Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 4.djvu/208

 1 90 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

have this quasi-aesthetic sense of economic or industrial merit, and to this sense of economic merit futility and inefficiency are distasteful. In its positive expression it is an impulse or instinct of workmanship ; negatively it expresses itself in a deprecation of waste. This sense of merit and demerit with respect to the material furtherance or hindrance of life approves the economically effective act and deprecates economic futility. It is needless to point out in detail the close relation between this norm of economic merit and the ethical norm of conduct, on the one hand, and the aesthetic norm of taste, on the other. It is very closely related to both of these, both as regards its bio- logical ground and as regards the scope and method of its award.

This instinct of workmanship apparently stands in sheer con- flict with the conventional antipathy to useful effort. The two are found together in full discord in the common run of men ; but whenever a deliberate judgment is passed on conduct or on events, the former asserts its primacy in a pervasive way which suggests that it is altogether the moregeneric, more abiding trait of human nature. There can scarcely be a serious question of pre- cedence between the two. The former is a human trait neces- sary to the survival of the species ; the latter is a habit of thought possible only in a species which has distanced all competitors, and then it prevails only by sufferance and within limits set by the former. The question between them is, Is the aversion to labor a derivative of the instinct of workmanship ? and, How has it arisen and gained consistency in spite of its being at vari- ance with that instinct ?

Until recently there has been something of a consensus among those who have written on early culture, to the effect that man, as he first emerged upon the properly human plane, was of a contentious disposition, inclined to isolate his own interest and purposes from those of his fellows, and with a pen- chant for feuds and brawls. Accordingly, even where the view is met with that men are by native proclivity inclined to action, there is still evident a presumption that this native proclivity to action is a proclivity to action of a destructive kind. It is held that men are inclined to fight, not to work — that the end of

I