offered by Comte and less definitely by later writers, and finally, the doctrine of ineradicable national hatred proclaimed by contemporary militarists. Nowhere else in anything like the same compass can be found so fair and so pregnant an account of efforts to discover the psychological principles by which social behavior is determined. Of especial interest to economists is the remarkably fresh treatment of Bentham's hedonism.

The result of this review is "to prove that as the scale of social organization extends, the merely instinctive guidance of Fear, or Love, or Pleasure, or Habit, becomes more and more unsafe; and that not only is a clearer consciousness of his actions and a stronger habit of forecasting their results needed by the ordinary man, but also that Thought in the great sense, the long-continued concentration of the professed Thinker in which new knowledge is made available for the guidance of human life, is required as it has never been required before " (p. 191).

Hence the great practical issue for modern society is whether our thinking about social problems can be made more effective. Mr. Wallas accepts the evidence of psychologists that we cannot control the movement of thought; but he contends that we can control the material circumstances necessary for thought, the mental attitudes which are favorable to thought, and our relations to the subject matter of thought. These relations include, besides logic in the narrow sense, our use of memory and record, and our standardizing of the facts about which we think by the use of money values, commercial grading of commodities, and the like. Keen and wise as is the discussion, its chief service is to define "the dominant intellectual problem of the Great Society." This problem "may be summed up in the statement that he who thinks about the civilized world

is now compelled either to standardize it in shifting Memory and abstract Record, and so think erroneously about it, or to attempt to standardize it in fact, and so, perhaps, destroy the only conditions of life in which man is fitted to find the satisfaction of his nature" (p. 222). About the practical solution of this problem Mr. Wallas is inclined to be optimistic, on the ground that "both the development of more delicate logical methods and the accumulation of recorded observations are, in fact, now making deliberate Thought about mankind less inexact and misleading than at any other point in history" (p. 240).

Having examined the "facts of human psychology with the purpose of discovering how they can be adapted to the needs of the Great Society " in Part I of his book, Mr. Wallas proceeds in Part II to "examine existing forms of organization in the Great Society with the purpose of discovering how far they can be improved by a closer adaptation to the facts of human psychology (p. 249). Into this field I shall not follow him, because his task here is less to develop than to apply social psychology. Suffice it to say that the discussion concerns a number of burning current issues: the efficiency of government by parliament, cabinet, and civil service; the relations between business managers and shareholders; individualism, socialism, and syndicalism; the effect of "scientific management" upon the happine s of workers; women's suffrage, and the balance betweesn liberty and compulsion most conducive to social welfare. Any one who doubts the helpfulness of looking at such issues from the psychological viewpoint will be rapidly converted to faith if he will entrust himself for a few hours to Mr. Wallas' wise leading.

IV

In an article published in the American Journal of Sociology in September, 1898, Professor Veblen introduced into psychological discussion a new instinct, which he christened the instinct of workmanship. Both Mr. Parmelee and Mr. Thorndike discuss this article, but doubt the genuineness of the alleged instinct. The former, misinterpreting it as simply " the tendency to work," decides that it is “very far from being a distinct instinct," because it "is very complex in its character and causes." Mr. Thorndike likewise holds that this propensity as "the gifted economist Veblen " defines it, is "a complex of several sets of original connections and of their guidance by material and human surroundings.” 2 But while thus breaking the alleged instinct up into several original elements, he pronounces that, "Such a tendency surely comes to exist in very many men under the ordinary circumstances of life, and may properly be used in economics as a postulate."

Thus Mr. Veblen's long-awaited volume upon The Instinct of Workmanship encounters the preliminary objection that its very title in a misnomer and its fundamental thesis is an error. But Mr. Veblen is prepared for such criticism. He admits that the concept of instinct has disintegrated in the biological sciences since these sciences have begun a search for the irreducible

1 The Science of Human Behavior, p. 252.

? Chief among the original connections he mentions the tendencies to multiform physical and mental activity, the satisfyingness of mental control and of human approval, and the annoyance we feel at being thwarted and at being the object of human contempt. Among the environmental guiding factors he mentions, "objects to be duplicated, ends to be gained, and the human customs of approving certain products of intellect or skill and condemning others."

The Original Nature of Man, pp. 143, 144.

• The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts. By Thorstein Veblen. New York, The Macmillan Company, 1914. 8°, pp. ix + 355.

elements that go to make up behavior. By a brilliant anticipation of Mr. Thorndike's results, he points out that the concept would disintegrate in psychology also, if it undertook a similarly searching analysis of the mental elements in human activity. But his own task is neither biological investigation nor exhaustive psychological analysis: it is "inquiry into the nature and causes of the growth of institutions." For certain factors of unquestioned importance in this process of institutional growth, he thinks that "no better designation than the time-worn'instinct' is available" (pp. 1-3).

What then are instincts as factors in the evolution of culture? Mr. Veblen describes them as "innate and persistent propensities of human nature," constituted by the "composite functional groups" into which the simple and irreducible psychological elements of human nature fall." For their peculiar purposes the social sciences are warranted in handling these clusters of quasi-tropismatic impulses as themselves "irreducible traits of human nature." For, "it is in the particular grouping and concatenation of these ultimate psychological elements into characteristic lines of interest and propensity that the nature of man is finally to be distinguished from that of the lower animals" (p. 3).

Mr. Veblen's concept of instincts, then, as "composite functional groups" into which the "simple and irreducible elements of human nature fall" seems to be nearly identical with Mr. Wallas's concept of " complex dispositions." And like Mr. Wallas, but unlike Mr. Thorndike and Mr. Parmelee, he lays stress upon the functioning rather than upon the structure of instincts. Moreover the functioning which concerns him is not the early manifestation of instincts in the life of the individual, but the mature role which instincts play in social

life.

When studied from this viewpoint, each instinct is found to propose "an objective end of endeavor "; and it is by this "purpose to which it drives" that we identify a given instinct and distinguish it from its brethren. That is, "Instinctive action is teleological, consciously so (pp. 3, 4). 4). Hence Hence "all instinctive action is intelligent in some degree. That is what

marks it off from the tropisms and takes it out of the category of automatism" (p. 31). "When instinct enjoins little else than the end of endeavor, leaving the sequence of acts by which this end is to be approached somewhat a matter of open alternatives, the share of reflection, discretion, and deliberate adaptation will be correspondingly large " (p. 38). In short " for present use, [instinct] denotes the conscious pursuit of an objective end which the instinct in question makes worth while " (p. 5).

Now instincts as they function" in the give and take of cultural growth," which is Veblen's business, differ from instincts as parts of the original nature of man, which is Thorndike's business, and from instincts as a feature in the evolution of the nervous system, which is Parmelee's business. It is confusing to have the same term used to cover these three concepts, because statements which hold true of one concept become false when another concept is considered. For example, Mr. Thorndike protests vigorously against teleological interpretations of instinct (p. 15); for, by original nature, it seems clear that the individual does not at first appreciate the ends of his muscular responses to stimulating situations. But it seems equally clear that in the course of experience man does find out what his ends are, so that, as factors in social life, the instincts become consciously teleological, as Veblen says they are. Again, as preformed connections between certain