CHAPTER I PAGE INTRODUCTORY 1 CHAPTER II CONTAMINATION OF INSTINCTS IN PRIMITIVE TECHNOLOGY 38 CHAPTER III THE SAVAGE STATE OF THE INDUSTRIAL ARTS 103 CHAPTER IV THE TECHNOLOGY OF THE PREDATORY CULTURE 138 CHAPTER V OWNERSHIP AND THE COMPETITIVE SYSTEM 187 CHAPTER VI THE ERA OF HANDICRAFT 231 CHAPTER VII THE MACHINE INDUSTRY 299 THE INSTINCT OF WORKMANSHIP CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY For mankind as for the other higher animals, the life of the species is conditioned by the complement of instinctive proclivities and tropismatic aptitudes with which the species is typically endowed. Not only is the continued life of the race dependent on the adequacy of its instinctive proclivities in this way, but the routine and details of its life are also, in the last resort, determined by these instincts. These are the prime movers in human behaviour, as in the behaviour of all those animals that show self-direction or discretion. Human activity, in so far as it can be spoken of as conduct, can never exceed the scope of these instinctive dispositions, by initiative of which man takes action. Nothing falls within the human scheme of things desirable to be done except what answers to these native proclivities of man. These native proclivities alone make anything worth while, and out of their working emerge not only the purpose and efficiency of life, but its substantial pleasures and pains as well. * * * * * Latterly the words “instinct” and “instinctive” are no longer well seen among students of those biological sciences where they once had a great vogue. Students who occupy themselves with the psychology of animal behaviour are cautiously avoiding these expressions, and in this caution they are doubtless well advised. For such use the word appears no longer to be serviceable as a technical term. It has lost the requisite sharp definition and consistency of connotation, apparently through disintegration under a more searching analysis than the phenomena comprised under this concept had previously been subjected to. In these biological sciences interest is centering not on the question of what activities may be set down to innate propensity or predisposition at large, but rather on the determination of the irreducible psychological--and, indeed, physiological--elements that go to make up animal behaviour. For this purpose “instinct” is a concept of too lax and shifty a definition to meet the demands of exact biological science.