CHAPTER II
THE HUMAN ORIGINS OF INDUSTRY
§ 1. Although it is no part of my purpose to endeavour to set
forth the facts and laws of the historical evolution of modern
industry, it will be useful to make some brief allusion to the ori-
gins of industry and property, so as to give concrete meaning
to the stress laid upon organic processes in our interpretation.
For just in proportion as it is realised that industry has all its
earliest roots in the primary organic needs of man, will assent
more easily be given to the proposal to adhere to the organic
conception of welfare in valuing modern economic processes.
It is not easy to ascertain where the activities which we term
industrial first emerge in the evolution of organic life. Every
organism selects, appropriates, and assimilates matter from its
environment, in order to provide for growth or waste of tissue
and energy given out in the general course of its vital processes,
including the activities of procuring food, protection against
organic or inorganic dangers, and the generation, rearing, and
protection of offspring. Nutrition and function are the terms
usually applied to describe the primary balance of the vital
processes of intaking and outputting energy. The organism
feeds itself in order to work. It seems at first as if we had here
laid down in the origins of organic life a natural economy of
production and consumption. But do the organic processes of
feeding, choosing, appropriating, and assimilating food, constitute
consumption, and do the other activities for which food is utilised
constitute production? Reflection will show that there is very
little intellectual service in pressing sharply this distinction.
The active life of an organism consists in a round of nutritive,
protective, generative processes, each of which, from the stand-
point of individual and species, may be regarded alike as produc-
tive and consumptive. A plant drives its suckers into the soil in
search of the foods it needs, disposes its leaves to utilise the light
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