runs at a higher tension, counts up finally, because cumulatively, into the most substantial cultural achievement of the race, - its systematised knowledge and quasi-knowledge of things.
This instinctive curiosity, then, comes in now and again serviceably to accelerate the gain in technological insight by bringing in material information that may be turned to account, as well as by persistently disturbing the habitual body of knowledge on which workmanship draws.
Human curiosity is doubtless an “idle” propensity, in the sense that no utilitarian aim enters in its habitual exercise; but the material information which is by this means drawn into the agent’s available knowledge may none the less come to serve the ends of workmanship. A good share of the facts taken cognisance of under the spur of curiosity is of no effect for workmanship or for technological insight, and that any of it should be found serviceable is substantially a fortuitous circumstance.
This character of “idleness,” the absence of a utilitarian aim or utilitarian sentiment in the impulse of curiosity, is doubtless a great part of the reason for its having received such scant and rather slighting treatment at the hands of the psychologists and of the students of civilisation alike.
Of the material so offered as knowledge, or fact, workmanship makes use of whatever is available. In ways already indicated this utilisation of ascertained “facts” is both furthered and hindered by the fact that the information which comes to hand through the restless curiosity of man is reduced to systematic shape, for the most part or wholly, under canons of workmanship. For the large generality of human knowledge this will mean that the raw material of observed fact is selectively worked over, connected up and accumulated on lines of a putative teleological order of things, cast in something like a dramatic form. From which it follows that the knowledge so gained is held and carried over from generation to generation in a form which lends itself with facility to a workmanlike manipulation; it is already digested for assimilation in a scheme of teleology that instinctively commends itself to the workmanlike sense of fitness. But it also follows that in so far as the personalised, teleological, or dramatic order so imputed to the facts does not, by chance, faithfully reflect the causal relations subsisting among these facts, the utilisation of them as technological elements will amount to a borrowing of trouble. So that the concurrence of curiosity and workmanship in the assimilation of facts in this way may, and in early culture must, result in a retardation of the technological advance, as contrasted with what might conceivably have been the outcome of this work of the idle curiosity if it had not been congenitally contaminated with the sense of workmanship and thereby lent itself to conceptions of magical efficacy rather than to mechanical efficiency.55 The further bearing of the parental bent on the early growth of technology also merits attention in this connection. This instinct and the sentiments that arise out of its promptings will have had wide and free play in early times, when the common good of the group was still perforce the chief economic interest in the habitual view of all its members. It will have had an immediate effect on the routine of life and work, presumably far beyond what is to be looked for at any later stage. In the time when pecuniary competition had not yet become an institution, grounded in the ownership of goods in severalty and on their competitive consumption, the promptings of this instinct will have been more insistent and will have met with a more unguarded response than later on, after these institutional changes have taken effect. A manifest and inveterate distaste of waste, in great part traceable on analysis to this instinct, still persistently comes in evidence in all communities, although it is greatly disguised and distorted by the principles of conspicuous waste56 among all those peoples that have adopted private ownership of goods; and serviceability to the common good likewise never ceases to command at least a genial, speculative approval from the common run of men, though this, too, may often take some grotesque or nugatory form due to preconceptions of a pecuniary kind. This bias for serviceability and against waste falls in directly with the promptings of the instinct of workmanship, so that these two instinctive predispositions will reënforce one another in conducing to an impersonally economical use of materials and resources as well as to the full use of workmanlike capacities, and to an endless taking of pains.
Some reference has also been made already to the technological value of those kindly, “humane” sentiments that are bound up with the parental bent, - if they may not rather be said substannntially to constitute the parental bent. It is of course in the non-mechanical arts of plant and animal breeding that these humane extensions of the parental instinct have their chief if not their only industrial value, both in furthering the day’s work and in contributing to the advance of technology. In the primary mechanic arts, e. g., an affectionate disposition of this kind toward the inanimate appliances with which their work is occupied does no doubt still, as ever, to some extent animate the workmen as well as those who may have the remoter oversight of the work. But the part played by such humane sentiments is after all relatively slight in men’s dealings with brute matter, nor do they invariably conduce to expeditious work or to a hard-headed insight into the mechanics of those things with which this work has to do. In fact such tender emotions so placed may somewhat easily become a source of mischief, in a manner similar to the mischievous technological consequences of anthropomorphism already spoken of.
It is otherwise with the bearing of the parental bent on the arts of tillage and cattle-breeding. Here its promptings are almost wholly serviceable to technological gain as well as to assiduous workmanship. The kindly sentiments intrinsic to the parental bent are admirably in place in the care of plants and animals, and their good effects in so giving a propitious turn to the technology of early tillage and cattle-breeding are only re-enforced by the parental and workmanlike inclination to husband resources and make the most of what comes to hand. The particular turn given to the anthropomorphic bias by this line of preconceptions also is rather favourable than otherwise to a working insight into the requirements of the art. And it has had certain specific consequences for the early technology of husbandry, as well as for the early culture in which husbandry was the chief material factor, such as to call for a more circumstantial account.
Under the canons of workmanship a teleological animus - an instinctive or “spiritual” nature - is imputed to the plants and animals brought into domestication. The art of husbandry proceeds on the apprehended needs and proclivities so imputed, and the technology of the craft therefore takes the form of a “tendance” designed to further these quasi-animistically conceived beings in whatever ends they have at heart by virtue of their natural bent, and to so direct this tendance upon them as will conduce to shaping their scheme of life in ways advantageous to man.
Like other sentient beings, as is known to shrewd and unsophisticated man, they have spiritual needs as well as material needs, and they are putatively to be influenced by the attitude of their human cousins towards them and their conduct, interests, and adventures. Further, their life and comfort are manifestly conditioned by the run of the seasons and of the weather; various inclemencies are discouraging and discomforting to them, as to mankind, and other vicissitudes of rain and shine and tempest are of the gravest consequence to them for good or ill. Under these delicate circumstances it is incumbent on the keepers of crops and flocks to walk circumspectly and cultivate the goodwill not only of their crops and flocks but also of the natural phenomena that count for so much in the life of the crops and flocks. These natural phenomena are of course also conceived anthropomorphically, in the sense that they too are seen to follow their natural bent and do what they will, - or perhaps more commonly what the personal agents will, in whose keeping these natural phenomena are conceived to lie; for unsophisticated man has no other available terms in which to conceive them and their behaviour than the terms of initiative, design and endeavour immediately given in his own conscious action.
Now, as has already been said, the scheme of life of the crops and flocks is, at least in the main, and particularly in so far as it vitally and always interests their keepers, a scheme of fecundity, fertility and growth. But these matters, visibly and by conscious sentiment, pertain in a peculiarly intimate sense to the women. They are matters in which the sympathetic insight and fellow-feeling of womankind should in the nature of things come very felicitously to further the propitious course of things.
Besides
