For the economy of blind instincts is only accommodated to simple activities in a stable environment, and is even then subject to enormous vital wastes.
For complicated activities in a rapidly changing and complex environment, a general instinct of adaptability of means to ends, involving conscious reflection, is required. Reason is this general instinct and science is its instrument. Society, as its processes of evolution become more conscious, will be able to use more profitably the services of science. Those services consist not in authoritative legislation for social conduct, for laws based upon experience of the past can have no full authority to bind the future.
Faith and risk-taking, involving large elements of the incalculable, are inherent in organic processes, and are the very sap of spiritual interest in life. They can never be brought under the dominion of a scientific economy.
But the main staple in every art of conduct is repetition and considered adaptation, resting upon a continuity of conditions. For this part of social conduct science, when sufficiently equipped, can and will offer authoritative advice. Throughout all nature the arts of conservation and creation run together. The art of conservation is the practical function of science:
the art of creation ever remains a region of beckoning liberty, continually annexed by science, and yet undiminished in its size and ts appeal.
'For all experience is an arch where through Gleams that untravelled land whose margin fades For ever and for ever as we move.'
NOTES:
1. It was precisely on this rock that J.S. Mill's utilitarianism split.
He tried to incorporate in the quantitative calculus of Benthamite pleasure and pain distinctions of the quality or worth of different sorts of pleasure and pain, and failed to furnish any method of reducing them to common terms.
2. Wicksteed, Common Sense of Political Economy , p. 405.
3. p. 409.
4. p. 153.
5. p. 156.
6. p. 159.
7. This older doctrine of marginalism, concerned with the comparison of marginal utilities, or marginal costs, in the application of expenditure of productive energy, must not be confused with the novel doctrine which we discussed in Chapter XI in relation to wages. In the newer doctrine any unit of a supply may be regarded as the marginal unit and every unit as equally productive or useful. According to the older doctrine each unit has a different cost or utility.
8. Professor Pigou in his Wealth and Welfare discusses with skill and precision the measurable influences of an increase of the general dividend upon general welfare, but omits to take into consideration the 'cost' factors which enter into 'welfare,' however that term be defined.
9. Protectionists can seldom, if ever, plead successfully either of these cases. By reducing the community of economic interests between nations Protection normally increases the chances of war, while lessening the national resources which are the sinews of war. So, likewise, its normal tendency is to worsen the distribution of Wealth within the nation.
10. Henri Fabre, The Eng. Review , Dec., 1912, The Modern Theory of Instincts .
11. Quatre-vingt-treize , Livre III, Chapter XI.
12. Cf. McDougall, Social Psychology .
