CHAPTER XII 
INVENTION AND PRODUCTION 
ActTIvE 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 human 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 Warp (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. 
’ Posthumous work now in press. 
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