In either case we have substantial guarantees for the organic utility of most articles which enter the primitive standard of consumption.This view is, of course, quite consistent with the admission that in the detailed operation of this economy there will be a large accumulation of minor errors and wastes.The most accurate instinct affords no security against such losses: indeed the very strength of an animal instinct entails an inability of adaptation to eccentricities or irregularities of environment.No one can doubt this who watches the busy bee or the laborious ant pursuing their respective industries.
§6.If man had always lived either in a stationary or a very slowly changing environment, he would have remained a creature motived almost wholly by specific instincts along a fairly accurate economy of prescribed organic needs.The substitution of reason for a large part of these specific instincts was evoked by the necessity of adaptation to changes and chances of environment so large, swift or complex, that specific instincts were unfitted to cope with them.Hence the need for a general 'instinct, of high adaptive capacity, endowed with a power of central control operative through the brain.The net biological economy of this evolution of a central conscious 'control', in order to secure a better adjustment between organism and environment, carries us to a further admission regarding the organic value of the basic elements in a standard of consumption.
By the use of his brain man not merely selects from an indefinitely changing environment foods and other articles conducive to survival, but adapts the changing environment to his vital purposes.He alters the physical environment, so as to make it yield a larger quantity and variety of present and future goods, and he combines these goods into harmonious groups contributing to a 'standard' of consumption.In this adaptive and progressive economy, evolving new needs and new modes of satisfying old needs, shall we expect to find the same degree of accuracy, the same immunity from serious error as in the narrower statical economy of 'instinctive' animalism?
In the processes of adapting external nature for the provision of present, still more of future, goods, in discovering new wants and methods of satisfying them, and in assimilating the new wants in a standard of consumption, there will necessarily be larger scope for error.But so long as the inventive and progressive mind of man confines the changes, alike of industry and of consumption, to the sphere of simple material commodities having a close and important bearing upon physical survival, the limits of error and of waste must continue to be narrow.All such progress will require experimentation, and experiment implies a possibility of error.But at this early stage in the evolution of wants, any want, or any mode of supplying a want, which is definitely bad, will be curbed or stamped out by the conditions of the struggle for life.A tribe that tries hastily to incorporate a tasty poison in its diet must very soon succumb, as many modern instances of races exposed to the attraction of 'firewater' testify.Thus far it may be admitted that organic utility will assert its supremacy as a regulative force, not only in the rejection of the bad, but in the selection of the good.The low standard of consumption of a prosperous caveman or of a primitive pastoral family must conform to an economy of high utility.Not only would all his ingredients of food, clothes, shelter, firing and utensils, be closely conducive to physical survival, but they would be closely complementary to one another.This complementary structure of the standard of consumption follows from the organic nature of man.Unless all his organic needs are continuously met he perishes.While, therefore, he may know nothing of the distinctions which science later will discover in the necessary constituents of food, he must have worked out empirically a diet which will give him some sufficiently correct combination of proteids, carbohydrates and fats, and in the forms in which he can assimilate them.So also with his clothes, if he wears them.No savage could possibly adopt, for ordinary wear, costumes so wasteful and so inconvenient as flourish in civilised societies.Similarly with housing and utensils.And not only must the articles belonging to each group of wants be complementary, but the groups will themselves be complementary.The firing will have relation to the times and sorts of feeding: clothing and shelter will be allied in the protection they afford against weather and enemies: tools and weapons will be even more closely related.
Thus in the earlier evolution of wants, when changes, alike of ways of living and ways of work, are few and slow and have a close bearing on survival, a standard of consumption will have a very high organic value.
§7.But when man passes into a more progressive era, and a definite and fairly rapid process of civilisation begins, the brain continually devising new wants and satisfactions, we seem to lose the earlier guarantees of organic utility.When the standard of consumption incorporates increasing elements, not of necessaries but of material conveniences, comforts and luxuries, and adds to the satisfaction of physical desires that of psychical desires, how far may it not trespass outside the true economy of welfare?
So long as the requirements of physical survival dominate the standard, it matters little whether animal instinct or some more rational procedure maintains the standard.But when these requirements lose control, and a standard of civilised human life contains ever larger and more numerous elements which carry little or no 'survival value', the possibilities of error and of disutility appear to multiply.
