202 PART IV PREPARATORY STAGE. 



physiological, and environmental conditions favouring efficient 

 performance. As will be seen, such economy will furnish pro- 

 ducts of a standard quality, and will therefore make towards 

 uniformly high quality as well as towards great quantity. The 

 problem of systematically improving what is given, which is 

 the complement to economy, is dealt with in 171, since this 

 forms an integral part of objective methodology. 



The basic reconstruction of scientific, artistic, administrative, 

 professional, educational, economic, domestic, and other mental 

 and bodily activities with a view to maximum output of opti- 

 mum quality in minimum time with least effort and with no 

 avoidable depreciation or waste l of instruments, materials, and 

 material and mental energies, congruent with a long, rich, 

 worthy, and joyous life, involves the following factors : 



89. 1. ECONOMY OF PURPOSE.- (a) The aiming at un- 

 ambiguity or clearness, of distinctness or decided distinctive- 

 ness, and of conspicuousness or ready apprehensibility, of pur- 

 pose or of the conception of the task to be realised. 



(b) The application of the above to the purposes subsidiary 

 to the initial purpose. 



2. ECONOMY OF VOLITION. (a) The unhesitating trans- 

 lation of the above purpose into the appropriate act, involving 

 maybe courage, resoluteness, strenuousness, and the resolve 

 to be persevering and adaptable. 



(b) The application of a volition subsidiary to the initial 

 volition, including, besides independence of thought and judg- 

 ment, quickness of decision, initiative, originality, enterprise, 

 and forethought. (The elements of these qualities require to 

 be ascertained and recorded in detail.) 



1 The question of the conservation of natural products, such as coal, 

 metals, forests, and countless others, merits the close attention of the eco- 

 nomist and the statesman. Not until we have harnessed the energies of the 

 ocean tides, of the sun, or of the atom to our engines, and have realised 

 by science the ambitions of the alchemists of old, shall we be justified in 

 lavishly consuming nature's wealth. E.g., "if it were possible to convert 

 the chemical energy of coal completely into work, without at first burning 

 it to liberate the energy as heat, the energy of 1 ton of coal would then be 

 sufficient to lift one of the largest liners, weighing 20,000 tons, 500 feet high." 

 (F. Soddy, Matter and Energy, p. 31.) Indeed, as our methodology compels 

 us to take into account the distant future, we have seriously, though without 

 alarm, to ask ourselves whether our remote descendants will know anything 

 of precious or useful metals, of material fuels and non-artificial fertilisers, 

 of natural precious stones, of wild, or even domesticated, animals, of na- 

 tural scenery, and much else that we find in the bowels or on the surface 

 of the earth, not excluding the moral, intellectual, artistic, and historic 

 treasures of the then hoary past. A less remote contingency is the elimi- 

 nation of the vast stretches of waste in our present economic system. To 

 the diverse aspects dealt with in this Conclusion, we may add organisation 

 for mass production and distribution, introduction wherever possible of 

 automatic labour-saving machinery, national and international organisation 

 of transport and power facilities, exclusion of unnecessary middlemen, and 

 elimination of anti-social methods in the conduct of undertakings. 



