Chapter VI

TECHNOLOGY AND PROGRESS

TECHNOLOGY is organized skill. As a definition this formula is both inadequate and misleading, but there is not better way to explore and clarify the meaning of technology than by discovering the inadequacies of common­sense conceptions such as this one. All skill is organized, of course, and all behavior skilled in some sense or other. We commonly distinguish between the skill of the artisan and the mastery of the scientist or the "creative" artist and these distinctions are important. But do they distinguish between skill and non­skill? We do not ordinarily think of the scientist or the artist as "unskilled."

However important they may be, such distinctions are between kinds of skill. An artisan is one who performs operations which a scientist has devised. Much the same distinction is made between the artist who is a "mere" performer and one who is a "creator." But differences appear even within the field of creation. In one of his later essays Roger Fry retracted his earlier declaration that Sargent was not an artist but repeated his earlier judgment in this form, that Sargent was an "applied" artist. The distinction was more than a slight. What Fry meant was that Sargent had adopted the color chords which the Impressionists had "created" (or discovered or invented ) , and had used them in painting portraits of rich sitters. Whereas Sargent, according to Fry, had "learned something" from the Impressionists, later painters stood to learn nothing from his canvases.

A similar distinction is made between pure and applied science. A man who knows no mathematics is only a mechanic, however good a mechanic he may be. If he knows and uses the common branches of mathematics, he is an engineer. If his scientific training is sufficient to enable him to understand and reproduce the experiments of scientists, putting them to use in the fashion which Sargent used the palette of the Impressionists in painting portraits, he is an applied scientist. If he masters the work of earlier scientists in such a way as to be able to carry it on, putting their discoveries to the same sort of use to which they in turn had put the discoveries of still earlier scientists, the he is a scientist, too, in the same sense as they. Considerations of social prestige enter into these distinctions and give feeling­tone to judgements such as Fry passed upon Sargent, but they are irrelevant to the analysis of technology. The distinctions exist independently of the invidiousness which has been associated with them.

But they are not distinctions between skill and non­skill. What they distinguish is types of skill. The word "technique" is generally employed by musicians and other artists to refer to the finger­dexterity of the instrumentalist, or the hand-and-brush dexterity with which the painter applies his pigments to the canvas. Such technique is a more or less indispensable part of the equipment of every artist; but it is often mentioned sneeringly, and for this reason. A player may have acquired great finger­dexterity and still be musically illiterate. Nearly all the great composers were at one time eminent performers, but most of them let their "techniques" run down as they became increasingly absorbed in composition. Does this mean that playing the piano is a matter of skill but that of composing music is not? By no means. At another level of generalization it is customary to speak of "the techniques of the composer," meaning such things as skill in using scores. Many a musician who has acquired great skill in reading music, that is, in thinking from printed notes to sounds, would experience the greatest difficulty in writing out the notes even of a quite simple tune which he had just heard for the first time. Mozart's celebrated feat of writing out in full an unpublished and closely guarded "Miserere" after hearing it once in the Sistine Chapel was not only an act of "sheer genius"; it was a technical achievement which was possible at all only because even at the age of fourteen Mozart was master of the techniques of the composer. He was indeed "very good at it"; but what he was very good at must not be overlooked.

The conclusion toward which all these reflections lead is that all acts of skill involve the use of tools of one sort or another. Such distinctions as we have been considering are made in terms of the differences between these tools. An artisan is not a person of inferior dexterity. He is a person whose tools, however dextrously they may be used, are commonplace. But the skills of scientists and artists­­ even pure scientists and creative artists­­ are no less contingent on the use of tools. A mathematician or a composer may "have an inspiration" when he is wandering in the woods or (as in the case of Henri Poincare) when he is catching a train. At the moment he has in his hands nothing which could be identified as a tool of his profession. Nevertheless his profession is a tool­using profession, and his "inspiration" could never have occurred to a man who had never used those tools. In the case of a composer they are such things as the diatonic scale, musical notation, existing instruments, and the like; but even more important to the particular inspiration of the individual composer is the literature of music: the works of other composers existing as physical objects in the form of printed scores over which he has pored most of his life. The same is true of the mathematician. At any given moment he may be without paper and pencil and not need them> But mathematics as a science could not have come into existence in the absence of paper and pencils (or any substitutes ) . Teachers of mathematics try from the beginning to impress upon their pupils that a "point" is not a chalk­mark on a blackboard. (In Mr. Fortune's Maggot Sylvia Townsend Warner has written a very amusing account of the efforts of a lover of mathematics to convey this distinction to an aborigine.) Mathematicians have been able to define a point as "that which has" neither length nor breadth nor thickness, whatever "that which has" may mean in such a formula; but they could never have done so without using physical objects as tools. More important for present­day mathematics are of course the symbols which have been devised as the notation of complex mathematical operations. Here also the symbols are not themselves the operations; but here also it is still true that operations could not be conducted without symbols, and that no one could learn to think mathematically without having spent years poring over the printed record of the symbolically denoted operations of earlier mathematicians. The current issues of the mathematical journals are perhaps the most important tools of the trade of the practicing mathematician, and they are physical objects which must be used with skill, no less than wrenches and hammers.

This absolute mutual contingency of skills and tools is of supreme importance for an understanding of technology as a function of human behavior for two reasons. In the first place, technological activity can be identified in no other way than by its uniform, unvarying association with tools. In some cases identification is easy. When a primitive community is fashioning a dugout canoe, we observe that two sorts of activity are going on. While a number of men are engaged in hollowing out the log, one rattles sharks' teeth, and roars what are obviously incantations. We identify the former as technological activity and the latter as something else. But the distinction is not so apparent to the tribesmen, since they recognize all these practitioners as members of the same "holy order" of canoe­builders and know that all are following the sacred liturgy of their order, the "workers" no less than the roarer. To us hollowing out logs is a secular activity, but "intoning" is something else; and we apply our own distinctions as an a priori classification to the other people.

Other cases are not so easy. We recognize astrology and alchemy as pre­sciences; but the whole activity in which their practitioners engaged was that of necromancy. Furthermore, as we have learned to our sorrow, certain ways of thinking have been carried over from earlier activity into what we have regarded as the age of reason, so that our own science at least in its early stages has been contaminated by foreign elements. How are these to be distinguished? Categories such as "truth" and "knowledge" are disconcertingly inconclusive. It is precisely the "knowledge" of early modern times that is most dubious. The only reliable distinction is provided by what we call "experimental techniques," that is to say the tools of science. Even the necromancers employed "laboratory" techniques and were scientists insofar as they did so, in spite of the romantic names they gave their instruments and operations.

The case of the fine arts is even more confusing. Like science, all the arts were originally sacerdotal. All design and pictorial representation was a first cabalistic; all rhythm and tone patterns, all the gestures and postures of dance and drama, were at first the literal enactment of mystic rites. Modern anthropological studies have left no doubt on this score. And in this case we have emerged from the savage state only very incompletely. The arts are still associated with ecclesiastical activities and their contemplation and creation are still generally regarded as "spiritual" experiences in a sense that is not true even of science. The effect of works of art is still generally conceived to be a sort of "seizure," and the creation of "masterworks" is still attributed to "inspiration" of a sort that is not vouchsafed to even the greatest of scientists. People repeat Wagner's hyperbole about "God and Beethoven" as though it were a literal transfiguration­­ and all this in spite of the constant insistence of practicing artists that their achievements are the result of "taking pains."

In this case also there is only one solution to the enigma: that provided by technical analysis. Popular reputations wax and wane. The "seizures" people feel in the presence of great "masterworks" are of the nature of self­hypnosis induced by expectation. Their subjects are usually awe­struck by such things as "the marvelous colors," although the actual pigments may have been renewed half­a­dozen times by quite mediocre and anonymous restorers. To the annoyance of musicians the enthusiastic public admires Mozart for his "quaintness" and Bach for the intricacy of his counterpoint, although what they call Mozart's quaintness was a characteristic of all eighteenth­century music, while Bach's great distinction was that he added to the contrapuntal intricacies of his day a harmonic richness which music had never known before. The achievements, of the great artists are genuine achievements, but they are technical achievements which can be understood and genuinely appreciated only by a certain amount of study, a certain amount of knowledge of what is actually technically going on. This understanding and appreciation is understanding of the tools­­ color and design, tonal structure and texture, and the like­­ with which artists actually work. In the tangled web of human life, technical activities are almost inextricably blended with activities of another sort. The enthusiasm which they merit is almost indistinguishable from religious ecstasy. Nevertheless all tool­using activities have something in common which can be understood by virtue of the tools.

It is the peculiar character of all technology, from chipped flints to Boulder Dam and Beethoven's quartets, that it is progressive. It is inherently developmental. This circumstance which gives technology its peculiar importance in the analysis of culture­­ and most of all for economists­­ also can be understood only in terms of tools. If we limit the conception of technology to "skill," we are at once subject to great risk of conceiving technological development as the growth of skills, and since skill is a "faculty" of "individuals," we are pre­conditioned to think of the growth of skill as in some sense an increase of this faculty on the part of individuals. But we know nothing of any such increase.

That is what makes it so hard for economists of the traditional way of thinking to understand the technological principle. They understand the crucial importance of the issue. Since Veblen first began to write, it has been apparent that some sort of claim was being made for technology as a master­principle of economic analysis. This claim was seen to rest on the peculiarly dynamic character of technology as itself inherently progressive and the agent of social change, in particular the agent of the industrial revolution. As one of the most thoughtful of contemporary economists has remarked, this whole way of thinking "assumes for technology some kind of inner law of progress of an absolute and inscrutable character," as well as "some equally absolute and inscrutable type of 'causality' by which technology drags behind it and 'determines' other phases of social change." The whole issue between old and new ways of thinking in economics comes to focus here. The new way of thinking does indeed rest on some kind of inner law of progress. But there is nothing absolute or inscrutable about it. What makes it seem inscrutable is the inveterate predisposition of orthodox economists to think in terms of a conception of human nature as that of the uniquely individual "spirit." Thinking so, they think of technology as a skill­faculty of the individual spirit; and thinking so, they find the principle of technological development quite inscrutable­­ as indeed they must. For the developmental character of technology is implicit not in the skill­faculty of the human individual but in the character of tools. The whole analysis must proceed on the level of generalization of culture rather than of individuality in order for the principle of technological progress to be understood at all.

On that level it is perfectly obvious. As a result of the rapid advance of machine technology in recent years, the process of invention has attracted general attention and has become the subject of a considerable literature. These studies have given the coup de grace to the "heroic" theory of invention­­ the myth which attributes inventions to the sheer magnitude of soul of the "Gifted Ones." It is now generally agree that all inventions are combinations of previously existing devices. Thus the airplane is a combination of a kite and an internal combustion engine. An automobile is a combination of a buggy with an internal combustion engine. The internal combustion engine itself is a combination of the steam engine with a gaseous fuel which is substituted for the steam and exploded by the further combination of the electric spark. This is speaking broadly, of course. In actual practice the combinations are for the most part much more detailed. What is presented to the public as a "new" invention is usually itself the end­product of a long series of inventions.

In this process, materials­­ what economists have so misleadingly designated as "natural" resources­­ function as devices. According to the principle of indestructibility of matter there is no such thing as a "new" material. Helium gas must have been present in the earth of the Texas panhandle geologic ages before man first invaded the Western hemisphere some thousands of years ago. Nevertheless helium was not a "natural resource" of the republic of Texas, inasmuch as helium was not identified in the sun for many years after the end of the republic, nor isolated from the earth's atmosphere for many years after that, nor discovered to be a component of Texas natural gas until still later, nor treated as a resource until it was used in balloons only a few years ago. The history of every material is the same. It is one of novel combination of existing devices and materials in such fashion as to constitute a new device or a new material or both. This is what it means to say that natural resources are defined by the prevailing technology, a practice which is now becoming quite general among economists to the further confusion of old ways of thinking (since it involves a complete revision of the concept of "scarcity" which must now be regarded as also defined by technology and not by "nature" ) .

Furthermore, as regards the nature of the process there is no difference between "mechanical" invention and "scientific" discovery. Scientific discoveries also result from the combination of previously existing devices and materials, laboratory instruments and techniques. It was by combining a magnet with a Crookes tube, for example, that J. J. Thomson discovered that the stream of incandescence in the tube was in fact a stream of physical particles and was even able to calculate the mass of the electrons. It was by combining a prism with a telescope that astronomers were able to identify elements (such as helium) in the sun. Even in the fine arts "creation" comes about in the same way. Leonardo's great achievement illustrated by the famous Mona Lisa, about which so much nonsense has been talked, was that he applied techniques which the monks had devised for the portrayal of angels to the portraiture of living subjects. Cezanne characterized his achievement as resulting from the application of Pissarro's studio technique to painting from nature. In every innovation analysis reveals the combination of previously existing devices. That is what the achievement is which in different fields we call invention or discovery or creation.

This principle of combination is important by virtue of the light it throws on previous obscurities. One of these is the role of chance in discovery and invention. An extraordinary number of the most significant discoveries have been made by chance. Columbus discovered America by accident. Ostensibly he was sailing toward the Indies. The discovery of the X­ray resulted from the exposure of sealed photographic plates by their accidental juxtaposition to a Crookes tube. Ehrlich's "magic bullet" treatment for syphilis eventuated from the accidental relation between the spirochete of that disease and the trypanosome which Ehrlich had much earlier selected for experimental purposes because it was easily identified under the microscope and could be bred in laboratory animals. In the case of mechanical inventions the rule of chance is even more notorious. Adam Smith relates the tale of the invention of the automatic valves by which the steam engine operates from the trick of a lazy boy who tied the control string to a moving part which then opened and closed the value automatically.

But what do we mean by "chance" or "accident"? These words are of course relational. In a sense nothing occurs by chance, but some events are less relevant than others to any given point of reference. In all these cases the point of reference is the previous activities of some individual. The discovery of America was "accidental" with reference to the intentions of Columbus; but is was not accidental that it should have occurred in 1492. The arts of shipbuilding, seamanship, and navigation being what they were by the end of the fifteenth century, somebody was "bound" to have "discovered America" within a decade or so; and this also is true of inventions and discoveries generally. The lore of science and mechanics is full of simultaneous discoveries, often by several agents and as a result of strikingly similar combinations. The simultaneous development of the infinitesimal calculus out of the same mathematical material by Newton and Leibnitz is a case in point. So is the simultaneous enunciation of the theory of biological evolution by Darwin and Wallace. In this case the identity of the materials which entered into combination and the extreme separation of the agents of discovery are equally striking. Although Darwin thought out his statement in England and Wallace in Malaysia on the opposite side of the world, both were practicing naturalists concerned with the problem of species, and both received definite stimulation to this particular formula from reading Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population. Instances could be multiplied indefinitely. The Patent Office is engaged in a perpetual struggle with the problem of simultaneity. But what seems utterly mysterious so long as invention is regarded as an act of individual inspiration is easily explained in terms of the principle of combination.

These combinations are physical not less than ideational. To be sure they are achieved by men, usually by men of great ability. But the things they put together are physical objects. The coexistence of these objects constitutes a possibility of combination which transcends the acts of any individual. It is in this sense that inventions seem "bound" to occur. Granted a working steam engine, the steam­propelled locomotive was bound to follow. Granted the much lighter internal combustion engine, its application to the buggy and the kite was bound to result­­ almost simultaneously­­ in the automobile and the airplane. It is no disparagement of genius to recognize that certain combinations would almost necessarily have occurred in somebody's hands sooner or later. Individual genius not only places its possessor in the front rank of pioneers; it also determines when a discovery is made. Often this happens "before its time." That is, some inspired Mendel works out a given combination, the laws of inheritance among sweet peas, years before other combinations have occurred in the field of cytology to which those law are supremely relevant. The over­all determinant which defines the universe of discourse within which genius is at play is an objective actuality­­ the tool pattern.

Another anomaly of the inventive process which also is resolved by the tool­combination principle is the extraordinary role of tyros and amateurs in science and mechanics and even the fine arts. The number of important discoveries and inventions which have been made by juveniles and by such people as lawyers and clergymen whose professional training is wholly unrelated to the field in question is strikingly large­­ too large to be attributed to the peculiar talents of the individuals concerned, who in many cases have done little or nothing else to attract attention. In Mathematical physics for example, the Nobel prize has been given to so many men of such extreme youth as to give rise to the saying that in this field a man has passed his peak by twenty­eight. Why is this? Doubtless precocity has something to do with it in certain cases. Children learn languages easily, including the special languages of mathematics and music; but it is notorious that most prodigies peter out, and in any case the prodigy theory does not explain the discoveries of the clergyman, Joseph Priestley, or the paintings of the stockbroker, Paul Gauguin.

The explanation which follows directly from the tool­combination analysis of invention is the one which accounts for the annoying facility with which an intruder often finds a solution almost instantaneously for a jigsaw puzzle with which the player has been struggling for hours. Where the solution is a matter of putting together existing pieces, it may be impeded by fixed ideas, preoccupations, and other behavior "sets," on the part of the regular player from which the intruder is free. Consequently he sees at once the possible combination which has been hidden from the player by his own intense preoccupation. Innovations are often made by people who are so innocent as not to realize how outrageously novel they are. It is even said that important scientific discoveries have been made as a direct result of ignorance on the part of a discoverer who simply did not "know" that the thing he did "could not be done," and so just went ahead and did it. This is the explanation of the importance of detachment for scientific research and other creative achievement, what Veblen called "idle" curiosity. Obviously (though it has not been obvious to hostile critics , perhaps because they lacked detachment) he meant "detached" and not "indolent." Excessive preoccupation of any kind­­ pious, financial, uxorious, or even professional­­ is inimical to the "free play" of the imagination in the course of which combinations somehow occur. Discoveries are not made by punching timeclocks, and closing laboratories and libraries on Sunday is an excellent way to inhibit creative activity.

These corollaries of the analysis of invention in terms of the combination of existing devices, in which Mr. Gilfillan and his colleagues are interested for their own sake, assume increasingly great theoretical importance as they proceed from the particular to the general. If technological development results from the combination of existing tool­material devices, and if such combinations follow the pattern of existing devices and often do so in the hands of people whose peculiar advantage it is to be free from inhibiting preoccupations, then it would also seem to follow that innovations are likely to occur at any time and in any region in which devices are brought together which have hitherto existed in separate regions. This is an observed fact. The diffusion of culture traits from one culture area to another is quite generally accompanied by innovation. Indeed, so striking is the stimulus which results from culture contacts that it has been called the "cross­fertilization" of cultures. But is the tools themselves, not the people that have been hybridized. Such innovations­­ and they include some of the most important technological advances in history ­­ are not to be explained by any special excitation of the imaginations of the people among whom they occur. As a matter of fact the people most directly concerned are usually quite unaware of the importance of what is going on; and furthermore, once the mutually conditioning devices have been brought together, no sublime inspiration is necessary to the recognition of the pattern. The combination occurs almost "of itself," often quite anonymously. That is one reason why the history of mechanical inventions is so difficult to trace. No one has bothered to record the event because no one is aware that an act of "heroism" has been committed. It remains for later historians gradually to become aware of the transcendent importance of these almost surreptitious developments. Regarding them, as it is their habit to regard all history, as the sum of the acts of individual men, they are at a loss for an adequate explanation. But on the cultural level of generalization, regarded as combinations of physically existing devices, these innovations are not only explicable but inevitable. Where cultures meet, cross­fertilization is to be expected. It is direct result of the physical embodiment of technical behavior patterns in tools and physical materials.

We have here the explanation of the "inscrutable" propensity of all technological devices to proliferate. This "propensity" is a characteristic not of men but of tools. Granted that the tools are always tools of men who have the capacity to use tools and therefore the capacity to use them together, combinations are bound to occur. Furthermore it follows that the more tools there are, the greater is the number of potential combinations. If we knew nothing of history but had somehow come to understand the nature of our tools, we could infer that technological development must have been an accelerating process, almost imperceptibly slow in its earlier stages and vertiginously fast in its most recent phase. This is, of course, the observed fact. Mr. H. G. Wells, with his gift for dramatizing history, has remarked that the entire development of civilization (as distinguished from "savagery") has occurred within roughly one hundred generations, which is perhaps not more than one one­hundredth part of the experience of the race. The machine age occupies not more than one­tenth part of this period; the mass­production age, one one­hundredth. The old stone age was a prodigious length; the new stone age much shorter but still many times longer than the whole of subsequent history. Archaeologists and historians are well aware of this fact. Indeed, it is one of their persistent puzzles. But it is a puzzle to which the analysis of mechanical invention now provides a key. The tool itself is the key to the great mystery.

For the tool­combination principle is indeed a law of progress. If we suppose that tool­combinations occur in the same fashion as that in which digits are combined in the mathematical theory of permutations, then the resulting series is a progressive one in the mathematical sense of a series each member of which is derived from each preceding member by the same operation. In such a case it would be sharply progressive in the sense that the number of combinations would increase very rapidly, that is by squares:

x ; (x²) ; (x²) ² ; ((x²) ²) ² . . . or x ; x² ; x⁴; x⁸; x¹⁶. . .

Obviously this supposition at once calls for a number of reservations. We do not know that tool­combinations occur according to the mathematical law of permutations. Indeed we have no way of knowing for any given set of tools, devices, or materials, how many combinations are possible. We know only the ones that actually occur, and even these present a problem of enumeration which is perhaps insoluble, as is the initial enumeration of the given set. The mathematical analogy also takes no account of time, although time is of the essence of an actual historical sequence. Does the completion of each stage of the progressive series represent a year or a thousand years? Does the time­span increase for successive stages as the magnitude of the sets increases? Clearly the mathematical representation of the actual process of technological combination can be nothing more than illustrative, and illustrative only of one aspect of the process, that of increasing magnitude.

Nevertheless the analogy is highly suggestive. Although no one supposes that history conforms to any simple mathematical series, the idea that the actual technological process is progressive and accelerating has occurred to a number of students in widely separate fields of investigation. This principle is not teleological, any more than the physical principles of gravitation or centrifugence. It need not be supposed that any given invention is "bound" to occur. Certainly it will not occur if the solar system is obliterated by the collision of the sun with a wandering comet, nor will it occur if the human species is suddenly and completely obliterated by disease. It will not occur at any given time in any given community if all technological development or even that particular strain of technological developments, is inhibited by contrary forces at work in that community at that time. No one supposes that the technological process is the whole of culture, any more than anyone suppose that centrifugence is the only physical force to which inhabitants of the surface of the earth are subject. On the contrary, all students of technology have recognized that it is but one aspect of culture and that culture exhibits another aspect which is inhibitory to the technological process just as gravitation inhibits centrifugence. In some communities, apparently, technological progress has been totally arrested. Stone­age culture is still extant in certain regions. There is no community whose history does not reveal periods in which technology has been virtually stationary for long periods of time. But these facts do not deny the existence of technology nor invalidate the analysis of technological development in terms of a continuous, cumulative, progressive process, any more than the fact that we do not fly off at a tangent to the earth's surface invalidates the principle of centrifugence. It means that other forces are also at work, not that technological progress is an illusion.

Granting all this, some students of the social sciences hesitate to identify technological development with progress for another reason. The concept of progress is in bad odor at the present time, and rightly so. In the past, progress has been conceived in terms of the prevailing transcendentalism as movement toward a preconceived "end" or consummatory state. This consummatory state, as we now realize, has always been a projection, or "collective representation," of prevailing culture. That is, every people has conceived "heaven," or perfection, as the pure essence of its own prevailing institutions or mores, just as Dante pictured Paradise and Purgatory in terms of his own (community engendered) preferences and prejudices. We know today­­ it is a ground­ principle of modern social science­­ that such conceptions have no general validity, and students of the social sciences are therefore chary of any assumption which embodies them.

But when they insist that any conception of progress "must" be transcendental, they go beyond scientific caution. Why "must" it? What does "must" mean in this connection? It cannot mean that no other conception is possible, since another actually exists. It has been employed in mathematics since ancient times without demur. It is entirely clear and definite. Why, then, should its employment in the analysis of technology arouse resistance? But social progress, we are told, "must" be movement toward a preconceived "end." What "must" it? There is only one answer to this question. Although modern social studies have convinced us that human behavior exhibits no such "end" and therefore no such movement, we are still sufficiently obsessed by traditional ways of thinking to retain the conviction that if we are to think about social progress at all, we must do so in terms of transcendental "ends." We "must" because that is the traditional way of thinking.

This sense of intellectual compulsion to follow traditional ways of thinking is bound up with our whole conception of value, and our emancipation will certainly not be complete until it has included that category. But the analysis of technological process by students of mechanical invention and of the history of science and the arts is already sufficient to indicate the existence in all cultures of a dynamic force, a phase of culture which is in itself and of its own character innovational, one in which change is continuous and cumulative, and always in the same direction, that of more numerous and more complex technological devices. It may be objected that the very word "direction" implies an "end," but this is not so. Direction is implicit in the nature of a series. The series of cardinal numbers is directional, since the numbers continually grow larger as we count. It would be ridiculous to say that in counting we are striving to approximate infinity, or that counting is meaningless except as infinity is preconceived to be its "end," and it is just as ridiculous to insist that no continuous process can be conceived in the realm of culture except in terms of a preconceived "end."

Indeed, the restoration of the concept of progress is one of the crying needs of contemporary social science. The truth is, our agnosticism has gone too far. In ridding our minds of the naive collective representations of the past, we have gone so far as to deny the intelligibility of any sort of pattern in cultural development. But the development of culture exhibits pattern. The successive layers of artifacts which are laid bare by digging of the archaeologists are not a sheer hodge­podge conglomeration. Each successive layer is somehow related to the ones below and the ones above, and the relationship exhibits some sort of continuous process. Whatever the function be called which differentiates one from another, it is a continuous function and still further differentiates the second layer above from the second layer below.

To economists this problem of pattern is presented in the form of industrialization. It is a real problem. Something or other has been going on continuously. Whether good or bad, purgatorial or paradise­ approximating, it is the same process in each generation. What is this process? For reasons which have already been discussed, traditional economic thinking has attributed this continuous development to the agency of business enterprise, and this attribution has been one of the basic postulates of that way of thinking. But its technological character has been suspected all along by intellectual mavericks. It is now strongly substantiated by all the studies which have contributed to our present understanding of the technological process. Students of economics are therefore confronted by a challenge. In spite of traditional assumptions, the origin and development of the industrial economy remains a mystery. Can the technological principle of explanation resolve this mystery? It is to this challenge that we must now address ourselves.

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