36 W. G. Langivorthy Taylor 



moneyed capital consists not of consumable goods, nor of mate- 

 rial money, nor even of government notes, but of promises, 

 founded upon or rather recording business contracts (whence the 

 principle that "business makes money"). The double change 

 into a psychic and a future environment is not noticed. It 

 is not intended from these criticisms to develop a theory of 

 distribution ; the above instances are adduced in order to show 

 what difficulties arise in the absence of the theory of environ- 

 ments or conjunctures, which allows us so easily to discriminate 

 between long- and short-time causes. The use of this test allows 

 us to bring into self-consciousness many of the elements of com- 

 mon sense judgment that heretofore have not produced their 

 conclusions by virtue of self-consciousness but because of a prac- 

 tical sub-consciousness. 



The questions of orthodox political economy are of course 

 not precisely the same as those raised here. They relate 

 to production and distribution in any environment which ad- 

 mits of competition, and to the economic weal of classes or of 

 typical individuals. The separate environments there supposable 

 are not, therefore, precisely the same as those visualized in the 

 theory of progress, for the individual may be assumed to pass 

 from one part of the general environment to another, whether 

 the latter progress or not. And yet they are not so unidentical 

 as one might suppose: the larger movements of industry are 

 taking place pari-passu with the rise and fall of individual for- 

 tunes, and in fact, are composed of them. Even supposing no 

 progressive change in the general industrial environment of the 

 individual, his fortunes pass, as just remarked, from one (more 

 materialistic, technical, or quasi-technical) part of the given envi- 

 ronment to another (more psychic, involving "credit" opera- 

 tions). Who has not read of the brakeman that rose to be presi- 

 dent of the railroad? These part-environments are therefore 

 arranged locally or contemporaneously, at least, in a hierarchy 

 corresponding to the successive environments conceived of as con- 

 stituting the progress of the whole. Since the topic here treated 

 is that of progress, the, part-environments enter but little into the 

 argument, and do not need farther notice. They are mentioned 



36 



