Type founding

“ But in order not to have the trouble of beginning the work of creation over again, he keeps, in the main, to his original plan of creation, and creates merely new species, or at most only new genera, and much more rarely new families, new orders, or classes. He never succeeds in producing a new style or type, and always keeps strictly within the six categories or graduated groups. ”

“ The art of the founder is fundamental in its nature. The arts of founding and forging are, indeed, the essential preliminary steps which lead to the finer manipulations entering into all metal constructions. Whether forging preceded founding or founding forging is immaterial; both arts are as old as recorded history—much older indeed. Moulding, which is the first step in the founder’s art, should be among the oldest of human discoveries, since man had only to take in his hand a lump of moist clay to receive ocular evidence of his power to give it any desired form. ”

“ However, the human architect would perhaps, in this respect, be better off than the divine Creator, as he would have perfect liberty in the number of graduated subordinate 66 groups. The Creator, however, according to Agassiz, can only move within six groups or categories: the species, genus, family, order, class, and type. ”

“ At the same time it was pointed out that while the influence of the entire aggregate on the individuals is seen in this forming of them into a society of the inherited type, the influences of local circumstances, and of individuals on one another, in each group, make them differentiate into appropriate social structures, taking on fit occupations and industries: the implication being that in virtue of their inherited natures they all have partial capacities for the various activities they undertake ”

“ Trade, or Exchange of Goods.—In Mr. Clark Wissler's book on Man and Culture, he has shown quite conclusively that there are certain culture areas whereby certain inventions, discoveries, or customs have originated and spread over a given territory. This recognition of a centre of origin of custom or invention is in accordance with the whole process of social development. For instance, in a given area occupied by modern civilized people, there are a very few who invent or originate things, and others follow through imitation or suggestion. ”

“ And as they expect that the Trade in general will approve of their Plan, they beg that the Encouragers of it would send their orders with all convenient Speed to the above Foundery; (as they intend as soon as they have got a sufficient Number to lay open the whole) which they hope will not be less universal than the desire of being made Partakers of so interesting a Discovery: for it merits nothing less than the most cordial Encouragement of every Printer in Europe, though here so freely offered. ”

“ And perhaps no Founder ever had the good fortune to have his designs succeed more to his wish; this society has constantly produced one set of men after another, who have done both credit and service to their country by their practice and their writings. ”

“ But we find it to prevail in compound and doubly-compound societies, as throughout the semi-civilized states of Africa, those of Polynesia, those of ancient America, etc., where the presence of stable headships, primary and secondary, gives both the opportunity and the motive; and, recognizing this truth, we are led to recognize the deeper truth that present-making, while but indirectly related to the social type as simple or compound, is directly related to it as more or less militant in organization. ”

“ It seems probable further, that when descent was changed to the male line, or still earlier, animal names for the gentes were laid aside and personal names substituted in their place. The individuality of persons would assert itself more and more with the progress of society, and with the increase and individual ownership of property, leading to the naming of the gens after some ancestral hero. Although new gentes were being formed from time to time by the process of segmentation, and others were dying out, the lineage of a gens reached back through hundreds not to say thousands of years. ”

“ The Inventors, sensible of the great utility of their Discovery, have mentioned it to several of the Trade, who have made very considerable offers to encourage the laying open the Secret: But as their desire is, that every Printer in the Kingdom might be benefited by it they propose to make the Discovery as universal as possible, by making an honourable and generous present of it to the whole trade: To many of whom they are under some Obligations for the kind encouragement of their new Foundery. ”

“ Yet the development of hereditary leadership, the dominance of privileged classes, and the formation of traditions, laws, and forms of government went on unabated, during which the division of industrial and social functions within, causing numerous classes to continually differentiate, took place.
The Functions of New Groups.—In all social groupings the function always precedes the form or structure of the social order. Society follows the method of organic evolution in growing by differentiation. New organs or parts are formed, which in time become strengthened and developed. ”

“ Hitherto we have spoken of cases where custom has sanctioned the application of the common class names to the particular species, but we should not limit ourselves to these. If anything else be seen to be an attribute of several things but to have no common generic name, we should take it for examination and look what are its attributes or of what it is an attribute. ”

“ Generally speaking, these establishments do not for any length of time carry out the intentions of their founders, and it sometimes happens that they become diametrically opposed to them. It is as much as one can do to trace after many long years a few vestiges of their founders' original intention. ”

“ As we ascend in the order of time and of development, but descend in the scale of human advancement, inventions become more simple, and more direct in their relations to primary wants; and institutions approach nearer and nearer to the elementary form of a gens composed of consanguinei, under a chief of their own election, and to the tribe composed of kindred gentes, under the government of a council of chiefs. ”

“ This might be illustrated from the history of modern art, when some felicity of invention or achievement is explained by the fact that several strains of lineage, several branches of the Indo-European stock, have contributed to a result which no one of them could have produced alone. ”

“ No foundry existing is better stocked with matrices for those extraneous sorts which are cut more with a view to accommodation than profit; such as astronomical, geometrical, algebraical, physical, genealogical, and arithmetical sorts; and I feel it particularly incumbent on me to add that, as his specimen bears equal rank with any for the number and beauty of its founts, so he has strayed less into the folly of fat-faced preposterous disproportions, than either Thorne, Fry or Caslon. ”

“ With the foundation of society “selection”—by the elimination of the unsocial, would ensure, not only the survival of such fashions, but their multiplication and diversification, producing results which, to our eyes, have often been hideous. The immediate effect of this form of selection, however, was not a change in physical characteristics, but in the evolution of personal ornaments and development of the æsthetic sense. ”

“ In many cases, especially with the originators of the great foundries, Caslon, Cottrell and Jackson, it was the master himself who designed and cut his own punches. It was not till the unusual demand for artists at the close of last century broke down this exclusiveness that outsiders arose to work for the trade in general. And even these, it was the policy and endeavour of each founder to attach to himself, treating him as a gentleman at large, and free from the obligations imposed on his other workmen. ”

“ In the year 1909, what chances do you think an inventor would have in starting a business in competition with the United States Steel Corporation, or the American Sugar Refining Company, or the Standard Oil Company, or the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, or the Paper Trust, or the Bell Telephone Company, or the Moving Picture Trust, or the American Can Company, or the Baldwin Locomotive Works? These enormous aggregations of brains and capital would make it quixotic to attempt to compete with them in the markets of the world. ”

“ The other social and economic groups into [Pg 57] which mankind divided itself tended to perpetuate themselves as simulated sub-species by the transmission of special knowledge along strict hereditary lines. Crafts of every sort—whether metal-working or magic, architecture or agriculture, seafaring or sheep-breeding, even poetry and prostitution—came more and more to be inherited, until among some of the great ancient peoples the caste system became the foundation of society. ”

“ Grant them to be derived from one stock, and the varieties of man yield proof upon proof that non-specific traits of structure are bequeathed from generation to generation. Or grant only their derivation from several stocks, and we still have, between races descended from a common stock, distinctions which prove the inheritance of minor peculiarities. ”

“ Thus it is change and development are seen everywhere in production. The chief privileges of the Founders have gone, although they still take some little part in the stamping of weights and measures; but that, too, has become a Government duty. ”

“ It must be accepted therefore purely as the consequence of an objective or behavioristic examination of human civilization, that while the element of invention or creative progress remains unexplained, the factor of diffusion or imitation is the one that is operative in the majority of cultural events. As contrasted with it, instances of the principle of independent origin or parallel development prove to be decidedly rare, and tend to be illusory on searching analysis or to dissolve into only partial similarities. ”

“ Less complete because it does not cover the individual altogether in all the acts of life is the creation of secret associations, professional unions, learned societies, etc. The founder conceives an ideal of complete living or one limited to a given end, and puts it into practice, having for material men grouped of their free choice, or by coöptation. ”

“ The law of gradualness, on the strength of which every invention or discovery gradually approaches perfection, and which law requires that the inventor be educated professionally. The law of dependence, on the strength of which a new invention or discovery depends on others, known earlier, and cannot be made before them. And finally the law of combination, on the strength of which every new invention or discovery is a combination of other, earlier known discoveries or inventions, or rests on that combination. The last law requires that the inventor have a general education. ”

“ But I come back to this: that, in our old society there are old institutions, and among them the various distinctions and inherited advantages of classes, which have shaped themselves along with all the wonderful slow-growing system of things made up of our laws, our commerce and our stores of all sorts, whether in material objects, such as buildings and machinery, or in knowledge, such as scientific thought and professional skill. ”

“ This classification of the middle class of India on the basis of occupation was founded upon a thorough understanding of the laws of heredity—“the purpose being to develop the best qualities through heredity transmission. Thereby an attempt was made to develop further the brain of the scholar, the skill of the craftsman, and the ingenuity of the trader through the cumulative influence of careful selection from generation to generation.” ”

“ The theoretical outcome for which such a foundation is prepared is necessarily of a genetic kind. It necessarily seeks to know and explain the structure and functions of economic society in terms of how and why they have come to be what they are, not, as so many economic writers have explained them, in terms of what they are good for and what they ought to be. ”

“ How often does any proposal or improvement come before this Institution which after investigating its antecedents is found to possess originality of design? Is it not a fact that even the most ingenious and successful inventions turn out on inquiry to be mere adaptations of contrivances already existing, or that they are produced by applying to one branch of industry the principles or the contrivances which have been evolved in another. ”

“ Although the extraordinary diversity of the institutions established for this purpose bears eloquent testimony to the flexibility of human nature’s self-creation, this diversity is apparent only to the external observer, the anthropologist who looks back from the vantage point of historical time. In each of these societies a definitive organizational structure has eliminated any possibility of change. ”

“ Each such product has its history: that is to say, it has been wrought only in time, and under the infinitely varied modifying influence of historical circumstances; each is different, therefore, from all the rest: a thousand different products, of every degree of diversity, but each one answering the same general purpose, and capable of being acquired and wielded by every normally constituted human being, of whatever race. ”

“ Every discovery or new invention in whatever branch of industry it may be, is the property of the inventor, and its enjoyment is guaranteed to him in the form and for the time specified in the following articles. Art. 2. Every means of giving to a production already in existence a greater degree of perfection shall be considered as a new discovery. ”