THE COLLECTED WORKS OF THORSTEIN VEBLEN: Business Theories, Economic Articles & Essays. Thorstein Veblen

results that, on physiological grounds, the common run of human instincts are not to be conceived as severally discrete and elementary proclivities. The same physiological processes enter in some measure, though in varying proportions, into the functioning of each. In instinctive action the individual acts as a whole, and in the conduct which emerges under the driving force of these instinctive dispositions the part which each several instinct plays is a matter of more or less, not of exclusive direction. They must therefore incontinently touch, blend, overlap and interfere, and can not be conceived as acting each and several in sheer isolation and independence of one another. The relations of give and take among the several instinctive dispositions, therefore - of inosculation, “contamination” and cross purposes-are presumably slighter and of less consequence for the simpler and more apparently tropismatic impulses while on the other hand the less specific and vaguer instinctive predispositions, such as the parental bent or the proclivity to construction or acquisition, will be so comprehensively and intricately bound in a web of correlation and inter-dependence - will so unremittingly con-taminate, offset or fortify one another, and have each so large and yet so shifting a margin of common ground with all the rest - that hard and fast lines of demarcation can scarcely be drawn between them. The best that can practically be had in the way of a secure definition will be a descriptive characterisation of each distinguishable propensity, together with an indication of the more salient and consequential ramifications by which each contaminates or is contaminated by the working of other propensities that go to make up that complex of instinctive dispositions that constitutes the spiritual nature of the race. So that the schemes of definition that have hitherto been worked out are in great part to be taken as arrangements of convenience, serviceable apparatus for present use, rather than distinctions enforced at all points by an equally sharp substantial discreteness of the facts.⁸ This fact, that in some measure the several instincts spring from a common ground of sentient life, that they each engage the individual as a whole, has serious consequences in the domain of habit, and therefore it counts for much in the growth of civilisation and in the everyday conduct of affairs. The physiological apparatus engaged in the functioning of any given instinct enters in part, though in varying measure, into the working of some or of any other instinct; whereby, even on physiological grounds alone, the habituation that touches the functioning of any given instinct must, in a less degree but pervasively, affect the habitual conduct of the same agent when driven by any other instinct. So that on this view the scope of habit, in so far as it bears on the instinctive activities, is necessarily wider than the particular concrete line of conduct to which the habituation in question is due.

      The instincts are hereditary traits. In the current theories of heredity they would presumably be counted as secondary characteristics of the species, as being in a sense by-products of the physiological activities that give the species its specific character; since these theories in the last resort run in physiological terms. So the instinctive dispositions would scarcely be accounted unit characters, in the Mendelian sense, but would rather count as spiritual traits emerging from a certain concurrence of physiological unit characters and varying somewhat according to variations in the complement of unit characters to which the species or the individual may owe his constitution. Hence would arise variations of individuality among the members of the race, resting in some such manner as has just been suggested on the varying endowment of instincts, and running back through these finally to recondite differences of physiological function. Some such account of the instinctive dispositions and their relation to the physical individual seems necessary as a means of apprehending them and their work without assuming a sheer break between the physical and the immaterial phenomena of life.

      Characteristic of the race is a degree of vagueness or generality, an absence of automatically determinate response, a lack of concrete eventuality as it might be called, in the common run of human instincts.

      This vague and shifty character of the instincts, or perhaps rather of the habitual response to their incitement, is to be taken in connection with the breadth and variability of their physiological ground as spoken of above. For the long-term success of the race it is manifestly of the highest value, since it leaves a wide and facile margin of experimentation, habituation, invention and accommodation open to the sense of workmanship.

      At the same time and by the same circumstance the scope and range of conventionalisation and sophistication are similarly flexible, wide and consequential. No doubt the several racial stocks differ very appreciably in this respect.

      The complement of instinctive dispositions, comprising under that term both the native propensity and its appropriate sentiment, makes up what would be called the “spiritual nature” of man - often spoken of more simply as “human nature.” Without allowing it to imply anything like a dualism or dichotomy between material and immaterial phenomena, the term “spiritual” may conveniently be so used in its colloquial sense. So employed it commits the discussion to no attitude on the question of man’s single or dual constitution, but simply uses the conventional expression to designate that complement of functions which it has by current usage been employed to designate.

      The human complement of instincts fluctuates from one individual to another in an apparently endless diversity, varying both in the relative force of the several instinctive proclivities and in the scheme of coordination, coalescence or interference that prevails among them. This diversity of native character is noticeable among all peoples, though some of the peoples of the lower cultures show a notable approach to uniformity of type, both physical and spiritual. The diversity is particularly marked among the civilised peoples, and perhaps m a peculiar degree among the peoples of Europe and her colonies. The extreme diversity of native character, both physical and spiritual, noticeable in these communities is in all probability due to their being made up of a mixture of racial stocks. In point of pedigree, all individuals in the peoples of the Western culture are hybrids, and the greater number of individuals are a mixture of more than two racial stocks. The proportions in which the several transmissible traits that go to make up the racial type enter into the composition of these hybrid individuals will accordingly vary endlessly.

      The number of possible permutations will therefore be extremely large; so that the resulting range of variation in the hybrids that so result from the crossing of these different racial stocks will be sufficiently large, even when it plays within such limits as to leave the generic human type intact. From time to time the variation may even exceed these limits of human normality and give a variant in which the relative emphasis on the several constituent instinctive elements is distributed after a scheme so far from the generically human type as to throw the given variant out of touch with the common run of humanity and mark him as of unsound mind or as disserviceable for the purposes of the community in which he occurs, or even as disserviceable for life in any society.

      Yet, even through these hybrid populations there runs a generically human type of spiritual endowment prevalent as a general average of human nature throughout, and suitable to the continued life of mankind in society.

      Disserviceably wide departures from this generically human and serviceable type of spiritual endowment will tend constantly to be selectively eliminated from the race, even where the variation arises from hybridism.

      The like will hold true in a more radical fashion as applied to any variants that may arise through a Mendelian mutation.

      So that the numerous racial types now existing represent only such mutants as lie within the limits of tolerance imposed by the situation under which any given mutant type has emerged and survived. A surviving mutant type is necessarily suited more or less closely to the circumstances under which it emerged and first made good its survival, and it is presumably less suited to any other situation. With a change in the situation, therefore, such as may come with the migration of a given racial stock from one habitat to another, or with an equivalent shifting growth of culture or change of climate, the requirements of survival are likely to change. Indeed, so grave are the alterations that may in this way supervene in the current requirements for survival, that any given racial stock may dwindle and decay for no other reason than that the growth of its culture has come to subject the stock to methods of life widely different from those under which its type of man originated and made good its fitness to survive. So, in the mixture of races that make up the population of the Western nations a competitive struggle for survival has apparently