1902.] KEASBEY — A CLASSIFICATION OF ECONOMIES. 153 



required to exercise ingenuity in invention and undertake economy 

 in organization. Or, to express it more concisely : in order to 

 extend the scope of their consumption human beings are compelled 

 to improve their means and methods of production. 



Putting two and two together, the situation seems, then, to be 

 this : man's desire for variety urges him to extend the scope of his 

 consumption, and in order to extend the scope of his consumption 

 he is obliged to improve his means and methods of production. 

 Thus, in contradistinction to the circular sort of existence charac- 

 teristic of animal life, the course of human progress is upward, so 

 to speak, along the lines of a spiral. The emergence of elementary 

 wants in men's minds stimulates invention and organization and 

 results in the production of goods. The consumption of these 

 essential goods causes wants for complementary goods to emerge in 

 the mind, and these new wants in turn stimulate further invention 

 and organization. Thus new wants call continually for the im- 

 provement of productive processes, improved productive processes 

 provide a further variety of goods, which in being consumed cause 

 still other wants to emerge in the mind that call for further 

 improvement of productive processes, and so on ; want inducing 

 satisfaction and satisfaction inducing want almost indefinitely. 



Thus in the rational economy the economic sequence is progres- 

 sive and not merely recurrent as in the instinctive economy. In- 

 stead of demand tending toward utility, utility leading to utiliza- 

 tion, and utilization resulting in supply over and over again, as is 

 the case with most animals, in man's case expanding demand tends 

 toward the augmentation of utility, the augmentation of utility 

 leads to increasing utilization and increasing utilization results in 

 the differentiation of supply. 



