第151章 SOCIAL SCIENCE AND SOCIAL ART(7)

Nor is this all.It is not even true that an application of quantitative analysis does find exact equivalence of values at the margins.Taking a concrete instance, it is not true that the last sovereign of my expenditure in books equals, or even tends exactly to equal, in utility, that of my last sovereign's expenditure on bread.This would be the case if the future tended precisely to repeat the past.In that event my experience of the economy of last year's expenditure would progressively correct any errors, and I should come to employ my resources with greater economy or exactitude to the attainment of the same design.But I am not the same this year as last, my environment is not the same, my resources are not the same, and the plan of life I make will not be the same.This awkward factor of Novelty, involved in organic nature, belongs to every creative art, being indeed of the very essence alike of art and of creation, and impairs to an incalculable extent the quantitative calculus and its marginal interpretation.An addition of £100 to my income this year cannot be laid out by calculation so as to increase each sort of expenditure to an extent which will secure marginal equivalence of utility.That is to say, I cannot tell what will be the best employment of my larger income, until I have tried.The larger income will produce nowhere a strictly proportionate increase of expenditure on a number of several objects.It would shift my economic plan of life, making a new kind of life, and involving all sorts of changes in the items, which follow as consequences from the changed organic plan.This new plan I cannot accurately calculate or forecast.It will work itself out as Iproceed.Its execution involves no doubt elements of forethought and even calculation, but the central and essential change will proceed from some novelty of conception, some qualitative change of purpose.In a word, it is the creative power of man, the artist, inspiration, faith and that is ever at work, and the art faculties of adventure will lead him to experiment anew with his resources.As a man gains more intelligence, undergoes some new critical experience of his outer or his inner life, encounters some new personal influence, his entire mode of living will change, and innumerable alterations in the outlay of his income will take place.Some articles of earlier expenditure will disappear, new articles will take their place, and the respective importance of many articles remaining in the expenditure will be shifted.A change of residence from country to town, a 'conversion,'

religious or dietetic, a transfer from an outdoor manual to an indoor sedentary employment, marriage, or any other critical event, must bring about some such large complex organic alteration.A comparison of the items of expenditure before and after will shed interesting light upon the results of the psycho-economic change of which they afford a quantitative register, but it cannot be regarded as an explanation of the change of heart or of outlook which is the determinant act from which these shifts of values flow.

§8.The life of a society presents this same problem on a larger scale.On the plane of economic conduct which directly concerns us, every one of the innumerable and incessant alterations in methods of production and consumption ranks as an organic novelty, and, in so far as it is novel, necessarily baffles quantitative analysis and scientific prediction.It would, of course, be incorrect, either in the case of an individual or of a society, to represent any change as entirely novel.Organic growth itself is largely a quantitative conception: the changes are proportionate in size to former changes, and are in definite quantitative relations to one another.The doctrine of continuity thus enables us to go far in calculating the character of future changes.So far the scientific interpretation of uniformity of nature carries us.But quantitative growth, or any other set of quantitative changes, however calculable, always carries some qualitative and essentially incalculable elements of change.These are what we signify by novelty.It is their occurrence in evolution that baffles the clean logic of the geologist, still more of the biologist, and far more of the psychologist.Whether they show themselves as 'faults' or 'sports' or 'mutations,'