The instinct of workmanship, and the state of industrial artsVeblen, Thorstein
Philosophy
The instinct of workmanship, and the state of industrial arts
Veblen, Thorstein
Industrial arts -- History; Industries -- History; Technology -- History; Workmanship -- History
complex and deliberate) instinctive activities merge into the class of
unmistakable tropismatic sensibilities, without its being practicable
to determine by any secure test where the one category should be
declared to end and the other to begin.[3] Such quasi-tropismatic
activities may be rated as purposeful by an observer, in the sense
that they are seen to further the life of the individual agent or of
the species, while there is no consciousness of purpose on the part
of the agent under observation; whereas “instinct,” in the narrower
and special sense to which it seems desirable to restrict the term for
present use, denotes the conscious pursuit of an objective end which
the instinct in question makes worth while.
* * * * *
The ends of life, then, the purposes to be achieved, are assigned
by man’s instinctive proclivities; but the ways and means of
accomplishing those things which the instinctive proclivities so make
worth while are a matter of intelligence. It is a distinctive mark of
mankind that the working-out of the instinctive proclivities of the
race is guided by intelligence to a degree not approached by the other
animals. But the dependence of the race on its endowment of instincts
is no less absolute for this intervention of intelligence; since it is
only by the prompting of instinct that reflection and deliberation come
to be so employed, and since instinct also governs the scope and method
of intelligence in all this employment of it. Men take thought, but
the human spirit, that is to say the racial endowment of instinctive
proclivities, decides what they shall take thought of, and how and to
what effect.
Yet the dependence of the scheme of life on the complement of
instinctive proclivities hereby becomes less immediate, since a more or
less extended logic of ways and means comes to intervene between the
instinctively given end and its realisation; and the lines of relation
between any given instinctive proclivity and any particular feature of
human conduct are by so much the more devious and roundabout and the
more difficult to trace. The higher the degree of intelligence and the
larger the available body of knowledge current in any given community,
the more extensive and elaborate will be the logic of ways and means
interposed between these impulses and their realisation, and the more
multifarious and complicated will be the apparatus of expedients and
resources employed to compass those ends that are instinctively worth
while.
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