Home Recreation: A Way of Life Modern society tends to fragmentize life Sports Films History Baseball: The Components of Profit Estrogen and Antagonists Diet and Nutrition The Vitamins Vitamin B Vitamin C Vitamin D Vitamin E Let the stars size up your shopping style Astrology: Magic or Science? Jamaica For Cyclists Maine: Earliest Inhabitants The passion for football Changes in Body Weight The Metabolism and Energy Transformations of Healthy Man Normal Activity Restricted by the Conditions of Experiments Metabolism During Specific Activities and Movements Public Colleges M to N N to Z What Is It We Want? Directed Thinking On Being Oneself Economics Is a Branch of Biology Life Is Also Frustration How Goods are Bought and Sold Leisure and work The Pecuniary Standard of Living The Uses of Time Teaching People to Want Things Art as leisure The Loss of Privacy The Great Emptiness	Economics Is a Branch of Biology The first thing to ask of this vast intricacy of human activities in which we live is, What as a whole is it? What is its nature? How did it arise? What do we know of its history? When and how did this world of work and wealth begin? We must go back first to historical biology, the prelude to history. In the Science of Life there is a careful account of the beginnings and ascent of living things, of the dawn and primary nature of human psychological processes, of the development of man as a social animal and as a reasoning creature,--an account which culminates in a special book devoted to Human Biology. At that point this present work takes up its task. Economics, which is neither more nor less than the academic name for the science of work and wealth, is spoken of in the Science of Life as a branch of ecology; it is the ecology of the human species. Ecology deals with the welfare of species generally: how they hold their own in their environment, and how they depend upon and serve other species of plants and animals; how they prosper and increase or suffer and decline. It is the science of the balance of life. Economics is the science of the balance of human life and how it prospers or decays. We have to deal here, in this survey of work and wealth and happiness, with the position and prospects in space and time of practically the only economic mammal, Homo sapiens. That is the wide framework of our undertaking. By economic animal we mean an animal that prepares and stores food socially. Ants and bees are economic animals. Almost immediately we will explain how it is that man differs from all other vertebrates in being economic. Until recently economic science and discussion have ignored biology and outraged psychology; they have dealt with a sort of standard and inalterable man; it is only now that it becomes possible to bring economic realities into line with these more fundamental sciences and treat them as evolved and evolving facts. But in no field of knowledge has there been such vigorous advance during the last quarter of a century as in the study of social origins. A vast, rapidly organizing mass of fact becomes available for educational use and for application to the economic life of mankind. The way in which the knowledge of social origins has grown upon the minds of the intelligently curious during these past five and twenty years is a process as fascinating as the development of some long desired picture upon the plate in a photographer's dark room. There was a steady and at first almost unconscious convergence of originally very remote researches. Psychoanalysis, coming from the mental clinic by way of the study of mental stresses, dreams and childish thought, has illuminated mythology and primitive mentality very vividly; archæological discovery, the science of comparative religions, anthropological speculation and mental physiology have all been approaching the interpretation of the rapid and marvellous conversion during the brief space, astronomically speaking, of less than a million years, of a rare and rather solitary and self-centred species of primate into an economic animal with a continually developing social range and a continually increasing biological interdependence. For that is what has happened in and since the Pleistocene period. Man ceased almost suddenly to be an ordinary animal, eating its food where it found it, and he became very rapidly indeed an unprecedented species, leading an economic life resembling only quite superficially the social economic life of the ants, bees and termites. He achieved this social economic life, not as the insects did, by the development of organizing instincts, but by the interplay of motives in his cerebrum. The nature of this transition lies at the root of any sound economic study. A review of human work and wealth and happiness cannot be either sound or helpful unless it rests firmly on this fundamental biological fact. The Science of Life tells the story of the evolution of the cerebral cortex in the mammals, and the way in which hand, eye and brain have educated one another, shows how a new power of abstraction and planning crept into existence with the appearance of the primates and, with a resort to vocal and visual symbols, imposed itself upon the wasteful trial-anderror methods employed by mentalities of a lower grade. And further, biology demonstrates how these symbols of sound and gesture, which appeared at first as a mere means of communication, rendered possible the immense and rapid mental organization of Home sapiens: immense in relation to the intelligence of any other living creatures. Man's rapid yet insensible transition from the casual feeding of all other sorts of vertebrates, to economic foresight, was the direct outcome of this mental organization. All this is explained quite clearly in the Science of Life or any equivalent biological summary that may exist. And thereby the way is cleared for a sound psychological approach to human economics. Up to the beginning of the present century such an approach was impossible. Historical and economic speculation was profoundly vitiated by the tacit assumption that man in the opening phases of his social life saw things as definitely, apprehended consequences as clearly, and generally thought as we do now. Historians had still to realize that either geography, climate, or human nature could change. And among other fundamental failures of imagination in their thought, the economics of the last century carried back into the remote past the distinctions we make to-day between the religious and material interests of man. Primitive man was supposed to be mentally already a business man, driving bargains and reaping the "rewards of abstinence." Abstract thought was ascribed to him. Popular writers upon pre-history, anxious to make their subject sympathetic, have always been disposed to exaggerate the resemblances between the life of a man or woman in the late palæolithic age and the life of to-day. They made out the early savage to be a sort of city clerk camping out; they presented the men of Ur and early Egypt as if they had been the population of Pittsburgh or Paris in fancy dress. They minimized or ignored the fact that these people were not only living under widely different stimuli, but reacting to them in ways almost as much beyond our immediate understanding as the mental reactions of a cat or a bird. "Human nature," they said, "never changes." In truth, it never ceases to change. Anyone who will spend a little time in looking over the carvings on a Maya stele or the representations of Indian gods, and who will reflect that these strange and intricate forms were made with intense effort and regarded with the utmost gravity, that evidently they conveyed meanings that were felt to be otherwise inexpressible, may get some intimations of the width and depth of the mental gulf across which we moderns, with our abstract terms, our logical processes and our prompt rejection of irrelevances and unorthodox associations, must strain to conceive the earlier thoughts of man. Dreamlike and childish is what we call these images now, and dreamlike and childish they are, but such was the quality of the mental atmosphere in which the enlarging social life of humanity began. Man began his social life dreamingly, amidst fear and fantasies, before he could talk very much. Speech and social organization grew complicated together. His fantasies still haunt our social institutions. The exponent of the science of work and wealth has to bring out all this. The task before the workers in the field of modern economics is to use all this new work to fertilize their barren abstractions. The ideas of Frazer, of Jung, of Atkinson play upon and enrich each other. The last haunting suggestions of a "social contract," of the idea that human society was a deliberate arrangement between intelligent people like ourselves, is being cleared out of our minds by this play of thought between the mythologist and the psychologist, and the way is being opened to a proper understanding of the social mechanism.