Page:The Criterion - Volume 4.djvu/26

16 (3) The labour which actually shaped the matter into form.

(4) The need or demand of the consumer or purchaser, who looks to the function or end of the thing, and expresses his demand by means of money.

Now these are simply the four Aristotelian causes—material, formal, efficient, and final. G. H. Lewes thought fit to belittle Aristotle’s insight when he declared that these causes were not susceptible of verification; but if we accepted only what could be verified by being weighed and measured in a laboratory, we should get very way in any of the sciences that deal with man.

Let us take a bicycle as an example of a modern com- modity and analyse it as Aristotle would have done. It is made of metal and rubber, provided originally by Nature, and purchased by the manufacturer from the holder of raw material. Its form is the result of the brainwork of several generations of inventors, the fittest of whose ideas have survived. This form is imparted to it by workmen, using highly specialised machinery. This machinery, a compound of work and form, is, like the bicycle itself, in its parts and their combination, the result of the continually improved designs of inventors. It is set up in a factory erected by money borrowed from the capitalist or from shareholders, on land rented from the landlord.

Land, raw material and capital all come under the head of the material cause; management, invention, organisation, etc., under the head of the formal cause. Communist schemes of expropriating the capitalist (or shareholders) and discouraging the inventor and employer, would put out of action two of the causes—the material and the formal—of wealth production, would fatally cripple the power of the final cause (demand) and would even—as the example of Russia and of experiments like the Building Guild prove—gravely impair the operation of the efficient cause (Labour).