CHAPTER XII 



INVENTION AND PRODUCTION 



Active adaptation as a process was defined in our Introduction 

 as the " purposeful modification of any organic or quasi-organic 

 unity to suit it to its environment, or the purposeful modification 

 of the environment to make it favorable to the unity." In the 

 preceding chapter we noted the difficulty in drawing any line 

 between passive and active adaptation, so here we have the same 

 difficulty in distinguishing between activities that are deliberately 

 purposeful and those that are the outcome of a personal life acting 

 occasionally with forethought but usually as a result of impulse 

 and habit. Though foresight and purposeful activity are the 

 flower of the process of hmnan development, their beginning far 

 outdates history, — indeed they are to be found among the 

 lower orders. 



For practical purposes, then, active material adaptation will 

 comprise the whole process of industrial development, or about 

 what Professor Ward includes under the term material achieve- 

 ment. 



As representative writers who have laid supreme emphasis on 

 material achievement as the basis of cultural, or on material 

 adaptation as the basis for spiritual (including social) develop- 

 ment, we will consider in this chapter the social theories of 

 Ward, Simon N. Patten, and Carver. 



Lester Frank Ward (1841-1913) 



Material as the Basis of Spiritual Achievement 



Professor Ward has the most thorough-going system of any 

 English writer since Spencer, including as it does Dynamic 

 Sociology, Psychic Factors in Civilization, Outlines of Sociology, 

 Pure and Applied Sociology, and Glimpses of the Cosmos.^ 



1 Posthumous work now in press. 

 221 



