An analysis of these definitions will disclose other factors than the neural involved in invention. According to these statements, invention cannot be called "a flash of lightning out of a clear sky." Such phrases as "the associative memory," "fertility of imagination," "abundance of guesses," imply that the content of ideational experience and the development of mental ability, as well as the congenital neural equipment, condition invention. The content of experience and mental development, in turn, indicate the presence of social factors. The ideas and ideals of persons, the methods of life-control, whether mystical or mechanical, the activities of the person and the group are the material and mechanism of the intermental texture and process. Even if, as we admit, the energy and the potential capacity of the individual are largely determined by his neural endowment, yet his neural and mental development and organization take place in the social environment through the play of factors which we are about to analyze.

These social influences may be considered from three standpoints. First of all, the individual depends for his stock of ideas almost entirely upon the group. Then, the possible efficiency of the individual is relative to the degree of the division of labor and to the scope of personal freedom. Finally, the direction of the attention of the individual is largely determined by social stimuli and demand. We shall now seek to show that these three factors, namely, the state of the social heritage, the character of the social organization, the nature of social stimuli and demand, not only are phases of socialization, but also make possible, facilitate, and direct the play of individual initiative and originality.

The social heritage is not itself the socializing process, but rather the product, the increment of socialization. For example, communication is an inter-mental activity; but language, the symbols and means of communication, is the product of the process. The social heritage, the outcome of the associated life of men, is the capital which each succeeding generation receives from the past. Considered abstractly, the social capital is the stock of ideas. Ward3 has emphasized the paradox that, while only a few heirs benefit at present by participation in the common inheritance of scientific knowledge, the admittance of all on equal terms would not diminish the share. The question, therefore, to what extent participation in

Applied Sociology, 1906, p. 300.

the social estate conditions the augmentation of the social capital is of first-rate importance in social policy.

The dependence of the originator upon the stock of ideas current in the group shows itself in three ways: (a) in the organic relation of the new to the old idea; (b) in the development of a particular attitude toward ideas; (c) in the participation of the person in the fund of knowledge. In all these cases it will be seen that the person as an innovating factor necessarily participates in the social heritage before he can add an iota to the social capital.

a) The physical resources of the globe, land in the economic sense, have been the common material for the activities of thousands of generations of men. All human changes are transformations and transpositions of these forces and substances. Yet these mutations, petty singly, but epoch-making in their cumulative effect, constitute the social capital of each generation. This social heritage-ideas, methods, tools-so becomes the medium and the material for personal expression that all further modification is impossible without its use. Thus, the language of the tribe twists the tongue of the child; and a new word or a new mode of expression is determined largely by the roots available and by the idioms in use. This control which present copies exert over modification evinces the strength of the influence which folk-ways of thinking and acting exert over the person. A forcible statement of the dominance of folkproducts over the course of invention has been given by Vierkandt. "Every civilization represents a sum of fixed forms. Whether we think of language, custom, law, technique, industry, or of political and social conditions, or of art, science, and religion, all these cultural goods constitute definite grooves in which the life of the whole moves. Civilization consists of a series of objective structures, which are free from the caprice and the accidental judgment of the individual, and which stand over against him as a given and coercive force." 4

Vierkandt's conception of the continuity of culture stresses, first, the survival of the cultural element in the group, a process which we have already emphasized; secondly, and primarily, the independence of the evolution of culture of the individual, his dependence upon it, and its arbitrary control of subsequent origination. There is a certain advantage, perhaps, in regarding the sum-total of technique

Stetigkeit im Kulturwandel, 1908, p. 103.

as the extra-organic equipment of the group. Vierkandt, however, because of this objective point of view, fails to emphasize sufficiently the fact that the stock of ideas becomes psychically possessed by the individual through personal appropriation by means of the processes of imitation, suggestion, desire, and habit. It is not the fact of the continuity of invention that is significant, so much as it is that the totality of human technique comprising all the elements of culture is not only the result of the interaction and integration of the individual and collective activity of generations of men, but also constitutes, at any given time, the attained level of culture upon which further progress is dependent.

A few concrete illustrations will help to show how custom and habit and the group store of ideas hamper and confine the free play of invention, determining the actual course of improvement. The organic connection between the new and the old is shown in the structure of many innovations. In the transition from basketry to pottery, the ceramic worker appears to have imitated the structure of the woven object. Many of the geometric designs in pottery are traced back by the ethnologists to pictures of animals and men. The first automobiles resembled carriages; the railroad cars in Europe are a slight modification of the old road coaches. The tyranny of known processes over attempts at new processes is strikingly illustrated in the transition from handwork to machinery. The principle upon which many of the earlier experiments in mechanical sewing were based was that of the through-and-through stitch with short thread. "This principle was persistently followed up by inventors long after the introduction of the eye-pointed needle and continuous thread." A phonograph was constructed by Faber in direct imitation of the human vocal cords, lungs, and esophagus."

These instances indicate in a concrete way the control which the materials supplied by the group exert upon the person. The objects, the copies at his hand, are his, only because of his membership in the community. His share in this mental life of the group provides

"Holmes, "Form and Ornament in Ceramic Art," in the Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, IV (1882-83), 449, 461.

"Pitt-Rivers, The Evolution of Culture, 1906, pp. 39–44. "Iles, op. cit., pp. 117–18.

8Twelfth Census, loc. cit., p. 414.

Iles, op. cit., p. 343.

him with the stuff of thought and the tools of action, but at the same time stamps its mark upon his personal contribution. His bow and arrow with all the improvement which he can add still disclose a long line of ancestors, just as the Springfield rifle of today exhibits its pedigree from the shotgun of the Middle Ages. The continuity of invention reveals in a cold, objective way that the improvements of the individual rest upon the achievements of the race.

b) Up to this point, our attention has been upon social heredity as a whole; we must now distinguish between method and content. Method itself is also an idea, a definite way of utilizing the content of experience. What, then, is the influence of method on the inventive process? Is method in invention something acquired, or is it something innate in man?

History has clearly revealed that the attitude of the experimenter to the body of facts presented to him by his predecessors and contemporaries, or his attitude to the new percepts and ideas or new combinations of ideas which rise to his consciousness, is of utmost. importance for discovery and invention. Thus the use of magic by the savage was a waste of effort; the theological interpretation of reality in the Middle Ages distracted attention from the present to the future life and delayed progress. Modern civilization is the outcome of the empirical movement which, under the impulse of Bacon, Descartes, and Comte, loosed physics, psychology, and sociology from their metaphysical moorings, and directed them into the scientific course. The moment of the self-conscious employment of the scientific method, observation, experimentation, and comparison, for the control of life, rather than the Discovery of America, the Capture of Constantinople, or the Collapse of Feudalism, marks the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Era.

The simplicity of the scientific method would seem to indicate that it was an original personal possession. "The whole secret of the art of discovery [is as follows]: The entire field of possibilities is divided into sections which can be controlled by the means at our command, and each section is separately examined. By this method the particular part of the field which contains the solution of the problem cannot escape discovery." 10 In short, the scientific

10Ostwald, "Art of Discovery," in the Scientific American Supplement, LXX (1910), 123-24, translated from Die Forderung des Tages, 1910, p. 158; see also his Erfinder und Entdecker, 1908.

method is no more nor less than controlled trial and error. In spite of the simplicity of the scientific method, the long repression of science by magic, theology, and metaphysics indicates that the employment of the scientific method is not innate, but a socially acquired characteristic. So far from being a natural faculty of the human mind, the acquirement of the scientific method has been one of the most difficult, as it has proved the most dynamic of human achievements. The difficulty is only increased by the fact that any specific application of the experimental method requires the development of a new technique for the specific problem. This technique is often no more than a simple idea. Yet numerous examples may be brought forward of the credulity even of scientists outside of their own field or in an undeveloped territory. The reader of Hobbes, Berkeley, and Hume, not to multiply these names with those of philosophers before their time, is struck with amazement at their abrupt change of attitude in passing from an examination of natural to spiritual data. Even the great skeptic Hume, who maintained that "the proof against a miracle is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined," " stated "that, upon the whole, we may conclude that the Christian Religion was at first attended with miracles." 12 We can find conspicuous examples of the same scientific inconsistency in our own time. Sir Alfred Wallace, codiscoverer of the doctrine of evolution, was deceived13 by the tricks of spurious mediums which less able men, by the introduction of controlled experiments, were competent to expose. The German "thinking" horse, "Clever Hans," baffled scientists until a young student devised a simple control1a— merely the introduction of a screen between the horse and the observer.

The scientific attitude is essential to scientific discovery and mechanical invention. The extension of this method, developed in the narrow habitual, perceptual, and mechanical areas of life, to the solution of all the problems of the universe was a co-operative process in space and time. While the achievement of the scientific

11 Hume, Essays, edited by Green and Grose, 1889, II, 93.

12 Ibid., p. 108.

13 My Life, 1905, II, 293-367.

14Pfungst, Clever Hans (Rahn's trans., 1911).