avowed socialism is practically taking on
the character described above, except so far as it has grown oppor-

tunist and has sought affiliation with the liberal democratic movement
and the reformers.

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 34]

the conservative critics, is involved in the presence
of goods. (2) Ownership of the means of living
is an inalienable right of man, ethically inevitable ;
the cancelment of property rights is felt to violate
a fundamental principle of morals. All this, of
course, proceeds on the assumption that the insti-
tution of ownership cannot be abrogated, as being
an elemental function of human nature and an
integral factor in the order of things in which
human life belongs.

To the modern socialist all this is coming to be
less and less convincing. In this respect there is
a fairly well marked progressive change in the
attitude of the professed socialists. Their position
is progressively less capable of beg formulated as
a business proposition ; their demands are progres-
sively more difficult to state in the form of a
pecuniary claim. The claim to the full product of
labor, which once filled a large place in socialistic
clamors and had a great carrying force during the
earlier three-quarters of the nineteenth century,
has gradually fallen into abeyance, both with the
agitators and the adherents of the propaganda,
during the last generation. To-day this claim is
an afterthought in the advocate’s presentation of
socialism, more frequently than it is a point of
departure for the argument, and it is made more
of by the proselytes, who have carried the meta-
physics of it over from the current common sense

842 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

of the business community, than by the socialists
of confirmed standing. The claim to the full prod-
uct is an article of natural-rights dogma, and as
such it is a reminiscence of the institutional situa-
tion from which socialism departs, rather than a
feature of the prospective situation to which social-
istic sentiment looks.

The like obsolescence of the sense of equity
in ownership is visible in the attitude taken by
strikers in the large, mechanically organized indus-
tries, outside of the ranks of avowed socialism.
These strikers are less and less deterred by consid-
erations of vested rights, property rights, owner’s
interests, and the like. The principle that a man
may do what he will with his own is losing its
binding force with large classes in the community,
apparently because the spiritual ground on which
rests the notion of “his own” is being cut away
by the latter-day experience of these classes.
Abridgment of proprietary discretion, confiscation
of proprietary rights, is growing gradually less
repugnant to the industrial populace; and the
question of indemnity for eventual loss is more and
more falling into neglect. With the socialistic
element the question is not, what shall be done in
the way of readjustment of property claims, but
what is to be done to abolish them.’

1 Where members of the well-to-do classes avow socialistic senti-
ments and ideals it commonly turns out to be a merely humanitarian

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 343

The question of equity or inequity in the distribu-
tion of wealth presumes the validity of ownership
rights on some basis or other, or at least it presumes
the validity of some basis on which the claims of
ownership may be discussed. Ownership is the
major premise of any argument as to the equity
of distribution, and it is this major premise that is
bemg forgotten by the classes among whom social-
istic sentiment is gaining. Equity in this connec-
tion seems not to belong in the repertory of
socialist concepts. It is at this point — the point
of a common ground of argument— that the dis-
crepancy occurs which stands in the way, not only
of an eventual agreement between the socialists
and their conservative critics, but even of their
meeting one another’s reasoning with any substan-
tial effect. In the equipment of common-sense
ideas on the basis of which the conservatives
reason on this matter, there is included the con-
ventional article of ownership, as a prime fact ; in
the common-sense basis of socialistic thinking this
conventional premise has no secure place. There

aspiration for a more ‘‘equitable’’ redistribution of wealth, a re-
adjustment of the scheme of ownership with some improved safe-
guarding of the ‘‘reasonable”’ property claims of all members of the
community. What ‘‘socialist’’? reform commonly means to this con-
tingent of well-to-do irregulars is some scheme of equal rights of
ownership for all. Whereas to socialists of the line equal rights of
ownership is as idle a proposition as an equal right of citizens to sell
their votes. Instead of a reform of ownership the socialists conteim-
plate the traceless disappearance of ownership.

344 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

is, therefore, a discrepancy in respect of the meta-
physics underlying the knowledge and reasoning
of the two parties to the controversy, and the out-
look for a common understanding is accordingly
vain. No substantial agreement upon a point of
knowledge or conviction is possible between persons
who proceed from disparate preconceptions.

Still the conservative reformers and the icono-
clasts have a good deal in common. The prevalent
habit of mind of both classes is a hybrid product
of conventional principles and matter-of-fact in-
sight. But these two contrasted grounds of opinion
and aspiration are present in unequal degrees in
the two contrasted classes; in the conservatives
the conventional grounds of finality dominate and
bear down the matter-of-fact knowledge of things,
while the converse is true of the iconoclasts. Con-
trasted with earlier times and other cultural
regions the consensus, the general drift, of the
modern Western culture as a whole is of an icon-
oclastic character; while the class contrast here
in question lies only within the range of this West-
ern cultural consensus. As one or the other of the
two contrasted proclivities— recourse to conven-
tional precedents and recourse to matter-of-fact
insight — gains and overbalances the other, the gen-
eral cultural movement will drift toward a more
conservative (archaic), conventional position er

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 345

toward a more iconoclastic, materialistic position.
During modern times the cultural drift has set in
the latter direction. With due but not large ex-
ceptions, the effective body of the modern popula-
tion has been growing more matter-of-fact in their
thinking, less romantic, less idealistic in their
aspirations, less bound by metaphysical considera-
tions in their view of human relations, less man-
nerly, less devout.

The discrepancy between the conservatives and
the iconoclasts need not be taken to mean that the
two contrasted classes are moving in opposite
directions, nor even in widely divergent directions.
Neither class can properly be said to be reactionary.!
Taken generally, both wings have been moving
in the direction of a more impersonal, more matter-
of-fact, less conventional point of view. In this
composite cultural growth the matter-of-fact habit
of mind has on the whole been gaining at the
expense of the conventional, and the conventional
premises that have been retained have also come
to bear more of a matter-of-fact character, — as,
e.g., in the supersession of feudalistic or theocratic
principles of law by natural rights. So that the
position for which the effective body of conserva-
tives now stand is not in substance a very archaic
one. It is a more matter-of-fact position, less

1 Unless it be in the latest extremes of conservatism, such as is
shown in the recent success of dynastic politics in Germany, Tory
policy in England, and predatory political ideals in America,

346 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

closely bound by authentic conventions, than the
position effectively occupied by the iconoclastic
wing a hundred years ago.

Throughout the modern cultural complex there
is a somewhat variable, scattering shifting of
ground to a more matter-of-fact basis. The direc-
tion of spiritual growth or change is much the
same throughout the general body of the popula-
tion; but the rate of change, the rate at which
matter-of-fact ideals are superseding ideals of con-
ventional authenticity, is not the same for all
classes. Hence the class discrepancy here spoken
of. The coefficient of change is so much larger
in the vulgar, industrial classes as progressively
to widen the cultural interval between them and
the conservatives in the respect which is here in
question. And the resulting discrepancy of insti-
tutional aims and ideals may have none the less
serious consequences for being due to a differential
rate of movement rather than to a divergent cul-
tural trend.

In this differential rate of movement the de-
parture from the ancient landmarks has now gone
so far (or is reaching such a point) among the
socialistic vulgar as to place their thinking sub-
stantially on a plane of material matter of fact,
particularly as regards economic institutions.
Whereas in the conservative classes the change
is not yet large enough to take them off the plane

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 347

of received conventional truth, particularly as re-
gards economic institutions and such social ques-
tions as are of an economic complexion. In the
case of the former this change in habit of mind
has been so considerable as, in effect, to constitute
a change in kind; crude matter of fact has come
to be the dominant note of their attitude, and con-
ventional authenticity has been relegated to a sub-
sidiary place; that is to say, the change is of a
revolutionary character. In the case of the con-
servative classes, so far as touches the institutional
notions here under inquiry, the corresponding
change has not yet gone so far as to amount to
a change in kind; it is not of a revolutionary
nature. The views current among the respectable
classes on these matters still, in effect, run on the
ancient levels on which were built up the pecun-
iary institutions about which the controversy
circles. For the present there need be no appre-
hension that the more respectable classes will
reach a mature revolutionary frame of mind. The
discipline of their daily life does not, on the whole,
favor such a result.

This, in substance, is also the view taken by
the socialistic revolutionaries, particularly by those
that are of Marxian antecedents. It is a point
of conviction with them, though not wholly of
reasoned conviction, that the socialistic movement
is, in the nature of the case, a proletarian move-

348 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

ment, in which the respectable, that is to say the
pecuniarily competent, classes can have no organic
part even if they try. It is held, in effect, that
the well-to-do are, by force of their economic cir-
cumstances, incapable of assimilating the socialist
ideas. The argument here set forth may serve
to enforce this view, but with a difference. In-
stead of contrasting the well-to-do with the indi-
gent, the line of demarcation between those avail-
able for the socialist propaganda and those not
so available is rather to be drawn between the
classes employed in the industrial and those em-
ployed in the pecuniary occupations. It is a ques-
tion not so much of possessions as of employments ;
not of relative wealth, but of work. It is a ques-
tion of work because it is a question of habits of
thought, and work shapes the habits of thought.
The socialists themselves construe the distinction
to be a distinction in respect of habits of thought ;
and habits of thought are made by habits of life
rather than by a legal relation to accumulated
goods. This legal relation may count materially
in shaping the animus of the several economic
classes; but it appears not to be competent of
itself to explain the limitations observable in the
spread of socialistic sentiment.

The socialistic disaffection shows a curious ten-
dency to overrun certain classes and to miss cer-
tain others. The men in the skilled mechanical

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 349

trades are peculiarly liable to it, while at the
extreme of immunity is probably the profession
of the law. Bankers and other like classes of
business men, together with clergymen and _ politi-
cians, are also to be held free of serious aspersion ;
similarly, the great body of the rural population
are immune, including the population of the coun-
try towns, and in an eminent degree the small
farmers of the remoter country districts'; so also
the delinquent classes of the cities and the popu-
lace of half-civilized and barbarous countries. The
body of unskilled laborers, especially those not
associated with the men in the skilled mechanical
trades, are not seriously affected. The centres
of socialistic disaffection are the more important
industrial towns, and the effective nucleus of the
socialistic malcontents is made up of the more intel-
ligent body of workmen in the highly organized
and specialized industries. Not that socialism
does not spread in virulent form outside this
narrow range, but at a farther remove from the
centre of dispersion it appears rather sporadically
and uncertainly, while within this field it is fairly
endemic. As regards the educated classes, social-
istic views are particularly likely to crop out
among the men in the material sciences.

1 Socialistic notions are apparently making some inroads among the
rural population of the American prairie region, where a mechanically
organized and standardized method of farming prevails, with a large
use of mechanical appliances,

350 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

The advocates of the new creed have made
little headway among the rural classes of Kurope,
whether peasant farmers or farm laborers. The
rural proletariat has hitherto proved virtually
impermeable.! The discipline of their daily life
leaves their spirit undisturbed on the plane of
conventionality and anthropomorphism, and the
changes to which they aspire lie within the scope
of the conventionalities which have grown out of
these circumstances of their life and which express
the habit of mind enforced by these circumstances.

Without claiming that this explanation is com-
petent to cover the case of socialism in all its bear-
ings, it may be pointed out that this socialistic bias
has effectively spread among the people only within
the last quarter of a century, which is also approx-
imately the period since which the machine process
and the mechanical standardization of industry has
reached its fuller development, both as regards the
extent of its field and as regards the extent of its
technological requirements; that it 1s found in vig-
orous growth only in those communities and partic-

1So striking has been the failure of the German socialists, for
instance, in their attempts upon the integrity of the farming commu-
nity, that they have latterly changed their tactics, and instead of at-
tempting to convert the peasants to a full socialistic programme, they
have turned to measures of compromise, in which the characteristic
and revolutionary features of the socialistic programme are softened
beyond recognition, if not suppressed. The habits of life, and therefore
the habits of thought, of the peasant farmers move on the ancient
levels of handicraft, pecuniary management, personal consequence,
and prescriptive custom.

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 351

ularly among those classes whose life is closely
regulated by the machine technology ; and that the
discipline of this machine technology is peculiarly
designed to inculcate such iconoclastic habits of
thought as come to a head in the socialistic bias.
Socialism, in so far as the term means the subver-
sion of the economic foundations of modern culture,
occurs only sporadically and dubiously outside the
limits, in time and space, of the discipline of the
machine technology. While among those classes
whose everyday life schools them to do their habit-
ual serious thinking in terms of material cause and
effect, the preconceptions of ownership are appar-
ently becoming obsolescent through disuse and
through supersession by other methods of appre-
hending things.’

1Tf this account of the class limitation of the socialist bias is ac-
cepted, it has an immediate bearing upon a question which is latterly
engaging the attention of the advocates of socialism. The question
is as to the part played by propertyless office employees and by the
business men whom the modern consolidations of business reduce to
the position of salaried managers and superintendents. With a faith
prompted by their own hopes rather than by observed facts or by the
logic of events, the spokesmen for socialism are strongly inclined to
claim this ‘‘ business proletariat’ as a contingent which the course of
economic development is bound to throw into the socialist camp.
The facts do not in any appreciable degree countenance such an ex-
pectation. The unpropertied classes employed in business do not
take to socialistic vagaries with such alacrity as should inspire a con-
fident hope in the advocates of socialism or a serious apprehension
in those who stand for law and order. This pecuniarily disfranchised
business population, in its revulsion against unassimilated facts, turns
rather to some excursion into pragmatic romance, such as Social Settle-
ments, Prohibition, Clean Politics, Single Tax, Arts and Crafts,
Neighborhood Guilds, Institutional Church, Christian Science, New

352 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

But the machine technology not only trains the
workmen into materialistic iconoclasm, it has also
a selective effect. Persons endowed with propensi-
ties and aptitudes of a materialistic, matter-of-fact
kind are drafted into the mechanical employments,
and such are also peculiarly available socialistic
material. Aptitude for the matter-of-fact work of
the machine technology means, in a general way,
ineptitude for an uncritical acceptance of institu-
tional truths. It is probable, therefore, that the
apparent facility with which the mechanical em-
ployments (and the material sciences) induce a
socialistic or iconoclastic bent is to be set down in
part to the fact that the human material in these
employments is picked material, peculiarly amen-

Thought, or some such cultural thimblerig. The work of the cap-
tain of industry in curtailing the range of individual discretion in
business and in reducing the lesser undertakers to the rank of clerks
and subalterns need not be looked upon as unavoidably furthering
the spread of the socialistic bias, except in so far as the change results
in throwing the men affected by it out of the pecuniary or business
occupations and subjecting them to the discipline of the mechanical
industry. At the most, apparently, the change from an independent
to a dependent business life serves to weaken the men’s interest in
the question of property ; it does not appear that it throws them into
an attitude of substantial distrust or iconoclasm. Their interest in
this particular institution slackens through the loss of that emulative
motive on which pecuniary endeavor proceeds, but their faith in its
intrinsic fitness is not thereby shaken, nor are they thrown into the
ranks of the chronic dissentients. The training given by their life
continues prevailingly to run on conventional grounds ; that is to say,
on grounds of legal relation, solvency, and the like. Accountants and
office employees are nearly as conservative as clergymen and lawyers,
and their being so is apparently due to the fact that their experience
runs on much the same ground of conventional finality.

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 353

able to this discipline. There is a sifting of the
working classes, whereby the socialistic and me-
chanically capable are roughly segregated out from
the rest and subjected to the iconoclastic discipline
of the mechanical employments and matter-of-fact
thinking ; while the residue, which is on the whole
made up of the persons that are relatively least
capable of revolutionary socialism, is at the same
time less exposed to the discipline that might fit
them for the socialistic movement. This sifting is,
of course, a rough one, and leaves many exceptions
both ways.

In the light of this consideration, then, it is to
be noted: (1) that the dominance of the machine
process in modern industry is not so potent a factor
for the inculcation of socialistic notions — it does
not so irresistibly shape men’s habit of mind in the
socialistic sense—as the first survey of the facts
would suggest; and (2) that the differentiation of
occupations involved in modern industrial methods
selectively bunches the socialistic elements together,
and so heightens their sense of class solidarity and
acts to accentuate their bias, gives consistency to
their ideals, and induces that boldness of convic-
tion and action which is to be had only in a com-
pact body of men.

But in either case, whether the visible outcome
is chiefly due to their selective or to their discipli-
nary effect, the bearing of the industrial occupations

354 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

upon the growth of socialism seems equally close
and undeniable. The two modes of influence seem
to converge to the outcome indicated above, and
for the purpose of the present inquiry a detailed
tracing out of the two strands of sequence in the
case neither can nor need be undertaken."

With such generality as commonly holds in
statements of this kind, it may be said that the
modern socialistic disaffection is loosely bound up
with the machine industry — spreading where this
industry spreads and flourishing where this indus-

1 Connected with this apparent selective action which the modern
specialization of occupations exerts, there is a further, and at first sight
more singular, point of disparity between the socialists and the con-
servatives ; and this difference has also a curious correlation with the
distribution of the machine industry. In a degree, — slight and uncer-
tain, perhaps, but scarcely to be mistaken, —the socialists and the
conservatives are apparently of different racial antecedents. It has
been seen above that the propaganda is most vital and widespread in
the industrial towns, as contrasted with the agricultural country. But
if the researches of such students as Ammon, Ripley, Lapouge, Clos-
son, and others that might be named, are taken at their face value, it
appears that the towns differ perceptibly from the open country in
point of race ; and that the migration from the country into the indus-
trial towns has a selective effect of such a kind that a larger propor-
tion of one racial stock than of another resorts to the towns. The
towns, in those countries where data are available, show a larger
admixture of the dolicho-blond stock than the open country. This
seems to argue that the dolicho-blond stock, or the racial mixture of
the towns in which there is a relatively large admixture of the dolicho-
blond, is perceptibly more efficient in the machine industries, more
readily inclined to think in materialistic terms, more given to radical
innovation, less bound by convention and prescription. This generali-
zation is strengthened by the fact that the more dolicho-blond regions
are also, on the whole, more socialistic than those in which this ele-
ment is less in evidence. At the same time they are industrially in
advance of the latter in the matter of machine industry ; and they are
also Protestant (irreligious) rather than Catholic.

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 355

try gives the dominant note of life. The correla-
tion between the two phenomena is of such a kind
as to leave no doubt that they are causally con-
nected; which means either that the machine in-
dustry, directly or indirectly, gives rise to socialism,
or that the two are expressions of the same com-
plex of causes. The former statement probably
expresses the truth of the case in great part, but
the latter need not therefore be false. Wherever
and in so far as the increase and diffusion of know]-
edge has made the machine process and the me-
chanical technology the tone-giving factor in men’s
scheme of thought, there modern socialistic icono-
clasm follows by easy consequence.

The socialistic bias primarily touches economic
institutions proper. But that is not the whole of
it. When the term is used without modifying
phrase it carries a certain implication touching
other than primarily economic matters. The po-
litical bias of this unmitigated socialism is always
radically democratic, to the extent that these social-
ists are in a high degree intolerant of any monarch-
ical, aristocratic, or other prescriptive government.
The state is doomed in the socialistic view.’ The

1 This, of course, does not hold for the inoffensive pseudo-socialistic
diversions set afoot by various well-meaning politicians and clergy-
men, known by various qualifying designations, such as ‘‘ State,”

‘¢ Christian,’’ ‘‘ Catholic,’’ etc., and designed to act as correctives of
the socialistic distemper.

856 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

socialist antagonism to the state takes various
forms and goes to varying degrees of intemperance,
but it is consistently negative. Except im their
destructively hostile attitude to existing political
organizations, the socialists have nothing consist-
ent to offer on the head of political institutions, less,
indeed, latterly than in the earlier days of the
propaganda. There seems to be a growing shift-
lessness of opinion on this head; one gets the im-
pression that the sense of the socialist malcontents,
as near as it may be permissible to use that word
in this connection, is that the community can best
get along without political institutions.

There is a like departure from the ancient norms
touching domestic relations. This is not confined
to those portions of the community that avowedly af-
fect socialistic views, although it has, on the whole,
gone farthest among the classes among whom the
socialistic views prevail. There is a visible weak-
ening of the family ties, a disintegration of the
conventions of household life, throughout large
classes. The defection is even felt, by sensitive
and solicitous persons, to be of such grave propor-
tions as to threaten the foundations of domestic
life and morality. This disintegration of the fam-
ily ties shows itself most alarmingly among the
socialistic classes, with whom it all wears such an
air of unconcern as argues that in this respect
they are incorrigible. To these the conventional

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 357

form of the household has in good part ceased to
appeal as something sacred. It is no longer one of
their secure spiritual assets.

What appears to be in jeopardy, should this so-
cialistic defection gain ground, is the headship of
the male in the household economy. The family,
as it has come down from the medieval past, under
the shelter of the church, is of a patriarchal consti-
tution, at least in theory. The man has been vested
with discretionary control in domestic affairs. In
the earlier days his discretion was very direct and
full, comprising corporal coercion. Latterly, after
and so far as mastery and servitude have passed off
the field and natural rights have come to rule, this
direct coercive control has been superseded by a
pecuniary discretion; so that the male head of the
household is alone competent to exercise a proprie-
tary control of household affairs. This latter-day
conventional headship of the man is now in its turn
beginning to lose the respect of a good share of the
populace. The disintegration of the patriarchal
tradition has gone farthest among those industrial
classes who are at the same time inclined to so-
cialistic views.

At this point in the institutional structure, as
well as at other points where the industrial classes
are giving evidence of a loss of spiritual ground,
there is little indication of a constructive movement
toward any specific arrangement to take the place

358 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

of the institution whose existence is threatened.
There is a loosening of the bonds, a weakening of
conviction as to the full truth and beauty of the
received domestic institutions, without much of a
consensus as to what is to be done about it, if any-
thing. In this, as at other junctures of a similar
kind, the mechanically employed classes, trained to
matter-of-fact habits of thought, show a notable
lack of spontaneity in the construction of new
myths or conventions as well as in the reconstruc-
tion of the old.

All this disintegration of the spiritual founda-
tions of our domestic institutions spreads with the
most telling effect, because most heedlessly, among
the population of the industrial towns. But it
spreads also outside the limits of the industrial
classes ; for the habits of life and of thought in-
culcated by the machine technology are not limited
to them, even if these classes are the ones who
suffer most and most severely from the machine
discipline. The disintegration shows itself, in vary-
ing degree, in all modern industrial communities,
and it is visible somewhat in proportion as the
community is modern and industrial. The ma-
chine is a leveller, a vulgarizer, whose end seems
to be the extirpation of all that is respectable, noble,
and dignified in human intercourse and ideals.

What happens within the narrow range of the
institutions of domestic life repeats itself in sub-

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 359

stance in the larger field of national life and ideals.
Fealty to a superior installed by law or custom
suffers under the discipline of a life which, as re-
gards its most formative exigencies, is not guided
by conventional grounds of validity. And the
transmuted form of fealty called patriotism is in
much the same insecure case. The new ground of
class solidarity and antagonism, for which these
extreme spokesmen of the industrial régime stand,
is neither ecclesiastic, dynastic, territorial, nor lin-
guistic ; it is industrial and materialistic. But in
their attitude of heedlessness toward the dynastic
and national conventions the socialists are merely
the extreme exponents of the spirit of the age in
the modern industrial communities.

So, again, as regards the religious life. Men
trained by the mechanical occupations to material-
istic, industrial habits of thought are beset with a
growing inability to appreciate, or even to appre-
hend, the meaning of religious appeals that pro-
ceed on the old-fashioned grounds of metaphysical
validity. The consolations of a personal relation
(of subservience) to a supernatural master do not
appeal to men whose habit of life is shaped by a
familiarity with the relations of impersonal cause and
effect, rather than by relations of personal dominance
and fealty. It does not come as a matter of course
for such men to give the catechism’s answer to
the question, What is the chief end of man? Nor

360 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

do they instinctively feel themselves to be sinners
by virtue of a congenital, hereditary taint or ob-
liquity. Indeed, they can only with great difficulty
be seriously persuaded that they are sinners at all.
They are in danger of losing the point of view of
sin. The relation of status or fealty involved in
the concept of sin is becoming alien to their habit
of mind. They are therefore slow to realize that
their past life has violated such a relation of fealty,
on the one hand, and that it is of vital consequence
to reéstablish such a relation of status by a work
of salvation or redemption. The kindly ministra-
tions of the church and the clergy grate on the
sensibilities of men so trained, as being so much
ado about nothing. The machine, their master,
is no respecter of persons and knows neither
morality nor dignity nor prescriptive right, divine
or human; its teaching is training them into in-
sensibility of the whole range of concepts on which
these ministrations proceed.'

Not alone in the direction of growth given to
vulgar sentiment and to the vulgar insight into
facts 1s the matter-of-fact discipline of the machine
technology apparent, but also in the scope and

1 The cultural era of Natural Rights, Natural Liberty, and Natural
Religion reduced God to the rank of a ‘‘Great Artificer,?? and the
machine technology is, in turn, relegating Him to that fringe of minor

employments and those outlying industrial regions to which the handi-
craftsmen have been retired.

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 361

method of that scientific knowledge that has had
the vogue since the advent of the machine indus-
try. Scientific inquiry is directed to a different
end and carried out under the guidance of a differ-
ent range of principles or preconceptions in the
modern industrial communities than in earlier
days or in cultural centres lying outside the
machine's dominion. Modern science is single-
minded in its pursuit of impersonal relations of
causal sequence in the phenomena with which
it is occupied.

The line of descent of this matter-of-fact modern
science is essentially British, as is that of the
machine technology and of the characteristically
modern civil and political institutions. It is true,
beginnings of the modern scientific movement were
made in Italy in the days of the Renaissance, and
Central Europe had its share in the enlightenment ;
but these early modern risings of the scientific
spirit presently ran into the sand, when war,
politics, and religion reasserted their sway in the
south of Europe. Similar tentative stirrings of
matter-of-fact thought were had in Spain and
France before and during the early phases of the
state-making era; but here, again, war and politics
rendered these onsets nearly nugatory, so that the
intellectual output was more speculation than
science. In the Low Countries something similar
holds true, with a larger qualification. The Brit-

362 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

ish community made a later and slower start,
coming out of barbarism at a later date and with
a heavier handicap of physical obstructions. But
being, relatively, sheltered from war and _ politics,
the British were able to take up the fund of scien-
tific gains made by the South-European men of
workday insight, to turn it to account and to
carry it over the era of state-making and so pre-
pare the way for the modern scientific, techno-
logical era.

Of course, nothing but the most meagre and
sketchiest outline of this matter is practicable in
this place, and even that only in its relation to the
machine industry during the past one hundred
years or so. What is said above of the British
lead in modern science may perhaps be questioned,
and it is not necessary for the present purpose to
insist on its truth; but so much seems beyond
hazard as that the lead in the material sciences lay
with the British through the early machine age,
and that the provenance of this modern scientific
research to-day does not extend, in any pronounced
degree, beyond those communities that lie within
the area of the modern machine industry.

In time and space the prevalence of the modern
materialistic science is roughly coextensive with
that of the machine process. It is, no doubt, re-
lated to it both as cause and as effect; but that its
relation to modern industry is more that of effect

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 363

than cause seems at least broadly suggested by the
decay which presently overtook scientific research,
e.g., in the south of Europe when those peoples
turned their attention from material to spiritual
and political affairs.’

What is of immediate interest is the change
that has come over the scope and method of scien-
tific research since the dominance of the machine
process, in comparison with what preceded the
coming of the machine age. The beginnings of
modern science are older than the industrial revo-
lution ; the principles of scientific research (causal
explanation and exact measurement) antedate the
régime of the machine process. But a change has
taken place in the postulates and animus of scien-
tific research since modern science first began, and
this change in the postulates of scientific knowledge
is related to the growth of the machine technology.

It is unnecessary here to hark back to that
scholastic science or philosophy that served as an
intellectual expression of the ecclesiastical and
political culture of the Middle Ages. Its character,
as compared with later science, is sufficiently no-
torious. By the change from scholastic knowledge
to modern science, to the extent to which the
change was carried through, the principle (habit of

1 There is a similar suggestion in the relative (slight but percep-
tible) decline of scientific animus in England since the English com-
munity has turned its attention and aspirations to imperialistic feats
of prowess more than to industrial matters,

364 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

mind) of adequate cause was substituted for that
of sufficient reason. The law of causation as it is
found at work, in the maturer science of the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, com-
prises two distinguishable postulates: (1) equality
(quantitative equivalence) of cause and effect ; and
(2) similarity (qualitative equivalence) of cause and
effect. The former may, without forcing it, be
referred to commercial accountancy as its analogue
in practical life and as the probable cultural
ground out of which the habit of insisting on an
inviolable quantitative equivalence gathered con-
sistency. The ascendancy of the latter seems in a
similar manner to be referable to the prevalence
of handicraft as its cultural ground. Stated nega-
tively, it asserts that nothing appears in the effect
but what was contained in the cause, In a manner
which suggests the rule that nothing appears in
the product of handicraft but what was present in
the skill of the artificer. ‘“ Natural causes,’ which
are made much of in this middle period of modern
science, are conceived to work according to certain
“natural laws.” These natural laws, laws of the
“normal course” of things, are felt to tend to a
rational end and to have something of a coercive
force. So that Nature makes no mistakes, Nature
does nothing in vain, Nature takes the most eco-
nomical course to its end, Nature makes no jumps,
etc. Under this law of natural causation every

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 365

effect must have a cause which resembles it in
the particular respect which claims the inquirer’s
attention. Among other consequences of this view
it follows that, since the details as well as the
whole of the material universe are construed to
show adaptation to a preconceived end, this “ nat-
ural order” of things must be the outcome of
preéxistent design residing in the “first cause,”
which is postulated by virtue of this imputed de-
sign and is designated the “Great Artificer.”’
There is an element of conation in this original
modern postulate of cause and effect. The shadow
of the artificer, with his intelligence and manual
skill, is forever in the background of the concepts
of natural law. The “cause” dealt with in a given
case is not thought of as an effect ; and the effect is
treated as a finality, not asa phase of a complex
sequence of causation. When such a sequence is
under inquiry, as in the earlier, pre-Darwinian theo-
ries of evolution, it is not handled as a cumulative
sequence whose character may blindly change from
better to worse, or conversely, at any point; but
rather as an unfolding of a certain prime cause in
which is contained, implicitly, all that presently
appears in explicit form.

In the conception of the causal relation as it
may be seen at work a hundred years ago, cause
and effect are felt to stand over against one an-
other, so that the cause controls, determines the

366 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

effect by transmitting its own character to it. The
cause is the producer, the effect the product. Rela-
tively little emphasis or interest falls upon the
process out of which the product emerges; the in-
terest being centred upon the latter and its rela-
tion to the efficient cause out of which it has come.
The theories constructed under the guidance of this
conception are generalizations as to an equivalence
between the producing cause and the effect-product.
The cause “makes” the effect, in much the same
sense as the craftsman is apprehended to make the
article on which he is engaged. There is a felt
distinction between the cause and the environing
circumstances, much as there is between the work-
man on the one hand and his tools and materials on
the other hand. The intervening process is simply
the manner of functioning of the efficient cause,
much as the workman’s work is the functioning of
the workman in the interval between the inception
and the completion of the product. The effect is sub-
sequent to the cause, as the workman’s product is
subsequent to and consequent upon his putting forth
his productive efficiency. It is a relation of before
and after, in which the process comes in for atten-
tion as covering and accounting for the time interval
which, in analogy with workmanlike endeavor, is
required for the functioning of the efficient cause.’

1 Compare, however, Sombart, Kapitalismus, especially vol. I.
eh. VITT and XV. Sombart finds the modern scientific concept of

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 367

But as time passes and habituation to the
exigencies of the machine technology gains in
range and consistency, the quasi-personal, handi-
craft conception of causation decays, —first and
most notably in those material, inorganic sciences
that stand in the closest relation to the mechani-
cal technology, but presently also in the organic
sciences, and eyen in the moral sciences. The ma-
chine technology is a mechanical or material process,
and requires the attention to be centred upon this
process and the exigencies of the process, In such
a process no one factor stands out as unequivocally
the efficient cause in the case, whose personal char-

cause and effect to be essentially an outcome of the discipline of ac-
countancy enforced by business traffic. So that he makes business
enterprise rather than mechanical industry accountable for the rise
of modern science and for the matter-of-fact character which distin-
guishes this science. In this view there is, no doubt, a large and
valuable element of truth. To the end of a mathematical formulation
of causal phenomena as well as a tenacious grasp of the principle of
quantitative equivalence, the accountancy enforced by the petty trade
of early modern times, as well as by commercial traffic proper, ap-
pears to have given the most effective training. In so far as this
element of quantitative equivalence, simply, has dominated the
growth of science, it has given, as its most perfect product, Positivism.
Positivism flourished at its best and freest in France, where the
modern economic culture was commercial rather than mechanical.
And when the machine discipline seriously invaded France, Positivism
languished and died. But modern science is not a calculus simply.
It deals not with calculations of quantitative equivalence only, but
with efficient causes, active relations, creative forces. The concept of
efficient cause is not a derivative of accountancy, nor is it formed in
the image of accountancy. But this generic concept of efficient cause,
the kinetic concept, antedates Positivism and has outlived it. In its
earlier (eighteenth-century) phase this concept shows close relation-
ship with the notion of workmanship, in its later (nineteenth-century )
use it has much in common with the notion of mechanical efficiency.

368 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

acter, so to speak, is transfused into the product,
and to whose workings the rest of the complex of
causes are related only as subsidiary or conditioning
circumstances. To the technologist the process
comes necessarily to count, not simply as the inter-
val of functioning of an initial efficient cause, but
as the substantial fact that engages his attention.
He learns to think in terms of the process, rather
than in terms of a productive cause and a product
between which the process intervenes in such a man-
ner as to afford a transition from one to the other.
The process is always complex ; always a delicately
balanced interplay of forces that work blindly, in-
sensibly, heedlessly ; in which any appreciable devi-
ation may forthwith count in a cumulative manner,
the further consequences of which stand in no or-
ganic relation to the purpose for which the process
has been set going. The prime efficient cause falls,
relatively, into the background and yields prece-
dence to the process as the point of technological
interest.

This machine technology, with its accompanying
discipline in mechanical adaptations and object-
lessons, came on gradually and rose to a dominating
place in the cultural environment during the closing
years of the eighteenth and the course of the nine-
teenth century ; and as fast as men learned to think
in terms of technological process, they went on at an

\ accelerated pace in the further invention of mechani-

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 369

cal processes, so that from that time the progress of
inventions has been of a cumulative character and
has cumulatively heightened the disciplinary force
of the machine process. This early technological
advance, of course, took place in the British com-
munity, where the machine process first gained
headway and where the discipline of a prevalent
machine industry inculcated thinking in terms of
the machine process. So also it was in the British
community that modern science fell into the lines
marked out by technological thinking and began
to formulate its theories in terms of process rather
than in terms of prime causes and the like. While
something of this kind is noticeable relatively
early in some of the inorganic sciences, as, ¢.g.,
Geology, the striking and decisive move in this
direction was taken toward the middle of the
century by Darwin and his contemporaries.’ With-
out much preliminary exposition and without
feeling himself to be out of touch with his con-
temporaries, Darwin set to work to explain spe-
cies in terms of the process out of which they
have arisen, rather than out of the prime cause to
which the distinction between them may be due.’
Denying nothing as to the substantial services of the

1 Darwin, of course, does not stand alone. He is the great expo-
nent of a mass movement which involves a shifting of the point of
veiw and of the point of interest in scientific research and speculation.

2 This is the substance of Darwin’s advance over Lamarck, for
instance,

370 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

Great Artificer in the development of species, he
simply and naively left Him out of the scheme,
because, as being a personal factor, He could not be
stated and handled in terms of process. So Darwin
offered a tentative account of the descent of man,
without recourse to divine or human directive
endeavor and without inquiry as to whence man
ultimately came and why, or as to what fortune
would ultimately overtake him. His inquiry
characteristically confines itself to the process of
cumulative change. His results, as well as his
specific determination of the factors at work in
this process of cumulative change, have been ques-
tioned ; perhaps they are open to all the criticisms
levelled against them as well as to a few more not
yet thought of; but the scope and method given
to scientific inquiry by Darwin and the generation
whose spokesman he is has substantially not been
questioned, except by that diminishing contingent
of the faithful who by force of special training or
by native gift are not amenable to the discipline of
the machine process. The characteristically modern
science does not inquire about prime causes, design
in nature, desirability of effects, ultimate results, or
eschatological consequences.

Of the two postulates of earlier modern science,
— the quantitative equivalence and the qualitative
equivalence of cause and effect, —the former has
come practically to signify the balanced articula-

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 371

tion of the process of cumulative change; the
endeavor of the Positivists to erect this canon of
quantitative equivalence into the sole canon of
scientific truth, and so to reduce scientific theory
to a system of accountancy, having failed. The
latter thesis, that like causes produce like effects, or
that the effect is, in some sense, of the same char-
acter as the cause, has fallen into decay as holding
true only in such tenuously general terms as to
leave it without particular force. The scientists are
learning more and more consistently to think in the
opaque, impersonal terms of strains, mechanical
structures, displacement, and the like; terms
which are convertible into the working drawings
and specifications of the mechanical engineer.

The older preconceptions are, of course, not
wholly elimmated from the intellectual apparatus
of scientific research and generalization. The
cultural situation whose discipline gives the out-
come is made up of inherited traditional notions at
least as much as of the notions brought in by the
machine process. Even among the scientific adepts
there has been no complete break with the past ;
necessarily not, since they are, after all, creatures
of their own generation. Many of them, but more
especially those who are engaged in upholding the
authentic results of scientific research, are somewhat
prone to make much of the definitive results
achieved, rather than of the process of research

372 THE THEORY OF BUSINESS ENTERPRISE

in which these results are provisional appliances
of work. And many of these, together with the
great part of those well-meaning persons who
exploit the sciences for purposes of edification,
such as clergymen and naturalistic myth-makers,
still personify the process of cause and effect and
find in it a well-advised meliorative trend. But
that work of research which effectually extends the
borders of scientific knowledge is nearly all done
under the guidance of highly impersonal, mechani-
cal, morally and esthetically colorless conceptions
of causal sequence. And this scientific work is
carried out only in those communities which are in
due contact with the modern mechanically organized
industrial system, — only under the shadow of the
machine technology.

In the nature of the case the cultural growth
dominated by the machme industry is of a scep-
tical, matter-of-fact complexion, materialistic, un-
moral, unpatriotic, undevout. The growth of habits
of thought, m the industrial regions and centres
particularly, runs in this direction; but hitherto
there has enough of the ancient norms of Western
Christendom remained intact to make a very re-
spectable protest against that deterioration of the
cultural tissues which the ferment of the machine
industry unremittingly pushes on. The machine
discipline. however, touches wider and wider circles

CIVILIZATION AND THE MACHINE PROCESS 373

of the population, and touches them in an increas-
ingly intimate and coercive manner. In the nature
of the case, therefore, the resistance opposed to
this cultural trend given by the machine discipline
on grounds of received conventions weakens with
the passage of time. The spread of materialistic,
matter-of-fact preconceptions takes place at a cumu-
latively accelerating rate, except in so far as some
other cultural factor, alien to the machine disci-
pline, comes in to inhibit its spread and keep its
disintegrating influence within bounds.