CHAPTER V

ORIGINATION AS A FUNCTION OF SOCIALIZATION. III. SOCIAL STIMULI AND DEMAND

Personal participation in the social heritage, the extra-organic equipment of the race, is necessary to secure a basis for innovation. The complexity and character of the social organization either extends or contracts the scope of personal freedom, the measure of opportunity, and the degree of possible efficiency and specializationall big factors in determining the rate of the acceleration of progress. But another factor, conditioning invention and, like the social heritage and the social organization, also an aspect of socialization, is social stimuli and demand. While the social heritage affords the basis for the innovation, and the social organization accelerates or impedes progress, social stimuli and demand largely determine the direction and character of invention. For example, the technical preconditions for two possible inventions may be altogether similar, yet one materializes and is perfected, while the other is never conceived or else dies still-born. The explanation of this situation involves the analysis of this additional factor, namely, social stimuli and demand.

The distinction between social stimuli and social demand is only relative. They are the two sides of the same shield. By group stimulus is meant all the intangible and tangible social influences which control the direction of the attention of the individual, arouse his interest, and determine his activity. By social demand is meant the entire gamut of group needs, unconscious as well as conscious, which impinge upon the individuals in the group. The stimuli are objective and more or less definite; the demands are subjective, but are mandatory if not always specific.

1. Social stimuli are of two kinds: natural and artificial. Natural social stimuli, praise and blame, fashion and fad, many economic advantages, are only slightly under rational group control. Artificial stimuli, such as rewards and special privileges, are arrangements sanctioned by the group and designed to direct the course of inventive talent.

a) Under the natural social stimuli we shall consider those operating in two situations: first, those arising in the thought-provoking

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eddies of intimate social intercourse; and secondly, those found in the deeper currents of the social stream.

We can hardly overestimate the influences generated in the intimate face-to-face groups. By means of conversation, through the give-and-take of ideas, the horizon of the person is enlarged, his interests are widened, his attention is drawn to the needs of the group, his ingenuity is directed and stimulated. Accounts of the decisive influence of the intimate group upon invention are familiar. A chance debate on the possibilities of the invention of a weaving mill drew out the assertion from Cartwright that the difficulties were not so great as in devising an automatic chess player,1 and finally led this argumentative clergyman to put his theory into practice. Arkwright's attention was turned to textile inventions because he was brought "into constant intercourse with persons engaged in weaving and spinning," and because "inventions.

were a constant

topic of conversation among the manufacturing population." That Whitney, a Yankee, should invent the cotton-gin was due to the faith in his mechanical ingenuity of the southern woman in whose home he was tutor. In all three instances the attention of men of mechanical genius was directed to a field of activity by reason of their membership in intimate groups.

How far-reaching in every activity are the group influences! The standards of achievement are erected in the group; here the pace is set; records are established only to be broken. Personal ambition, envy, admiration, self-seeking are all placed under the social yoke to cultivate and to enrich the social field. The concrete process of human association for the twofold achievement of personal and group ends intensifies the socialization and results in important human achievements. This personal participation of the person in the life of the group is the means by which the individual secures for himself the heritage of the past and is fitted for a part in the co-operative achievement of further advance. Socialization, then, in this aspect of a social environment furnishing the strongest possible stimuli for action, has a determining influence over the course of invention.

'Burnley, History of Wool and Woolcombing, 1889, p. 111.

Dictionary of National Biography, II, 82.

Crabtree, op. cit., p. 637.

More definite, perhaps, but not more powerful, are the influences emanating from the scientific group. The scientific circle, in a peculiar sense, is an intensely intimate group. Here the intimate character of the association is not entirely or exclusively based on its face-to-face character, although scientific gatherings and the relation of teacher and student afford opportunity for personal relations. The essential social bond is through the medium of the printed page. The anonymous character of the public created by the newspaper does not extend to the little group knitted together by scientific publications. There is no editorial "we" in scientific journals to conceal the identity of authorship; the contributors form a group whose efficient social stimulus is the common praise or blame and standing in the group.

More intangible, but as significant for the play of originality, is the range of contact open to the individual. The psychic isolation of the person not only shunts him off the main course of progress, but makes his efforts a dead loss to the group. "By reason of poverty, geographical isolation, caste feeling, or 'pathos,' individuals, communities, and races may be excluded from some of the stimulations and copies which enter into a high grade of mind. The savage, the Negro, the peasant, the slum-dwellers, and the white woman are notable sufferers by exclusion."

Physical isolation, in general, involves psychic isolation. The small community with its conventional or old-fashioned standards in literature, art, public speaking, religious appeal, is all too likely to furnish out-of-date copies to its young impressionable members. The social friction of contact with many types of men, the multitude of stimuli that attract the eye and the ear, the hustle and pace of business, are influences that cannot easily be escaped in the thronging of people together. The sheer density of population, while the most obvious aspect of urban life, is by no means as significant for progress as the secondary factors generally connected with it. In the study of the conditions determining the expression of literary genius-and they hold for technical genius as well-Odin discusses and analyzes these forces. Upon the basis of a classification of

Thomas, "Race Psychology," in the American Journal of Sociology, XVII (1912), 744.

"Woolston, "The Urban Habit of Mind," in the American Journal of Sociology, XVII (1912), 602-14.

"men of letters" according to place of birth as in large cities, in small cities, and in the country, he finds that while in general the relative fecundity of communities in the production of literary men varies with the density of population, other more significant factors are present which explain both the rule and the exceptions. These decisive influences which bear no absolute relation to concentration of population are the centralization of political, ecclesiastical, and judiciary administration in cities; the concentration of wealth in centers of population; the urban residence of the leisure, intelligent, and wealthy classes; and the presence of universities, libraries, and other educational facilities in cities.

Similar to the influence of the intimate group upon the individual members is the stimulus of the life of the larger group upon the various groups within it. The intense phases of social activity have always impressed into service the best efforts of the individual and resulted in the significant achievements. The reason why the bow and arrow of the savage were highly evolved before the diggingstick was well on its way to the plow was because of the intense interest in hunting and fighting and the lack of stimulus in plant culture. The degree of interest in the hunt and the fight is not to be explained solely by reason of the hunting type of the human mind, but also by the social significance of these activities and the group recognition of distinction in them. Modern business, emphasizing the value of a whole series of mentally uninteresting economic processes, has introduced stimuli into the perfection of the whole range of industrial activities. Over against the Watervliet Arsenal gun, once the most powerful in the world, and the mammoth ocean dreadnaughts may be placed the skyscraper and modern bridge construction as feats of engineering as great for industry as for war. Yet even today, organized society, because of the struggle for survival and success, still places a high social valuation upon advance in military art. The telegraph, wireless telegraphy, the railroad, the airship, have been quickly adapted to warfare. The building of the Panama Canal was due as much to naval as to commercial policy. But war has a negative as well as a positive influence on invention. The advocates of peace would find comfort in the statistics of the

"Odin, Genèse des grands hommes, 1895, pp. 511-12; summary in Ward, op. cit., pp. 193–94.

United States Census which exhibit a marked decrease in patents during periods of war and financial depression.

We turn now from a consideration of the general social influences of small and larger groups to a consideration of the more definite social stimuli. Fads, crazes, and fashions indicate irrational tendencies and crystallizations of the social mind which may, or may not, represent the actual needs of the group. Or individual appreciation of relatively unconscious group wants may offer the requisite impulse to the activities of the inventor.

Fashions, fads, and crazes, though irrational and ephemeral expressions of the valuations of the group, have often played an important part in the perfection of an appliance of limited utility. The bicycle could hardly have attained its present perfection had it been limited from the start to its practical use in transportation. But the social mind was affected by the quirk which we call a "craze," and afforded the necessary stimulus to inventive genius. In this connection, the fact is significant that with the collapse of the bicycle craze the number of patents applied for on bicycle parts immediately decreased. That obsession of the Dutch mind known as the "tulip craze" resulted in the development of an extraordinary number of marvelous new varieties. Epoch-making inventions in the button industries followed the tremendous impetus, soon after 1875, given to the manufacture of composition buttons "by the fashion, then coming into vogue, of trimming ladies' garments lavishly with buttons, not merely for fastening purposes, but also for ornamentation." Amateur photography, a fad pure and simple, by multiplying demand has greatly stimulated inventiveness in photography. Thus, the most irrational and irresponsible play of the mental activity of the group has a not-to-be-despised rôle in stimulating invention.

Many economic rewards, while not consciously presented by the group, stimulate invention. An appreciation by the inventor of the commercial possibilities of a certain new method or product is a lodestar in guiding his course. Edison ruefully confesses that the rejec

"See chart in Byrn, op. cit., p. 463, with decrease of patents in the Civil War, Spanish-American War, and in the financial depressions of 1873 and 1893.

Vincent, "Rivalry of Social Groups," in the American Journal of Sociology, XVI (1910-11), 481.

Twelfth Census, loc. cit., III, 322.