22 IV. G. Langzvorthy Taylor 



Much of the materialistic conjuncture has been worked out in 

 men's minds. After being worked out in their minds, they have 

 ceased thinking about it ; it acts on mere suggestion, as it were — 

 mere impulse of coal, water power; mere replenishment and up- 

 keep. Improvements have purely objective, present economic 

 efficiency, the same as fields and rivers. Hence an improvement 

 once accepted is not a part of the economizing, but only of the 

 economized industry. It produces, but does not economize with 

 respect to present industry. It does not save. 



Is this a theory of ''materialism"? Does it maintain that human 

 economic destiny is dependent upon and hence formed by mat- 

 ter? Certainly not. Only one side of the case is contained in 

 the conjuncture. Really the assumption of the environment is a 

 necessary stage in the analysis of the relation of mind and matter 

 in progressive production. 



All human reasoning is upon a physical, i. e., materialistic 

 basis of analogy — in other words, just as all human economy is 

 built upon* a materialistic conjuncture, so is all reasoning about 

 the subjective interests, the thoughts, customs, institutions, and 

 actions of men explained by metaphors drawn from the same 

 materialistic conjuncture. Kinetic reasoning is no exception to 

 this rule. The business man speaks of prosperity in terms of 

 quantity ; he must measure it in money, which he handles by 

 physical analogy, e. g., sale of a note. Materialism abounds also 

 in the law, e. g., trover or replevin of a note. So the theories 

 of stimuli, of differentiation, of equilibria are purely physical 

 analogies. They are the only means of explaining psychic phe- 

 nomena. The use of physical or environmental language or 

 terms is therefore no test as to whether the subject-matter be 

 materialistic or psychic. But the kind of physical analogy 

 employed will be the test as to whether the thought be kinetic 

 or static. Thus, with dawning consciousness with respect to eco- 

 nomics, people speak naively of a fortune as a given quantity or 

 mass of matter instead of a collection of interindividual rights, 

 of which fortunes are usually composed. This error is made 

 cumulative by speaking of the fortune of the deceased as so 

 much money — of which an estate is almost never composed. A 



22 



