150 KEASBEY — A CLASSIFICATION OF ECONOMIES. [Aprils, 



than the outcome of economic initiative. Thus the instinctive 

 system, characteristic of the animal world, becomes more and more 

 complicated as we advance from the lower to the higher orders of 

 animal life ; but there is nothing to indicate that this increase of 

 complexity is due to conscious effort on the animal's part. Lamarck, 

 it is true, attributed appetency to animals and endeavored to prove 

 that evolution is to a large extent the result of active initiative ; 

 but modern opinion still inclines to the belief expressed by Darwin 

 that the process is effected unconsciously, through natural selection. 

 But it is not necessary at this juncture to go into this abstruse ques- 

 tion of the relative importance of appetency and variability in the 

 evolutional process. We are dealing, it will be remembered, merely 

 with differences of degree, and may accordingly content ourselves 

 with establishing obvious distinctions. This much at least is evi- 

 dent from casual observation : if we exclude the development of 

 the human species from our survey, progress in the economic sense 

 is not a notion that can properly be applied to the evolution of 

 animal life, and of course much less to plants. Even the highest 

 animals, when once adapted to their environment, show no disposi- 

 tion in their natural state to improve their material condition or 

 meliorate the lot of their progeny. On the contrary, to the extent 

 that they remain uninfluenced by selection, animals and their off- 

 spring appear to be urged by the same appetites, to utilize the same 

 resources in the same way from generation to generation. The im- 

 pulse leading to utilization is in their case instinctive, and therefore 

 more or less rigidly determined along certain definite lines. And 

 inasmuch as nature has provided them with the means of utilization, 

 it is not necessary for them to exercise ingenuity in the invention 

 of artificial instruments. Some animals do, to be sure, manufacture 

 artificial implements of production — witness, for example, beavers 

 that build dams, or certain ants that actually cultivate their fields. 

 Still even in such cases nature supplies the necessary tools, and it 

 would be difficult to find instances in which animals were led to 

 improve their productive processes with a view to meliorating their 

 material condition. Thus, from the fact that the impulse leading 

 to utilization is in their case instinctive, and from the further fact 

 that the means employed in the process are for the most part natu- 

 ral organs that act without the intervention of intelligent foresight 

 on their part, animals may be said to subsist in a circle. Appetite 

 impels them in first instance upon their food quest, and the 



