Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/770

 756 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

calling in question of the social habits themselves ; but in this case also the conflict interest makes the play.

In the field of mechanical invention, likewise, the object is to secure an advantage either over nature or over some form of life, and ethnological evidences bearing on the early condition of man suggest that his interest in finding out mechanical helps to his contests with man and animals was hardly less keen than his instinctive interest in the conflict itself. The preparation, in fact, of mechanical helps to overcome or circumvent an enemy or a wild animal may be regarded as a part of the conflict itself, and sustained by the same interest. The club, the throwing stick, the spear with the obsidian point, the arrow barbed and tipped with poison, the trap, the pitfall, are inventions worked out by the savage with something of the joy of victory in antici- pation. All these contrivances implied a close observation of the habits of animals and of the qualities of plants and the prop- erties of matter, as well as an analysis of the ways of men. The powerful spring-trap was not placed at random in the forest, but in the path by which the animal approached the water at night. The preparation of poison from snakes, the entrails of insects, putrifying animal matter, and from plants, involved accurate observation and the presence of ideas of causation. It is here, indeed, in this process of invention, that the human mind was expanding. The interests and mental traits which developed here, the desire to find out things, the curiosity which is indis- pensable to an organism which cannot afford to be indifferent to any new situation which contains (as any new situation must) possibilities of good or evil, are precisely the standpoint of modern scientific investigation. The investigations of Newton, Helmholtz, or Darwin are not so immediately convertible into social advantage, and the end is not so clearly in view, but the interest of these investigators is identical with the interest of primitive man in devising and making force appliances.

We have seen that our pleasure-pain reactions were devel- oped as inevitable reflexes in connection with situations vitally good and vitally bad, and were doubtless pretty definitely fixed at a period of development before the species could be called