one moment of the destruction of property involved in it? Why, gentlemen, if this sort of thing is allowed to go on, you will in a very few years destroy the noblesse!' Physicians maintained that travel through tunnels would be most prejudicial to health. Dr. Lardner protested against passengers being compelled to put up with what he called 'the destruction of the atmospheric air,' and Sir Anthony Carlisle insisted that 'tunnels would expose healthy people to colds, catarrhs and consumption.' Many critics expected the boilers of the locomotives to explode at any and all times. Others were sure that the railways would throw so many workmen out of employment that revolution must follow, and still others declared that England was being delivered utterly into the power of a small group of manufacturers and mine-owners. But in spite of all this, the people took to riding on the railways and England prospered." 20

Here, in the stage of the crystallization of opinion around two conflicting lines of policy in regard to the feasibility of the improvement of transportation, we have the forces of conservatism, embodied in the landlord class with its pseudo-feudal privileges arrayed to suppress the impulse for innovation, supported by the self-made and aggressive captains of industry. A century earlier, the outcome of the clash of classes and opinions on this proposal might have been dubious, but the Industrial Revolution had occurred, bringing in its train an immense change in human valuations. The Weltgeist, as well as the state of mechanical knowledge and the necessities of industrial development, favored the emergence of the railroad. Thus industry and commerce achieved another significant and final victory over feudalism. It is of interest to note that the institution of the first English railroad required" the sanction of the highest conscious process of the social mind, namely, the legislative act of Parliament.

Social inertia, superstitious apprehension, religious scruples, vested interests, as obstacles to the appropriation of origination, all reduce to one formula: the conservatism of social valuation. Social valuation is inherently conservative, not only in the broadest sense of conservative, but also in its narrower and conventional connotation. A valuation, once formed, excludes, for the time, all

26 Holland, Historic Inventions, 1911, pp. 161-62. 27 Smiles, Lives of Engineers, 1905, III, 276, 360.

but the sanctioned idea or course of action. As such, it limits the variability of human action and tends to rigidity. Thus, the very process of social valuation, so important in the conservation of invention, contains within it, by the nature of its operation, an unprogressive tendency antagonistic to its function.

Conservation, then, in both its positive and its negative phases, reduces to an aspect of the process of personal and social valuation. The innovation must possess a value, conceived as magical, supernatural, or functional, appreciated by the group; in the long run, it must articulate with the practical activities of the group; and it must be sufficiently generalized throughout the group by appropriation and by diffusion to assure its conservation. Socialization, then, as the process integrating the ideas, attitudes, and activities of the members of the group into an organic whole operates to secure the preservation and survival of objects and methods of social value.

CHAPTER III

ORIGINATION AS A FUNCTION OF SOCIALIZATION. I. THE SOCIAL HERITAGE

The role of socialization in invention is not confined to securing the survival of the innovation. The social mental organization of the group conditions and governs the originating process as well. Different phases and products of the socio-psychic activity, as the state of knowledge of the group, the social organization, social stimuli and demand are fundamental elements in the invention activity. These various interrelations of the person and the group provide the individual with his stock of ideas, afford opportunity for specialization, and stimulate the activity of the inventor. The further question remains, In what concrete way and to what extent does socialization function in the act of origination?

First of all, we should recognize that invention, like the other aspects of human activity, is a mental process. In every inventive act, psychic factors, such as memory, association, and imagination, are the forces immediately operative. The influence of differences in congenital equipment in invention, particularly in determining the personnel of the inventors, cannot be overlooked in any study of invention, although for the present analysis these differences must be assumed rather than analyzed. What is important for our purpose is how the mode of participation in the inter-mental activity of the group facilitates or impedes the play of the mental processes immediately involved.

1

"Invention," says Thomas, "means that the mind sees a roundabout way of reaching an end when it cannot be reached directly. It brings into play the associative memory, and involves the recognition of analogies." Jevons gives an objective statement of the inventive act: "It would be an error to suppose that the great discoverer seizes at once upon the truth, or has any unerring method of divining it. Fertility of imagination and abundance. of guesses at truth are among the first requisites of discovery; but the erroneous guesses must be many times as numerous as those which prove well founded."

1Source Book for Social Origins, 1909, pp. 166-67.

2Principles of Science, 1874, p. 577.

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.