H.— ANTHROPOLOGY. ] 47 



and it must be understood that the concession is not meant to embody a 

 definition of invention as distinct from discovery, in the relation of these 

 words to the subjective workings of the human mind, or even to the 

 objective results. It would, indeed, be better to discard the word 

 invention altogether, in any scientific treatment of the subject, since its 

 edge has been blunted by common use and misuse. The word discovery 

 also suffers from the same defect, since it is used in reference to identifica- 

 tions and localisations which are due to the application of deductive 

 methods, as well as to trivial incidents of daily life. 



After allowing for such inconsistencies of usage, a main cause of the 

 difl&culties that have always stood in the way of attempts that have been 

 made to distinguish sharply between discovery and invention, is the failure 

 to separate the subjective from the objective content of the words, and 

 to this point we may give some attention. 



The word discovery, in its bearing on material culture, relates only to 

 the subjective appreciation of the properties or reactions of material 

 substances or bodies, and it does not necessarily carry the implication of 

 an objective exploitation of the knowledge gained. Only when the 

 knowledge is applied to a useful purpose, more or less directly, for the 

 ijiitiation or development of a method or an artefact, does the discovery 

 play a practical part. We may say, therefore, that a discovery is a 

 subjective event, which may in many cases be utilised in an objective 

 application, and that it is these applied discoveries alone that are factors 

 in human progress. It is therefore necessary to qualify the word dis- 

 covery and speak of an applied discovery, before we can obtain an objec- 

 tive as well as a subjective term. If we attemjit to treat the word 

 invention in the same way, and speak of applied invention as the 

 objective aspect of invention, we realise at once that we are doing 

 violence to our conception of the meaning of the word.^ The word 

 invention, in fact, unlike discovery, covers both subjective and objective 

 meanings, and a failure to appreciate this inequality is the cause 

 of misunderstanding. Moreover, whilst it is easy to distinguish between a 

 discovery and an applied discovery as being subjective and objective 

 respectively, I know of no attempt to make a corresponding distinction 

 between the subjective and objective aspects of invention. At the 

 moment we need not pursue this question further, since it will arise again 

 at a later stage. 



Applied Discoveries. 



It is clear that material progress began with discoveries relating to 

 materials, objects, and phenomena, of natural or chance occurrence, and 

 that the initial value of such discoveries lay in their immediate practical 

 use. It may have been the behaviour of stones he handled that first 

 aroused man's interest in them, but the utility of indi\adual stones as 

 implements was more important to him than the properties which made 

 them useful. His generalisation was unconscious, or even instinctive, since 

 animals discover, though man alone invents. The making of discoveries 

 was not the result of a conscious search for means or methods to achieve 



' The application of an invention such as the plough, to the purpose ior which 

 it was made, is clearly not comparable with the application of a discovery, such 

 as that of the fusibility of copper, to the production of artefacts. 



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